Settler Feminism and Race Making in Canada 9781442679818

Citation preview

SETTLER F E M I N I S M AND RACE MAKINIG IN C A N A D A

This page intentionally left blank

Settler Feminism and Race Making in Canada

Jennifer Henderson

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2003 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-3703-8

Printed on acid-free paper

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Henderson, Jennifer (Jennifer Anne) Settler feminism and race making in Canada /Jennifer Henderson. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-3703-8 1. Women pioneers - Canada. 2. White women - Canada - History. 3. Canadian literature (English) - Women authors - History and criticism. 4. Canadian literature (English) - 19th century- History and criticism. 5. Canadian literature (English) - 20th century - History and criticism. 6. Canada - Ethnic relations. I. Title. FC26.W6H45 2003 F1005.H45 2003

305.4'0971'0904

C2002-905942-9

Illustration on page 203 - Reproduction taken from images that appeared in: Emily Murphy Crusader. Copyright © Byrne Hope Sanders, 1945. Reproduction by permission of Macmillan Canada, an imprint of CDG books Canada, Inc. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP)

for Keith Denny

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

Acknowledgment.! Introduction

ix

3

chapter one 'A Magnificent and an Enviable Power': Governance of Self and of Others in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada 45 chapter two Female Freedom as an Artefact of Government: Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear 103 chapter three Inducted Feminism, Inducing Tersonhood': Emily Murphy and Race Making in the Canadian West 159 Epilogue Notes

221

Works Cited Index

209

263

254

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgmentss

Many thanks are due to Thomas Loebel, Bettina Bradbury, Marie-Christine Leps, and especially Barbara Godard for their guidance and their commitment to this project in its earlier incarnation as a doctoral thesis in English at York University. Daniel O'Quinn and Craig Gordon were also important interlocutors along that first path. More recently I have benefitted from the encouragement of Mariana Valverde, Pamela McCallum, Donna Palmateer Penne, Heather Murray, Alan Hunt, and members of the Toronto History of the Present group. I was helped in my research by knowledgeable staff at the Alberta Provincial Archives, the City of Edmonton Archives, and the Doris Lewis Rare Book Room at the University of Waterloo. Sections of these chapters were presented to engaging audiences at (The) Concrete Matters, University of Alberta, 1998; the North Eastern Modern Language Association, Buffalo, 2000; the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English, University of Alberta, 2000; and the John Douglas Taylor Conference, McMaster University, 2000. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council provided me with crucial research funding along the way. I received excellent suggestions and criticisms from three anonymous readers of the manuscript, as well as the judicious advice of Siobhan McMenemv, my editor at the University of Toronto Press. Barbara Tessman was a superb copy editor. 1 am grateful to Katherine Binhammer, Nina Bregman, Christy Carlson, Maureen Curtin, Lauren Gillingham,Jim Ellis, Glenn Mielke, Lianne Moves, Julie Murray, Carl Neudstedter, Jean Noble, Mary Polito, Patricia

x

Acknowledgments

Seaman,Jo-Ann Seamon, Peter Sinnema, Cheryl Sourkes, Jeremy Stolow, Louisa Taylor, Janet Wesselius, and Jeanne Wood for the pleasures and comforts of friendship. Particular thanks are owed to Catherine Heike for her level-headedness through the crucial years. I wish to thank my parents, Eleanor and Wesley Henderson, for a faith in me that has been very sustaining. Doris and Kes Denny have also stood by me all along the way. Most of all, I wish to thank my front-line interlocutor, Keith Denny, who has truly looked on tempests without being shaken. Thank you for patience, for Herculean feats of support, for your incomparable wit and and critical intelligence, and for the enduring stimulation of your company. This one is for you.

SETTLER F E M I N I S M AND RACE M A K I N G IN CANADA

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction

When Canadians figure their country to themselves, they call up no cypher of population, no symbol oj territory, no statistic of trade, but the image of a woman, young and fair, with the flush oj sunrise on her face. When they apply for admission to the great family of nations, they do not present as credentials their wealth, their cities, their harvests of a thousand million Imshels, but a few printed books, some songs, a tale or two. They say to the world in effect: 'We are a people ... because we have a voice.' Archibald MacMechan, Headwaters oj Canadian Literature

The representation of the national literature as the organic expression of a people, involved in a process of maturation akin to that of the hero of a Bildungsroman, is a convention as old as Canadian literary criticism itself. It has been remarked that the hero of this narrative of national maturation is normatively masculine - in the case of nineteenth-century Canada, a wholesome and vigorous Nordic youth, blazing a westward trail across the northern half of the continent.1 The passage borrowed for my epigraph, from a 1924 text by Archibald MacMechan, is a fragment from another representational history, one that has feminized the nation's expressive voicing. The passage aligns femininity with youthful vigour and authenticity of expression, and presents these as aspects of the true measure of nationhood - the quality of the nation's human resources rather than its quantities of trade or raw materials. It has been specifically in relation to the question of human quality that the hero of the national Bildungsroman has been figured as a woman writer blazing a specifically Protestant and English-speaking trail of 'civilizing' culture.2

4 Settler Feminism and Race Making As Settler Feminism and Race Making in Canada demonstrates, that feminine figure has a history, in discursive practices more diverse than that of national literary history. The failure to acknowledge literature's relation to these practices has allowed MacMechan's 'image of a woman' to be recycled in contemporary celebrations of a Canadian 'matriarchy of letters,' celebrations that reinscribe the received account of early Canadian women's writing as the 'voice' of a colony in the process of becoming a nation. Against such a view, this book argues that the feminine personification of Canadian literary expression occludes important historical questions about the relationship between settler women's narrative selfrepresentations and the microphysics of power in a settler colony.3 I argue that the magnetic pull between the 'human' nation and the 'image of a woman' is the product of specific historical transformations and ideological exigencies rather than a natural coalescence of national and feminine essences. The idea of such a natural coalescence has been forged in nationalist and feminist literary criticism that identifies the metaphorically colonized position of the nineteenth-century woman with the position of Canada as a British colony. This criticism has also tended to read settler women's writing for wilderness encounters in which the nineteenth-century woman discovers her 'aboriginal' relation to a 'dark continent' that is, at the same time, outside of and within the female self. Carrying this gendered sense of an aboriginal relation to the wilderness over to Canadian literature's relationship to place, the criticism unwittingly reinvents nineteenth-century attempts to indigenize settler culture, or render it 'native.' Contrary to this tradition of criticism, this book argues that the settler woman occupied the site of the norm, not a position outside of culture and external to the machinations of power. Unpacking the historical personification of the Canadian nation is a useful starting point for analysing more recent strategies of self-representation of a former settler colony. By factoring the material history of this feminine personification into our readings of contemporary writers, we can also become more critical readers of fictions, metaphors, and interventions that construct Canadian culture in terms of an uncorruptible feminine essence characterized by marginality, fertility, and exploitability by external, masculinized forces (Berland 523). This book's criti-que of the standard valorization of the voice and agency of the individual settler woman thus speaks to the problems with a liberal politics of reading that fails to take account of complex social histories. The voice and agency of the women writers I discuss were acquired at the considerable

Introduction

5

cost of the writers' participation in the government of poverty, race, and morality. I ask how, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the mutual reinforcement of the categories of 'colony' and 'woman writer' resulted not in an organic unfolding of national identity, but rather in exclusionary assertions that 'we are a people'? Prying apart these apparently homologous categories, this book examines the ways in which 'colony' and 'woman writer' were articulated together at specific historical moments. 4 Instead of valorizing the woman writer as the means by which Canadians have 'figured their country to themselves,' then, I ask what power relations this figuration has served to legitimate at three crucial points in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Canada, when the contradictions of an exclusionary and coercive liberal order grounding itself in the principles of liberty, equality, and property became explosive.5 Canada as Liberal Experiment The celebratory model of feminine voicing has allowed literary critics to presuppose an evolutionary narrative of Canadian history that historians are in the process of rethinking. Ian McKay has proposed that one way of moving beyond the naturalizing, continuist narratives of Canadian history that seek to ground national uniqueness in the unfolding of an essential pattern - Laurentianism, frontierism, Toryism -would be to try to reconstruct a historical sense of Canada as a project (621). Instead of taking the necessity of Canada's existence for granted, he argues, we should ask how the Canadian nation-state was created through the experimental transplantation and then expansion of an incipient liberal political order onto a terrain that was already thick with alternative, indigenous logics. In this new reading of history, Canada's existence is less self-evidently foreordained; it is reframed as the product of a complicated process involving the 'extensive projection of liberal rule across a large territory and an m/£n«t>£subjectification, whereby liberal assumptions are internalized and normalized within the dominion's subjects' (623). In order to recapture this sense of Canada as a project of rule — as the precarious and contested realization of a scheme to extend the government of 'freely' self-governing individuals (and the exclusion of deficient remainders) across a new space and into an indefinite future - it is helpful to take one's point of departure from the transatlantic perspective of the nineteenth-century liberal reformer, for whom Canada was not so much a new home as a testing ground for the political principles

6 Settler Feminism and Race Making

and practices of liberalism. Nineteenth-century Canada was riddled with British-born 'liberal activists' who were the 'active superstructures of a future base they earnestly struggled to build,' and it was the ultimate coherence of their vision of a liberal order functioning across an array of social formations and territories that produced the Dominion of Canada (McKay 628, 637) .b One of these liberal activists was Anna Brownell Jameson, whose 1838 account of her travels around Upper Canada was reviewed in England as a work of political economy. I begin with an analysis of Jameson's Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada precisely in order to install a British reformer's orientation to Canada as a testing ground at the origin of my narrative. Jameson's ruminations on questions of female character, moral reform, and the progress of 'civilization' belong to a liberal discourse that was already in the process of being grafted onto Upper Canada as she made her tour of the colony. Jameson spent less than a year in Upper Canada, but her visit occurred on the eve of the transition from paternalistic to liberal government and the proliferation of new liberal institutions and practices in the colony, including the census, hospitals, poorhouses, and the police (McKay 629). Her text was published in England only months after the 1837-8 rebellions against non-representative government and restricted franchise in Upper and Lower Canada, rebellions that were punished with hangings and prison terms. These events preceded the triumph of bourgeois liberal government in British North America, as Lord Durham's Report and the 1841 Act of Union installed a compromise between Tories and reformers that was subsequently redeployed in other colonies. McKay's argument is addressed to Canadian historians, but it has much in common with recent scholarship in the international field of postcolonial studies that calls for more attention to the status of the colonies as testing grounds for governmental technologies imported back into Europe in the nineteenth century.7 The case for reading the settler colony, more specifically, as a liberal laboratory was made as early as 1958, when the political historian Oliver MacDonagh noted that the gaze of the nineteenth-century British reformer tended to pass through the settler colony before redirecting itself to work on home ground. MacDonagh contended that public support for the nineteenth-century British 'revolution in government' - through which more and more aspects of life were subjected to administration - was most easily secured when the terrain for experimentation was removed to the 'social laboratory' of the settler colony (62).8 As Bruce Curtis has argued, the absence of local structures of

Introduction

7

aristocratic authority in Upper and Lower Canada made these colonies a suitable ground for experimentation with the liberal restraints of limited representative government and public education ('Representation' 62). The constitution of an industrial working class occurred much later in Canada than in Britain, but a colonial population that included 'French Canadians and republican farmers [who] were at least as alien as English proletarians' in the eyes of mid-nineteenth-century British reformers made for a useful analogy with the problems of government at home (ibid., 63). Nineteenth-century Canada was thus a privileged testing ground for the liberal democratization of political rule, characteristically coupled with the institution of diffuse new mechanisms of coercion and constraint. The sense of nineteenth-century Canada as an experimental countersite through which the gaze of the British reformer was temporarily deflected is usefully illuminated by Michel Foucault's discussion of heterotopic spaces. Foucault defines the heterotopia as an 'effectively enacted Utopia' ('Of Other' 24). He distinguishes it from the distant, placeless Utopia, suggesting that in contrast to this abstract form of counter-site, the heterotopia is actually embedded and materialized within the real, in the form of'another real space as perfect, meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled' (27). Whereas the abstract Utopia is analogous to the unreal, virtual space that we might think of as being situated 'behind' the surface of a mirror, a heterotopia resembles the mirror itself insofar as the mirror actually exists, and exerts a counteraction on the position of the gazer — in our case, the British liberal reformer. 'Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me [from heterotopic space],' Foucault writes, T come back toward myself; I begin again to ... reconstitute myself there where I am' (24). Foucault's examples of heterotopias that perform a compensatory function in relation to the subject's own 'messy, ill constructed, and jumbled' world include institutions of control such as the prison and the reformatory, and an unspecified South American Jesuit colony in which the 'daily life of individuals was regulated ... by the bell' (27). Instead of this somewhat fanciful colonial landscape, I propose the settler colony, an appropriated territory that served as a space for working out questions related to managing the everyday life of a population. The sense of the settler colony as a heterotopic mirror-space is especially striking in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles. Jameson approaches Upper Canada as the extension of what was for her a more familiar counter-site, the Fnglish theatre. In the Shakespeare criticism and the

8 Settler Feminism and Race Making

essays on actresses that Jameson wrote before coming to Upper Canada, the theatre is understood as a parenthesis opened up in the existing order of things in England, an exceptional space that permits women to practise a transformative work on the self, unconstrained by the dictates of social custom. But projected onto the settler colony, Jameson's sense of the theatrical heterotopia loses this aesthetic and idealist emphasis and becomes a space suited to the isolation and correction of moral deficiency, an unforgiving 'arctic zone' that exposes the weakness of transplanted selves and demonstrates the need for tutelary measures to 'infuse ambition and discontent into ... abject, self-satisfied mind[s]' (Winter 292). Through her appropriation of colonial space, Jameson's feminist project to widen the possibilities of female character is thus drawn into dangerous proximity with governmental schemes to implant bourgeois morality in the poor. Her 'arctic zone' has a double inflection that connects the nineteenth-century feminist's concern with the government of the self to the project of governing others. Canadian second-wave feminist readers of Winter Studies and Summer Rambles have tended to overlook the political and specifically governmental implications of Jameson's identification of social progress with the inculcation of individual moral strength, preferring to read the text as the account of a nineteenth-century British woman's self-realization in a new landscape. The criticism's deployment of the settler woman autobiographer as a source of values of authenticity, indigeneity-by-proxy, and irreducible exteriority to the machinations of power tends to presuppose an association of 'woman' with 'nature' that is distinctly unsuited to a text as determinedly social as Jameson's. In this criticism, the analogies that connect Jameson's position as a married woman without property rights to the subjugated positions of the colony or of First Nations people circumvent the other other in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles: much of Jameson's account is in fact a form of proto-sociological observation that is focused on the problem of the morally degenerate settler. The critical excision of Jameson the social scientist from feminist readings has thus prevented the rich contradictions of this text from coming into view. This excision has also obscured the radical displacement that Winter Studies and Summer Rambles effects in the end, as Jameson sidesteps a form of governmental implication and social validation that becomes foundational for later settler women writers. The beginning of the constitution of a liberal order in Canada coincided with the closure of revolutionary openings and the containment of briefly glimpsed feminist possibilities on the other side of the Atlantic. 10

Introduction 9 By the time that Jameson found herself speculating on the fate of a woman 'made part of the state machinery,' as she was paddled across Lake Huron on the day of Queen Victoria's accession to the throne, the qualifier 'male' had been inscribed in the definition of 'universal' suffrage in Britain (Winter 494). Jameson made her trip to Canada, significantly, after the practical qualification of the language of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen by a constitution that excluded women, slaves, and free men of colour, and after the execution of Olympe de Gouges and the vilification of Mary Wollstonecraft. By 1837, earlier arguments for women's right to participate fully in political life in Britain and Europe had been largely recast in terms of the duty of the well-disciplined woman to devote herself to the moralization of the unruly classes. Not surprisingly, then, in Canada the first regional and national women's organizations, formed later in the century, were missionary societies to promote the evangelization of'heathen' women and children in India and China, and in pockets of'foreignness' within Canada - among Catholic francophones, peasants from eastern and southern Europe, and First Nations people.11 These constituencies of inferiority would form the proving ground of the Anglo-Protestant settler woman's own claim to a self-governing capacity. The settler women's narratives that provide the focal points for the second and third chapters in this book coincide with moments of democratic opening in Canadian history - moments that were just as quickly closed down as the 1837-8 rebellions. Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear: The Life and Adventures of Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney, the focus of my second chapter, appeared at the tail end of the 'liberalization' of the Canadian West, when the paternalistic rule of the Hudson's Bay Company was replaced with government by the Canadian state. These captivity narratives were published in 1885, immediately following the second uprising of First Nations and Metis against their displacement from western lands requisitioned for agricultural settlement, on the eve of the execution of some of the insurgents, and following a debate over the proposed extension of the franchise to unmarried women and First Nations, in a bill rejected by the Liberal leader Edward Blake as the 'most monstrous proposal ever made to any legislative body.'12 In chapter 3 I turn to Emily Murphy's career as an author, a feminist activist, and the first female police magistrate in the British Empire. The earlytwentieth-century period during which Murphy invented the characternarrator Janey Canuck and sent her on expeditions back to England in Impressions of Janey Canuck Abroad, and across the Canadian West m Janey

10 Settler Feminism and Race Making

Canuck in the West, included the watershed moment of Canada's participation in the First World War, the struggle of first-wave Canadian feminists for official recognition as legal 'persons,' and their jostling with other marginalized contenders for the vote as they proposed the government of the 'social' as the specialization of the middle-class AngloProtestant woman. 13 The texts of Anna Jameson, Theresa Gowanlock, Theresa Delaney, and Emily Murphy map out a sequence of westward excursions that would appear to reinscribe the heroic east-to-west thrust of a canonical strand of Canadian historiography.14 The narrative of Settler Feminism and Race Making thus moves from an English woman's account of her travels around the Great Lakes, to the captivity experiences of two eastern Canadian daughters on the frontier of western settlement, to the confident striding across the western provinces of an Ontario woman who adopts Alberta as her home. Yet, in this study, rather than being positioned as heroic women pushing forward the frontier of settlement, these writers serve as markers of the construction and reconstruction of the settler woman, a subject position bound up in the production of racial distinctions and the elaboration of norms of conduct. If each of these writers is turned towards the West, it is because the West has been the site of'internal enemies' - temporal others situated at a civilizational remove, dangerous mixtures of primitivism and Catholicism, potential menaces of imported communism and opium-peddling - against which Anglo-Protestant femininity has been defined in a wider elaboration of norms imbued with racial defensiveness. Beginning with the received historiographic design of a national development originating in Upper Canada and then extending itself with a westward thrust, this book thus exposes a different set of coordinates for that familiar scheme. These alternate coordinates locate the political at the level of morals and manners, norms of individual character and conduct. They point to the subtle technologies designed to cultivate forms of selfhood and habits of conduct suitable to a liberal political order. My coordinates also extend beyond Canadian borders, to include debates and discourses that are not home-grown, and to include as well a 'settler woman' who chooses not to settle, who rejects the subject position of the 'daughter of empire' and refuses, in the end, to associate her feminist project with the colonial one. What this book thus offers is a counternarrative to the dominant story of feminist and national progress. It does so by beginning with the analysis of a text that ultimately serves a warning about attempts to attain a freedom that is realized in the subjection of others. While Gowanlock and, more especially,

Introduction

11

Delaney and Murphy pursue the very freedom ultimately rejected by Jameson, their narratives are comparable to hers as instances of travel writing addressed back to an imperial centre; for Gowanlock, Delaney, and Murphy, it is just that that centre is no longer Britain but rather an Ontario that has been coloured orange by an Anglo-Protestant monopolisation of official power, seeking to extend its cultural and political hegemony westward. It is not a coincidence that each of the women writers I discuss is linked by marriage or family association to the more aggressive strands of concentrated privilege in nineteenth-century Anglo-Protestant settler culture. Indeed, the women's familial connections to institutionalized power were essential to the public circulation of their narratives. Jameson was the separated wife of Robert Jameson, an attorney-general of Upper Canada who was connected to violently anti-reformist elements of the Orange Order. Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney became embroiled in the second Riel Rebellion as the 'white brides' of men whose occupations on the Frog Lake settlement were predicated on the displacement and subjection of First Nations and Metis. Emily Murphy travelled westward as the wife of an Anglican minister and the daughter of a prominent Ontario Orange Order family. These writers come to the act of writing under very different circumstances and with greatly varying literary competencies - as a professional woman of letters, as women without previous literary ambition from whom narrative testimony is induced, and as a woman who initially takes up her pen in an extension of her social duties as a minister's wife. 15 However, each of their narratives derives its conditions of possibility from the very moment of political insecurity that it describes. The narrative is not simply a secondary representation of this moment of explosive political opening and recontainment; the publication of the narrative and its circulation among readers are events that should be read as integral to the moment itself. Thus, Winter and Summer Rambles in Canada returns the significance of the 1837-8 rebellions to British and Canadian readers as a demonstration of the need lor 'civilizing' interventions to quell radicalism. In Two Months in the Camp oj Big Bear, the 1885 north west uprising is rendered meaningful as a display of the results of unhygienic and improvident habits among First Nations and Metis: rebellion is only the symptom of the refusal to enfold the norms of British 'civilization.' In the texts of Emily Murphy, the argument on behalf of white women's full 'personhood' is mounted through Janey Canuck's pronouncements on the non-normative cultural practices, sexualities, and household organizations of racialized others.

12 Settler Feminism and Race Making

My reading of Canadian settler women's writing is admittedly partial, for I attend to a small sample of texts. Instead of addressing questions of genre or literary intertextuality, furthermore, I emphasize the relationships between these settler women's narratives and the rules and subject positions of non-literary discourses in each period. The connections between the narratives of Jameson, Gowanlock, Delaney, and Murphy are not grounded in anything as solid or continuous as a chain of literary influence. Instead they are linked by reappearing figures, thematic motifs, performative modes of signification, and exterior relations to political events. I present these narratives as discrete instances of the peculiarly concentrated binds of settler feminism, representations of the means by which women's first-person narration was embedded in governmental strategies in each period. Together these narratives tell a story about the recuperation of feminist thinking about freedom on settler terrain, a terrain that was constructed as a space bereft of human history, and appropriated as the ground for race-making projects. In the more global representation of the contradictions of settler feminism that these chapters piece together, history provides a field of problems for an attempt to broach currently pressing questions about how to read feminist discourse in its external relations, how to read the political life of tropes of violation and recovery, and how to analyse the complex origins and destinations of women's first-person narratives. Throughout this book, I therefore repeat the gesture of desubjectivizing the sort of narrative that appears to invite an isolationist reading of individual self-expression, and I endeavour to demonstrate the narrative's connections to prior complications and wider struggles. Thus, while these readings do not offer a comprehensive history of Canadian settler women's writing, they nevertheless confront the limits of certain commonplaces of feminist literary-critical and historical sense-making: women's historical exclusion from the exercise of power, the analogous positions of woman and colony, the uninscribed ground inhabited by the pioneer woman writer, the first-person narrative as a work of selfexpression, the givenness of race, and white feminism's benefiting rather than its impoverishment - from its implication in the elaboration of racist knowledges and practices. The Perils of Self-Representation This volume asks how the commonplace asserted by Archibald MacMechan in the 1920s - that Canada's credentials for nationhood rested

Introduction

13

on 'the image of a woman, young and fair, with the flush of sunrise on her face' (24) - came to be devised. It does so by analysing women's selfrepresentations that were deployed in complex strategic situations that constrained feminist possibilities, even as they equipped certain kinds of women with new forms of social agency. This kind of analysis requires a critical, materialist feminist historiography that lowers its gaze from evolutionary national history to the level of discursive practices and substitutes a lens wide enough to take in the dominion's historical function as a laboratory for liberal government. h The self-governing status of the dominion was predicated on its production and maintenance of a population deemed capable of individual self-government. The Anglo-Protestant settler woman was more than a marginal participant in the preparation of this constitutive ground of responsible government, even though (or more accurately because) her capacity to govern herself was still in question. Settler women's narrative self-representations negotiated this in-between position by staging exemplary self-regulations against backdrops of moral and racial 'inferiority.' The authority of the woman who could pronounce on problems of government was predicated on her embodiment of certain norms of conduct. She was subjected to a moral and racial valorization that tied her expertise in the government of others to the requirement that she relate to herself as valuable racial material, an investment in future Canadian 'stock.' The scene of the settler colony thus intensified a contradiction internal to liberal feminist discourse since Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), a contradiction that allowed nineteenth-century feminist protest to be transformed into advocacy on behalf of the norm, while a new set of 'social' professions provided the bourgeois woman with the means of'access to public life [and] the springboard ... for the recognition of her political rights' (Donzelot xxxiii). Such a springboard was already hinted at in Wollstonecraft's ambiguous demand that women reform themselves by reforming the world. Wollstonecraft justified her project to give women power over themselves in terms of their particular responsibility for moral education. But eventually this strategic justification for a demand came to replace the demand itself, and the liberal feminist dream of broadening women's desires and capacities was collapsed with the goal of reforming the dangerous classes. This collapse was not inevitable. As I shall argue, it required the intervention of a text like Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), which turned Wollstonecraft's concept of the woman who required interventions to supplement her underdeveloped capacity for

14 Settler Feminism and Race Making

self-government into a template for strategies to secure social order. Over a century later, in 1911, this heritage of thought was invoked by a British obstetrician, sociologist, and proponent of 'eugenic feminism' with whose texts Emily Murphy was familiar.17 Caleb Saleeby repeats Malthus's intervention by assigning woman a central function as 'nature's supreme organ of the future' in what he called the 'real economy' concerned with the 'making and preserving of life' (Methods 344-5). According to Saleeby, it was woman's special role to perform a saving relation to her self as well as to other women, in the name of racial fitness. The first-person narratives analysed in Settler Feminism and Race Making are joined to this historical construction of woman as a concentrated site of repair and supplementation of the capacity for self-government. They perform a 'character' that is poised at the intersection of literary and moral registers, between an aesthetic construct and a device of moral regulation. Analysis of this character requires a method of reading that draws links between textual performances and contemporaneous scenes in which female character is an object of normalizing legislation, the target of correctional and rehabilitative procedures. What my readings thus explore, as they derive the preconditions of first-person narratives from extra-literary discourses, is what Denise Riley has called the 'dangerous intimacy between subjectification and subjection' - that is, the risks entailed in women's attempts to put themselves into discourse when the legitimacy and authority of women's speech are already meticulously regulated (17). I describe instances of discursive implication which turn on the writers' interpellation by discourses that offer them authority, but only on the basis of these discourses' prior construction of woman as the linchpin of moral and racial economies concerned with the 'making and preserving of life.' I use 'economy' to describe what otherwise might be called systems of race and morality in order to emphasize the specific logic through which these systems are managed, an economic rationality that is concerned to avoid unnecessary expenditure and wastage of forces and resources. As we shall see, economic figures of accountability, indebtedness, investment, and insurance recur with a striking insistence in this set of settler women's narratives because the narratives themselves are involved in the distribution of a morality that turns on practices of provident frugality. Indeed the Canada Savings Bond might be said to acquire a new meaning in this body of writing, as economic tropes become the mechanisms through which women are drawn into a social bond while they are excluded from formal channels of political participation. One of the

Introduction 15 ways in which the liberal state governs a population is precisely through the introduction of an economic rationality to the intimate space of self-governance. Economies, as we know, are fuelled by exchanges, and indeed something is extracted from the woman writer in return for her accession to public speech. Already assumed in the discourse in which she discovers an opportunity for self-assertion is the identity of her interests with such politically inoculating constructs as an aggregate human happiness, a collective security, a racial well-being. The opportunity to speak for herself within these constraints does not amount to liberation from silence or from political structures in which she can only be represented by others. Women's authorization to speak the truth, their equipment with agency, is not the opposite of victimization. Agency, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has warned, is always the effect of a prior instrumentalization, the result of a complex process in which institutionalized power 'annuls itself by 'vesting an agent' ('The Rani' 137).18 The approach to women's writing adopted in this book counters the view that the aim of feminist literary criticism should be the recovery of an authentic feminine subject as author. It suggests, rather, that feminist cultural critique can be sharpened and rejuvenated through a refusal to assume that the individual woman is the subject - the source and centre - of her own narrative. The ability to say T at the beginning of a narrative was assembled, in these instances, as part of a transaction that set in motion the dynamic of subjectification - the collection of a subjection to moral norms from the performing T in exchange for her accession to the position of a speaker of 'truthful' discourse. ' This book, then, is a cautionary study of women's first-person narratives as things of this world that are included in what Foucault calls a '"general politics" of truth,' involving genres of discourse accepted as true, the conditions necessary for their 'truthful' functioning, and the subject positions associated with the voicing of particular kinds of truth ('Truth and Power' 131). The misconception that truth is by definition exterior to power is held up to critical scrutiny as I reframe women's words about themselves and others as a form of veridical discourse that was deployed in particular governmental strategies. 'Veridical discourse' has been used to refer to objective, scientific discourse, but I propose its extension to those discourses that establish their truth claims on the basis of unmediated experience, and an authority predicated upon an alleged distance from power.20 The following readings suggest that the misconception that women are excluded from power has had a certain historical effectivity, for it was in part this view that allowed settler women's narratives to formulate and

16 Settler Feminism and Race Making disseminate norms of conduct in the form of politically innocent common sense. 'Race' and 'Race Making' As Mariana Valverde has observed, the slippery nineteenth-century sense of'race' as a marker of moral, national, and biological distinctions provided a certain kind of Canadian woman with an edge in the struggle for gender justice ('When' 4-5). By invoking her racial identity, the middle-class Anglo-Protestant woman could lay claim to a particular set of moral attributes marked as exclusively British. As long as she stressed cultural and environmental rather than hereditary explanations for her moral superiority, the Anglo-Protestant woman could also claim responsibility for the improvement of 'inferiors' as an extension of her maternal role within the family. In spite of the mixed genetic inheritance of the Dominion of Canada, this argument went, a pure nation could be produced through the Anglo-Protestant woman's concerted efforts to create morally improving social and cultural environments. This crucial rhetorical manoeuvre generated a specialized, gendered form of social labour for certain kinds of women, on the very basis of the dominion's heterogeneous population. It also articulated feminism with a vision of 'race-culture' that was distinct from the more restrictive one associated with the masculinist Canada First movement. The distinction between these visions rested on the feminist's more 'tolerant' openness to the other, an openness that served only to argue for women's greater effectiveness in accessing moral and racial 'inferiors,' the better to correct and improve them. The maternal feminist argument rendered practical the kind of poetic pronouncement about the improving influence of a 'cold north wind that rocked the cradle of our race,' which was to be found in a text like Robert Grant Haliburton's The Men of the North and Their Place in History (10). Haliburton's famous 1869 lecture looked back to a primordial union of various elements of a northern race in a Viking heritage that he imagined being reassembled and revitalized in Canada's rugged landscape. The feminist argument widened the limits of potential citizen material from this very restricted sense of a Viking race, and translated Haliburton's concept of environmental influence (the 'cold north wind') into maternal influence. What the feminist position did share with Haliburton's masculinist one, however, was a sense that race making should be the dominion's primary industry. Haliburton's opening

Introduction

17

salvo specified the joint stock company' in which Canadians should place their hope of 'future dividends' as neither intercolonial trade, nor Confederation, but. rather the production of a 'healthy, hardy, virtuous, dominant race' (1, 10). The familial metaphors that organized the representation of empire in the latter part of the nineteenth century gave the 'daughter of empire' a privileged role in the cultivation of this staple crop - not just as the creator of healthy environments, but also, implicitly, as the body that would birth forth the human crop. In recognizing the work of these familial metaphors, however, we need to be careful to avoid subsuming the 'diverse, overdetermined and contradictory formal dynamics and ideological codes' of imperialist discourse into a simplistic sexual allegory of feminine otherness colonized by imperialist objectives (Chrisman 500). As Laura Chrisman has argued, the point is rather that an imperialist discourse already imbued with the logic of political economy in the first half of the nineteenth century came to refocus itself on an economy that was centred on the physical body; the foregrounding of feminine 'life-force' and 'womb-power' that this investment in the body entailed did not replace the earlier rhetoric of political economy but rather folded it within a new construction of society as a biological organism (506-7). 'Race making' has only recently come into critical parlance, but the term is not a recent invention. When Marion Cran used it in her 1911 text, A Woman in Canada, it was to describe the work of the 'woman of refinement and culture, of endurance, of healthy reasoning courage' in terms of a defensive project of 'home-making and race-making' posed against the threat that the children of the dominion might 'go down, not up, in the scale of progress' under the guidance of the 'ignorant' and 'slovenly lower-class woman' (109). This English woman's specification of the type of female human resource required by the country presupposes precisely the form of racism described at the end of Foucault's History of Sexuality, A 'racism of expansion' through which the bourgeoisie authorized itself to impose a normative 'health, hygiene, descent, and race' on class others, this dynamic racism found its support in the cultivation of an exemplary racial purity and robustness, an 'art of longevity, ... of having healthy children and keeping them alive' (History 125). At the heart of this racial self-affirmation was an intensive subjectification of the bourgeois woman, who was not only positioned as a symbol of moral authority but also enlisted as a practical agent of government. For most twenty-first-century readers, racial differentiation is by definition a process that invests 'skin colour' with significance. I try to suspend

18 Settler Feminism and Race Making

this tautological linkage by showing how race has been attached not just to bodies but also to forms of conduct. I discuss discourses about the 'social' that worked to identify dangerous or degenerative forces in the conduct of ill-governed women and unruly paupers as well as First Nations people. The term 'race making' usefully reminds us that race is always an effect of discursive practices, an effort of construction. Race is a highly mediated and historically variant construct that works to organize knowledge and to justify various forms of exclusion and discipline. Nineteenth-century race making was a fertile arena for the production of new objects and techniques of power. It involved the work of constituting and coercively maintaining the boundaries of the 'normal' through the inscription of differences in capacities for self-government that, tautologically, could explain and justify social inequalities and political exclusions. Turning to race making as an object of analysis thus opens up a set of questions that goes beyond the problematic of exclusion. As David Scott reminds us, racial classifications have been deployed inside modern political projects to disable certain forms of life and to oblige others to come into being: race making operates at the level of 'subjectconstituting social practices' to produce various kinds of '"raced" subjectivities,' and not just to exclude those marked as others from liberal rights and freedoms (193, 196-7). As I shall demonstrate, the settler woman's implication in race making was the effect of discursive entanglements, figurative entailments, and presuppositional thicknesses - a consequence of the sort of unwitting involvement suggested by the 'pli's' (the folds) of words such as implicit, imply, and implicate, rather than the sense of criminal agency associated with the word 'complicity.' The settler woman's first-person narration folded into itself and was in turn folded into discourses of political economy, population control, assimilative pedagogy, racial hygiene, and white slavery. This enfolding incorporated disenfranchised and propertyless nineteenth-century settler women in the machinery of government under the banner of racial superiority. But even as it was the basis for their 'empowerment,' this implication in government was dangerous to women themselves because it almost always required that they bear witness to woman's special sexual and racial vulnerability. Settler Feminism and Race Making thus assumes that reading for discursive implication is a more helpful approach to the study of historical conjunctures of feminism and racism than the approach that rendersjudgments about 'complicity' - especially when the purpose of historical investigation is to fuel critical awareness of the life of feminist discourse in the present, the ways

Introduction

19

in which it is always folded into other discourses and capable of being put in the service of other projects. The emphasis of this book differs from that of other recent attempts to historicize white femininity, and to account for intersections between feminist and racist discourses, in its insistence on the constraining effects of this implication on white women themselves.21 In this respect, my argument takes its cue from Hazel V. Carby's suggestion that nineteenth-century white women who saw their caste as their freedom and identified their interests with paternalistic powers of 'protection' were in fact tragically constrained by a feminist movement that was energized by racist discourses of sexual morality (309). A 'transformed woman's movement, purged of racism,' Carby rightly points out, 'would have provided a liberating experience for women themselves' (319). Government In order to rewrite the evolutionary narrative of Canadian nation building in terms of the attempt to implement a project of liberal rule, I draw the theoretical underpinnings of my argument from Foucault's definition of liberal government as the set of policies and programs aimed at the 'conduct of conduct.' 22 'Government' in Foucault's usage refers to something wider than a political doctrine; it refers to the action of governing in the broadest sense of an activity that targets the everyday life of a population through regulatory techniques. Foucault defines the technical problem characteristic of the liberal state as that of'knowing what relations of propinquity, what type of storage, circulation, marking, and classification of human elements should be adopted in a given situation in order to achieve a given end' ('Of Other' 23). In liberal societies, the activity of government forms the practical underside of liberalism's avowed philosophical foundations of liberty, equality, and freedom. Schemes for inculcating fitting dispositions and for shaping forms of subjectivity that are merely presupposed by the theories of contract and individual right of classical liberal political philosophy, but they are necessary to undergird a non-despotic, liberal political order. Power is organized and exercised in liberal societies through a strategy that harnesses individual modes of self-government to wider campaigns to govern others. This strategy aims to minimize the expenditure offeree and to streamline the exercise of state power by coordinating 'totalizing' with 'individualizing' forms of power. Political goals related to the global condition of a population are approached through forms of power that address the life-conduct of indi-

20 Settler Feminism and Race Making

viduals. In this sense, the government of 'all and each' (Foucault, 'Omnes') draws on the functions of the husbandman and the shepherd: it wants to exploit the value-producing capacity of the herd as a whole, but government must also coordinate that 'totalizing' outlook with an 'individualizing' interest in the welfare of each member of the flock. Regulating the details of the everyday life of a population requires the superimposition of simplifying diagrams and homogenizing grids of technical calculation over the complex and sometimes resistant realities of those living populations. These superimposidons or territorializations of the abstract science of government reframe social injustices and political struggles, which are dense with history, within a neutral, ahistorical space of administrative calculation. Reframed within that space, complex struggles appear as administrative problems calling for purely technical solutions. Mary Poovey has documented the violence of this kind of'implementation of abstraction' in the case of poor neighbourhoods in mid-nineteenth-century Britain (Making 35). The discursive practices of an emergent social science, which included theories and studies of poverty, marginality, and degeneration, were crucial to the reconstitution of these neighbourhoods as governable spaces. As Riley has argued, the discursive practices of early social science introduced perceptual and evaluative grids that were capable of isolating bodies, behaviours, and family arrangements in a homogeneous space distinguished by the lack of a conscious past and filled in with middle-class norms of family life (49). The data-collecting and mapping activities of social investigators subjected poor neighbourhoods to a new 'occular penetration,' which reorganized them according to a 'logic of spatialization, compartmentalization, and functionalization' (Levy 27-8). In early-twentieth-century Canada, as McKay has suggested, nothing was more emblematic of this kind of violent reorganization of living spaces than the carving, 'in lines that majestically remind us of Euclidean geometry and panoptical state power, [of] the perfect geometry of the Province of Saskatchewan ... [and] the molecular checkboard of quarter-sections and individual properties contained within the new province's boundaries' (641). Two decades earlier, the 1885 uprising in Canada's Northwest was staged by Metis and First Nations peoples in an attempt to refuse this aggressive extension of the space of liberal rule and its 'civilized' lifeconducts. The two white women's captivity narratives that represented this uprising to readers in eastern Canada, as I shall argue, actually participated in the territorialization of liberal norms. In Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear, Gowanlock and Delaney help to reframe a contested

Introduction 21 territory as a space of moral and racial differences, thereby displacing political conflict with questions of admissibility to civilized society and proximity to or distance from the norm. Delaney in particular makes sense of the 1885 uprising through a moral filter that identifies pauperism and improvidence, or the inability to save resources, as crucial deficiencies among her former First Nations 'protegees.' Central to the authority of Delaney's pronouncements is her insistence that she is 'no politician,' but rather an adoptive mother of these infantilized adults. Turning her unofficial role as the domestic tutor of First Nations women at the Frog Lake settlement into a platform for the assertion of an expertise in the diagnosis of problems of character, she asserts that she can 'speak openly [of the "Indians"] for I know them thoroughly' (Two Months 100). The constitution of a space of governability segments and partitions existing populations according to the forms of administration that they are seen to require. In Canada in latter half of the nineteenth century, there was a meticulous specification of what Uday Mehta has called the 'thicker set of social credentials' (429) constituting the real bases of liberal political inclusion: a rigid differentiation according to sex as well as a legal codification of distinctions between moral and immoral women, 'white' and 'Indian' women, 'status Indians,' 'enfranchised (i.e. former) Indians,' and unrecognizable, abject forms of otherness — unenfranchised, non-status 'Indians,' 'Indian' women married to 'white' men, and Metis people.23 A liberal order cannot do without the regulation of conduct according to such moral-racial classifications. As Bonnie Honig has argued, these classifications contribute to the closure of political contest by figuring political resistance as an essential difference that predates political arrangements, and calls for 'beneficent' intervention (152-4). The Durham Report, which in 1839 recommended that British North America be granted self-governing status, spoke to precisely these imperatives of marking and classification. When Lord Durham, chairman of the committee responsible for drafting the 1832 Reform Act in Britain, turned his gaze to the problems in British North America, he argued for a remapping of political boundaries in such a way as to resituate the francophone population of Lower Canada as an assimilable minority. In his report the granting of responsible government to the Canadas was tied to the institution of an internal colonialism that was designed to subject Catholic francophones to the assimilative pressures of an Anglo-Protestant hegemony. Durham also called for the creation of institutions of local representative government and state education that would habituate people 'to the limitations of their political power

22 Settler Feminism and Race Making

and [situate] the source of their potential complaints in their own activity' (Curtis, 'Representation' 72-3). The Durham Report was more widely read over the nineteenth-century English-speaking world than any other British state paper (Porritt 101). It is significant, therefore, that the report made recognition of a colony's right to self-government contingent upon its reorganization around a permanent campaign of internal purification. Foucault has argued that such campaigns of internal purification or 'state racism' are the defining feature of modern liberal societies. State racism consists in the constant 'discursive production of unsuitable participants in the body politic,' a process of classification and segmentation that is usually represented as a 'necessary and noble pursuift] to ensure the well-being and very survival of the social body by a protective state' (qtd. Stoler 64) .24 This kind of racism is derived from an understanding of social relations in terms of a permanent war between races.25 Nineteenth-century campaigns of internal purification and efforts to root out 'internal enemies' within the borders of the nation revived this early modern understanding of the social body as essentially binary and locked into a condition of permanent war. But the revival of this binary conception of the social body in the nineteenth century entailed a slight adjustment - the conversion of 'races' in the plural to 'race' in the singular. This alternation made the binary conception of the social body available to the modern state as a tool of internal racism. From being an external element that 'arrived from somewhere else' or 'at a certain moment triumphed and dominated,' the foreign enemy now became a sub- or lower race, a parasite within the nation's social fabric (Foucault qtd. Stoler 66-7). The Durham Report's conversion of the 1837-8 struggles for democratic government in Upper and Lower Canada into a compromise project to assimilate an 'inferior' race turned on precisely this logic. This kind of internal racism was replayed fifty years later in Canada in the resolution of disputes over land in the Northwest. The orchestration of an Anglo-Protestant majority and the reconstitution of political conflict as a problem calling for strategies of internal purification and racial self-defence prepared the ground for the extension of a liberal order to this territory. The Colonial Conference Table The importance of the Canadian precedent in Britain's concession of self-government to other settler colonies is well known. The Durham

Introduction 23 Report's racial argument was instrumental in governmental calculations as to how to incorporate Indians in colonial East Africa and it was applied to potential federations in central Africa, southern Arabia, Nigeria, and the West Indies (Winks 49-51). Nineteenth-century Canada was thus part of a larger cultural and political system whose history cannot be adequately understood in narrowly national terms. To highlight the transatlantic, transcolonial domain in which Canada served as a laboratory for governmental solutions, I turn now to an event that saw the Dominion of Canada taking a place in a new council of empire, along with representatives of the Australian, New Zealand, and South African settler colonies, to participate with ministers of the British government in the formulation of strategies for the joint management of empire. Resituating our compass point to the 1907 Colonial Conference in London allows us to grasp Canada's status as a test-case at the centre of the set of problems and solutions traded at a gathering of co-imperialists. Between 1887 and 1937, colonial conferences were the principal means of formal, high-level consultation between Britain and the members of its self-governing empire on questions of trade, emigration, and imperial defence. The conferences constituted a kind of board of directors of empire. What was significant about the 1907 Colonial Conference was that it was the first meeting of representatives of the colonies of white settlement on a new, equal footing with representatives of the British government, and it was the first conference to be summoned for 'business' rather than ceremonial purposes (Ollivier 226).26 The published proceedings of this conference demonstrate the way in which the discussion around the conference table invested the distinguishing feature of the dominions - self-governing status - with a new, racially exclusive determination. The scene of the Colonial Conference can be viewed as what Gilles Deleuze calls a dispositif, a machine of knowledge projected onto the world, which determines what it is possible to see and speak at a given historical moment; the dispositif's selective illuminations send out 'lines of light which form variable shapes inseparable from the [knowledge] apparatus in question' ('What Is' 160). Such a dispositif can serve as a blueprint for reading women's narratives that helped to develop an exclusionary sense of the dominion's constituency through their identification of racial problems and their proposals of characteristically liberal, 'beneficent' solutions. As I have suggested, my interest is in the ways that settler women's attempts to represent themselves were bound up in the discourses that determined what it was possible to see and speak in each of their moments. I want to propose the disposilifof the Colonial

24 Settler Feminism and Race Making

Conference table, though, as a more global, organizing metaphor for the way that these women writers' respective Canadas came to them already illuminated by selective 'lines of light.' Part of the business conducted at the 1907 conference was an improvement upon the somewhat tautological definition of the term 'dominion' as a self-governing colony, through a specification of self-governance as, in the words of the British prime minister, the 'genius of our race' (Ollivier 226). 'We found ourselves, Gentlemen,' he announced loftily, 'upon freedom and independence - that is the essence of the British Imperial connection ... Anything which militates against that principle would be wholly contrary to the genius of our race and our political ideals, and would sooner or later be disastrous' (ibid.). Although this definitional business was conducted as an exercise in nominalist description, the more precise definition of 'dominion' on which the conference participants finally agreed was one that invested the ideals of 'freedom and independence' with a particular political program of exclusion and rigorous normalization. The unsatisfactory indeterminacy of the term 'dominion' surfaced as a problem at the conference in relation to a resolution on the composition of future meetings, which were to be called 'imperial' rather than 'colonial,' in order to reflect the participants' equal standing and their equivalent stakes in the management of empire (Ollivier 232). It was the Canadian prime minister, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, who objected to the initially proposed description of participants at future conferences as 'the Mother Country and His Majesty's Dominions over the seas,' on the grounds that, in this usage, 'Dominions' might 'as well apply to Trinidad or Barbados as to Canada' (237). What was dangerous about this indeterminacy was its failure to secure the limits of 'freedom and independence.' The formulation failed to specify the boundaries of the firstperson plural in Laurier's pronouncement that 'upon one thing we are all agreed ... that ... the basis of the union which now binds the British Empire ... [is] a proper and always permanent recognition of the principle that every community knows best what does for itself (227). Representing the first dominion and the 'splendid example of selfgovernance' at this 1907 meeting, Laurier called for a new 'expression which would make a differentiation between the self-governing Colonies and the other Colonies' (Ollivier 236). The conference proceedings show that after considering the expressions 'self-governing communities of the Empire' and 'British Dominions possessing responsible government,' the participants finally returned to the 'single apt word,' dominion

Introduction

25

(237-8), The term would hereafter be 'taken to mean "self-governing Colonies'" but would now have the capacity to 'strike the imagination more' (237), What was at stake in this circular discussion was of course the specification of the referent of dominion as a racialized capacity for self-government. This specification inverted the logic according to which 'Trinidad or Barbados' were seen to require benevolently imposed colonial administrations until their populations had acquired 'civilization.' Instead, the new specificity attached to the term 'dominion'justified an institutionalized differentiation between Crown colony and dominion on the basis of the essential racial inferiority of the former's population. Three days after the new sense of 'dominion' had been established around the conference table, the Australian prime minister argued for the necessity of ensuring the control of the dominions by 'our own people and by our own race' through measures to direct the flow of 'migration of people of British stock' to the dominions and to stop the 'draining [of] the life blood of the Empire' in 'foreign' directions (Ollivier 254-5). While he found it necessary to stop and insist that he was using the word 'race' 'generally and in no invidious sense' (demonstrating his broad-mindedness in relation to the 'two [white] races' in Canada and South Africa by anticipating their 'gradual merging into a common stock'), this non-invidious usage was broad enough to cover only those 'races with whom we are most intimately associated' (254). The inoffensive racism of normalization (predicated on the subjection of French-Canadian and Boer populations to a rigorously British educational curriculum, a transformation of language and habit) was to be supported by the exclusion of those populations beyond the pale of such enculturation. Thus, as the conference participants went on to discuss the problems of incursions of 'coloured labour' and the 'poor in a lump,' the polite nominalism of 'self-governing status' was discarded in favour of near-frantic calls for white populations in the dominions (256, 258). In these discussions, the Dominion of Canada was held up as a model of well-managed immigration. The discussion around the 1907 Colonial Conference reveals what Mehta has identified as the slippery manoeuvre at the heart of liberal political philosophy, a manoeuvre that posits universal human attributes - freedom, equality, and rationality - while refusing to acknowledge the specific conditions and practices necessary to foster these attributes. The 'highly conventionalistic regime of instruction and social manipulations' necessary to the actualization of these capacities cannot be conceded, as Mehta points out, for this would constitute an admission of the contin-

26 Settler Feminism and Race Making gency and vulnerability of liberalism's political institutions (433). Differentiation and hierarchy must therefore be introduced to liberal orders by means of the "implicit divisions and exclusions of the social world,' which derive their efficacy precisely from their situation 'below the threshold of consciousness and theoretical discourse' (435; emphasis added). In the discussions around the Colonial Conference table, the work of differentiation and hierarchy necessary to secure liberal order in the dominions is kept largely 'below the threshold of consciousness and theoretical discourse' by means of the rhetorical manoeuvre of metalepsis.27 The 'genius of our race,' or the cultural attributes that are the effects of an unacknowledged process of enculturation, are subtly repositioned as the causes of imperial connection and dominion specificity. Self-governing status is repositioned as the expression of a racial essence, even as the conference participants commit themselves to the micrological practices necessary to produce, sustain, and circumscribe British populations. Caught in the contradictions between liberal theory and practice and in some senses propelled into the public arena by these very contradictions - the nineteenth-century woman was not at liberty to define her own subject position. This position was constructed in social legislation, in the discourse of moral reformers, in as unlikely a text as Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, even in the talk around the Colonial Conference table. Thus, in 1926, so expansive was Emily Murphy's field of expertise seen to be by the national media that she was sent a telegram by a prominent Canadian newspaper asking for her opinion on the latest conference's recommendation for the individual sovereignty of the dominions within the empire. She confidently replied that such a recommendation was praiseworthy because it allowed each dominion to 'maintain an organic unity with the other nations of the Imperial League for the defense of our common interests, and the development of our common civilization.'28 As I argue in chapter 3, Murphy's popular ethnographic sketches of the heterogeneous new population settling the Canadian West in Janey Canuck in the West worked to demonstrate the utility of feminine qualities and capacities to liberal government. Murphy's narrative sketches exhibit the enculturating influence of Janey Canuck in relation to the new raw materials of race making in Canada, including the Doukhobors, who had been described just a few years earlier at the 1907 Colonial Conference as the outstanding example of a transplanted 'lump' 'worth all the money spent upon it, [and] justifying] the enthusiasm [and] the hopes raised on its behalf (Ollivier258).

Introduction 27 Exclusion, Inclusion, Right, and Norm As Joan Scott argues in Only Paradoxes to Offer, the history of feminism can be read as a history of the paradoxes that feminist subjects have embodied as they have predicated their projects on the contradictorily universalist and exclusionary political discourse of liberalism. We have seen how the rhetorical figure of metalepsis structured this contradictory universality and exclusivity in the redefinition of the term 'dominion' around the 1907 Colonial Conference table. The 1907 discussions re-enact the contradictions of liberal political philosophy, which proclaims the universality of certain human capacities but remains silent on the specific cultural and psychological conditions necessary to cultivate them (Mehta 430). Liberalism reaches for stabilizing foundations as much in normative 'scientific' discourses on character, morality, and race, as it does in the philosophical texts that it positions as its origin. In order to open the lining of the liberal order of rights and liberties to critical scrutiny, it is thus necessary to look to the more mundane and practical level of the discursive practices that frame problems related to the health, happiness, and moral welfare of populations. At this level, as Mitchell Dean has observed, the value of individual freedom does not flow from a philosophy asserting liberty as the natural condition of humankind but rather from the practical necessity of inciting governed populations to economic and sexual practices harmonized with the 'natural' laws of industrial capitalism (153). A key feature of the discursive stratum that worked to supplement a philosophy of natural liberty with a science of social order in the nineteenth century was the figuration of the bourgeois woman as a moral exemplar in genres such as conduct books, domestic fiction, and travel literature. These genres tell us about the history of the bourgeois woman as a 'civilizing' agent involved in liberalism's coercive inculcation of particular styles of conduct and practices of self-government. As Sylvana Tomaselli has noted, we tend to be more familiar with the view of woman as nature's 'untouched daughter' than the view of woman as an agent of liberal coercion. What accounts for the wider circulation of the former figure is the fact that the alternate history of woman as an agent of 'civilization' has been embedded in 'social practice, custom, and convention, rather than intellectual history' - that is, it has formed part of the very disciplinary and normalizing practices that go unacknowledged at the level of liberal political philosophy (Tomaselli 107, 29 l

124) :

28 Settler Feminism and Race Making

Besides the rhetorical figure of metalepsis, then, there is a second manoeuvre to be accounted for in liberal political discourse: the figure of synecdoche, through which a part of the political game is made to stand for the whole.30 The task of the modern state, as we have seen, is that of ensuring the differentiation, protection, and survival of a more advanced race. However, the work of state racism cannot be described in the official language of liberal politics, the terminology of sovereign rights. The work of state racism is impossible to describe in this language, and yet it is the language of rights that outlines the legitimate field of political contestation. Thus, the battle conducted by the liberal state and its accessory institutions against a perceived racial danger, constantly reproducing itself within the social fabric, can be neither described nor contested in the language of the official political and legal apparatus. The discourse of rights, in other words, protects the coercions of discipline and normalization from critical scrutiny. Modern society ... from the nineteenth century up to our own day, has been characterised on the one hand, by a legislation, a discourse, an organisation based on public right, whose principle of articulation is the social body and the delegative status of each citizen; and, on the other hand, by a closely linked grid of disciplinary coercions whose purpose is in fact to assure the cohesion of this same social body. Though a theory of right is a necessary companion to this grid, it cannot in any event provide the terms of its endorsement. Hence these two limits, a right of sovereignty and a mechanism of discipline, which define, I believe, the arena in which power is exercised. But these two limits are so heterogeneous that they cannot possibly be reduced to each other. The powers of modern society are exercised through, on the basis of, and by virtue of, this very heterogeneity between a public right of sovereignty and a polymorphous disciplinary mechanism. (Foucault, 'Two Lectures' 106; emphasis added)

This heterogeneity makes it possible for me to argue that settler women were included in the exercise of power aimed at ensuring social cohesion, even though they were excluded from the constituency of natural rights. The encounter between 'two lines of approach, two mechanisms, two absolutely heterogeneous types of discourse' in a liberal order conditioned the situations in which feminists arguing against women's political exclusion could turn for support to another area of discourse concerned with norms rather than rights. Discipline and normalization are not silent alongside the clamour around the 'edifice of right,' Fou-

Introduction 29 cault notes; they have their own discourses, which produce the specific forms of knowledge of the human sciences ('Two Lectures' 106-7). While these discourses speak past or even against sovereign right and the rule of the law, in the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, they nevertheless increasingly 'invade the area of right so that the procedures of normalization come to be ever more constantly engaged in the colonization of those of law' (107). Feminist historians have come to see that nineteenth-century women's political agency emerged through the very heterogeneity of the legalpolitical form of the state's power, on the one hand, and the multiplicity of practices of discipline and tutelage grounded in 'spontaneous' power relations on the other. As Riley has argued, the apparently apolitical nature of the terrain of public domesticity occupied by activist bourgeois women did not mean that they were not engaged in political work; this apparent political neutrality reflected the productively tautological association of the terrain of public domesticity with women who were by definition 'overwhelmingly sociological and therefore ... not political entities' (51). In Desire and Domestic Fiction, Nancy Armstrong suggests that the figure of the domestic woman served as the source of a moral authority centred in an emotional interior that was seen to be removed from the 'superficial' contingencies of inherited social standing. Set against the comparatively hollow authority of the aristocracy, the moral authority of the domestic woman provided a central instrument of middle-class self-assertion and a justification for a host of new proto-professions that targeted the moral 'inferiority' of the working classes. The female home visitor, for example, turned the 'weakness and feebleness' of the bourgeois woman into a 'special kind of strength' (Hall 62); she became the 'true forerunner of social work, the instrument at once of the capillary distribution of "household relief and of that "study of character" which was beginning to be considered indispensable for good social administration' (Procacci, 'Social Economy' 165). The home visit by an empathetic sister was not only a central technology in the project of morally incorporating the poor in Britain,31 it was also the means by which white women launched themselves into foreign missionary work, arguing that only female missionaries could penetrate the 'zenanas' or women-only spaces occupied by Muslim and high-caste Hindu women. If the penetration of these other spaces was the special task of the missionary woman, the responsibility of the colonial memsahib was the daily construction of an exemplary unit of'civilization' in the outer reaches of empire. As Rosemary Marangoly George has shown, colonial household-

30 Settler Feminism and Race Making

management guides assigned the memsahib the functions of supervision, inspection, education, and discipline in relation to servants, functions that were to be coordinated through her natural adeptness in the use of 'kindly and reasonable devices' (The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook qtd. George 112). These are the grounds for George's move to amend Armstrong's argument that the bourgeois individual was, in a paradoxical sense, first and foremost a woman, with the additional claim that this paradigmatically female individual was also an imperialist (97). Malthusian Feminism

According to the traditional account of the reworking of the distinction between the public and the private under the pressures of nineteenthcentury industrial capitalism, the end of the eighteenth century saw a transition away from an older conception of the private as a realm that included processes of production. Under the new separation of public and private spheres, processes of production gravitated towards the public sphere as the private closed in around the home and family. The decline of household production also meant that divinely sanctioned patriarchal authority was rejected as the paradigm for political authority. It was replaced by reason, constitutively opposed to the passion that was explicitly feminized in the work of philosophers such as JeanJacques Rousseau. Contemporary ideologies of gender disqualified women from participation in a public world that was reserved for those capable of exercising this reason. When the historian's focus is shifted away from the advent of an industrial mode of production or the new prestige of a unified, transhistorical reason, however, it becomes possible to see how the nineteenth century was also a period of ambiguous opportunity for the redomesticated bourgeois woman. Focusing on the more specific and practical forms of rationality that unified liberal government in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Foucauldian historians have emphasized the importance of the new form of knowledge of political economy. Political economy framed a new field of governmental problems, which were distinct from the old problem of maintaining sovereignty. These new problems were related, instead, to the phenomena of population - the complex relations between wealth, birth rate, means of subsistence, habits, health, and climate, which were seen to require constant tracking and adjustment in the interests of a general welfare. In

Introduction 31 contrast to pre-liberal forms of rule, concerned primarily with the question of how to maintain the sovereignty of the state, liberal government had a multiplicity of aims - the production of wealth, the regulation of birth and mortality rates, the fostering of 'happiness' — which were derived from analyses of the condition of the population itself. Instead of maintaining order through displays of violent force, liberal government would attempt to secure and then use as its own instruments the autonomous processes of population, especially its 'spontaneously developed relations of authority and subordination' (Burchell, 'Peculiar' 140). It would secure the self-regulation of these relations of authority and subordination, and extend their orderly functioning into the future, by enframing them within regularizing structures. One of the instruments of order that liberal government found within the autonomous processes of population was the family. The family was a privileged segment of the population because it could serve as a source of information on birth and death rates, sexual behaviours, patterns of consumption, and other matters related to the conduct of everyday life (Foucault, 'Governmentality' 100). Thus, from serving as a model for divinely sanctioned patriarchal government under the old household mode of production, the family became one element of the population among others, but an element privileged for its ability to serve as an instrument in the 'conduct of conduct.' If liberal philosophical discourse relegated woman to a private sphere of home and family that was, by definition, separate from the sphere of politics and market forces, something else was happening to the figure of woman at the more practical level of governmental know-how. As the family's status shifted from that of a model to a privileged instrument of government, the two members of the new normative family- the responsible breadwinner and the economically dependent woman - came to provide the two sides of a dynamic regulatory mechanism. It was this instrumentalization of relations within the family that opened the way for the bourgeois woman's equipment with forms of authority and agency conducive to social order. As Jacques Donzelot and Denise Riley have argued, nineteenth-century government enlisted the mother as a collaborator, promoting her to a position of authority within the family, as the custodian of health and morality. Precisely by considering nineteenthcentury women's complaints against the arbitrariness of patriarchal 'sovereignty,' Donzelot argues, the liberal state was able to convert women into agents of normalization. But in order to grasp this event in women's history, we must be prepared to find the familiar divisions between pri-

32 Settler Feminism and Race Making

vate and public spheres operating in unfamiliar ways. For if the exclusionary distribution of natural rights was determined by the division between domesticated women and men of reason and property, the heterogeneous mechanisms of discipline and normalization organized themselves according to a different dividing line. This was the eminently flexible line between the state and the processes of population - a line that demarcated the 'space of problematization, the fertile ground for experimental innovation in the development of political technologies of government' (Burchell 141). The distinction drawn by this line was not ontological, as Graham Burchell points out, but rather instrumental. The shift in the family's status from model of government to instrument of government accompanied the disembedding of 'economy' from the sphere of household production and its subsequent reformulation as an autonomous, self-regulating process of resource allocation and exchange. Economy in this new sense was the motor force of the civil society described by such social scientists avant la lettreas Adam Ferguson, David Hume, Thomas Malthus, John Millar, and Adam Smith. It was Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), however, that showed how this economy was subject to what he called the 'power of population.' The capacity of population to increase at a faster rate than the means of subsistence was concentrated, for Malthus, in a ravenous, self-multiplying constituency of unproductive beings who were at all times capable of destroying wealth if not subjected to certain checks — the checks of war and famine or of moral restraint (more promising to Malthus because it was within the reach of government). At the centre of this dangerous hoarde of self-multiplying indigents, possibly governable through pedagogies of moral restraint, Malthus placed the figure of the unruly reproductive woman. As Dean has demonstrated in The Constitution of Poverty, in the decades between the publication of Malthus's Essay and the passage of the British Poor Law Reform Act in 1834, the discussion of poverty focused on the question of how the poor were to be reconciled to a new set of moral responsibilities. For Malthus the problem with pre-1834 poor laws that guaranteed a right to subsistence was that they interfered with moral restraint. What was needed was a distribution of relief that would punish refusals to enter into wage labour and the new familial norms of husbandly responsibility, wifely dependence, and frugal reproduction. The poor law reforms of 1834 cohered around what Dean calls a strategy of 'dispauperization,' a strategy that anticipated the future course of liberal governmental measures of moral, educational, and medical regula-

Introduction

33

don, by beginning with the disqualification of irresponsible men and undomesticated women from outdoor relief, or assistance provided beyond the walls of the workhouse. Foucauldian historians have associated the birth of this liberal course with the shift to a mode of government that actively aimed to foster the conditions under which wage labour and 'responsible' breeding would be 'freely' chosen through individual calculations of self-interest. This required the establishment of conditions conducive to the pursuit of interests that individuals would understand to emerge from themselves.32 Hence, a different figure of subjectivity from the subject of law and contract was presupposed in practical governmental calculations: this was the 'economic man' who was driven by instincts and considerations of interest and was regulatable through positive cultural conventions and institutions - through the deployment rather than the repression of desires (Burchell 'Peculiar' 127). Another name for this economic man, object of governmental technologies, was the self. The empiricist psychosociology formulated in David Hume's Treatise on Human Nature (1738-40) imagined a self produced through the constant infolding of norms. w Individual recognitions of self-interest, Hume suggested, would be determined by the interplay between two types of regulation, which together would form a system of socialization capable of adjusting individual desire to the general interest, or what Malthus would later call the 'aggregate mass of happiness among the common people' (Essay 43). For Hume, these two interanimating regulations were the 'principles of association' and the 'principles of the passions,' or habits of thought and impulses towards action. While conventionalized thought supplied the form and regularity necessary to socialize the passions (nudging them towards institutionalized means of satisfaction and constraint), from the other side, the passions provided a particular orientation towards the real, the specific impulses and motives necessary to practical activity. In this scheme of socialization, Malthus privileged the practical function of the passions, arguing that the passions were the preeminent force and the more valuable resource for government, which should seek their 'regulation and direction ... not diminution and extinction' (Essay [ 1826] 470). The pre-eminence of the passions in Malthus's Essay becomes the basis for a project to place the still relatively new science of political economy 'in a point of view in some degree different from any hitherto seen' ([1798] 11). Malthus's argument is mounted against contemporaneous critiques of political institutions that, in his view, address 'mere

34 Settler Feminism and Race Making

feathers that float on the surface' of the 'deeper-seated causes'; foremost among these deeper-seated causes are the 'corporal propensities,' which override the capacity of reason to regulate conduct (74-5, 104). The burden of this argument is carried by Malthus's introduction of the power of population to the discourse of political economy. This power makes the superior influence of the passions felt in the continuous reintroduction of the 'chilling breath of want' to conditions of prosperityan event that inevitably calls up the figure of the 'mother with a large family' in Malthus's Essay (80). As Mary Jacobus has observed, this figuration is not accidental, for the power of population to outstrip the means of subsistence epitomizes the law of what is for Malthus always a feminized nature, one whose 'infinite variety' generates a permanent excess of desire. By isolating the power of population, Malthus frames a new project for government. This project involves practical interventions at the level of individual character, aiming to educate interests and desires and to correct such behaviours as promiscuity and improvidence. While poverty itself is as natural and necessary for Malthus as it is for the classical political economists (a 'part of the society must necessarily feel a difficulty of living, and this difficulty will naturally fall on the least fortunate members,' he writes [38]), he links the necessity of this difficulty of living to the specific imperative of maintaining checks on the power of population. Without this check provided by the suffering of the poor, the reproducing body would eventually destroy all prosperity. The human misery that for Malthus forms part of nature's infinite variety thus bears the function of ensuring the best condition that can be hoped for, not equality but 'the aggregate mass of happiness' (43) ,34 But while the 1798 edition of Malthus's Essay situates the misery of the poor as a necessary check on the reproducing body, the second edition of the Essay (1803) argues that it should be possible to reorient the poor towards the kinds of preventative checks through which the middle classes govern themselves. Here Malthus formulates the project of earlynineteenth-century sociology, which carves out a specifically moral approach to the problem of poverty. The inspiration for this plan to design inducements to the kinds of conduct that would increase the 'happiness' (that is, decrease the unmanageable disorderliness and political discontent) of the poor, without requiring a redistribution of wealth, is Malthus's consideration of the discipline of disgrace as it functions in women's sexual self-government. Reading the central place given to women's punishment in Malthus's

Introduction 35

scheme, Jacobus has argued that Malthus effectively 'domesticates' the power of population by locating it in the female reproductive body; he then proposes measures to seal this body up and render it docile (86). But the figure of the unruly reproductive woman is perhaps even more productive in Malthus's scheme than Jacobus's reading would suggest, for in subsequent editions of the Essay she becomes the template for moral problems in the poor. Malthus's narrative of her evolution into the perfectly regulated woman provides a model for the implantation of the internalized discipline of prudence in the irresponsible pauper, something that permits Malthus to anticipate a 'gradual and progressive improvement in human society' in later versions of the Essay ([1826] 575). The Essay s enclosure of the capitalist economy of production and exchange within an economy of bodies and behaviours permits economic activity to be repositioned as a 'proving-ground of moral discipline' (Collini 39). As Stefan Collini notes, this receding of economic activity as a moral practice owes something to the way in which evangelical moral psychology 'penetrated the discussion of economic life early in the [nineteenth] century' (39). What I want to stress, however, is that the appropriate agent of such a penetration was perceived to be the well-disciplined bourgeois woman, equipped with an expertise derived precisely from her proximity to the dangerous power of population. It is in Malthus that the art of government is turned towards moral problems first formulated around the dangerously fecund, inadequately self-governing woman. In another section of the Essay, however, Malthus seems to rest the project of inculcating moral restraint in the poor on an expertise grounded in specifically feminine qualities. In the final chapter of the Essay, he turns to the question of what it is that 'awaken [s] social sympathy ... and ... afford[s] scope for the ample exertion of benevolence' ([1798] 152). The answer to this question, he finds, is the 'heart that has ... known sorrow itself [and is] feelingly alive to the pains and pleasures, the wants and wishes, of its fellow beings' (150). This character, elevated by experience and 'overflowing with the milk of human kindness,' 'vivified to a high degree by the excitements of social sympathy' yet 'without those peculiar powers of mind called talents' (150), sounds very much like Malthus's description of the ideal female character a bit earlier. Above and beyond the 'mere distinction of... being a female,' he writes, it is '"the symmetry of person, the vivacity, the voluptuous softness of temper, the affectionate kindness of feelings, the imagination and the wit" of a woman' that inspires the 'virtuous love' of a man (89-90). Thus, the same bourgeois femininity that, according to Malthus, provides the provocation to nor-

36 Settler Feminism and Race Making mative heterosexual desire in men also qualifies the well-regulated domestic woman to participate in the work of correcting the conduct of moral 'inferiors.' The reward for the domestic woman's successful selfinvigilation is her promotion to a central role in the project to inculcate moral restraint in the immoral poor. From serving as an emblem of internal qualities valorized in domestic fiction against the superficiality and bankruptcy of aristocratic manners, the bourgeois woman is raised to a position of authority and expertise in moral government and empowered to 'pit [her virtues] against working-class culture' (Armstrong, Desire 8). The question that interests me is how nineteenth-century feminism lakes itself back from Malthus. There is a path to be traced from the theme, in Wollstonecraft's Vindication, of the inadequately governed woman who bears responsibility for the moral formation of others to the unfurling of this problematization of female self-governance within a science of social order in which the well-disciplined bourgeois woman enjoys the privileged position of a specialist in morally improving interventions. This path might be described most economically as running from Wollstonecraft's argument for sympathy for the poor (a sympathy to be produced through a revolution, first in aristocratic manners, and then in female ones), via Malthus, to the project of inculcating social cooperation in the poor in a later feminist's ambitious nine-volume popularization of the forms of conduct and reasoning appropriate to workers under industrial capitalism, Harriet Martineau's nine-volume Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-4). Wollstonecraft's central demand - for women's freedom to cultivate power over themselves — expresses a radical project to transform the 'normal,' contented woman who is educated to serve interests which betray her wider potentiality. However, the Vindication leaves this empowered relation to self precariously suspended between a space of ethics not necessarily defined by 'worldly utility' on the one hand, and a 'private virtue' firmly identified with 'public benefit' on the other (169, 267). This suspension leaves Wollstonecraft's feminist project open to being collapsed with the project of governing others, and the site of the moral problem open to being shifted from the contented woman to her 'inferiors' of class and race. Martineau's early essay 'On Female Education' (1823) is reminiscent of Wollstonecraft's Vindication in its strategic argument for the social 'expediency of giving proper scope and employment to the powers which [women] do possess,' and for the urgency of a progressive response to women's 'claims to cultivation of mind' in

Introduction 37

their role as the 'guardian [s] and instructress[es] of infancy' (91-2). A decade later, however, Martineau merges women's education with the govermental task of educating the masses in the proper use of freedom. In her Illustrations oj Political Economy, the goal of female emancipation is displaced by that of social cohesion - that 'the aggregate of human life [be] cheerful and virtuous [not] mournful and depraved' (Preface xvi). Martineau's particular sense of her public role was, as Shelagh Hunter has observed, that of a 'governess to the nation' (37). Indeed, in the preface to the first volume of the Illustrations, Martineau sets herself the task of training the 'great mass of the people' to conduct themselves according to the truths of classical political economy, a task that she sees as requiring the popularizing mediation of a woman's pen (x, xiii). The intensely popular Illustrations goes on to delineate the 'natural' domestic and work relations presumed in the 'cold, dry' doctrines that have heretofore prevented the 'few grand principles' of political economy from being 'generally understood [in a way that] would gradually remove all the obstructions, ... remedy the distresses, and equalize the lot of the population' (ix). 35 Reviewers understood Martineau's narrative elucidations of the principles of classical political economy to be an extension of women's charity work, operating through the application of a feminine aptitude for sympathetic understanding to the task of communicating the duty of social improvement in an accessible narrative form (S. Hunter 46-9). Published two years before the Poor Law Reform Act, Martineau's narrative 'Cousin Marshall' is a tale devoted to illustrating the law that charity 'must be directed to the enlightenment of the mind, instead of to the relief of bodily wants' ('Cousin' 132). Martineau explains to her readers that the popular analogy between the state and its members, on the one hand, and a parent and his family, on the other, is false. The 'rulers of a state ... have little influence over its subsistence-fund, and no control whatever over the number of its members' (131). The 'Summary of Principles' at the conclusion of the tale reinforces this theme of a state that has pulled away from the earlier model of domestic economy. Yet the summary does not encapsulate the way in which Martineau's narrative has resituated the state's influence and control in the femak parent. The narrative has staged this lesson by means of an opposition between two women: Cousin Marshall, distinguished by an admirable frugality and sense of social duty that lead her to assume responsibility for her dead relative's children rather than send them to the workhouse, and Mrs

38 Settler Feminism and Race Making Bell, an ill-conducted pauper-wife who shamelessly squanders parish assistance. The opposition between independence and idle dissoluteness is thus illustrated in wifely terms that focus the story's pedagogical energies through the negative example of the overspending and overbreeding pauperwoman who fails to reign in a vagabond husband. When the word 'character' appears in this story, it is, significantly, in relation to female servants who find themselves in the workhouse for lack of a 'character,' in the sense of a character reference (18). At the other end of the scale of character in the workhouse is the female workhouse visitor, a doctor's sister who is the story's source of insights into the problems with the 'let-alone plan of [pauper] policy' as well as the story's vehicle for the innovative suggestion that 'poverty' be carefully partitioned from the contagion of'indigence' (Cousin 32, 29). But '[tjhese distinctions were somewhat too nice for the gentleman [visitor]'s perceptions; at least, while announced in abstract terms. He stood in an attitude of perplexed attention while ... Miss Burke observed that... classification in the house was an imperative duty' (29). If the voice of a writer like Martineau was first heard as that of a monstrous 'female Malthusian' who deprecated charity and declared childbearing to be a crime against society (Polkinghorn and Thomson 26), by the second half of the century 'women's mission' had been firmly reoriented towards the practical necessity of inciting the poor to forms of moral restraint. Martineau's next project, after the completion of the Illustrations series, was an account of her expedition to observe morals and manners in the New World, in the three-volume Society in America (1837), which she had wanted to call Theory and Practice of Society in America, in order to reflect the nature of her project as an investigation into a world in which 'no ancient forms prevented] the progress of mankind towards a "natural society"' (S. Hunter 158, 153-4). Martineau frames her observations of the 'theory and practice of society' as being derived from the privileged vantage-point of the female observer granted access to the 'nursery, the boudoir, the kitchen ... all excellent schools in which to learn the morals and manners of a people' (Society 53). In the midst of her own rambles through Upper Canada, Anna Jameson discovers in local newspapers 'whole columns extracted from Miss Martineau's long-expected book on America,' and she praises Martineau's book for its infusion with the author's 'good and womanly spirit' (Winter251).Jameson's adfeminumpraise identifies the feminized author-function of nineteenth-century women's writing, informed by an authority that was, as Armstrong has argued, associated with the well-

Introduction 39

springs of the human heart and devoted to the explanation of the sociopolitical world in the individualizing terms of habits and character. The Settler Woman and the 'Social' Recent work at the conjuncture of gender studies and imperial historiography has shown that the assumption that nineteenth-century women were excluded from the exercise of power rests on a too narrow conception of the field of politics, an incomplete understanding of the way in which power is exercised in liberal societies.36 Riley has argued eloquently and concisely that while nineteenth-century women were indeed bereft of rights and excluded from representative politics, they were 'too thoroughly' included in a different space of politics, the 'social' constituted through the enlargement of the domestic sphere into an arena of moral problems and individualizing interventions (15). This arena of public domesticity offered middle-class women opportunities to demonstrate their moral or racial 'superiority' through the improvement of others of class and race. Just as the bourgeois British woman's work of improving morality in working-class homes was imbued with a sense of imperial mission,37 the colonies themselves were seen to offer an expanded arena for this public domesticity, and an arena much more palatable to imperialist patriarchal society than were suffragist demands (George 100). Within the field of the social, the bourgeois woman occupied the paradoxical, double-edged position of a template for problems of self-government and an expert in the repair or improvement of these problems in others. But if the field of the social was constraining as well as enabling for nineteenth-century British women, this ambivalent condition was only accentuated for the settler woman who found herself in an experimental counter-site, the parameters of which roughly coincided with those of the social. In the context of the settler colony, the formation of a liberal order involved the placement of the well-governed white woman at the centre of race making. In Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, therefore, Jameson encounters one of a string of colonial laws designed to equip more inert legislative tools inherited from Britain with the positive capacity to administer norms of proper femininity. This legislation was an attempt to recede the aristocratic concern for the transmission of wealth that shaped rape law as a more 'democratic' biological concern with the transmission of racial property. As I shall argue, this current of legislation demonstrates the way in which the law comes to be deployed in the dissemination of familial and sexual norms, and also

40 Settler Feminism and Race Making

points to the vanguard position of the dominion in the refinement of a normalizing liberal order. Stoler's point that state racism is elaborated in relation to 'uncertainties about what it means to be bourgeois, about the permeability of its distinctions, and what constitute] its vulnerabilities' is borne out by the centrality of the figure of the vulnerable and dangerous woman in the colonial legislation that I discuss (92). Although some white women passed through the Crown colonies as the wives of colonial administrators, others entered the dominions as single, 'unprotected' emigrants, forced to look beyond their European homelands in search of means of self-support.38 These were women whose outer domesticity constituted a moral problem and a potential racial risk requiring initiatives to protect, recapture, and reclaim them. As Valverde has observed, the concern was not just that such women were endangered, but also that they were potentially dangerous: thus, the Canadian Council for the Immigration of Women, established in 1919, would declare itself committed 'primarily to ensure Canada against the undesirable type of woman' (qtd. Valverde, Age 126). Part of the work of Winter Studies and Summer Rambles is to resituate the problem of pauperism within the laboratory of the settler colony, which Jameson grasps as a terrain capable of calling attention to the 'gross vices, the profligacy, the stupidity, and basely vulgar habits of a great part of the people' (292). Jameson neither condemns oligarchic colonial government nor evaluates the grievances of those who rebelled against the ruling Family Compact in Upper Canada in 1837. Instead, her narrative ventures to diagnose the conditions that account for the transformation of potentially 'respectable' persons into members of the 'Radical set' and proposes the implantation of responsible government at the level of families and individuals (539). But Jameson also has an interest in Upper Canada as an experimental terrain for the inculcation of female self-government, an 'arctic zone' empty of those institutions that in Britain constrain the development of female character. She begins with an interest in the moral and psychological conditions that foster social order, but her narrative eventually becomes a protest against the utilitarian calculations governing the formation of women's desires and interests and the duplicity of a 'civilizing' project that attempts to reconcile First Nations to a 'common interest' defined by British settlers. Jameson's travel narrative thus doubles as a dramatization of her progressive disidentification from the truths of her own culture. She eventually rejects her initial conceptualization of freedom in terms of a transplantation to negative, open space and adopts a different conception of freedom as a practice of experimentation that arises out of an analysis of current constraints.

Introduction 41 I begin to track the loss of Jameson's critical perspective on liberal freedom as I turn to the first-person narratives of Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney in Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear in chapter 2. The genre of the white woman's captivity narrative performatively reinscribes freedom's opposition to captivity, an opposition that supports the invisibility of disciplinary and normalizing power in the apparently unfettered space of negative freedom. Prioritizing historical rather than generic cues, my reading of these captivity narratives insists on their connections to the central figures in another genre - the white slavery narrative, which also circulates in Canada at precisely the same historical moment. White slavery was used by late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century reformers to frame the 'saving' of prostitutes as a moral issue on a par with the abolition of slavery, but in this discourse the racial connotations of enslavement tended to pass to the male figure, constructed as a 'foreign' enemy within the borders of the nation, who threatened to abduct women from their proper function in the reproduction of racial purity. In 1885, the demarcation of'internal enemies' and the extension of paternalistic protections promised to be especially fruitful politically. This was a moment when women were increasingly circulating outside of domestic space, and working-class militancy was on the rise as industrial manufacturing and urban populations were expanding in the eastern Canada in which the narratives of Gowanlock and Delaney were published. I argue that there is a subtle form of control at work in Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear - one that subjects Gowanlock and Delaney themselves to the pressures of norms of sexual and racial purity. The 'freedom' to which these women returned after their experiences of captivity involved a coercive incitement to testify under conditions that predicated the truthfulness of their statements on their embodiment of a 'normal' femininity. Gowanlock accedes to this pressure by delineating the revulsions and hardships of unclean domesticity in a Metis tent. What makes 'slushing in an Indian teepee' so much worse than being a typical 'maid-of-all-work' in her narrative is precisely the condition that, thirty years later, distinguishes white women's labour in a 'Chinese chop suey palace,' or any other Asian-owned business, from the kind of domestic service recommended to emigrant daughters of empire. The former 'enslavement' was differentiated from run-of-themill exploitation by its unhygienic environment, dangerous to racial purity and social order. Gowanlock's narrative accedes to the demand for 'normal' femininity, but it also stages a protest against the coercive terms of its own production, stressing the position of indebtedness to 'civilized' society in which

42 Settler Feminism and Race Making

she 'owes' an account of violation to her readers. By emphasizing the transaction that underpins her freedom, Gowanlock deprives her audience of the pleasure of unaccountability for colonial violence secured through sentimental identification with a bereaved female captive, and instead positions this audience as an investor reaping returns. The critical energy of Gowanlock's narrative is contained, however, by the structure of split narrativization of Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear. Theresa Delaney's narrative follows that of Gowanlock, and converts the trope of debt repayment into a voluntary investment in a general security, for Delaney frames her narrative as an insurance contribution against future political upheavals. While Gowanlock represents herself as the victim of 'unhygienic' exploitation, Delaney undertakes a wider critique of exploitation, from a supererogatory position that evaluates the social benefits of the government of natives against their 'exploitation' by the antisocial Hudson's Bay Company. 'Exploitation' in her narrative stands, quite simply, for the absence of liberal government. In the course of the career of Emily Murphy, the kind of expert gaze assumed by Delaney becomes institutionalized. The westering adventures of Murphy's character-narrator are involved in prefiguring a type of maternal authority that is soon to be deployed in the administration of normalizing justice. As Dorothy Chunn has argued, in the early decades of the twentieth century the grafting of non-legal discourses, expertise, and techniques onto existing legal mechanisms substituted the essentially different individual who required a 'cure' for the formally equal legal subject; it also eroded the distinction between deviant and dependent subjects, thereby creating the more inclusive category of the marginal, who would require positive techniques of normalization. Murphy's writing about the innovative work of her Women's Court, in Canadian newspapers and periodicals in the teens and twenties, links this turn towards individualizing procedures to the female magistrate's special concern with the difficulty of the female criminal's social reinstatement and her need for rehabilitation 'in the light of her disabilities, capabilities and adaptabilities.'39 When in 1916 Murphy is appointed the first female magistrate in the British Empire, the pedagogical energies of Murphy's Janey Canuck literary sketches are carried into a new kind of courtroom concerned with moral crimes and therapeutic cures. Reading Murphy's Janey Canuck sketches alongside court documents demonstrates the way in which the settler woman's textual productions actually contributed grids for the perception and evaluation of conduct, grids that could even crystallize into institutions. Janey Canuck's pene-

Introduction

43

tration of the domestic spaces of immigrant communities in the West by means of a sympathetic understanding encoded as a form of feminine expertise formulated a strategy of power that was subsequently materialized in Murphy's court. The Canadian West that was the setting for these innovations in the classification and assimilation of racial others was also claimed by Murphy as the stage for her vanguard action against patriarchal 'barbarity' on another front - in her campaign for official 'person' status on behalf of Canadian women. Her 1929 address to the Edmonton branch of the Women's Canadian Club suggested the way she saw these two struggles coming together in an Anglo-Protestant feminism committed to race making. As a worthy and timely club undertaking, she proposed the 'study of the 50 races of foreign peoples ... the new blood stream that is coming to Canada,' and the formation of Canadian Clubs among 'New Canadian women.' 'Women [are] prone to talk glibly of Canadianization, and to stand back when there was anything so definite to "do,"' she observed, but the 'simple touch of kindliness [is] more effective than any other agent.'40 Feminist postcolonial criticism has tended to focus either on white femininity as a symbol of the moral authority of colonialism - stressing the necessary voicelessness and lack of agency of women themselves in narrative representations of their 'eroticized and ravaged bodies' (Sharpe 66) - or on the position of the memsahib empowered to act as the manager of native servants in the colonial 'base camp' (George 107, 102). My interest is in accounting for the paradoxical combination of the settler woman's functions as an emblem of sexual vulnerability and an agent of government. To this end, 1 discuss texts that point to the reversibility of the position of template for problems of government into a position of moral expertise. While the focus on the colonial woman's voiceless victimhood prevents us from understanding how first-person narratives were something more complicated than opportunities for selfexpression, the focus on her empowerment as the manager of an exemplary unit of civilization fails to account for the intense constraints involved in her outfitting as the bearer of norms of 'civilization.' This empowerment was inextricable from her position as the epitomization of the settler population's vulnerability to racial contamination. The promise held out in Murphy's courtroom was that the fully reformed 'nightwalker' or 'impulsive degenerate' would be able to replicate Janey Canuck's exemplary conduct as well as her supervisory function in the open sphere, after a time of preparatory practice in the heterotopic space of the correctional institution. Anna Jameson's text,

44 Settler Feminism and Race Making

as I shall argue, is also dotted with reflexive indications that its travel narrative should be read as a rehearsal for the practice of female moral character. Jameson approaches the settler colony itself as a kind of feminist set, positioning Upper Canada as an extension of the space of the theatre as she moves from literary studies of dramatic character to the narrative of her voyage around the colony in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles. Jameson's text thus situates the settler colony within the chain of spaces of governability that, later on in this book, will include the model home of Theresa Delaney, the Indian agency farm instructress, and the Women's Court presided over by Janey Canuck.'

chapter one

'A Magnificent and an Enviable Power': Governance of Self and of Others in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada

[IIn the morning she studies, in the mening she embodies those studies: she has the means oj testing and correcting them by practice, and of resuming her studies in the morning, to improve, the weak parts, remedy the failures, and in the evening try the corrections, Florence Nightingale, 'Cassandra'

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, Anna Brownell Jameson's narrative of her eight-month visit to Upper Canada in 1837, was published in three volumes in 1838 by the London publishers Saunders and Otley. Written as a series of journal entries addressed to a female friend, the text is divided into the two sections indicated by its title, sections that record Jameson's interpretive and translating activities during a winter of seclusion in Toronto, followed by her exploration of the colony by means of baker's cart, farmer's wagon, steamboat, and canoe during the spring and summer seasons. 'Winter Studies' takes the reader on discursive flights back to the Old World, as Jameson comments on the texts of German literature that she is re-reading while waiting out an inhospitable Canadian winter. 'Summer Rambles' then carries the reader across a topography of lakes, rivers, forests, new settlements, and Native encampments in the New World. Knitted together, the accounts of Jameson's studies and rambles produce a narrative that proceeds from literary criticism to readings of the social text of Upper Canada. As Judith Johnston has observed, there is something rather perverse about a book ostensibly on Canada that devotes its first half to a discus-

46 Settler Feminism and Race Making

sion of German literature (129). In 'Winter Studies' the few accounts of Jameson's attempts to venture out into Toronto are interspersed with much lengthier ruminations on Weimar tragic drama and on Johann Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe, a text that Jameson was in the process of translating. But the two-pronged structure of Winter Studies and Summer Rambles 'seems too deliberate ... to have come about by accident,' as Johnston remarks (129). Indeed, it is only when the passage from literary criticism to colonial travel writing is acknowledged as a conscious design that the originality of Jameson's approach to the question of female selfhood can be understood. The movement from stationary study to active exploration in the text's two-part structure enacts something of the process of alternating, interanimating preparation and practice that is described in the epigraph to this chapter, taken from Florence Nightingale's essay 'Cassandra.' Nightingale's essay was written fifteen years after Jameson's text, but the essay takes tip the questions that are central to Winter Studies and Summer Rambles and to the feminist campaigns that Jameson would pursue in England into the 1850s on behalf of the self-supporting middle-class woman.1 Like Jameson, Nightingale decries the utter loss of self-determination in the middle-class woman, who has had to 'break down all individual and independent life' and content herself with supplying periodic, inconsequential 'remarks,' never developing the current of her own thoughts ('Cassandra' 42). The exceptional outer-domestic woman that Nightingale describes in this section of her essay, the woman whose occupation demands a self-sustaining 'exercise of faculty'(41), and permits her to study in the morning and then embody her studies in the evening, is the actress. The actress also provides Jameson with a figure for the woman engaged in experimental transformations of the self; indeed, a substantial portion of the discussion of German literature in 'Winter Studies' is a commentary on female dramatic roles and their embodiments by particular actresses. As I shall argue, it is the figure of the actress that presides over the transition from study to practice in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, carrying Jameson's sense of the theatre as a special space of freedom from social conventions from the discussion of German drama into the description of the settler colony. Toward the end of 'Winter Studies,'Jameson criticizes 'people practicing resignation to social, self-created evils; fitting, or trying to fit, their own natures by "a process of degradation" to circumstances which they ought to resist' (149). This condition, in which '[w]e are so accustomed to the artificial atmosphere round us, that we lose sometimes the power

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles

47

of distinguishing the false from the true,' is for Jameson a peculiarly feminine one, and what she proposes as an alternative to this immersion in an 'artificial atmosphere' is the vocation of the actress (148). For Jameson, the theatre is a parenthesis within the existing order of things, an instance of the counter-site organized according to a different conception of space and time, which Foucault calls the heterotopia. The distinguishing feature of the heterotopia - its existence as an 'effectively enacted' Utopia that exerts a 'counteraction' on entrenched ways of seeing and doing ('Of Other' 24) - is for Jameson manifested in the special labour of self-transformation that the theatre requires of its professional female inhabitants. The creative but disciplined work of cultivating and embodying character - especially a female character conceived outside of the constraints of wordly circumstances, as a purely aesthetic conception - is for Jameson an urgent and necessary pathway to a freer existence for women. As a post-Wollstonecraftian feminist, Jameson is a critic of the system of female education that fits its products to their circumstances. She argues that female education generates a product characterized by a 'strength of local habits and attachments, a want of cheerful self-dependence, a cherished physical delicacy, [and] a weakness of temperament' (258). The question of how a resistance to circumstances might be mounted through the re-creation of female 'nature' is the central preoccupation of Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, a preoccupation that links Jameson's text to Wollstonecraft's earlier call for the cultivation of women's capacity for self-government. Wollstonecraft's name is nowhere mentioned in Jameson's text, but as Adele M. Ernstrom has argued, this careful omission of the name of a defamed precursor is precisely indicative of the magnitude of Wollstonecraft's importance, for Jameson and for early-nineteenth-century women writers generally, who 'moved on terrain she had charted' (282). In a private letter written as she returned to England, Jameson announced that she was in the process of writing a book 'for Englishwomen ... to tell them some things they do not know' (qtd. Johnston 129). Indeed, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles is an essentially pedagogical text, dramatizing the narrator's fundamental intellectual displacement for a reader invited along for the ride. The 'you' to whom Jameson's narrator addresses her discourse is initially a specific interlocutor, Jameson's friend Ottilie von Goethe (the daughter-in-law of the German poet). But while this addressee is at first specified as Ottilie, the second-person pronoun gradually loses its association with a proper name and the 'you' of the text assumes the more general contours of a middle-class English

48 Settler Feminism and Race Making woman.2 As I shall argue, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles can be read as a dramatic rendering of the argument of Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman - a kind of script for the middle-class English woman who would change her self. Foregrounding the persuasive and performative elements of discourse that Wollstonecraft's text minimizes or erases, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles suggests that the self-governing woman has to be performed in order to be recognized. Jameson, Wollstonecraft, and the Practice of Freedom Although Jameson's text represents itself as a set of aesthetic notes and social vignettes, a loosely collected series of observations addressed to an intimate friend, the text is a much more deliberate construction. As Clara Thomas has noted, it is the product of at least three stages of reading and writing: a preparatory stage in which Jameson outlined the course of her voyage, a second stage of note taking and journal writing, and a final stage of editing, which involved the addition of ethnographic and historical information in footnotes (Afterword 548). In spite of this meticulous rewriting, Jameson does not alter what is a trajectory of intellectual displacement, thereby preserving the status of travel in her text as a figure, as well as an occasion, for such a fundamental unmooring. Her careful recording of the chronology of her journey is associated with her 'fancy' that she carries at least one other woman along with her; she thus promises to 'take things in order, ... that you may accompany us in our canoe voyage' (522). The text's epistolary mode of address seems designed to protest that this is a privately circulated correspondence rather than a book publicly distributed to an anonymous audience, its author innocent of the kind of literary entrepreneurialism through which Jameson in fact supported herself, especially after the retirement of her estranged husband, Robert.3 But it is also important to observe that in this feigned correspondence, Jameson writes in her own name, a fact that makes her text an act of dramatic self-representation, a piece of stage business that implicates the reader as a kind of spectator.4 Because this dramatic method does not depend upon the establishment of a 'fourth wall' - it is paired with Jameson's direct address to a 'you' - the text leaves a passage open between the world of the reader and the stage on which Jameson acts as the reader's proxy.5 What Jameson wishes to find on the stage of Upper Canada is an expansion of the exceptional, heterotopic space of the theatre in which the European woman is able to make free use of her self. But while Winter

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles

49

Studies and Summer Rambles appropriates Upper Canada as a wider exercising ground for the transplanted bourgeois woman, the woman of the Old World for whom Jameson's text is written is invited to take her moral exercise through reading, much as Jameson represents her own clinging to books, during the long winter months in Toronto, as 'mechanical means to maintain the balance of my mind, and the unimpaired use of my faculties, for they will be needed' (103). Winter Studies and Summer Rambles thus gestures towards its own place within an empirical problematization of subjectivity that recognizes the work of conduct literature in regulating and directing women's desires. This gesturing would seem to mark the text's distance from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, where the extension of the Enlightenment discourse of natural rights to women calls upon the idea of an essential human nature. However, the Vindication couples this idea with a more practical, empirical problematization of the female self as an artefact of a particular form of rule and a specific kind of training. Wollstonecraft concerns herself not just with the pronouncements on female nature by philosophers such as Rousseau, but also with the effects of practical texts offering women advice on how to conduct themselves, texts such as Dr Gregory's Legacy to His Daughters, which, she argues, proposes the kind of 'starched rules of decorum' required by minds deprived of a 'cultivated understanding' (Vindication 200). Wollstonecraft's recognition of the work of female conduct books in shaping women's tastes and desires assumes that human beings are 'made up as subjects' through discourses, techniques, procedures, and forms of judgment that shape self-understandings as well as ways of acting upon the self (Rose, 'Authority' 296) .6 This recognition extends the Vindication into a critique of the constitutive ground of the liberal political order, a ground manufactured through the production of civil selves. Wollstonecraft's concern with this constitutive ground takes her from the abstract and universalist discourse of rights into the field of practices and techniques in which the liberal ideal of individual freedom must be thought in terms of specific actions, operations, and confrontations. The Vindication thus grounds the ideal of freedom by asking how it is cultivated and practised. The existing system of female education equips women with an incapacity for citizenship, Wollstonecraft argues, by denying them opportunities to develop and practise an 'austerity of behaviour' (163). Although women are rational creatures, she suggests that the capacity to exercise reason and to understand the social duties flowing from it requires certain practices of the self. The kind of asceticism that Wollstonecraft has

50 Settler Feminism and Race Making

in mind can, I think, be connected to the particular sense of ethics as a 'way of being and behaviour' predicated on an intensified self-reflexivity and self-regulation that Foucault draws from the ancient Greek sense of ethos (Ethics 286). For Foucault, individual freedom is ethical to the extent that it is the result of a deliberate, ongoing, and at least semiautonomous care for the self, a watchfulness over one's actions and attitudes. Ethics in this sense refers primarily to a labour of self on self that strives to stylize conduct in a particular way. This labour requires the opening of an interval or division within the self that allows one to 'take oneself as an object of knowledge and a field of action, so as to transform, correct, and purify' (Foucault, Care 42). But the ability to open this interval, to question one's everyday conduct and exert a form of power over the self, requires a prior condition of nonslavery to others as well as to 'oneself and one's appetites' (Ethics 286). Thus, Foucault does not fail to observe that in the ancient world, the 'privilege-duty' of ethics was reserved for men of 'those social groups, very limited in number, that were bearers of culture' (Care 45). Wollstonecraft recognizes the same exclusivity of the space of ethics or practical freedom when she points out that an 'austerity of behaviour' is scarcely to be expected from a female being who, 'from its infancy, has been made the weathercock of its sensations,' having been ruled through the 'severe restraint' of'blind propriety' (163, 262). The possibility of practising freedom in the form of a concerted self-shaping rests on a prior escape from such restraints. Although Wollstonecraft argues that women are enslaved by their senses and appetites, this does not mean that they do not exercise power over others; on the contrary, she argues that women are encouraged to cultivate a coquettish power over men precisely at the expense of the power that they would otherwise have over themselves (156). She underlines the corrupting effects of coquetry and cunning, substituted for access to the natural rights of humankind, by observing that women forced to resort to these mischievous forms of power tend to 'render both men and themselves vicious to obtain illicit privileges' (89). In order to argue that female self-government would be more socially beneficial than these unstable and immoderate powers over others, Wollstonecraft compares the dangers of ill-governed women to the dangers posed by an uneducated underclass. The point of comparison for the coquettish woman thus shifts from the despotic ruler to the ruled, from the aristocracy in its 'gaudy hereditary trappings' to the unruly poor (103). Borrowing the 'sentiments' of an 'eloquent Frenchman,' Wollstonecraft appeals to the moderate sensibility of the bourgeois reformer

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles

51

and writes that 'they know not, when they make a man a brute, that they may expect every instant to see him transformed into a ferocious beast' (156). Likewise, the risks of depriving women of instruction in self-government are far greater than the risks of providing them with such instruction. Women inculcated with the single desire to establish themselves through marriage - 'this desire making mere animals of them' are only 'fit for a seraglio!' How can women outfitted with such selves 'be expected to govern a family with judgement, or take care of the poor babes whom they bring into the world?' she asks (83). The spectre of animal-like, orientalized mothers that Wollstonecraft creates here in order to warn against the dangers of uneducated women implies as its flip side the wholesome social consequences of women trained to fulfil the task of raising reasonable beings in the space of the English family. For both Wollstonecraft and Jameson, the link between female selfgovernment and the government of others is indirect: it is a matter, first, of qualification, and then of influence through exemplarity. The ancient sense of ethos also implied a connection between care for the self and power relations involving others outside of the self: first, in the sense that ethical care for the self was what made one competent to occupy a place as a citizen, and second, in the sense that an attentive care for the self was necessary to regulate the citizen's power over others and to prevent it from becoming abusive or tyrannical (Foucault, Ethics 287-8). Wollstonecraft's argument replicates this logic insofar as it is women's lack of self-control that forces them to resort to debased forms of power, just as, inversely, 'to their senses, are women made slaves, because it is by their sensibility that they obtain present power' (154). At the close of the eighteenth century, Wollstonecraft's mobilization of this logic assumes the form of a promise or an assurance: that the woman encouraged to foster a power over her senses and appetites will exercise a more beneficent form of power in the world. As Denise Riley has demonstrated, the history of the nineteenth-century 'social' is the story of how women's labour to reform themselves became identified with a wider project to reform the worlds of the inferior and dangerous classes. In this story, the rehabilitation of woman is effected through a 'bland redistribution and dilution of the sexual onto the familial,' the projection of the 'sexualised elements of "women" onto new categories of immiseration and delinquency, which then bee[o]me sociological problems' (48). There was nothing necessary or inevitable about this projection; rather - as I attempt to demonstrate in my reading of Winter Studies and Summer Rambles- it was the result of a collision between the vision of a feminist prac-

52 Settler Feminism and Race Making

dee of freedom and a new form of scientific knowledge associated with the practical problems of governing the domestic habits of a population. Wagering her feminist project on the authority of this new knowledge, Jameson offers a cautionary diagnosis of the neglect in moral cultivation that causes potentially 'respectable' settlers to become members of the 'Radical set' (539). This diagnosis was especially timely, as Winter Studies and Summer Rambleswas published less than a year after the outbreak of popular rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada. In Upper Canada, the 1837 rebellion had pitted a new social group of merchants, mechanics, farmers, and professionals, demanding democratic government and channels of class mobility, against an entrenched elite of British and Loyalist gentry stock, who had managed various paternalistic accommodations with lower-ranking Orange Order allies in the producing class (Cadigan 323, 326). Jameson came to Upper Canada in 1836, when this paternal order was 'in the throes of dissolution' (Cadigan 320). In a year of Orange Order election riots against Reformers, she arrived as the separated wife of the AttorneyGeneral of Upper Canada, a former Tory member of the Legislative Assembly who had colluded with Orangemen in the intimidation of Reform supporters in the 1836 elections.8 Anna Jameson's thematization of moral degeneration among settlers in this context did not position her with the Tory establishment, which refrained from 'moralizing] about the rough edges of plebeian life, or were politically wise enough to keep it to themselves' (Cadigan 344). Her warning that 'the ranks of the disaffected are perpetually recruited in Canada from the ranks of the injured' (Winter 53Q) was rather more in line with the point of view of the moderate Whig-style reformer, who recognized that limited forms of representative government, institutions of discipline such as common schools and asylums, and a stricter approach to problems of crime and immorality, could serve as a way of 'limiting and containing "the people"' (Curtis, 'Class' 105). Indeed, some of the central demands of the Canadian Reformers - especially for local channels for political participation, and for the replacement of a government by notables with a rationally organized government by bureaucratic cadres - were 'commonplaces derived from the struggles for the [British] Reform Act in which many of those shaping imperial policy in the Canadas had been active' (ibid., 104) .9 As I shall argue, Jameson's interest in the question of women's capacity for self-government cannot be dissociated from her repeated thematization of moral degeneration among settlers; indeed, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles eventually proposes female self-governance as the solution to the

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles

53

problem of moral 'retrogadation' in Upper Canada. In this respect, her text inherits the ambiguity of Wollstonecraft's call for women to 'labour by reforming themselves to reform the world,' a call that Wollstonecraft left precariously suspended between a feminist care for the self and a female morality fully identified with 'public benefit,' expressed through women's participation in the taming of class others (Vindication 133, 267). Although the 'kinds of women's lives post-Wollstonecraft feminists were least interested in changing were lives like their own,' Miriam Brody observes, it was the contented normalcy of economically secure, dependent middle-class womanhood that Wollstonecraft herself wished to interrupt (Introduction 60). For Jameson, as for Wollstonecraft, it is not, initially, the conduct of the inferior and dangerous classes that needs changing, but rather that of the respectably married woman of the middle class, who, as Wollstonecraft puts it, 'has never thought, much less acted for herself (137). The problem that arises for the feminist moral scientist, however, is that the unjust conditions under which such femininity is cultivated do not necessarily produce discontented women. The cultivation of new desires and internal resources in women - desires and resources that would make women's present lot unsatisfactory — must be the precondition for a society in which the constraining institutions of marriage and motherhood would cease to be the only forms of life open to women. But these institutions continue to be desired by the woman educated for the 'worldly utility' of the obedient wife (Vindication 169). In the self-sustaining machine of civil society, desires and institutions are hard-wired into relations of mutually reinforcing productivity. In order to steer past the problem of the circularity of positive power, then, it is necessary to transplant the 'normal' woman to another time-space - theoretical, experimental, or actual - in which the 'circumstances and advantages around her' cease to supply her with 'deficiencies' (Winter 259). In Wollstonecraft, this alternative time-space exists only as a hypothetical future state 'where there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage' (118). Jameson, however, locates a limited realization of this future state in the experimental and extraterritorial space of the theatre; in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, she then attempts to discover in the colony a theatre that has expanded its boundaries to encompass the whole of society. One consequence of Jameson's attempt to expand the boundaries of the theatre in her colonial travel writing is a shift in tone and discursive register that finds her recommending punitive solutions to the contented condition of the bourgeois woman, including her exposure to

54 Settler Feminism and Race Making

the character-strengthening conditions of necessity and adversity. This recourse to punitive pedagogy coincides with the slide from an aesthetic to a scientific problematization of female character that I track below, as I follow the figure of the actress from Jameson's earlier literary criticism to her appearance in the first half of Winter Studies and Summer Rambles. For Jameson, the actress's connection to practice — in the dual sense of habitually executed action and preparatory exercise - allows her to function as a living emblem of women's assumption of the privilege-duty of ethics. The professional actress's regime of self-cultivation, which transcends the limits of convention insofar as it finds its source in aesthetic models, provides a link to romantic visions of the aesthetically organized existence. However, this regime also addresses the more practical question of how the bourgeois woman might change herself, for it is by identifying with characters in structured narratives (in the protected space of the theatre) that the actress learns the crucial distinction between strengthened passions and inflamed sentiments that, in the eyes of both Jameson and Wollstonecraft, is necessary for her to build independent resolve and, in effect, become a 'person.'10 The Political Economy of Female Character

Jameson's long digression on the subject of actresses in the midst of her discussion of German romantic drama in 'Winter Studies' picks up some of the themes she had explored in earlier writing on female character and its performance, in an 1832 book on Shakespeare's women and an 1830 essay on the career of the English stage actress Fanny Kemble. By 1838, these works and other ventures in fiction, literary criticism, historical biography, and travel writing had established 'MrsJameson' as a professional woman of letters in England. But it was only with Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, the text that carried her concern with the question of female character firmly into the social domain, that Jameson's reputation as a feminist social critic was established. When the book was reviewed in 1841 in the radical Westminster Review, it was read as a work in political economy. The text was praised for its author's advancement, relative to 'most other writers, in the degree of latitude and freedom she bespeaks for the exertions of the "sisterhood,"' but also for its 'exact appreciation of the point that society has attained in refinement, conventional or real' (Margaret Mylne qtd. Thomas, Love 142-3). This wider, interdisciplinary context of Jameson's thinking about female character is often forgotten in readings of Winter Studies and Sum-

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles

55

mer Rambles by twentieth-century Canadian feminist and nationalist critics, who tend to position the text as a contribution to the genre of pioneer women's autobiography and to identify Jameson's feminist perspective with that of the colony struggling to define its relationship to an imperial centre.11 The focus on the ostensibly private, diary and letter forms of the text leads critics to overlook the significance of the theatrical metaphor developed in the 'Winter Studies' as well as the performative dimensions of the text as a whole. The journal entry entitled 'German Actresses' in 'Winter Studies' links Jameson's Canadian text to her pre-1837 work on female character in a way that should make us much more cautious about reading Winter Studies and Summer Rambles as a published diary addressed to an intimate friend. The autobiographical reading has also tended to overlook what might be called the 'social' aspirations of Jameson's text, insofar as it links Jameson's liberal feminist perspective by analogy to the point of view of a colonial society, smoothing over the contradiction of that society's simultaneous attempt to colonize First Nations people, and ignoring the text's dialogic relation to aspects of a wider, transatlantic discourse of bourgeois governance. Too realist in its epistemological assumptions to observe that Jameson's discourse is helping to constitute the 'social' reality that it claims to be describing, the autobiographical reading effectively takes Jameson at her word when she proclaims that she has abstained from politics 'because such discussions are foreign to my turn of mind and above my capacity' (12). On the contrary, when Jameson announces a few pages later that she knows of 'no better way of coming at the truth, than by observing and recording faithfully the impressions made by objects and characters on my own mind' (16), she places her text within an emergent genre of pre-sociological observation that was carved out as a domain of feminine expertise by early-nineteenth-century women writers such as Maria Edgeworth and Harriet Martineau.12 This genre contributed to the administrative enterprise of nineteenth-century liberal government. As Bruce Curtis reminds us, the capacity to subject populations to the arts and techniques of governance depended on knowledgegenerating practices that took stock of the social landscape, defining its features in order to insert them in categories that would allow for their administrative appropriation and manipulation ('Canada' 539). Nineteenth-century imperialism was sustained by the 'massive official documentary system that grew up alongside' it, a system to which the protosociological observations of the travelling woman of letters contributed (535). l

56 Settler Feminism and Race Making Jameson read Martineau's Society in America (1837) - another account of a British woman's stocktaking of society in the New World - during her own tour of Upper Canada. In the midst of writing 'Summer Rambles,' she discovers 'whole columns extracted from Miss Martineau's long-expected book on America' in local newspapers, and praises this material for its infusion with Martineau's 'good and womanly spirit' and her 'even tone of good-nature and good temper - of high principle and high feeling of every kind' (251). Martineau's first-hand, detailed observation of domestic life modelled an intimate knowledge of people and things that could make new areas of life amenable to political administration. She would systematize this method of social observation in her How to Observe: Morals and Manners (1838) and in later works in which she concerned herself with the pragmatics of fostering virtues capable of supporting the law of progress (or capitalist development) in society.13 But what did this form of observation have to do with Jameson's preoccupation with the question of female selfhood? Although the combination of social investigation and drama criticism in a single text appears peculiar to us today, in the early nineteenth century it exemplified an entirely commonplace 'interdisciplinarity.' The studies and rambles structure of Jameson's text could fold together the discourses of aesthetic evaluation and political economy - and in the process display a language of character imbued with market relations of contract, exchange, credit, and accountability - because the clean division of these two aspects of life into separate disciplinary jurisdictions had not yet been achieved in the 1830s.14 Indeed, as Jean-Christophe Agnew has argued, the theatre provided an idiom as well as a practical arena for the clarification of social relations of agricultural, commercial, and early industrial capitalism. As soon as it became necessary to make sense of a placeless and timeless market process founded on uncontrolled exchange, new kinds of social performances, and the new conditional credibility of contract, the metaphor of the theatrum mundi (the world as theatre) was deployed as a 'complex, secular commentary on the commodity world' (Agnew 12). Thus, just as Thomas Hobbes looked to the theatre and its model of the 'artificial person' for an analogy for social relations in which ownership of and responsibility for certains acts could be contractually transferred to surrogate agents, Adam Smith located a 'dramaturgical imperative' at the centre of capitalist societies, in which selves competed for the scarce commodity of sympathy through imaginative enactments and exchanges designed to sustain moral/commercial credibility (Agnew 98, 184). Smith's Theory of Moral

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles

57

Sentiments (1759) suggests that the impulse to individual industriousness is a concern for approbation and for the protection of honour against the potential spectacle of destitution. In this context, as Agnew observes, honour amounts to a 'bottomless line of credit, a claim or protection against the contingencies of the social marketplace where reputations fluctuate] like so much stock' (181). For Jameson to take up the question of character even close to a century after Smith's Theory was to tread on this cross-fertili/ed terrain of commerciality and theatricality, in which the self was a form of investment in a field of risk. Agnew argues that the protean, plastic qualities of the kind of self set in motion by capitalist exchanges made the stage actor the embodiment of'economic man,' the calculating and performing 'market self who was 'both the ideal and the nightmare of modernity' (14). Jameson's almost compulsive returns to the figure of the actress in her writings are at least partly driven by an ambivalent desire to see the bourgeois woman trade (for) her self in capitalist society. Her writing on the actress is an early contribution to a nineteenth-century counter-discourse 'emanating in large part from women themselves and representing the actress as being freed and empowered by her life on stage,' against the dominant nineteenth-century view of the actress as the embodiment of an unfeminine egoistic force (Powell 4). While the figure of the actress was largely confined within 'rhetorical structures of madness, disease, prostitution, deformation, and inhumanity,' Kerry Powell argues, within this female counter-discourse she represented an alternative to that other middleclass working woman, the governess (46). Insofar as acting demanded of women an ability to 'grapple with real, hard facts, to think and work and depend on themselves ... and the constant use of the higher faculties of taste and imagination,' wrote an anonymous contributor to the Englishwoman's Journal in 1859, the vocation promised to 'raise them far above those women who are absorbed by the petty vanities and trifles and anxieties of a woman's ordinary life' (qtd. Powell 6). Moreover, a life on the stage was decidedly public: it required forceful vocalizations and the cultivation of a certain desire for power, for the actress acted 'directly upon [her] subjects/ bypassing the comparatively 'cumbrous machinery of a government,' as one actress put it (qtd. Powell 9-10). Yet the position of the actress was like that of the governess in the sense that it was both idealized and suspect. The governess was read as a superior mother for her social knowledge - even as she exposed the artifice of natural maternity - but also as a morally ambiguous woman because of her unmarried and unprotected state. As Mary Poovey has observed, the situation of the gov-

58 Settler Feminism and Race Making

erness articulated the 'contradiction between the moral role women had been assigned in capitalist society and the economic role into which they were being driven in increasing numbers' (Uneven 162). The actress who traded (for) her self in a spectacular way also exposed the artifice of the prohibition on women's participation in the public economy of commodities and thus, as we shall see, she walked a fine line between embodying the self-governing female individual and the dangerously promiscuous market self exposed to the whims of public attention. Before her sojourn in Canada, in an 1830 essay on the English actress Fanny Kemble, Jameson singled out the professional actress as a woman 'privileged to step forth for a short space out of the bounds of common life' and able to use her own body and person as the materials of an artistic and ethical practice ('Fanny Kemble' 290).15 Here Jameson attributes to the actress a 'magnificent and an enviable power,' a power related to the double-sided feat of self-transformation - Fanny Kemble was able to 'realize in her own presence and person the divinest dreams of poetry and romance' - and the ability to command the feelings of others (290). Jameson's praise for Fanny Kemble is in line with the counter-discourse's defence of the actress's 'egoistic' self-display as a labour of self-improvement and a public enactment of the wider possibilities of female subjectivity. But while this counter-discourse looked forward to the importation of the actress's autonomy, audacity, and authority into everyday life, in the event, the legitimation of the actress in the last few decades of the century was accomplished through her redomestication as the embodiment of an idealized, passive femininity. In the England of the 1880s, the figures of actress and 'normal' woman became synonymous - but not in the way that Jameson had hoped they might. It was not the commanding presence of a pre-Victorian actress like Sarah Siddons, known for her portrayal of Shakespeare's murderous queen, or even Siddons's niece, Fanny Kemble, who embodied this new symbiosis of acting and womanhood, but rather the spectacle of self-policing feminine propriety provided by the mutely suffering heroines of the respectable Victorian theatre (Powell 53-4). Like the woman frozen into a silent statue - the figure of Galatea, with whom she came to be associated - the late-nineteenth-century actress on the legitimate stage was, paradoxically, 'least powerful when she appear[ed] most desirable and influential' (Marshall 62). The same paradox, of a female agency folded back on itself and turned towards the containment of its own disruptive potential, is acted out in the space that Jameson appropriates as the extension of the stage in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, the colonial heterotopia. A change

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles

59

of place that figures a change of time, the colonial setting allows Jameson to postulate a future moment in the progress of 'civilization' that necessitates the cultivation of new qualities in women. Jameson is a romantic critic of the limitations placed on the growth of the 'living germ planted by an almighty hand' in women (Winter 260), but like Wollstonecraft she qualifies this sense of a divinely planted human nature with an empiricist psychology that understands human nature to be a social artefact. Norms of conduct are natural, for Jameson, to the extent that they cultivate a socially useful human nature. In order to argue that there is something wrong with present norms of femininity, she must therefore posit an emerging form of society in which women are expected to survive and be useful and demonstrate that, in relation to this society, the constitution of female selves is out of date. In the journal entry of 13 March Jameson builds the partly metaphorical, partly metonymic figure of the 'arctic zone' into the setting for this gap between a society in which the institution of marriage has disappeared and an outmoded female nature. The figure of the arctic zone is suspended, in this passage, between a reference to a hypothetical spacetime and a much more direct, deictic reference to the frozen surroundings from which Jameson produces her speculations, as she suspends her plans to travel around the colony for the duration of the winter in Toronto. As she argues that '[w]e have gone away from nature, and we must, - if we can, substitute another nature,' her use of the present perfect tense situates her in the realized form of this future civil society, characterized by an objective disjunction between new social arrangements and anachronistic female desires (118). The ambiguous setting of the 'arctic zone' thus permits a feminist political agenda to be formulated precisely in reverse, as an innocent project to effect an adjustment in women's desires in response to the objective fact of society's movement away from nature - its 'becoming every day more artificial and complex' (118). The journal entry that contains the reference to the 'arctic zone' is ostensibly sparked by a physician's suggestion that 'poetical talent' in women is 'almost universally' a hysterical symptom of 'disappointment] in th[e] best affections' and a compensation for a life without marriage and children (117-18). The counter-argument that Jameson proposes at first pretends to be predicated upon this medical opinion, as a brave refusal to 'shrink' from a truth 'not very politely or delicately expressed'; it proceeds, however, by immediately renaming women's disappointed affections as a 'painful or false position' resulting from the work of

60 Settler Feminism and Race Making

'nature, or fate, or the law of society (118; emphasis added). Jameson thus establishes at the outset that it is the soda/body upon which the symptom of the writing woman makes itself legible, as the sign of an unnatural discordance between women's happiness and the progress of civil society. It is most certain that among the women who have been distinguished in literature, three fourths have been either by nature, or fate, or the law of society, placed in a painful or false position; it is also most certain that in these days when society is becoming every day more artificial and complex, and marriage, as the gentlemen assure us, more and more expensive, hazardous, and inexpedient, women must find means to fill up the void of existence. Men, our natural protectors, our lawgivers, our masters, throw us upon our own resources; the qualities which they pretend to admire in us, - the overflowing, the clinging affections of a warm heart, — the household devotion, - the submissive wish to please, that feels 'every vanity in fondness lost,' - the tender shrinking sensitiveness which Adam thought so charming in his Eve, - to cultivate these, to make them, by artificial means, the staple of the womanly character, is it not to cultivate a taste for sunshine and roses, in those we send to pass their lives in the arctic zone? We have gone away from nature, and we must, - if we can, substitute another nature. (118)

The cultivation of 'tender shrinking sensitiveness' in women is condemned here not as a cruel disfigurement, but rather as a program of self-making that has ceased to be socially expedient. Positing the disappearance of the institution of marriage as an effect of the natural progress of 'civilization,' the passage points to the anachronistic nature of women's desires, which have not been readjusted to society's advancement 'away from nature.' This reformulation takes the physician's diagnosis of the disappointed woman back one step, to the point at which feminine dispositions are constituted. Framed this way, the problem calls not for a resuscitation of 'outdated' institutions, but rather for the reformation of women's desires. The passage eventually abandons the purely reactive logic of an adaptation of desires necessitated by already altered conditions. The argument shifts from the ground of utility to that of politics as it relocates its reference point in the ambiguous position of 'women [who] are not happy wives and mothers - are never either wives or mothers at all' (120). Slipping off scientific ground, Jameson suggests not that the institution of marriage has actually faded, but rather that women enter into

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles 61

marriage only because they are ill-equipped for any other destiny. The problem with the existent regime of feminine self-making is not that it is outdated, therefore; it is rather that it is barbaric. Women are deprived of the moral character that would protect them from the 'fall' into marital arrangements which are indistinguishable from prostitution. Their desires must be changed, therefore, in order that the institution of marriage be eradicated. '[Wjomen need in these times character beyond everything else; the qualities which will enable them to endure and resist evil; the self-governed, the cultivated, active mind, to protect and maintain ourselves. How many wretched women marry for a maintenance! How many wretched women sell themselves to dishonour for bread! - and there is small difference, if any, in the infamy and the misery! ... But the more paths opened to us, the less fear that we should go astray' (119-20). Marriage is not an extinct but rather is an unacceptable means for the satisfaction of women's desires; it is an institution for which women are fitted only by means of a violence that forces a woman's 'accomplishments, her sentiments, her views of life, ... to take one direction, as if for women there existed only one destiny - one hope, one blessing, one object, one passion in existence; some people say it ought to be so, but we know that it is not so' (120). The placement of 'is' and 'ought' here misrepresents the terms of the argument, for Jameson's point is that while women are presently fitted for only one destiny, they ought not to be - from the ethical and political perspective that she introduces at this late point in the passage. The possibility of knowing 'that it is not so' that it is not the case that there exists only one destiny for women - is linked to her counterhegemonic identification with the position of the 'disappointed' woman, a citizen of the future space-time of the 'arctic zone.' Like the stage, then, the colonial 'arctic zone' permits the question of female nature to be reopened. Transplantation to the settler colony disrupts the circularity of a female education that 'fits us for the circumstances in which we are likely to be placed' and reveals the 'fretful, frivolous woman, strong neither in rnind nor frame' as an outpaced specimen (Winter259, 248). Jameson will observe that she has not met a single settler woman 'who considers] herself happy in her new home and country' - who is, in other words, capable of fitting into the scheme of desires and institutions of the future form of civil society. But she notes that girls born in the colony, like the eldest daughter of her hostess in the town of London, are not only very happy but 'acquiring, at the

62 Settler Feminism and Race Making age of fifteen, qualities and habits which might well make ample amends for the possession of mere accomplishments.' The Upper Canadian daughter, who acts as 'manager in chief, and glide[s] about in her household avocations with a serene and quiet grace which [i]s quite charming,' thus appears to justify Jameson's hope that the colony might provide a setting for the moral improvement of the 'weak, frivolous, half-educated or ill-educated woman,' cultivated to fit her constrained circumstances in England (259). Her removal from those constrained circumstances opens up the possibility of a female ethics, but as Winter Studies and Summer Rambles progresses, the colonial rehearsal of female freedom, initially framed by Jameson in terms of the unconstrained expression of character in an arctic zone of unlimited possibility, gradually becomes indistinguishable from a project to inculcate socially useful qualities and capacities, in women and others. At the end of the journal entry of 13 March, Jameson introduces the possibility of a feminist work on the self that would be conducted in relation to counterhegemonic truths. But in order to differentiate itself from a project of moral assimilation, such a project would have to be predicated on a refusal to acknowledge the 'universality' of the norm of rational self-governance, which collapses women's demands for the means of self-improvement with a training to serve the interests of society 'as a whole.' Because Jameson fails to distinguish between feminist ethics and female social utility, her project in women's self-improvement becomes implicated in a project to govern the poor, and the settler colony comes to resemble not so much a theatre as a governmental laboratory. Female Character, from Shakespeare to the 'Social' Jameson's previous endeavour in female moral pedagogy was a book entitled Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical (1832), a taxonomy of female characters drawn from Shakespeare. The text puts on display a 'colony of mythic women,' transplanted from the context of Shakespeare's plays to a utopic, conditional tense of unlimited possibility (Auerbach 211). Read alongside this earlier work, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles can be seen as the text that attempts to locate the objective correlative of its conditional tense in the concrete terrain of the settler colony. For in Upper Canada Jameson appears to discover the referent for the decontextualized and ahistorical space to which she removes Shakespeare's female characters in Characteristics of Women. Her Canadian text manifests a greater impatience for the embodiment of

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles 63

ideals of female character by shifting the terms of the discussion from dramatic roles to their embodiments by particular actresses. The bridge between the two texts, and, indeed, between the studies of dramatic literature and the social investigation of the colony within Winter Studies and Summer Rambles itself, is the very elastic nineteenth-century concept of character, capable of moving a discussion between aesthetic and social registers. The historical lack of a clear boundary between these registers goes some way to explaining why Jameson might have chosen to title a study of Shakespeare's female heroines - written amidst the political turbulence preceding the passage of the first British Reform Bill - Characteristics of Women. To speak of 'character' was not a politically innocent practice when political agitation around questions of revolution or reform was about to culminate in an exclusionary compromise that saw the franchise being extended only to the respectable man of property.16 In this context, the decision to illustrate female character by examples, in lieu of launching 'opinions in the face of the world, in the form of essays on morality, and treatises on education,' suggested the stance of a cautious reformer (Characteristics 14). Indeed, Jameson steps firmly onto the terrain of liberal governmental know-how when she takes up the question of female character and the 'various modifications of which [it] is susceptible, with their causes and results' in Characteristics of Women (13). The notion of character, understood as the moral disposition gradually impressed upon individuals through the work of habit, was the favoured nineteenth-century liberal explanation for human and national fates. 'Even if we confine ourselves to the established canon of Victorian Liberal political theorists,' as Collini has noted, 'we find Spencer urging that "the end which the statesman should keep in view as higher than all other ends is the formation of character," or John Stuart Mill that "the problem of character is the determining issue in the question of government"' (31). Within this nineteenth-century consensus on the importance of individual moral character, however, was an unresolved tension between determinist and voluntarist theories of character formation. This tension is exemplified, for Collini, in Mill's System of Logic (1843), which attempts to moderate the view that character is entirely determined by external circumstances. Mill proposes that circumstances provide only the means of shaping character, means that include an individual's 'desire to mould [his or her character] in a particular way.' Thus, 'when our habits are not too inveterate, [we] can, by ... willing the requisite means, make ourselves different' (qtd. Collini 36).

64 Settler Feminism and Race Making In Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, Jameson suggests that colonial circumstances might provide the impetus for this complicated willing of means to self-transformation, especially in the case of the displaced middle-class English woman. Her conviction that progress begins with 'inward change' is declared early on in 'Winter Studies,' in the sixth journal entry, where she represents herself writing in an act of defiance against the paralysing effects of a Toronto winter: 'this will never do! - I must rouse myself to occupation; and if I cannot find it without, I must create it from within' (29). Penned in ink that freezes as she writes, the entry of 16January 1837, entitled 'Winter Miseries,' begins: Some philosopher has said or written, that our good and bad qualities, our virtues and our vices, depend more on the influence of climate, than the pride of civilised humanity would be willing to allow; and this is a truth or truism, which for my own part I cannot gainsay - yet which I do not much like to believe. Whatever may be the climate in which the human being is born or reared, can he not always by moral strength raise himself above its degrading, or benumbing, or exciting influence? ... Is there more wisdom ... in passively assimilating ourselves, our habits, and our feelings, to external circumstances, or resisting and combating them, rather to defend the integrity of our own individual being, than with the hope of changing or controlling the physical or social influences around us? (28) 'Climate' in this passage has the complicated function of demonstrating the surmounlability of 'external circumstances,' as it provokes Jameson into a defence of individual integrity. The passage positions the Toronto winter as the indirect source of a will to 'create ... from within,' but this will ironically produces an argument against the power of climactic ('physical or social') influence. The winter climate thus carries the ambiguity of voluntarism and determinism in Mill's 'willing [of] the requisite means [to] make ourselves different.' Either the bourgeois woman's removal to the wintry void of the settler colony frees her from the constraining customs of England and permits the exercise of her will, or the wintry void exposes her fundamental weakness and points to the need for positive interventions to train her in self-reliance. Indeed, one of the paradoxes of Winter Studies and Summer Rambles - a paradox to which I shall return - is that Jameson attempts to appropriate the terrain of the settler colony as the space for the realization of an essential female character, even as she acknowledges that subjectivity is constructed through contingent techniques and practices.

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles

65

As I have noted, Jameson's earlier text on the question of female moral character, Characteristics of Women, located a 'means [to] make ourselves different' in Shakespeare's women, which it held up as universal ideals of female character purified of social and historical specificity, 'not mortified by particular customs, by fashion, by situation'(46). The text situates itself as a corrective to the formation of female character according to an outmoded "idea of delicacy' reminiscent of the 'tone of French manners previous to the revolution' (35). By promoting Shakespeare's female characters as 'dramatic and poetical conception [s]' that illustrate the 'manner in which the affections would naturally display themselves in women,' could women escape their social contexts, the text attempts to compensate for a system of girl making that yields products 'with feelings and passions suppressed or contracted, not governed by higher faculties and purer principles' (40), echoing Wollstonecraft's critique in the Vindication of a female education that instils dangerously wavering romantic feelings instead of strong, persevering passions.1' In the Introduction to Characteristics of Women, Jameson's characternarrator protests to her male interlocutor that she has not been so seized by a '[vjanity run mad' as to have written a book that endeavours to improve women; she describes her study as an attempt to 'illustrate certain positions by examples, and leave my readers to deduce the moral themselves' (14). Instead of proclaiming the justice of women's claim to the franchise or speculating on the rights of women in 'essays on morality, and treatises on education,' Characteristics of Women cautiously opts to vindicate the integrity of female character. Claiming an impatience with the abstract reasoning of essays and treatises - but perhaps more concerned to distance herself from an infamous precursor whose name had become equated with moral depravity - Jameson strives for the more immediate force of the example. She presents a kind of exercise book for the governance of the passions by 'higher faculties and purer principles' that works to improve the reader precisely by calling on her to 'deduce the moral' herself in studying Shakespeare's dramatic heroines (40). Inscribing itself in a tradition of character handbooks holding out the promise that knowledge of the other will allow one to alter the self, Characteristics of Women simply shifts the locus of these other selves to the literary imagination, a laboratory of female selves undisturbed by social and historical variables. Gail Marshall argues that the universalizing and prescriptive readings of female character detached from social and historical contingencies in

66 Settler Feminism and Race Making

Characteristics of Women encapsulate the definition of ideal womanhood by means of a 'sculptural reference' that was initially worked out as a style of acting (4).18 The norm of grace and stillness on the stage was applied with a special intensity to female players in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; the actress was valued as an icon of sexual desirability to the extent that she embodied this 'statuesque' ideal and managed her adoption of the sculptural metaphor as a natural and instinctive display (49). Jameson's monurnentalization of Shakespeare's female characters as static representations of universal qualities would seem to further this statuesque ideal of femininity, but her appreciation of the skills of the actress in other writings stresses the conscious interpretation that makes the actress an artist rather than an art object. Her 1830 essay on Fanny Kemble, written to accompany Sir George Hayter's sketches of the actress in the role of Juliet, repeatedly insists on the inadequacy of Hayter's pictorial representations, noting, for example, that the effect of a certain 'action of the arm, ... and in the kindling eye and brow' of the actress 'could not well be conveyed in a drawing,' as this 'perfect triumph of illusion is more than painting could convey' ('Fanny Kemble' 295). Hayter's drawings cannot capture the agency of the actress in conceiving and delineating the character, an art of producing a form of 'living, breathing poetry' so far superior to all the other arts that, finally-Jameson notes, somewhat triumphantly with regard to one scene — 'the artist has relinquished any attempt to fix it on paper' (289, 298). The syntax of the title of this essay, 'Fanny Kemble in Juliet,' insists upon the priority of the performance, the singularity of the particular assumption of the role of Juliet - the 'revelations of beauty and feeling, [which] we owed to Fanny Kemble alone' (296). Jameson's emphasis on the untaught 'genius' for tragic acting in Kemble, who 'appeared on the stage without any previous study or tuition' (292), suggests a spontaneity and an intuitive feeling that set the actress apart from her lineage in the Kemble-Siddons school of acting, with its neo-classical accent on dignified poses and minimal action (Highfill 166). 'It was not only necessary that she should understand a character,' Jameson writes of her friend, 'it was necessary that she should^/it' (301). In her own writing, Fanny Kemble recalls that the quality of her own performances tended to depend 'upon the state of my nerves and spirits,' 'the passion I was uttering sending hot waves of blushes all over my neck and shoulders' (qtd. Matthews and Hutton 246, 248). Contemporaneous critics comment on Kemble's revival of an outmoded naturalism, noting that her

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles

67

acting is less finished and more spontaneously passionate than that of her aunt, Sarah Siddons.19 The sense in which her performance is as much Juliet 'in' Fanny Kemble as the reverse is suggested by the critic who observes that 'as the tragedy deepens, [Kemble's] powers are developed in unison with the strengthened decision of purpose which the poet gives to the character' (qtd. Matthews and Hutton 250). The indication that something more than mere imitation is going on is also evident in Jameson's insistence that this process cannot be captured through a secondary mimesis of Kemble's acting: it 'will be allowed, even by the most enthusiastic lover of painting,' she writes, 'that the merely imitative arts can do but feeble justice to the powers of a fine actress' (289). What is this power that cannot be painted or sketched, that requires 'no previous study or tuition,' only a capacity to feel 'hot waves of blushes' with the mere utterance of a character's speech? And how does this power relate to the exceptional capacity for self-government that Jameson will later attribute to the actress in 'Winter Studies'? Jameson's appreciation of Fanny Kemble's acting can be seen as part of an event that occurred at the level of literary character at the beginning of the nineteenth century, as character was equipped with a new psychological interiority, secret motivations, and uncharted depths. This retooling of character involved a new expectation that stage performers and their audiences behave more like solitary readers of novels - readers who were, meanwhile, learning to regard their activity as an opportunity to practise feeling, to certify 'powers of taste, mental discipline, and sympathetic identification' (Lynch 131). It was not just the eighteenth-century actor's rigidly restrained system of external signs, gestures, and poses that came under pressure at this moment, but also the sense of reading as merely becoming acquainted with a set of exemplary types. As Deidre Lynch has argued, 'good' reading was now expected to involve a process of 'ethical individualization' that would help to differentiate the self from the kinds of objects traded in a commercial society of universal exchangeability (141). In other words, the 'good' reader acquired non-commodifiable psychological depths through sympathetic identification with 'rounded' characters.20 For Jameson, writing in the midst of this sea change in character, the model of the sensitive reader was the actress. Tracking Jameson's interest in the relationship between the actress and the concept of character, from the Fanny Kemble essay to Characteristics of Women through to Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, allows us to see how the actress's art of sensitive reading - her practice of self-government -

68 Settler Feminism and Race Making

comes to be connected to wider governmental imperatives and a larger supervisory machinery, especially when it is transplanted to the 'theatre' of colonial settlement. The practice of self-government that Jameson describes in the Fanny Kemble essay rests on an admixture of empiricist and romantic conceptions of subjectivity insofar as it combines elements of impersonation and self-discovery. Investing a preconstituted role with passion, the actress turns the iterability of the character type inside out, producing a singular individuality that is constituted, paradoxically, through performance. Her 'character' is produced inside an invented model, but only through the crucial infusion of that model with the individualizing element of desire.21 The practice of self-government that is called acting in the Fanny Kemble essay is the practice demanded of the reader of that moral exercise book, Characteristics of Women, designed to inculcate in the reader the very psychological depths that it describes in literary characters. Jameson's character-narrator positions her text's 'soften [ing of] the [reader's] heart by images and examples of the kindly and generous affections' as the feminine alternative to satire's degrading, punitive approach to moral correction (Characteristics 20). But more importantly, character appreciation is superior to the reading of history because, unlike the historical example, literary character provides the opportunity to 'unfold the whole character before us, stripped of all... disguises of manner ... [to] take leisure to examine, to analyze, to correct our own impressions' (55-6). While this form of interpretation is supposed to grasp female character in its essential truth, it also has pedagogical effects. The feminist possibilities in character appreciation, for Jameson, have to do with the improving potential of a practice in which the reader understands and expands herself in the process of discovering the inner depths of literary characters. This pedagogical design is already evident in the second half of Jameson's Fanny Kemble essay, which moves from the description of the actress's acting talents to an evaluation of her moral rectitude. Jameson reminds the reader that Kemble's brief stage career was entered into as a matter of duty. Before her first stage appearance, the actress's family faced financial ruin as owners and managers of the Covent Garden theatre, but 'by her talents [Kemble] won independence for herself and those she loved' (303). Having insisted on the context that made Kemble's work a necessity rather than an indulgence, Jameson goes on to applaud the 'mixture of self-subjection and self-respect' with which the actress 'preserve[d] the command over her own faculties' and the

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles

69

'moral strength with which she sustained the severest ordeal to which a youthful character could be exposed,' the ordeal of a sudden transportation into public life (302-3). While Jameson acknowledges in this section what she calls the 'prosaic drawbacks' of the actress's profession, she argues that the public performances that exposed Kemble to moral dangers allowed her to equip herself with the resources to survive them (302). Kemble can thus be said to have made a profession out of dutiful self-improvement and the spectacular display of 'self-subjection and selfrespect.' When Jameson returns to the figure of the actress in her Canadian text, the link between this conception of a female profession of selfgovernment and the government of others becomes clearer. Lasting for 'two long days' of reading and 'scribbling away,' the 'German Actresses'journal entry in 'Winter Studies' is framed by reflections on duty (the 'upholding law through which the weakest become strong,' the 'abiding principle' without which no 'character, however harmoniously framed and gloriously gifted, can be complete') (47, 34). The discussion does not explicitly appoint the actress as the emblem of character-strengthening duty; instead it builds this symbolization incrementally, through a series of seemingly accidental associations. In this part of 'Winter Studies,' Jameson has been rereading the tragedies of Schiller, Goethe, Adam Oehlenschlager, and Adolf Miillner for their 'effect on the imagination' (39). As she discusses these plays in the journal entry of 21-2 January, her attention moves repeatedly towards their female figures, and the contexts of the plays themselves fall away. Thus, her gloss of Oehlenschlager's Corregio hones in on the figure of the Magdalen, represented through Corregio's description of his painting of her: 'it is good to see a hapless woman / That has once fallen redeem herself (36). Then the gloss of Milliner's tragedy, The Schuld, as a contrast between two national characters in feminine form, sparks a 'slight touch upon an extreme link,' which sends Jameson back 'through a long chain of memories and associations' to the reported effect of one actress's performance on the Vienna stage (39). Through this associative 'flight' from snow-bound Toronto to Madame Arneth in the role of Milliner's 'fair and serious' Scandinavian maid, the journal entry proceeds - as if in spite of its writer's intentions - to a disquisition on the profession of the actress (40). Madame Arneth, Jameson observes, was 'herself not unlike' the heroic character she played (40). With the actress's resemblance to her dramatic character offered as a first proof, she then proclaims, against 'often agitated' claims to the contrary, that 'there is nothing in the pro-

70 Settler Feminism and Race Making

fession of an actress which is incompatible with the respect due to us as women - the cultivation of every feminine virtue - the practice of every private duty' (40). Calling upon the authority of classical literary criticism by pointing to the instinctively human love for imitative action, she condemns the 'barbarous ... senseless inconsistency' of a hypocritical system of judgment that allows theatre audiences to 'encourage and take delight in what they affect to contemn' (40). What wonder that from such inconsistency a 'whole heap of abuses and mistakes' should arise, she asks, adding that this hypocrisy is an insult to 'all womankind,' and not just to actresses (40). For if actresses 'do require caution and dignity to ward off temptation, and self-control to resist it, and some knowledge of their own structure and the liabilities incurred by their profession, in order to manage better their own health, moral and physical, then they only require what all women should possess - what every woman needs, no matter what her position' (41). 'But to return to Madame Arneth' is the abrupt transition at the conclusion of this passage, as if the defence of the actress's profession as a model for female moral education has been a mere digression from the central subject. In fact, the defence of the actress's profession has shifted the ground of the discussion, and the praise for individual actresses to which Jameson now returns is strongly tinged with moral evaluation. Thus, the actress Sophie Miiller is remembered as 'the most successful representative of some of Shakespeare's characters,' leaving 'ineffaceable impression [s]' - but more importantly, never distinguishing an admirer with a preference and remaining 'austere to herself (41). Anna Kriiger is praised for her 'chef d'ceuvre1 as Schiller's Joan of Arc but also for remaining 'blameless in her conduct and reputation as a woman' (41). Madame Arneth is praised for her ability to 'analyse' Schiller's conception of Beatrice, to 'render' the character's qualities 'with such felicity and effect,' and finally to return to reflect on her conception with a 'ripened judgement and more cultivated taste' (42). This praise for a style of acting that sounds very much like the activity demanded of the reader of Characteristics of Women only serves to preface a story about Madame Arneth's willingness to endure emotional torture and personal insults in the performance of her duty. In the end, Jameson observes in approving tones in a footnote, Madame Arneth left the stage to turn her expertise in self-government to social use, by running a benevolent institution for the illegitimate children of soldiers. As the interest in the effect of an actress's representation is increasingly subordinated to a concern with her moral qualities, 'Winter Studies' reconfigures the

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles

71

actress as the model of the well-fortressed woman who steels herself against sexual threats and temptations through a concentration on duty. From representing the woman who models the aesthetico-ethical discipline of self-shaping in a spectacular form, then, the actress thus comes to represent the woman who has simply internalized wider governmental imperatives. As the actress's ethical work gradually becomes identified with sexual self-restraint, the discussion slides from the image of the fallen and redeemed Magdalen in Corregio, to the 'insulted and tortured' actress, Madame Arneth, and finally comes to rest on the social figures of the prostitute and the seduced girl. As I have noted, the actress who was widely seen as dangerously overpowering and unfeminine in the 1830s was reinterpreted as an 'appropriately and particularly feminine' woman later on in the century, when the stage was discursively reconstructed as an extension of the Victorian home in a campaign to attract the patronage of 'respectable' middleclass audiences (Powell 60). As part of the campaign to break the historical association between theatre and brothel, prostitutes were banned from theatrical spaces. It is thus remarkable that, a half century before this campaign, Jameson's attempt to reconcile the figures of actress and 'normal' woman rests on an acceptance, rather than a refutation, of the conventional identification of actress and prostitute. The actress is in a position of public exposure and commodification that is indeed comparable to the position of the prostitute, Jameson suggests in 'Winter Studies,' but only in as much as the prostitute's position is already identical to that of the 'normal' married woman with neither legal rights nor an independent civil existence. The dangers and humiliations of the 'profession of the stage,' she proposes, are identical to the 'scenes' attendant upon woman's 'conventional position' as 'legal property' (45). The actress thus comes to stand for the married woman without rights to selfrepresentation, the woman subjected to routine humiliations in forums of public judgment such as the church, the newspaper, and the court of justice - as 'one stage is not worse than another' (45). A little later, Jameson draws the prostitute into the company of the actress and the married woman, when she turns to the 'one-fifth part of our sex' forced to 'die in reprobation, in the streets, in hospitals, that the virtue of the rest may be preserved and the pride and passions of men both gratified' (72). The critique of male hypocrisy with regard to the subject of prostitution echoes Jameson's earlier observation that those who 'affect to contemn' the woman on stage 'continue to frequent the theatre as an amusement, and even as a source of mental delight and improvement'

72 Settler Feminism and Race Making

(40). Such hypocrisy is an insult to 'all womankind,' not just to 'women who have adorned and still adorn the stage' (40). But instead of unfolding the critique of marriage as institutionalized prostitution that seems to be incubating here, Jameson uses the links between actress, married woman, and prostitute to return to the theme of character-strengthening duty. It is as if her expansion of the stage to include the scenes of 'conventional' life, instead of allowing Jameson to envision a world of self-shaping Fanny Kembles, only serves to brush 'all womankind' with the taint of the promiscuous commodity form that seems to cling to the figure of the actress. Perhaps this is because the actress purchases the freedom to work on her self in the heterotopic space of the theatre by allowing herself to become a spectacle, a commodity-form with a precarious exchange value. The slipperiness of acting as a practice of aesthetico-ethical individualization that can involute into a practice of selfcommodification explains why Jameson's actresses always seem to perfect their vocations by leaving the stage. Thus, while Madame Arneth retires to a more wholesome form of public service in the benevolent institution for illegitimate children, Fanny Kemble ultimately leaves the stage for America, where Jameson finds her to be 'an excellent manager of a household' (qtd. Kemble 98). It is in the entry for 21 February in 'Winter Studies,' entitled 'Fire at Toronto,' that Jameson returns to the theme of character-strengthening duty by way of the prostitute. The journal entry reproduces the rhetorical strategy of'German Actresses,' building up a politically charged symbolism through apparently accidental, metonymic links. This time, the links are not occasioned by the movements of memory but rather by the description of an event - a Toronto house fire the previous night, which Jameson deploys as a metaphor for the sacrificial social system that she wishes to condemn. She begins by recalling how the 'monotony of this, my most monotonous existence, was fearfully broken last night' by a 'strange light flashing through the atmosphere' (70). The account of the fire eventually situates her outside, standing alongside the Irish woman whose house is being consumed by fire, and at such proximity to the flames that 'one side of my face was scorched and blistered' (71). The passage insists on Jameson's proximity to this sacrificial victim, just as, earlier on, the insult to actresses was reframed as an insult to 'all womankind.' The significance of this solidarity at the cost of scorched and blistered skin becomes apparent as soon as Jameson turns to the public discourse circulating around the event the next day. '[SJeveral people have attempted to comfort themselves and me too with assurance, that

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles

73

whatever might be the private loss or suffering, a fire was always a public benefit in Toronto - a good brick house was sure to arise in the place of a wooden one' (71-2). Against this type of 'wicked calculation' characterizing 'these days of political economy, [in which] it is too much a fashion to consider human beings only in masses' - 'in which the honour, rights, or happiness of any individual, though the meanest, is made to yield to a supposed future or general good' -Jameson holds out her own burned skin (72). Her proxy-wounds testify to women's 'especial reason' to protest against the political principle that the 'meanest' individuals should be sacrificed for the sake of a 'general good' (72). Appropriating the house fire as a metaphor for 'the subject' - the subject of prostitution, towards which the entire journal entry can now be seen to have been 'digressing' - Jameson argues that women must counter the sacrificial social logic that overlooks the 'ulcer in the bosom of society,' the wasted virtue of'one-fifth' of womanhood (72). She illustrates the costs of this logic of sacrifice by means of an anecdote about the seduction and betrayal of a colonial girl by a British officer. The girl is eventually removed to England, where she disappears for a time only to resurface as an 'impudent, degraded, haggard, tawdry thing' in a 'house of infamous resort' (73, 74). 'And yet one word more before I throw down my pen,' Jameson announces at the conclusion of this tale. 'What virtuous woman has the least idea of what a libertine is?' It is the ignorance on the part of the virtuous woman that is the cause of her seduction, rather than the female taste for libertines into which this ignorance is converted by 'wits and playwrights till foolish women take the thing for granted' (74-5). If the sexual economy is to express a knowledge, Jameson argues, let that be women's 'self-knowledge, selfreliance, [and] self-respect' (75) .22 '[T]here is no salvation for women but in ourselves ... in mutual help and pity' (75). Jameson claims to have 'wandered far from the fire in King-street,' but her accidental wanderings accumulate into a careful refutation of the truths 'told openly by moralists and politicians' (74). The critique of classical political economy that she stages here turns on the suggestion that any general good calculated from the distant perspective of the 'wide frame of human society' will be underpinned by the sacrifice of women. The sexual economy positively requires the cultivation of sacrificial victims like the colonial daughter in her anecdote, ignorant and innocent young women with undeveloped capacities for 'self-knowledge, self-reliance, [and] self-respect.'Jameson's insistence on the politics of subject-formation exposes the bad faith of an order of 'natural'

74 Settler Feminism and Race Making rights that denies women opportunities to develop the kind of reflexive power over the self that, in her analysis, would have prevented the unsuspecting girl from ending her days as a 'tawdry thing.' Her denunciation of the false universality of the 'wide frame of human society' opens the possibility of a feminist ethical code that would be defined in a critical relation to sexually indifferent calculations of the general good. Jameson begins to build a case for the necessity of a female collectivity - designated by the phrase 'we women' - coming together to find 'some remedy within ourselves' (73). But the critical posture of this feminist care for the self is immediately countered by a footnote that she draws from Martineau's Society in America. Jameson cites a passage in which Martineau observes that the condition of marriage in America is less 'pure' than might be expected in the New World. The remedy that Martineau recommends for this 'increase of bachelors, and of mercenary marriages' is to 'strengthen the discipline of the whole of society, by each one ... relying on his own efforts after self-perfection' (130). 'Women, especially,' Martineau adds, should 'be allowed the free use of whatever strength their Maker has seen fit to give them; it is essential to the virtue of society that they should be allowed the freest moral action unfettered by ignorance and unintimidated by authority; for it is an unquestioned and unquestionable fact, that if women were not weak, men would not be wicked; that if women were bravely pure, there must be an end to the dastardly tyranny of licentiousness'' (qtd. Jameson 75; Jameson's emphasis). Martineau demands the freedom necessary for women to practise an 'unintimidated' care for the self, but she has already determined that, once developed, such a reflexive power over the self should be exercised in the interests of the 'purity' of the conjugal relation - of monogamous, legitimate, bourgeois heterosexuality (Society 128). As soon as Martineau frames women's care for the self as a demand justified by the interests of virtuous society, women become identified as the source of the social scourge and marked out as the special targets for programs of correction and improvement. This thematization of the social consequences of women's untrained ethical capacities is the meeting point of nineteenth-century feminism and government. Jameson cites this passage approvingly at the end of her interpretation of political economy as the doctrine of a sacrificial sexual economy. Her insistence on the sexual economy within classical political economy permits her to underline the forms of subjectivity and practices of self-government presumed by the calculations of the laissez-faire political economist; however, her insistence on the micrological view also installs

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles

75

a language of individual bodies and conducts that frames a social problem in the organic terms of an 'ulcer in the bosom of society' and names 'women, especially' as the surgeons and the patients - the subjects and the objects - of the curative operation. 'Unless we women take some courage to look upon the evil, and find some remedy within ourselves,'Jameson writes, 'I know not where it is to come from' (73). The location of the remedy 'within ourselves' reappropriates the problem from unconcerned 'moralists and politicians,' but only at the cost of allowing female work on the self to be colonized by wider objectives of political rule. The discussion of 'public' women that slides from the actress to the prostitute in this part of 'Winter Studies' thus moves the question of female character from the arena of literature into that of the science of society. Jameson initially frames female work on the self in the romantic, aestheticized terms of the actress's art of self-cultivation, but that vision is then reconfigured around the social problem of prostitution and linked to the public objective of ending what Martineau calls the 'tyranny of licentiousness' (Society 130). The account of the house fire and the report of the rationalizations of individual catastrophe as public benefit the next day are used to launch 'Winter Studies' into the discursive terrain of political economy. Claiming a feminine counter-expertise in problems of government that reach to the level of the 'mysterious world of powers, and affections, and aspirations which we call the human soul,' Jameson begins to carve out the terrain of a specifically female authority on the pedagogy of conduct (72). The theorist with whom she is engaging most directly in her critique of the laissez-faire sexual economy is most likely Thomas Malthus, whose famous Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) proposed prostitution, or 'vicious customs with respect to women,' as one of the natural and necessary preventative checks on dangerously rapid population increase (45). Jameson abhors this 'wicked calculation,' but only in order to marshal an alternative, specifically feminine authority on the question of'vicious customs', suggesting that without the interested intervention of women themselves, these customs will continue to be 'alluded to with sneering levity' or 'waved aside with a fastidious or arrogant prudery' (Winter73). By proposing that women cannot afford the indifference that seems to prevent 'moralists and politicians' from touching the subject of prostitution, she establishes an experiential ground for women's expertise in moral deficiency. More than simply moral outrage, it is women's proximity to the 'ulcer in the bosom of society' that accounts for the special knowledge they have to contribute to government.

76 Settler Feminism and Race Making

As Nikolas Rose has noted, the nineteenth century witnessed a proliferation of the kind of 'secular pedagogies for the conduct of conduct' that Jameson envisions here as a female specialization ('Authority' 316). In the course of the century, the art of government increasingly came to depend upon new forms of expertise in the 'human soul,' mobilized in various sites for the formation and reformation of conduct and woven into the very deliberations of political rule. Together, these knowledges of the human mapped out a space of non-juridical social laws and relationships that could be managed through pedagogies of the civil subject and other strategies designed to ward off the dangers of 4 default[s] of sociability' (Procacci, 'Sociology' 181). As I shall argue in the section that follows, Jameson's account of her visit to Upper Canada is engaged in the complex production of the 'social' as a terrain suited to female observation, comprehension, and intervention. Her approving citation of Martineau is crucial in determining the text's relation to this emerging science of society, for it was Martineau who wrote the early methodological treatise, How to Observe Manners and Morals, on her way to America, and later translated the first course of lectures by Auguste Comte, the founder of positivist social science. As Riley notes in her history of the feminized 'social,' Comte explicitly connected the science of manners and morals to the agency of the sex specializing in 'social feeling,' the sex better situated to appreciate the 'need of a moral government' precisely because it enjoyed 'little influence in political government' (qtd. Riley 49). For the nineteenth-century feminist, taking up this special appointment to the 'social' was as risky as it was rewarding because the 'social' was nothing but her own purported sexual and moral weakness projected onto 'inferior' others. The specialization of the professional female reformer was thus her own potentially dangerous and abnormal nature at one remove. Government in the 'Arctic Zone'

Critics have seldom remarked that the same writer who announces in her preface that the problems of colonial administration are beyond her depth later represents herself sitting before statistical reports of criminal convictions in Toronto, attempting to calculate the relationship between crime rate and population growth (Winter 11, 146). Describing her reading material as the 'list of criminals tried at the spring assizes here, and the mayor's charge to the jury,' this self-confessed political novice nevertheless observes, with the frustration of an exacting statistician, that

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles

77

' [tjhese are very imperfect data, and quite useless where we wish to come at results' (145, 146). Jameson's interest in the content of the mayor's charge to the jury, which 'complains of the increase of crime, and of poverty, wretchedness, and disease, (the natural cause of crime,) within the bounds of the city,' suggests her share in what was a rising interest in penal conditions in the colonies and the imperial centre in the 1830s (145). Her desire for more perfect statistical data, the better 'to come at results,' is equally prescient, for the centralization and coordination of administrative knowledge and political power would be a central feature of what Ian Radforth calls 'the triumph of counter-revolution in the wake of the rebellions [that] eliminated democratic and republican alternatives, ... [and] alerted conservatives to the need for administrative and other reforms that would strengthen their hold and permit economic improvement along capitalist lines' (65). The subordination, after 1840, of the old local dominance of individual notables to agencies of the state representing the common interests of men of property meant that administrative knowledge would no longer be 'bound to the understanding or interests of a single priest, proprietor, or notable' (Curtis, 'Canada' 536). By centralizing the activity of locating and classifying elements of the population, the political union of the Canadas increased 'the capacity of administrative agencies to transform legislation and policy into social practices, to influence consciousness, comportment, and social relations broadly conceived' (ibid. 536). But in the winter of 1837, as Jameson notes, the 'only place of assembly or amusement, except the taverns and low drinking-houses' is the commercial newsroom, and the scarcity of books in the colony makes newspapers the 'principal medium of knowledge and communication' (154, 152). Jameson's identification of the newspaper as the central arena for the formation of public opinion gives a special weight to her offhand observation that she has been entertaining the idea of intervening in local debates on the question of national education by having newspapers print and circulate the English preface to her copy of Victor Cousin's 1837 report, On the State of Education in Holland, as Regards Schools for the Working Classes and for the Poor (32).23 She only wishes to 'assist the people to some general principles on which to form opinions,' she protests, but has been forced to abandon her project upon finding that her 'interference' is seen as 'visibly distasteful' (32). Cecilia Morgan's discussion of the Upper Canadian press's construction of separate spheres of engagement for the 'public man' and the 'virtuous woman' suggests that the 'distastefulness' of Jameson's intention to intervene on

78 Settler Feminism and Race Making

a question as politically contentious as that of education was likely to have stemmed from its transgression of the boundary around 'woman's' proper concerns. If, before 1840, it was only ruling-class notable men who were qualified to govern, after 1840 it was only the impartial and disinterested public man who was qualified to participate in the arena of sectarian politics. The virtuous white middle-class woman, for her part, was qualified for charity work in the field of the 'social' precisely because she was mired in the deeply affective bonds of family that she could extend outward through voluntary efforts to 'uplift' others. As Morgan argues, the social drew its strength from its perceived distance from power struggles, even though its very work was to reconstitute power relations of race, class, and gender in the language of affection and sentiment (Public 182). As if to maintain the unpolitical nature of her interest in questions of education, penal reform, and temperance, therefore, Jameson protests that she recognizes only two kinds of political party 'those who hope and those who fear' - and claims that she divides the world only according to the distinction between 'those who love, and those who hate' (Winter 68). Yet, to accept Jameson's construction of the middle-class woman's domain as situated outside of politics would be to read her through the self-conception of the early science of society, when it was this new form of knowledge's very self-representation as a endeavour fuelled by 'hope' and 'love' that made it available as a practical tool of government. Jameson approaches the New World as the observer of a social experiment, and she is surprised and disappointed to find that 'ignorance, recklessness, despondency, and inebriety, seem to prevail' (Winter56). Indeed, about a third of the way through 'Summer Rambles,' she observes a depressing disjunction between the colony's natural and human resources. '[A]s I travel on,' she notes, 'I am disgusted, or I am enchanted; I despair or I exult, by turns; and these inconsistent and apparently contradictory emotions and impressions I set down as they arise, leaving you to reconcile them as well as you can, and make out the result for yourself (303). At this point, the reader is challenged to resolve Jameson's conflicting reports of the 'beauty and fertility of this land of the west, ... its glorious capabilities for agriculture and commerce,' and the 'social backwardness and moral destitution of the people' (303). How is it, she asks, that a space of abundance can foster moral depravity? In Canada, 'where there is almost entire equality of condition, to what shall we attribute the gross vices, the profligacy, the stupidity, and basely vulgar habits of a great part of the people, who

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles

79

know not even how to enjoy or to turn to profit the inestimable advantages around them?' (292). Answering her own question, she proposes that the equality in means of subsistence ensured by the colony's abundant natural resources serves only to expose moral deficiency 'where no schoolmaster interferes to infuse ambition and discontent into the abject, self-satisfied mind' (292). She points to a family of Highland settlers in possession of two hundred acres of land on the shores of Lake Erie who demonstrate no 'inward change' attendant upon this new advantage other than 'retrogradation.' They contribute to the colony only a 'brood of children, ragged, dirty and without shoes or stockings ... running about - and all [staring] with a sort of half-scared, uncouth curiosity, which was quite savage' (291). The Highlanders' transplantation to Canada, in other words, underlines a primitivism that has not been altered by a mere improvement in material circumstances. By the time that Jameson's text was published in 1838, the moral backwardness of the average North American was already something of a travel writer's commonplace: a theme in Alexis de Tocqueville's De la democratic en Amerique (1835, 1840), it also appears in Martineau's Society in America. But in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, the cold diagnosis of 'social backwardness and moral destitution' among settlers sits uncomfortably alongside the attempt to appropriate the colony as an arena for the bourgeois woman's self-realization, an open 'wilderness' suited to the 'true purpose of education': 'to cherish and unfold the seed of immortality already sown within us; to develope [sic], to their fullest extent, the capacities of every kind' (259). Jameson follows Wollstonecraft's feminist individualism in her conviction that the replacement of the veneration of social rank with a more genuine respect for individually acquired merit must be extended to women. Women, too, must learn to 'resign the privileges of rank and sex for the privileges of humanity,' Wollstonecraft argues (268). Throughout Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, Jameson thus playfully repudiates the rank-conscious title^ 'chancellor's lady,' which constructs her identity in relation to her husband's position as vice-chancellor of the Court of Chancery, the chief legal officer of the Crown in Upper Canada. She assumes the title only within ironizing quotation marks that register the purpose of her visit to Canada, that of extricating herself from marriage and from her status as the property of her husband, more specifically. This repudiation of the possessive relationship in 'chancellor's lady' is part of Jameson's argument on behalf of women's potential for self-ownership and against the incapacities for reason and self-government conferred on

80 Settler Feminism and Race Making

them by the laws of the liberal nation-state. Jameson thus represents herself as the kind of female traveller who can report that she has 'laid in a good dinner' in the company of backwoodsmen, girding up her strength with a meal of venison alongside men 'who appeared to me perfect specimens of their class - tall and strong, bronzed and brawny, and shaggy and unshaven - very much like two bears set on their hind legs; rude but not uncivil' (249). If at first there appears to be a contradiction between the criticism of settlers' 'vulgar habits' and the attempt to outfit the bourgeois woman with the qualities and capacities that would enable her to adapt to such sturdy company, what soon comes to distinguish the 'civil' woman is her capacity to make the moral depravity of the settler her business, as she glides about a new field of managerial possibilities. The project in female self-governance, in other words, gradually becomes collapsed with the project of eradicating moral difference in others. In order to track this gradual collapse, it is necessary to read for the non-literary intertexts of Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, intertexts that speak to the very public ambitions of a text staged in the modestly feminine forms of the diary and letter. Jameson's description of'retrogration' among settlers can be read as a travelling social scientist's reply to Malthus's positioning, in the first edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population, of the North American colonies as a utopic counter-site to England. Malthus imagines that a territory capable of sustaining rapid population increase with abundant means of subsistence would be sufficient to produce the condition of happiness (a condition that he equates with an optimal realization of male heterosexual desire). 'The happiness of a country,' he writes, 'does not depend, absolutely, upon its poverty or riches, upon its youth or its age, upon its being thinly or fully inhabited,' but first and foremost 'upon the rapidity with which it is increasing' (Essay 60). 'There are people,'Jameson writes in an oblique reply to this construction, 'who deem that a scattered agricultural population, where there is a sufficiency of daily food for the body ... must be a sort of Arcadia. Let them come here!' (292). Her challenge to these faraway speculators echoes Martineau's insistence, in Society in America, that no 'outward prosperity, [or] arrangement of circumstances, can keep a society pure while there is corruption in its social methods, and among its principles of individual action' (126). Malthus's discussion of the North American colonies opens a parenthesis in his famous argument that the laws of population increase require the natural 'checks' of misery and vice, including poverty, infan-

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles

81

ticide, and prostitution. In the first edition of the Essay, the calculation that finds these controls to be natural and necessary is temporarily set aside when the problem of population increase is imaginarily transposed to the setting of the agricultural colony. In this utopic space, Malthus imagines the possibility of a reproductive sexuality seamlessly implicated in the production of value-producing bodies. In the agricultural colony, 'encouragements to agriculture' supply the market with 'healthy work,' and this work, in turn, furnishes the 'race of labourers' with the food necessary to sustain rapid population growth (Essay 44, 59, 60). In contrast to the loose, indecipherable economic circuits of industrialized Europe, the economic circuit of the agricultural colony consists in the direct conversion of agricultural stock into the stock of bodies. As Catherine Gallagher notes, Malthus's 'short circuit of biological exchange' - from the production of agricultural stock to the reproduction of human stock - permits the political economist to ascertain into exactly 'how many pounds of labouring flesh the commodity can be easily converted' (97, 96).24 In the first edition of the Essay, therefore, Malthus does not foresee the problem of settlers who display 'retrogradation, not advancement' and prove themselves unable to turn their new material advantage to profit (Jameson, Winter 291). The problem of untutored subjectivities becomes apparent to Malthus only later, in relation to a colony a little closer to home. In Malthus's 1820 text, Principles of Political Economy, the figure of the complacently rag-clad, potato-eating Irish peasant, as Giovanna Procacci notes, stands witness to the 'futility of producing goods with which to invade a new market if there has been no previous concern there to "create the consumer"' ('Social Economy' 155). The Irish peasant alerts Malthus to what he will call the 'want of demand rather than ... capital' in Ireland, a subjective lack that suggests that a 'change in the tastes and habits of the lower classes of people' might be more beneficial, from the perspective of government, than the distribution of poor relief (Principles 279-80). Something more than either the possession of 300 acres of land or admittance into the field of unhampered commercial exchange is required to transform unruly characters into civil selves. In the revised, 1826 edition of the Essay, therefore, Malthus announces that it is 'upon the conduct and prudence of ... individuals themselves, and ... not ... an increase in the means of subsistence' that an improvement in the 'situation of the lower classes of society' depends (442). There is thus very little to distinguish the revised political economy of subsequent editions of the I^ssay from the conclusions reached

82 Settler Feminism and Race Making by Martineau and Jameson in their expeditions to observe manners and morals in the New World. Indeed, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles grasps Upper Canada as an experimental counter-site akin to Malthus's Ireland, a testing ground for governmental strategies bent on the practical necessity of inculcating new desiring dispositions and habits of selfregulation in the poor. Jameson's retrograde Highland settler is the Canadian equivalent of Malthus's Irish peasant: surfacing as a problem in a field of 'glorious capabilities for agriculture and commerce,' he joins the company of contented peasants, unruly vagabonds, and other figures of excess or wastage outside the circuit of economic-sexual productivity in nineteenth-century political economy. For Jameson, though, the question of what is to be done with the male settler who has 'work and wealth [but] neither education nor amusements' needs to be wedded - figuratively and literally - to the project of female individualism (Winter 254). Jameson effects this coupling by deploying the law of supply and demand. Thus, if for Malthus the case of Ireland argues for the necessity of orchestrating desiring conditions before invading a new market with goods, for Jameson the case of Canada illustrates the necessity of intervening to correct an anachronistic demand for ornamental women, who turn out to be useless outside of London drawing rooms. Jameson ties the oversupply of women characterized by a 'want of cheerful self-dependence, a cherished physical delicacy, [and] a weakness of temperament' in Upper Canada to the lack of 'demand for a better article* (258-9). The male settler laments that he is 'perishing and deteriorating,' becoming 'as rude and coarse as [his] own labourers, and as hard as [his] own axe' for want of a wife, while continuing to demand an article of woman 'as now educated' - precisely the kind of woman who 'has no business here,' she observes (254, 256, 258). While the weak and frivolous female article may be just as miserable in London as in the backwoods of Canada, in London at least 'her deficiencies are not so injurious, and are supplied to herself and others by the circumstances and advantages around her' (259). Jameson contrasts the dwarfing, pruning, and twisting procedures that compose the system of female education in Britain with the organic unfolding of the 'living germ' in the 'broad plain, and under the free air of heaven' in the colony, where there are no 'circumstances and advantages' to sustain moral deficiencies in women (259-60). But while she invokes romantic theories of education to imagine the fate of the bourgeois woman transplanted to the New World, she looks to the law of supply and demand for the technology that will bring about her transformation. It is by re-

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles

83

educating the desire of the male settler that she will bring forth the female product of the future, likely to be 'as happy in Canada as anywhere in the world' (259). The question of how to manufacture the 'demand for a better article' is addressed later on, when Jameson argues for a practice of government that would cease to 'educate and legislate as if there was no such thing in the world as the relation between the two sexes, the passion of love' (365).25 While attending the Upper Canadian Legislative Assembly, she discovers just such an attempt to govern the relation between the two sexes, in a piece of legislation that appears to her to confirm the colony's potential as a terrain for the cultivation of a new breed of woman. At the prorogation of the Upper Canadian Legislative Assembly in March 1837, Jameson hears the recital of a list of bills passed during the previous session, one of which inspires commentary in her text both at this point and again before her departure from Toronto on her summer rambles. 'There was an act for making the remedy in cases of seduction more effectual, and for the provision of children born out of wedlock, &c,' she explains. The legislation passed 'here,' she notes with emphasis on the deictic indicator of her colonial location and perspective, was recently repealed in England after being widely condemned as an attempt to make 'women solely answerable for the consequences of their own misconduct - misconduct, into which, in nine cases out of ten, they are betrayed by the conventional licence granted to the other sex' (94). Far from extending this chivalrous outcry to the Upper Canadian context, Jameson embraces the legislation as a disciplinary initiative to strengthen female character. 'I, as a woman, with a heart full of most compassionate tenderness for the wretched and the erring among my sister women, do still aver that the first step towards our moral emancipation is that law which shall leave us the sole responsible guardians of our own honour and chastity' (94—5). The act passed by the Upper Canadian Assembly in February 1837 was not in fact an attempt to make women 'solely answerable for the consequences of their own misconduct,' as Jameson imagines here. It was an attempt to update and tailor for Canadian conditions a common law action that permitted fathers to claim payment from their daughters' seducers under the guise of compensation for lost domestic services. Under the law that pre-existed the 1837 legislation, fathers, by claiming a loss of household labour, could recover losses from the 'tort-feasors' who seduced and impregnated their daughters. But as the daughters of the poorer class of settlers increasingly earned wages in domestic service

84 Settler Feminism and Race Making

performed outside of the family home, the tort of seduction appeared to operate as a form of class discrimination. Fathers with non-resident daughters were unable to claim a direct loss of services when their wageearning daughters were indisposed by pregnancy. In order to cover the situation of the poorer father - in effect to close the gap between his place of residence and the place of his daughter's domestic labour - the 1837 act introduced an additional level of figuration to the calculation of his losses. The theft of his daughter's chastity, rather than the loss of her services, would be recognized as the source of the injury - the 'wound given to parental feelings, the disgrace and injury inflicted upon the family,' in the words of Chief Justice Sir John Beverley Robinson (qtd. Backhouse, 'Tort' 50). The legislation thus encoded the father's grief as the symbol of a theft that had been carried out wherever his daughter happened to reside. This democratization of the common law made the tort of seduction one of the most popular civil actions in nineteenth-century Canada (ibid. 73) ,26 Jameson's appraisal of the Seduction Act as an attempt to make women 'guardians of our own honour and chastity' is based on her view of Canada as a training-ground for the self-governing woman. Isolating the legislation's change from the calculation of lost services to damaged chastity, she praises what she sees as an attempt to bring female character within the orbit of a disciplinary network of exchanges and debts. The 'tendency of such an enactment,' she predicts, 'will be the general benefit and elevation of the whole sex,' for what women require is 'to be left in all cases responsible for our own actions and our own debts' (94— 5). The language of moral character that Jameson uses here is infused with the economic figures of thrift and debt, saving and expenditure. This should not be surprising, for the daughter in question - who trades her services outside of the familial home - is constituted as a subject through her participation in a field of capitalist exchange in Upper Canada. The legislation acknowledges her admittance to this field by recognizing a 'class' of wage-earning colonial daughters, but it attempts to define the condition of this class in terms of an accentuated moral and sexual endangerment.27 Jameson is too eager to discover a legal recognition of the daughter as a subject to notice that, under the new law, the daughter continues to appear in the proceedings as the voiceless object of a transaction between two men. Although the Seduction Act brought the moral standing of the wage-earning daughter into the calculation of losses, it did not reposition her as the complainant in the suit against the seducer.

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles

85

The shift of emphasis from lost services to family injury only made her moral character newly relevant to the proceedings. Jameson at first sees reason to rejoice at a new recognition of women's moral capacities and responsibilities, symbolized for her in the new value placed on the chastity of the wage-earning daughter. She overlooks that only the terms of the calculation, and not the agents of the transaction, have changed. The seducer still is found responsible for an action and a debt, and the father still claims the loss. Indeed, as Constance Backhouse has argued, the 1837 Seduction Act was a means of reasserting patriarchal authority over daughters during a period in which families were undergoing 'dislocation, dispersement, and a crisis of authority,' as they were caught up in Upper Canada's rapid expansion and urbanization ('Tort' 46). But while the legislation may have had repressive effects, a focus on its productive force exposes the way in which it was also an attempt to implant bourgeois family feeling in the retrograde settler. 'While capitalist relations in commerce, manufacturing, [and] agriculture were by no means the dominant forms of economic production' in Upper Canada in the 1830s, Morgan observes, 'the growth of urban centres, the development of some forms of state-regulated institutions, the consolidation of various professional associations and the formation of an increasing number of voluntary societies' marked the increasing importance of middle-class values and practices (Public 19). In this context, the Seduction Act attempted to fold the conduct of the colonial daughter within the autonomous regulatory mechanism of the sentimental patriarchal family. It is crucial to observe the new organic relation that the legislation constructs between the daughter's stolen chastity and the father's wounded feelings. The new form of loss encoded by the legislation is perhaps less precisely calculable than lost services, but it introduces the possibility of governing the sexual conduct of the unmarried woman through the agency of the feeling father. Jameson's morally backward Highland settler is not just provided with the opportunity to recover some hard currency in 1837. He also has his authority as a responsible patriarch bolstered, on the condition that he relate to his daughter's new opportunities for wage labour and sexual liaisons with proper paternal concern. The Seduction Act thus did more than postpone the decline of the patriarchal, pre-industrial family, insofar as it changed the terms of a calculation, asserted the significance of family bonds, and incited and validated particular forms of emotional experience (fatherly grief, feminine vulnerability). If it appeared to recognize the interests of poorer men and indeed protected some women in

86 Settler Feminism and Race Making

domestic service from the unwanted sexual advances of their employers, it also introduced, under the banner of democratic reform, a wider encapsulation of sexual relations within the scope of family concern. The act encapsulated colonial daughters within an economy of family sentiment in which the wound of seduction was measured (for the purposes of a legal recovery of the costs of pain) in the father. A daughter might labour away from home, but her chastity resided intimately within her father, who was now legally positioned as a subject of 'parental feelings,' his tears an expression of the moral damage caused to a daughter. From the perspective of this father - neither in receipt of his daughter's services nor sufficiently propertied to have recourse to rape laws designed to protect lines of inheritance, but now invested with a certain moral authority - the act was a sign of egalitarian progress.28 On the lookout for signs of feminist progress, however, Jameson is determined to read the act as a 'public acknowledgment of the moral and legal responsibility of women' (94). Her precipitous embrace of the legislation suggests the extent to which she is prepared to find an expanded theatre of female self-realization in the colony, but it is also a reminder of the unmentionable intertext of Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, for the spectre of Wollstonecraft's Vindication is legible in Jameson's interpretation of the act as an attempt to provide women with a material interest in self-government. 'A truly benevolent legislator,' Wollstonecraft observes, 'always endeavours to make it the interest of each individual to be virtuous,' adding that this logic has yet to be extended to women, who are instead subjected to the 'severe restraint' of 'blind propriety' (262). At first Jameson sees the Seduction Act as an attempt to replace this gender-specific rule by fear with a mobilization of women's positive capacities for rational self-regulation. But by the time that she returns to the legislation, in the last journal entry to be written before her departure from Toronto on her summer rambles, she has decided that the legislation fails precisely to open this space of self-regulation. By widening the conditions under which an unmarried mother might collect the means of child support from a seducer, Jameson finds, colonial legislators have mistakenly prioritized the problem of poverty over that of moral deficiency. They have imposed a 'nominal tax for indulgence' on the seducer without intervening on the side of the woman to instil the capacity to resist seduction (192). Observing that the act has 'just come into operation,'Jameson notes that she has been unable to ascertain the circumstances that gave rise to its 'peculiar provisions' because 'it is touching on delicate and even forbidden ground to ask any questions' (191). She assumes that the purpose

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles

87

of the legislation is to lower the rate of infanticide among unmarried mothers. Women, she counters indignantly, 'do not murder their children from the fear of want, but from the fear of shame. In this fear, substituted for the light and the strength of virtue and genuine self-respect, are women trained, till it becomes second nature' (191). The way to dismantle this impulsive 'second nature,' she suggests, is not to coddle it with a new tax on seducers, but rather to 'thro[w] the woman upon her own self-respect and added responsibility' (191). The return to the 'peculiar provisions' of the Seduction Act at the end of'Winter Studies' thus produces an argument for preventative character-formation, beginning in the short term with the seduced woman's punitive delivery into a state of unmediated adversity. In the end Jameson concludes that the colonial legislation lets women off too lightly, calling seducers to account rather than requiring seduced women to redeem themselves. 'In entailing irremediable disgrace, and death of name and fame, upon the frail woman, the law of society had done its utmost; and to let it be supposed that the man had power to make amends by paying a nominal tax for indulgence bought at such a tremendous price, what was it but to flatter and delude both the vanity of lordly, sensual man, and the weakness of wretched, ignorant, trusting woman?' (192). Jameson underlines the greater force of the unwritten 'law of society' by arguing that the sentence of'irremediable disgrace' borne by the woman outweighs any compensation paid by the seducer. The unwritten law of disgrace is 'utmost' in efficiency, but it does not satisfy Jameson's criterion of justice, which would require some attempt to equip women with the knowledge and strength necessary to resist seduction. Jameson is here calling for a female version of what Collini calls the subject of 'Muscular Liberalism,' the individual 'confronting the task of maintaining [her] will in the face of adversity' (46, 47). In order to bring this morally muscular woman into existence, Jameson proposes a shift from a despotic rule through fear to a liberal government through the cultivation of individual strength of will. The question of how this strength is to be cultivated, however, falls back upon the force of the unwritten 'law of society,' the threat of disgrace. In the end Jameson proposes the inculcation of a disciplinary freedom that absolutely requires, and indeed internalizes, this threat. Malthus describes the historical development of bourgeois femininity as just such an internalization of the unwritten law of society that inflicts disgrace on the sexually unruly woman. He naturalizes this gender-specific form of disgrace by invoking a hypothetical primordial moment in which 'men might agree' that punishment for connection 'with a man who had entered into no compact to maintain her children' should fall

88 Settler Feminism and Race Making

where the 'evidence of the offence was most complete, and the inconvenience to the society at the same time the greatest' - that is to say, on the unmarried mother (Essay [1798] 84). '[A]s it would be highly unjust to punish so natural a fault by personal restraint or infliction,' he continues, these judicious men would agree that the punishment should take the form of social abjection, the fate of being 'almost driven from society' (84). Disgrace is thus for Malthus a natural means of limiting the social 'inconvenience' of unruly female sexuality, through the virtual expulsion of unmarried mothers from society. Not coincidentally, Malthus's theory of female punishment manifests the same logic as his proposals for the government of the poor. Disgrace functions as a rudimentary technology in the government of poverty, and the case of the sexually unruly woman provides the illustration of this technology at work. Just as Malthus suggests that 'dependent poverty ought to be held disgraceful' as a 'stimulus' to the 'power and the will to save among the common people,' his discussion of female punishment ends by observing that the disgrace that originated as a 'state necessity' ('as the most obvious and effectual method of preventing the frequent recurrence of a serious inconvenience to a community') has fostered the historical development of 'feminine delicacy' (40, 84). Among the poor, concern about the disgracefulness of dependent poverty produces a 'will to save'; in the case of the reproductive woman, the internalization of the disgracefulness of a sexuality posing a 'serious inconvenience to [the] community' eventually produces the disposition of 'feminine delicacy.' Malthus admits that this feminine disposition is much more common in 'that part of society where, if the intention of the custom were preserved, there is the least real occasion for it' (84). But as some nineteenth-century feminists would discover, 'feminine delicacy' could be mobilized as a model of the kind of saving disposition to be fostered in the poor and thus as a springboard for the middle-class woman's 'social' employments. At the end of 'Winter Studies,' there is little to distinguish Jameson's desire to throw the new wage-earning daughter 'upon her own selfrespect and added responsibility' from these Malthusian calculations (191). As Jameson predicates the constitution of female selves on the gradually ameliorative operation of unmitigated disgrace, the colonial garden of female capacities becomes the zone of character-forming adversity. Women's 'strength of virtue' comes to be recoverable through a laissez-faire arrangement designed to produce muscular Magdalens.29 It is not so much the specific laissez-faire logic ofjameson's critique of the

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles

89

Seduction Act that is important, however. The significance of the critique lies in its revelation of the extent to which Jameson's problematization of female ethics has become enclosed within a governmental perspective concerned with conducting the conduct of a population. As Mitchell Dean has observed, liberal doctrines of an individual freedom unassailed by state interference were only one part of the classical liberal mode of government, which included a multitude of strategic interventions designed to cultivate the subjectivities and domestic arrangements that would support capitalist social relations (13). Jameson's final word on the Seduction Act is notably both laissez-faire and interventionist, and in this sense it is characteristic of a liberal mode of government that had recourse to a diversity of tactics in its attempt to structure behaviours and forms of life. Jameson does not object to the moral presumptuousness of the Seduction Act's attempt to render the Highland settler responsible and outfit him with 'family feelings'; rather, she argues that these governmental interventions should not forget to intervene in the daughter's relation to her self. Thus, when Jameson moves out from the problem of the unsupervised colonial daughter to the problem of the retrograde settler, she concludes that it is not 'want of capital' that is the main obstacle to progress but 'want of energy, want of enterprise, want of everything needful, besides money' (230). T wonder some of our great speculators and monied men in England do not speculate here ... or rather I do not wonder, seeing what I see' (230). Jameson's recommendation that the seduced woman be left to her own devices as a form of punitive pedagogy marks the culmination of the process that has been gathering pace throughout 'Winter Studies.' At first an object of aesthetic knowledge, female character becomes a bridge to the science of society before these two intersecting knowledges confront the practical problem of governing the wage-earning daughter's sexuality. At this point the feminist question of women's care of the self has become indistinguishable from political economy's concern with the deleterious moral effects of poor relief. What will provoke Jameson to disengage her perspective from the calculations of liberal government in 'Summer Rambles' is a confrontation with the effects of liberal Indian policy on the 'power and utility' of the Ojibway woman. 'On my way to that ultimate somewhere of which I knew nothing*

In 'Summer Rambles' Jameson's physical displacements across unknown territory are offered to the reader as opportunities to accompany her on

90 Settler Feminism and Race Making an intellectual journey away from the commonplace view of the inevitability of the 'rolling westward of the great tide of civilisation' (305). As she advances 'alone - alone - and on my way to [an] ultimate somewhere,' through new settlements and First Nations encampments, towards the turning-point of a willed 'fall' in which she represents herself as the 'first European female who ha[s] ever performed [such an exploit] and assuredly ... not the last,' human history becomes unhinged from the comforting view that the 'moral world has its laws, fixed as those of physical nature' (462, 305). The colonial 'arctic zone' that she has appropriated as a laboratory for female self-governance up to this point is exposed as the scene of a disastrous experiment. As Adele Ernstrom has noted, the narrative of Winter Studies and Summer Rambles as a whole records the disturbance of an initially naive conception of First Nations people as Roussean 'children of the forest' (Winter 28), existing outside the historical frame of British settlement, and the 'Summer Rambles' section in particular is designed to bring to crisis a historical thesis 'that flourished in complex interchange with Rousseau's premise' (Ernstrom 287-8). This thesis, which found its central articulation in John Millar's Origin of the Distinction of the Ranks (1806), posited developmental stages of human society, moving from savagery through barbarism to civilization, and dispensing the benefits of this passage from one stage to the next on the woman progressively removed from a condition of drudgery. Millar proposed that 'women in the ages most remote from improvement' suffer the most accutely from the absence of restraining morals and customs in a general condition of barbarity 'subject to no limitation from the government' (qtd. Tomaselli 111). Malthus, another proponent of this view, argued that in the 'rudest state of mankind,' misery fell chiefly upon women, who were 'more completely in a state of slavery to the men than the poor are to the rich in civilized countries' (Essay 23-4). For Malthus, the misery of women in this rudest state functioned as a natural check on the power of population; the progressive conversion of this female misery into the 'feminine delicacy' characterizing the European woman reflected the latter's absolute gain from the advance of civilization. The European woman was thus positioned as the main beneficiary of the development of romantic love, refined manners, and regulated social intercourse in early-nineteenth-century histories of civilization, which routinely invoked the figure of the native 'drudge' as self-congratulatory proof of the relative advancement of European societies. Jameson sets out to observe the condition of First Nations women in

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles

91

'Summer Rambles' as part of a carefully planned project to redeploy this standard measure of European societies' advancement against the construction of the European woman as the main beneficiary of civilization. She does not mean to contest the rules of the discourse on the stages of society but rather to disturb its specific conclusions with regard to the privileged condition of the European woman. She takes hold of the anchoring point for self-congratulatory assessments of the benefits accrued to women in 'civilized' society - the theme of the native woman's drudgery - and subjects it to the verification of first-hand observation. Turning the standard evaluation of the First Nations woman's condition on its head, she appoints her as the emblem of the female civil subject, fit to manage her own desires and to assume a share of the work of 'providing for her own subsistence and the well-being of society as a productive labourer' (519). But as long as it remains isolated from a consideration of the practical effects of Indian policy, this attempt to dislodge the chivalrous assessments of the First Nations woman's enslaved condition, in order to invert the relative places of the native woman and the European woman on a developmental scale, risks amounting to no more than an extension of the Roussean figure of the noble savage into a female child of the forest. Indeed, there are aspects of Jameson's idealization of the First Nations woman, for the sake of an argument that is centrally about the condition of the European woman, that seem to do no more than reconstruct the former as a model of bourgeois feminine propriety, universalized as a 'true modesty ... from within' (516). The contradictions of this attempt to make the First Nations woman the emblem of a feminism that has accommodated itself to the perspective of liberal government - and hitched the goal of female self-realization to the 'social' project of moral assimilation - surface as soon as Jameson confronts the effects of colonial Indian policy. This confrontation leads her to disarticulate feminism from liberal governance and to detach the development of female ethics from the infantilization of others. The 1830s was the decade in which the British imperial government initiated experiments in 'civilizing' natives in the Canadas, shifting away from the eighteenth-century military and trading alliances, which had served the exigencies of a competitive struggle for empire in North America, towards a policy that effectively reconstituted First Nations people as wards of the state. During this decade the British Indian Department was transformed into the Department of Indian Affairs, control passed from military to civilian hands, and the reserve was established as a 'social laboratory 1 for the inculcation of European habits and values

92 Settler Feminism and Race Making (Tobias, 'Protection' 129). It was not just that lands that it had been expedient to recognize as belonging to military allies in the eighteenth century were now seen as a fertile terrain for agricultural exploitation and the expansion of a settler population; the new 'enlightened' policy of protection and civilization was also a response to arguments by romantic writers on both sides of the Atlantic, and by British organizations such as the Aborigines Protective Association, that European colonial expansion was leaving the 'noble savage' to perish. The new course of policy also found its impetus in the demands and ambitions of Protestant missionaries who were in the process of establishing local enterprises of cultural transformation (centuries after their Catholic counterparts had done so in Lower Canada), in the form of industrial schools and model villages (Tobias, 'Protection' 128-9; Titley 3). In relation to this new liberal turn in Indian policy, Jameson can at first offer only the languid observation that 'much is done for [the] conversion and civilisation' of Indians in Upper Canada (233-4). But her attempt to represent the colony as the 'very paradise of hope' in this regard soon stumbles upon contradictions which she promises to 'set down [in her record] as they arise' (303). The state of hopefulness that Jameson at first understands as the natural consequence of a colonial landscape bereft of cultural memorials she almost immediately reframes as an effect of European ignorance. If 'we are rich in anticipation, but poor in possession — more poor in memorials,'Jameson suggests of settlers, this richness of anticipation is perhaps due only to settlers' lack of interest in indigenous history, including the 'vague and general traditions ... of horrid conflicts between the Hurons and the Iroquois, all along these shores, in the time and before the time of the French dominion' (304). Her initial characterization of Upper Canada as a 'paradise of hope' is then contradicted by her observations on the hopelessness of the 'civilisation of the Indians, and the increase or even preservation of their numbers' - determined in the long run by the 'contagious example of the whites' in the use of alcohol and the dishonest land transactions that ensure that '"for ever" is like to be of short duration,' and in the short run by the zealous and uninformed optimism of missionaries and other 'excellent and benevolent people who have taken the cause of the aborigines to heart' (306-7, 319). Turning her translator's skills to a text entitled History of the Missions of the United Brethren among the Indians of North America, Jameson cites a missionary lesson 'described with great naivete,' she observes - dealing with the purported satanic influence betrayed by those who resist Christian conversion

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles 93

(308). 'The ignorance and intolerance of some of these enthusiastic, well-meaning men,' she comments, 'have done as much injury to the good cause for which they suffered and preached, as their devotion and self-sacrifices have done honour to the same cause' (308). Criticism of the missionary endeavours of Jesuits was not beyond the scope of the Protestant reformer advocating the extension of government activities, but Jameson's critique of Christian conversion goes much further: she declares First Nations people to be 'an untamable race' (322; emphasis in original). This statement needs to be read as a strategic challenge to the homogenizing arrogance that would assimilate a different culture to a scale of improvement. It is not the exclusion of First Nations people from liberal institutions that Jameson denounces here but - what now appears to her to be worse - the violence of their inclusion for the purposes of assimilation-as-improvement. Thus she asserts that she can 'no more conceive of a city filled with industrious Mohawks and Chippewas, than ... a flock of panthers browsing in a penfold' (322). 'Impossibility' stands in here for the unthinkable violation of a European enculturation designed to erase the difference of First Nations culture. The analogy with the panther in the penfold reaches to the heart of liberal colonialism's self-justification, enunciated in 1859 by John Stuart Mill in his essay On Liberty. Mill argues that '[djespotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end' (9; emphasis added). Mariana Valverde has interpreted Mill's pronouncement as an admission that despotism is integral to liberalism's definition of liberty. Rather than representing an exception to a general rule, Mill's reference to the necessity for illiberal practices of moral governance in the case of'barbarians' speaks to what Valverde calls the 'irreducible despotism' in the heart of even the 'paradigmatic liberal subject's relation to himself,' because the activity of governing others always presupposes a parallel system that 'continually reproduces despotism' within the rationally self-governing self ('Despotism' 359, 362). As Valverde notes, classical liberalism resolves the apparent contradiction between despotic means and liberal ends through reference to a concept capable of mediating between desire and compulsion, the concept of habit (362). A 'despotic' alteration of habits eventually produces the permanent transformation in desires that makes a moral modification automatic, as the subject comes to act on a positive desire for what was previously imposed from the outside. As we saw earlier, the concept of habit was central to Mill's argument against determinist views of charac-

94 Settler Feminism and Race Making

ter; it allowed him to maintain that 'when our habits are not too inveterate, [we] can, by ... willing the requisite means, make ourselves different' (qtd. Collini 36) .Jameson draws hope for the frivolous and weak-spirited woman from this sense that by 'willing the requisite means' - that is to say, by changing her own habits - the woman can make herself different. She dramatizes this principle in action early on in 'Winter Studies,' as she represents herself rising against the 'Winter Miseries,' pen in hand, rather than succumbing to wishing herself 'a dormouse, or a she-bear, to sleep away the rest of this cold, cold winter' (29). In the course of Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, this self-discipline appears to qualify her to make recommendations for habit changes in others, especially in the lower class of settler and the sexually vulnerable girl. However, in the following passage - which concludes her critique of the 'benevolent and earnest aspirations, in which so many good people indulge' (319) in relation to First Nations people -Jameson appears to decide that this program of benevolently despotic habit-changes constitutes a presumptuous and even damaging interference in practices that have their own logic and determination. The dirty, careless habits of the Indians, while sheltered only by the barkcovered wigwam, matter very little. Living almost constantly in the open air, and moving their dwellings perpetually from place to place, the worst effects of dirt and negligence are neither perceived nor experienced. But I have never heard of any attempt to make them stationary and congregate in houses, that has not been followed by disease and mortality, particularly among the children; a natural result of close air, confinement, heat, and filth. (322-3)

Whereas Jameson's earlier appeal that those who dream of the North American colonies as a 'sort of Arcadia' should 'come here' anticipated that first-hand observation would demonstrate the urgent need for the 'interference' of a schoolmaster (292), her second such appeal calls upon distant supporters of the civilizing project to confront the zerosum terms of their attempts to harmonize interests through the moral government of others. '[I]f there be those who think that in the present state of things the interests of the red man and the white man can ever be blended, and their natures and habits brought to harmonise,' she now announces, 'then I repeat, let them come here' (310). The call to first-hand observation is turned to debunking the view that education would be sufficient to reconcile an indigenous population to a state of

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles

95

subjugation. What would be required to 'insure the accomplishment of [the] benevolent and earnest aspirations' of civilizers, she argues, is nothing less than the preference of the 'future welfare of the wronged people they have supplanted ... above their own immediate interest nay, their own immediate existence' (320). The implications of this assertion of an absolute and irreparable cleavage of interests between European settlers and First Nations people can hardly be overemphasized. The assertion emphasizes, first of all, that political economy's fiction of 'common interests' always requires a concentration of misery in some portion of the population. This was a point that Malthus was willing to admit, but Jameson goes on to declare that in order to sustain the fiction of a 'common interests,' cultural difference must be recodified as moral inferiority. This recodification, what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls a 'worlding of a world [that] generates the force to make the "native" see himself as "other,"' is supported by the 'assumption of an uninscribed earth' that Jameson demonstrates to be the precondition for settlers' hopeful orientation to their new surroundings ('The Rani' 133).31 In the case of the First Nations woman, what this worlding of the world entails, Jameson argues in a passage in which she answers 'galIan [t] and chivalr[ous]' demonstrations of concern for the native 'drudge,' is the dismantling of a female character marked by an 'extreme delicacy and personal modesty' (516). Jameson's positioning of the First Nations woman untouched by European culture as the representative of a 'gracious' condition, 'dignified by domestic feelings and by equality with all around her,' and situated between the extreme poles of the 'refined leisure of an elegant woman in the higher classes of our society' and the 'servant-maid of all work, or [the] factory girl' (516) - has been read as implying a class critique of European femininity. 32 Situating the First Nations woman at the median of social stations also accomplishes a naturalization of bourgeois femininity by way of identification with a First Nations womanhood made to represent the kind of 'natural' state that Jameson earlier associated with Shakespeare's cast of heroines, not 'mortified by particular customs, by fashion, by situation' (Characteristics 46). But while Jameson seems to appoint the First Nations woman as the embodiment of a middle-class ideal of competent domestic femininity here, she goes on to denounce colonialism's subjection of the First Nations woman to the defining feature of this emergent ideal, through her transformation from an active producer into a captive consumer. Prior to European influence, she suggests, First Nations women:

96

Settler Feminism and Race Making prepared deer-skins with extraordinary skill; I have seen dresses of the mountain sheep and young buffalo skins, richly embroidered, and almost equal in beauty and softness to a Cashmere shawl; and I could mention other things. It is reasonable to presume that as these manufactures must have been progressively improved, there might have been farther progression, had we not substituted for articles they could themselves procure or fabricate, those which we fabricate; we have taken the work out of their hands, and all motive to work, while we have created wants which they cannot supply. We have clothed them in blankets - we have not taught them to weave blankets. We have substituted guns for the bows and arrows - but they cannot make guns: for the natural progress of arts and civilisation springing from within, and from their own intelligence and resources, we have substituted a sort of civilisation from without, foreign to their habits, manners, organisation: we are making paupers of them; and this by a kind of terrible necessity. (518; emphasis added)

This forced inculcation of a 'civilisation from without' renders the First Nations woman indistinguishable from the frivolous and untrained European woman in terms of the 'power and utility' or 'capacity of being useful' that Jameson proposes as the true measure of the 'importance and real dignity of woman ... everywhere, in savage and civilised communities' (519). The First Nations woman's participation in craft manufactures prior to Europeans' reorganization of the division of labour allows Jameson to posit women's 'capacity of being useful,' rather than their escape from 'drudgery,' as a universal bottom line in the evaluation of societies at different stages of development. However, throughout Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, she has also reinforced the point that human capacities are the result of positive pedagogical measures. Elsewhere in 'Summer Rambles,' therefore, her idealization of First Nations society is based on an interpretation of its operation as being regulated through the force of the norm. 'Their laws, or rather their customs,' she observes, 'command certain virtues and practices, as truth, abstinence, courage, hospitality; but they have no prohibitory laws' (396; emphasis added). What Jameson 'discovers' in First Nations society is an apparent simplification of the operation of power, one that dispenses with the distractions of rights and laws and allows for an isolation of the work of the norm that is her enduring preoccupation. In a long footnote that argues against the missionaries' view that it is a childlike lack of understanding that leads First Nations to resist the so-called natural law of liberal society - the principle 'that the law which restrains us brings us

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles 97

nearer to our first liberty in seeming to deprive us of it' -Jameson insists that this resistance is founded in an alternative conception of liberty as the 'free use of [one's] will and [one's] limbs' (351). This alternative organization of power trusts to the sort of positive inculcation of habits of self-regulation that she has earlier recommended as an alternative to the female education that turns on the mechanism of fear. The simplification of social regulation to the operation of norms in First Nations society permits Jameson to suggest that the resources for feminist resistance to the production of 'fittingly' frivolous women are not to be found in the winning of formal (that is to say, negative, protective) freedoms, but rather in an alternative shaping of desires and habits, which would dispense with the cultivation of fear. Jameson illustrates the difference between 'customs' and 'prohibitory laws' by means of an anecdote about an Ojibway woman 'who had remained unmarried from choice, not from accident or necessity': She lived alone; she had built a wigwam for herself, which was remarkably neat and commodious; she could use a rifle, hunt, and provided herself with food and clothing. She had carved a rude image of the sun, and set it up in her lodge; the husband's place, the best mat, and a portion of food, were always appropriated to this image. She lived to a great age, and no one ever interfered with her mode of life, for that would have been contrary to all their ideas of individual freedom. Suppose that, according to our most approved European notions, the poor woman had been burnt at the stake, corporeally or metaphorically, or hunted beyond the pale of the village, for deviating from the law of custom, no doubt there would have been directly a new female sect in the nation of the Chippewas, an order of urives of the sun, and Chippewa vestal virgins; but these wise people trusted to nature and common sense. The vocation apparently was not generally admired, and found no imitators. (396)

The passage argues on behalf of a system of 'nature and common sense' that dispenses with sovereign power, suggesting that spectacular punishment and exclusion only provoke moral irregularity, while the First Nations system of non-interference ensures that a deviant mode of life finds no imitators. What this idealization of a normalized society operating without the interventions of sovereign power does not address, however, is the way in which the substitution of the category of abnormality for illegality works to exert subtler forms of punishment. The spontaneous regulation envisioned here operates by substituting distinctions

98 Settler Feminism and Race Making

between the normal and the abnormal for lines marking illegality or the space outside of the law. It is the very inclusivity of the system of 'nature and common sense' that allows the norm to appear to emerge as an organic standard, derived from nothing other than the community itself. But from the moment it establishes itself, as Francois Ewald notes, the norm 'invites each one of us to imagine ourselves as different from the others,' for if the vertical relations of sovereignty are eliminated in a normalizing society, they are replaced by the 'horizontal' coercions of a 'common interest,' which 'forces the group to turn back in upon itself in self-scrutiny (154, 152, 154). Power in Jameson's own liberal society is exercised through a complex encounter between the subtle disciplinary power of norms and sovereign power, an encounter between procedures of normalization and what she calls 'prohibitory laws.' However, the field of formal politics in this liberal society is duplicitously narrowed to the parcelling out of sovereign power, so that the means of political contestation are unequal to the actual organization of power. Jameson believes that First Nations society is innocent of the synecdochal duplicity through which a part of the political game is made to stand in for the whole. It is innocent, as well, of the metaleptical manoeuvre through which human natures that are the effects of regimes of discipline and normalization are repositioned as the expressive origins of law. But while Jameson idealizes normalizing society, she does not foresee the subtler means of punishing deviations from the law of custom that the emergent discourses of the human and social sciences are in the process of inventing for liberal rule: apparatuses of knowledge that ground their truth-claims in the neutrality of observation and render these claims effective through the agency of experts capable of intervening to correct abnormalities. Among these experts in normalcy will be the educated middle-class Anglo-Protestant woman, for whom Jameson is so eager to find a field of utility. Jameson aligns her feminism with the dream of a normalized society and frames this alignment as an extension of her anti-colonial counteridentification with First Nations. Ironically, this dream of a society operating without prohibitory laws - purely through the positive deployment and direction of desires - describes nothing so well as the ideal society of the mid-nineteenth-century liberal reformer, for whom the Canadas provided a testing-ground and for whom the repression of the alternative political logics and practices of First Nations was a fundamental imperative. Jameson's idealization of First Nations society can thus be said to participate in what Laura Wexler has called the 'tender violence'

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles

99

of nineteenth-century literature, which appeared to come to the defence of the slave or 'savage,' while in fact serving to consolidate the liberal norms that would turn out to be dangerous to these objects of well-meaning solicitude (17). In later nineteenth-century Canada the heterotopic space for the inculcation of freedom that comes closest to matching Jameson's dream of the theatre is perhaps the residential school, in which the 'full utopianism of a vanguard liberalism came to the fore' within 'Christian/liberal manufactories of individuals' that forced First Nations children to be free 'in the very particular liberal sense of "free," even at the cost of their lives' (McKay 637). Liberal Virtue and Feminist Virtu After her return to England, Jameson does not cease to intervene in discussions on the condition of women. In an 1843 review of the Commissioners' Report on the Condition of Women and Female Children in Mines and Factories, she returns to the problem outlined in the 'arctic zone' passage of Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, that of the female subject educated to be a wife and mother but 'sent forth into the world, to toil and endure as though she had nerves of iron' ('Condition 258). It is 'the advance of civilization, no less than the pressure of the times,' that places her in this position, for if the end of marriages of alliance and the disappearance of a household mode of production produce 'increasing numbers of unmarried men,' they also produce a new female obligation to be self-supporting, 'of which womankind, in the long run, will not have reason to complain' (258). Jameson returns to the theme of women's condition as the measure of a society's degree of civilization here, but only in order to resurrect the dangerous view that while women 'are demoralized themselves, they demoralize all that comes within their reach' (257). As long as women are not educated for their new obligation to work, they will continue to become the 'debased, haggard, enfeebled creatures' described by the commissioners' report (257). Jameson finds no point in educating the working-class woman destined for a life of incessant labour; she 'go[es] a step higher,' to the paucity of professional prospects for the middle-class woman. Having taken this step, she leaves the 'demoralized' working-class woman behind, except insofar as she can serve as a warning about what the middle-class woman without prospects is in danger of becoming. Jameson argues that the middleclass woman equipped 'with the powers which God gave her, religiously improved, with a reason which lays life open before her,' who has 'in all

100 Settler Feminism and Race Making

England no chance of sustenance but by teaching,' is likely to be reduced to her wretched and diseased working-class sister 'whose offspring must, of necessity, be physically degenerate' (258, 257). The most telling aspect of Jameson's argument about the untenability of women's material position under industrial capitalism here is the nature of the solution that it proposes, a solution that she imagines in the spatial terms of the institution of segregation and training. The article ends by framing a demand for female normal schools, institutions for female juvenile delinquents, and asylums for female outcasts. It ends by articulating a female 'right' to discipline and normalization in institutions of training and moral rehabilitation that would also capture a market for the expertise of the middle-class woman, through the enclosure of her undisciplined sisters. But that is not the ending of Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, at least. At the end of Jameson's Canadian text, the same colony that seemed to promise the possibility of orchestrating the demand for a new 'article' of woman exposes the brutality of the Enlightenment project, in the pauperization of the First Nations woman who is newly deprived of 'all motive to work' and equipped with 'wants which [she] cannot supply' (518). Instead of identifying the interests of the educated woman with the punitive 'amelioration' of other women, Jameson ends by proposing a feminist practice of the self that is about testing the limits of moral prescriptions. As she descends a cataract at Sault Ste Marie in a canoe towards the end of 'Summer Rambles,' she tries on the positive freedom of will and limb that First Nations society has seemed to exemplify for her, in contrast to the protected space of negative freedom, closed in by prohibitions, that she sees offered to women in liberal society. Between her declared 'half-resolve' to attempt the descent and the announcement that she has become 'more resolute ... to venture [herjself in the midst' of the falls is interposed one of the text's more sustained attempts to dismantle European notions of First Nations inferiority (457, 461). This passage takes the form of a dialogue with a First Nations man,33 a dialogue that specifies the content of the intellectual displacement that is figured in Jameson's thrilling leap into 'dancing rapids.' The exchange with George Johnston turns on the question of whether First Nations warfare practices 'justiffy] the name savage.' His explication of the principle of 'contempt of danger and pain' upon which these practices are based leaves Jameson convinced that an 'Indian warrior, flourishing his tomahawk, and smeared with his enemy's blood' is not 'so very much a greater savage than the pipe-clayed, padded, embroidered per-

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles

101

sonage, who, without cause of motive, has sold himself to be ... slain' (458-60). '[T]here is not a needle's point difference between the one and the other,' she concludes (460). The ironic apology which follows that unorthodox conclusion - 'God forbid that I should think to disparage the blessings of civilization! I am a woman' - announces Jameson's adoption of the view that 'Indians' are to be preferred 'on the score of [the] consistency' of their developed capacities and their moral conduct (460). The assertion is still carefully phrased in the terms of the theory of the stages of society. But the action that Jameson used to dramatize her rejection of 'civilized' savagery in this same passage goes somewhat further. It is a woman's 'fall' that, 'terrific as it appears,' presents 'no absolute danger' (457). 'I could see, as I looked over the edge of the canoe, that the passage between the rocks was sometimes not more than two feet in width, and we had to turn sharp angles - a touch of which would have sent us to destruction - all this I could see through the transparent eddying waters, but I can truly say that I had not even a momentary sensation of fear, but rather of giddy, breathless, delicious excitement' (461). A female traveller's adventure is here turned into a transgression of the limits of freedom conceived as a condition of security and protection from danger. Adopting the 'contempt of danger and pain' described by George Johnston as the principle of First Nations warfare, Jameson represents herself defying a conceptualization of freedom that Thomas Dumm has called a 'form of domination and a primary category for determining the viability of actions' in liberal society (148). In seeking to elaborate a discourse of freedom that avoids the trap of appealing to rights which inevitably exert disciplinary pressure, Dumm proposes the embrace of fear as a 'value critical of value, resistant to teleology' (153). Fear, he notes, 'is a word rooted in the experience of being in transit'; the 'experience of fear is that of moving from protection to exposure, experiencing the vertigo of uncertainty, not knowing what threat to wellbeing might lie in wait' (148). Jameson's insistence on her 'giddy, breathless, delicious excitement' indeed stages a rejection of the invitation to take up freedom as a form of protection harmonized with the 'common interests' of society. At the end of her narrative, she withdraws her wager on the discourse of social science and attempts to practise a feminist freedom that is not bound to a politics of virtue and duty.34 This rejection and this withdrawal differentiates Winter Studies and Summer- Rambles from subsequent Canadian settler women's narratives that perform submission to norms of character and conduct in exchange for the right to exercise a 'freedom' that amounts to participation in the

102 Settler Feminism and Race Making

project of securing society against the dangers of moral difference and political dissonance. The intellectual displacement staged at the end of Jameson's narrative permits the text to differentiate between what Bonnie Honig has called virtue and virtu approaches to politics. Whereas the approach organized around virtue yearns for the closure of political context and the freeing of selves and institutional arrangements of instability, the more critical perspective of virtu calls attention to the processes through which political agon is displaced and order secured, underlining the predication of the virtuous political community upon the 'remaindering' of those who do not find their desires expressed by its institutional arrangements (5). Neither of these feminisms is external to power, but a virtu feminism understands the dangers of identifying itself with governmental calculations of the well-being of society 'as a whole.' Jameson's descent of the falls ends with the announcement that she has returned 'home' to Johnston, his mother and sisters (462; emphasis in the original). This is a very different home from the one to which the narrators of the white women's captivity tales I read in the following chapter will return. In Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear, Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney return to Ontario following the 1885 northwest uprising to participate in the recomposition of a 'calm security' at another moment in Canadian history that required an exclusionary specification of the forms of selfhood admissible within the virtuous community (Two Months 121). Gowanlock and Delaney compose a 'calm security' that rests on individualizing representations of insurgent natives but also on their own willingness to adopt speaking positions within late-nineteenth-century Canadian seduction and rape laws that positioned women as subjects in need of special protections. In this sense, they were drawn into a wardship system that had already succeeded in transforming First Nations people into recipients of paternalistic protection, whose rights to self-representation were linked to specific criteria of moral fitness.35 For Gowanlock and Delaney, speaking with authority about the moral character of racial others was thus a defence against the risk of being classified themselves as racial problems.

c h a p t e r two

Female Freedom as an Artefact of Government: Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear

Feminist readers of colonial discourse have shown that images of white female vulnerability set against the sexual aggression of male subalterns were deeply implicated in the legitimation of colonial authority. The defenceless white woman figured especially prominently in responses to challenges to the moral grounds of colonialism. In her study of colonial responses to mid-nineteenth-century anti-colonial insurgencies in India and Jamaica, Jenny Sharpe argues that colonial governments deployed a 'discourse of rape' that produced rhetorical slippages between the object of rape and the object of rebellion, between the purity of the English woman and the mission of colonialism (68). When 'the binarism of Western civilization and Eastern barbarism [was] difficult to maintain [because] the colonizer was an agent of torture and massacre,' she observes, a recourse to 'the violent reproduction of gender roles that position [ed] English women as innocent victims and English men as their avengers ... permitted] strategies of counterinsurgency to be recorded as the restoration of moral order' (6). According to Sharpe, this colonial discourse of rape deployed the figure of the vulnerable white woman as a guarantee of the moral value of colonialism. Crucial to this deployment was the kind of narrative that invited readers to experience sexual violence from a perspective that always precluded the possibility of female agency. This might explain why, despite the narrative energy generated around [the figure of the white woman], the stones of the women themselves escape the frame of the narrations,' she speculates (68). The 1857 Sepoy Rebellion in India, which 'entered the colonial record

104 Settler Feminism and Race Making

as a barbaric attack on innocent English women and children, was not as many worlds away from western Canada as one might assume,' as Sarah Carter has pointed out (23). Two of the key military commanders involved in the suppression of anti-colonial rebellion in the Canadian Northwest in 1885 had also taken part in the campaign of counterinsurgency in India in 1857. But in spite of these connections, as I shall argue, the white women's captivity narratives that represented the Canadian rebellion for readers in eastern Canada cannot be read as contributors to the discourse of rape outlined by Sharpe. In these narratives, the deployment of the white woman as violated object does not preclude the possibility of her agency; on the contrary, it involves her complex authorization to speak on her own behalf. In order to understand how in these narratives the racialization of insurgents is connected to the subjectification of the white women narrators, it is necessary to ask where else in the contemporaneous social field women were being equipped with authorized voices. As I shall argue, the wider conditions in which Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney were called upon to speak 'for themselves' can be deciphered in transformations in late-nineteenth-century Canadian rape laws, which altered the weight of the first-person, implicitly white, female voice. If the presence of white femininity in the Crown colonies legitimated the violent suppression of native insurgency, in the dominions the presence of white femininity was also marshalled to underline the need for protective boundaries and a tighter regulation of sexual conduct. Carter's suggestion that 'in colonial situations varying in time and geography, protecting the virtue of white women became a pretext for suppressing and controlling the indigenous population' thus gets at only part of the equation in the context of Canada (15). The figure of the defenceless white woman effected a linkage between the two pillars of settler colony rule: the containment of native politicization and unrest and the maintenance of cohesion within the settler population itself (Weitzer 27-8). Epitomizing that settler population's vulnerability to racial 'contamination,' white femininity served as a point of elaboration and generalization for measures of protection and containment. White femininity was not simply a pretext for suppressing and controlling others, but a mechanism for this work - a location for norms of sexual and racial purity. Beneath the level of colonial self-justification and the racialization of insurgents in the captivity narratives of Gowanlock and Delaney, therefore, there is a reflexive form of power at work that subjects the writers themselves to the pressures of discursive and moral conventions. This

Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear

105

normalizing power predicates the authority of the women's accounts on the extent to which they prove themselves to be 'normal' women who would rather die than transgress the protocols of race making and who understand their freedom as owed to the protections of'civilized' society. Nancy Armstrong identifies the normalizing function of the narrative of captured or violated settler femininity in an essay entitled 'Why Daughters Die,' which locates a shift in the narrative stakes of sentimental fiction as the genre migrates to North America. In the colony of settlement, where the protection of the genealogical or blood line is at issue in the sexual fate of daughters, the 'logic of sentimental fiction, or how to get the right man together with the right woman on a permanent basis, had to address the problem of race, or how to distinguish those within the diasporic community whose inclusion would cancel out its English identity' (2). Fictional daughters who were thus 'invested with the power of culture-bearers die[d] - often willfully - when they [left] the family,' proving themselves true through an incapacity to live outside of it (11). Crucial here was the negation of the possibility of 'going native and starting up a whole new family in the wilderness,' or even reproducing 'an English household without an English husband' (11). What was important about this shift in stakes on North American terrain was the burden of signification that it placed on the representation of a 'normal' femininity that always chose (indeed, could not but choose) death rather than an unleashing from the protection of the father's house. If an enforced fall from virtue was a fate worse than death, then what the death of daughters was preferable to, specifically, was an abduction into 'miscegenation' and ungovernable life outside the paternal family. Two Months in the Camp oj Big Bear narrativizes the rejection of the option of 'going native,' but Gowanlock and Delaney also remind us that they purchase their freedom by acceding to particular discursive demands. Their licence to speak authoritatively functions to recontain or recapture them, and this condition connects their narration to another scene in which Ontario daughters were equipped with the capacity to account for themselves, as a compensation for their new mobility outside of the family. This other scene becomes apparent when we take seriously the idea that a discourse of rape - a discourse in the sense of the set of subject positions and statements involved in a historically specific processing of sexual assault cases - was involved in the representation of anti-colonial rebellion. The changes that foregrounded race in the discourse of rape in Canada at this moment occurred through 'democratizations' of seduction

106 Settler Feminism and Race Making

and rape laws, changes that asserted the priority of gender over class categorization. They occurred at the level of legal definitions, in a reform process that muddied the distinctions between rape, abduction, prostitution, and seduction in a movement towards the specification of 'offences against chastity.' In this process, the technical definition of rape as interference with the line of property inheritance - something that required proof of the 'emission of seed' - was relaxed to mean something more like contamination; the British law against the abduction of propertied heiresses was broadened to include daughters of any class;1 the definition of the prostitute under vagrancy offences as a 'loose, idle, or disorderly person failing to give an adequate account of herself was inverted into the positive norm of 'previously chaste character,' a condition that a woman would now have to satisfy in order to claim legal protection. The spatial logic of race conflated the actions of abduction and seduction - stealing away and defiling - in a new concern with the removal of women from their proper place in a race-making economy. Once sexual violation became synonymous with the action of displacement, it could entail the use of fraudulent representations or intoxicants to loosen a woman's 'borders,' as well as her forced removal from a father's or nation's protection. All of these changes tended to bring forward the woman herself as an object of adjudication, until only the normatively infantilized woman was vulnerable to sexual-racial expatriation and thus entitled to claim legal protection. Neither Gowanlock nor Delaney was asked to provide evidence for the trials of the First Nations men convicted of murdering white settlers at Frog Lake (Carter 94); instead, the women were implicated in the public representation of freedom as a condition predicated upon the rigid charting of racially encoded spatial boundaries and the entry into morally disciplining transactions of indebted remembering and prudent promising. At stake in the first-person narratives of Gowanlock and Delaney is the specification of female freedom as a condition of protection, and the identification of women's interests with the mapping of racial boundaries and the perpetuation of Anglo-Protestant hegemony. It might be objected that my relocation of the centre of gravity of Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear to the domestic terrain and sexual arrangements of eastern Canada simply reinstalls the 'Western sexed subject' (the white woman) as a 'privileged signifier of Otherness' (Sharpe 11). My argument is conducted on grounds other than those of otherness, however. It turns on the force of the norm as 'a measurement and a means of producing the common standard,' the 'matrix that

Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear 107

transforms the negative restraints of the juridical into the more positive controls of normalization' (Ewald 141). The present chapter seeks to narrate the appointment of the white woman as the bearer of norms of civility in settler space, through the reduction of her freedom to a condition of protection and the identification of her agency with the project of assimilating others. Within a framework concerned with normalizing power rather than processes of othering, the white woman emerges as a privileged figure in the elaboration of moral standards. Gowanlock and Delaney are caught within a war wider than the 1885 rebellion, a war continued by other means - the struggle of a 'racialized version of the species in pursuit of hegemony through perpetuity, that requires and produces a normative heterosexuality at its service' (Butler, 'Passing' 266). By disestablishing the givenness of the normal, I thus argue with the positioning of the white woman as the privileged signifier of difference, but I do so by substituting the normal as her privileged location. 1885 and the Defence of the Race A short notice in the 'Books and Magazines' listings of the 25 November 1885 issue of the Canada Presbyterian announces the publication of a 'little volume in two parts,' entitled Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear. The text is described as a 'graphic delineation of the stirring adventures of Mrs. Gowanlock and Mrs. Delaney during the recent North-West rebellion,' and it is recommended to readers of Canada Presbyterian alongside such other publications as the latest issue of The Sanitarian, containing 'able discussions of matters pertaining to public and individual health,' Treasure-Trove, a 'carefully-conducted publication devoted to school children,' and last but not least, an illuminated Woman's Temperance Society calendar (777). What Two Months in the Camp ofBigRear might have in common with these other publications is not at first clear. The book contains the captivity narratives of two white women who were held for two months in an ambiguous condition of captive protection during the anti-colonial rebellion in the Canadian Northwest in the spring of 1885. Their narratives were published together in one volume in the autumn of 1885 by a Toronto printing office owned by Theresa Gowanlock's two brothers-in-law. Together the narratives of the two Theresas form the single instance of a widely circulated woman's captivity narrative in Canadian literary history. But what is also singular about these narratives is their refusal of the generic function of the late-nineteenth-century white woman's narrative of Indian captivity.

108 Settler Feminism and Race Making

Gowanlock and Delaney lost their husbands and their homes during the attack on their settlement, but neither of their narratives stages a widow's grieving for a martyred husband. In different ways, Gowanlock and Delaney deprive their audience of the exculpatory pleasure of a collective mourning. The packaging of Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear attempts to make up for this deficient production of national grieving by appending anonymously authored sketches of the 'Frog Lake Martyrs' (the male settlers and government agents killed in the uprising) to the women's narratives. However, the women's decidedly unsentimental first-person narration reaches in an entirely different direction. It foregrounds the discursive contracts through which they came to spectacular testimony and thematizes the transactions through which selves become implicated in the (re) production of social order more generally. This peculiar focus permits Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear as a whole to frame an argument that is much wider than a case for the legitimacy of anti-insurrectionary violence as the just vengeance of a martyred colonialism. The text argues for the defence of society through a generalized form of punishment, built into the very sort of contracts through which Gowanlock and Delaney arrived at the voicing of truthful discourse. 'Shift the target and change the scale,' Foucault writes in a paraphrase of the strategy of early penal reform, which sought to update the power to punish by inserting it more deeply into the social body (Discipline 89). Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear is involved in just such a shift of target and scale. The text was published in Ontario and was addressed to 'civilized' Anglo-Protestant Canada. In this context of reception, the distinction between the criminal and the vulnerable, the deviant and the dependent, was in the process of fading as the very different terms of a socialized form of justice were beginning to take shape (Chunn). Within these emerging terms, moral degenerates and racial 'inferiors' were seen as unfit to come to a social contract and thus unfairly punished according to mistaken presumptions of their capacities for rational reflection and self-control. What these deficient individuals required instead was a form of protection. In Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear, the target of this protective form of punishment is recentred in the vulnerable and dangerous woman. But the text also assigns the responsibility for supervising potential sources of political and racial insecurity to the morally exemplary woman, the 'foster-mother' of an expanded domestic sphere. The contours of this sphere coincide with the territory of moral problems marked out by the discourses of the emergent social sciences, the terri-

Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear 109

tory of the 'social.' Strategically separated from the economic and the juridical, and thus from demands for substantive equality and positive rights, the social was constituted as a sphere of reciprocal moral duties (Procacci, 'Sociology'). On this plane, the poor and marginal could be governed by means of the contractual mechanisms of disciplinary individualism. These mechanisms are figured in Two Months in the Camp of Big Braras the transactions that define the writers' different exchanges with their audiences, exchanges that they frame in terms of debt repayment and insurance contribution. It can thus be said that the 'war dispatches' of Gowanlock and Delaney transpose the stakes of the 1885 struggle for Anglo-Protestant domination in the Northwest to a different front - to the struggle to control bodies and behaviours in rapidly urbanizing and industrializing eastern Canada. Their work of signification at this level, beyond the representation of rebellion and captivity, is already suggested in the contiguities of the notice for Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear in the Canada Presbyterian, contiguities that establish the text's relevance to a domain shared by discourses of moral reform, pedagogy, and hygiene. The northwest uprising was a crisis provoked by dominion government policies designed to reinforce Anglo-Protestant political dominance nationally, and to secure western Canada as a space for European settlement. In February 1885, a Metis-led provisional government appropriated the discourse of responsible government in order to proclaim the rights of a heterogeneous group of settlers in a region of what was to become Saskatchewan. As in Manitoba fifteen years earlier, however, representative government would not be permitted until the existence of an Anglo-Protestant demographic majority had first been orchestrated. As long as settlements were composed of populations uncommitted to the project of agricultural colonization, and drawing their sources of demographic growth from the West itself instead of from eastern Canada and Europe, the recognition of land titles was manipulated in such a way as to create favourable conditions for the delivery of land to more desirable settlers.2 Fifteen years earlier, when the largely Metis population of the Red River settlement had set up a provisional government demanding selfgoverning autonomy, the dominion government appeared to accede to this demand, while in fact ensuring (in the words of Prime Minister fohn A. Macdonald) that this 'impulsive' population would be 'kept down by a strong hand until ... swamped by [an] influx of settlers' from Ontario (qtd. Sprague 89). Instead of recognizing a historic, collective

110 Settler Feminism and Race Making

Metis title to this part of western Canada, the Manitoba Act equipped Metis heads of families with a tradable commodity - 'scrip' that was redeemable either in cash or portions of randomly selected public land (Boisvert and Turnbull 135). The strategy ensured the westward exodus of many Metis; those who remained were subjected to an exclusionary adjustment of the criterion of rightful ownership several years later, as 'peaceful ownership' of land was specified in terms of year-round agricultural occupancy (St-Onge 153). Thereafter, rightful Metis occupancy required an on-going demonstration of adherence to standards of 'civilization' defined by sedentary settlement. The Metis as a group were deprived of land by an invitation to enter into an individualizing transaction, and the way was thus cleared for the extension of European settlement. Through the inoculative device of contractual implication,3 resistant Metis were offered a probationary form of political inclusion that relieved the state of any responsibility for their impoverished condition. This was simply a redeployment of the strategy to reconstitute potential forces of resistance as protected wards, which had already been used to subjugate First Nations people in eastern Canada.4 In 1885, a Saskatchewan district 'settlers union' (composed of white and 'half-breed'5 settlers, as well as displaced Metis) was faced with ongoing encroachment by colonization companies. When this union called upon the political skills of Louis Riel, leader of the 1870 rebellion in Red River, the dominion government adopted the strategy of isolating Metis political agitators as a racial problem. The land claims of white and 'halfbreed' settlers were quickly expedited in order to ensure that the Metisled resistance would lose the support of these groups.6 The dominion government also feared that the Metis might draw on the support of discontented First Nations, because those Cree who had refused to sign treaties were on the verge of starvation at this point; so, too, were those on reserves, who had not received the farming assistance they had been promised, and were being provided with rations in quantities sufficient only to keep political discontent at a manageable level.7 While the Metis set up a provisional government, several Cree bands in the region began to press Indian agents for increased rations. At the Frog Lake settlement, members of Big Bear's band retaliated against abusive government officials by murdering all but one of the white men, including the mill owner and farm instructor whose wives, Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney, they took captive.8 At first, in order to justify the use of military force in the suppression of this insurrection, the dominion government along with the eastern press

Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear

111

promoted the uprising as a 'world class rebellion' in which more troops had been lost to native insurgents than in British battles in Egypt and the Sudan (Dyck 132). However, it soon became apparent that more was to be gained by reducing the rebellion to a series of isolated criminal acts for which there could be no appeal to Britain.9 Native insurgency might thereby be disassociated from the very possibility of any systemic injustice, and accounted for, instead, as a symptom of bad character. As Bonnie Honig points out, while character is in fact criminalized by punishment, in a liberal order it is necessary to justify institutions of punishment and their regulation of compliance on the basis of something antecedent. Criminality is therefore constructed as 'sociopathic' (in this case, racial) so that the 'ineliminable moment of arbitrariness' in its punishment can be erased (142, 141). The strategy of criminalization had, in fact, been prepared earlier, when Indian Department officials in the Canadian West were given a second appointment, as stipendiary magistrates instructed to consider the 'nature of the man and the harm that he might do,' rather than simply evidence of lawbreaking (Tobias, 'Canada's' 534, 542; emphasis added). This confusion of dissidence with pathology permitted the 1885 uprising to be harnessed to the theme of the defence of society. Just as the Hamilton Spectator argued on behalf of the execution of insurgents on the grounds that 'society must protect itself against such criminals,' the Northern Advance and the Ottawa Citizen demanded capital punishment in the name of the 'safety of society' and the 'safety of the nation,' respectively (qtd. Silver 44). The year 1885 witnessed not simply the resistance of First Nations and Metis to land alienation and assimilative tutelage, but also newly concentrated efforts to purify the social body. It was the year in which the different sects of the Methodist Church were unified, the Dominion Woman's Christian Temperance Union was established, and the transatlantic reverberations of a white slavery panic in England provoked concern about the moral ruin of girls unleashed from parental supervision in the new cities of the dominion, where they might be exposed to the exploitative schemes of lecherous employers and 'foreign' men.10 The discourse of white slavery figured an insidious and invisible foreign threat to the most civilized and unsuspecting of nations. It participated in the constitution of a '"foul enemy" within' and a white feminine subject with a governable relation to racial contamination (McLaren 63). A vociferous lobby against white slavery was sparked by the publication of a series of sensationalist articles in the Pall Mall Gazette recounting the horrors of a traffic in innocent girlhood between Brussels and London.11 W.T.

112 Settler Feminism and Race Making

Stead's expose resulted in a 'complete re-examination of the legal control of sexual activity and the protection of females' in Britain and the almost immediate passage of an Act to Make Further Provision for the Protection of Women and Girls, the Suppression of Brothels, and Other Purposes (Parker 204). Prior to the passage of this act, emigration to Canada had been proposed as a solution to the morally endangering conditions of overcrowding that were seen to prepare the fate of white slaves in British cities. But Canada was also a space in which the internal racial threat could appear in magnified form, given the presence of unprotected daughters and racially ambiguous populations. Just as Canada's growing cities began to erect internal colonial frontiers and to present in microcosmic form the difficulty of producing a homogeneous Anglo-Protestant nation, the discourse of white slavery framed the dangers of the dominion daughter's abduction by the 'shadowy sponsor of vice [who was] suspected of being under the control of foreigners' (McLaren 106, 88-9). In this context, the captivity narratives of Gowanlock and Delaney thematized the sexual and racial dangers accompanying the reconstitution of external frontiers as internal ones, as the dominion moved to incorporate the 'uncivilized' Northwest. While it is generally agreed that the roots of the Canadian social reform movement extend back to this late-nineteenth-century period, social historians have tended to focus on the period of the movement's crystallization in the early years of the twentieth century.12 The spectre of a 'foul enemy within' was, however, markedly present in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as eastern Canadian 'civilization' moved to incorporate the ungoverned West, with its fast-growing, heterogeneous, transient population. This incorporation required a more meticulous specification of 'normal' heterosexuality, including particularly stringent prohibitions on the prostitution of status Indian women (McLaren 54). The texts of Gowanlock and Delaney prefigure the conjugations of race and space in which racial anxieties would become focused on the passage of white women through porous points around and within the national perimeter - passenger ships, ports, train stations, and such pockets of foreignness as 'alien' places of work.13 When the discourse of white slavery was put into circulation in Canada in the 1880s, it would thus have found a referent in the 'shivering subject for conversation' of two settler women abducted by murderous natives (McClung 183).14 It is on this basis that I suggest we read in the captor's tent and the would-be Metis violator of Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear the characters and spaces prominent in emergent discourses of social and moral reform.

Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear 113

What is at stake in this way of reading the narratives of Gowanlock and Delaney is a sense of how the women's testimony carried an additional burden of proof and spoke to a question that was beside the point of punishing insurgent natives. Beyond attesting to the political innocence of a violated colonialism, the narratives of Gowanlock and Delaney address the problem of female self-government- the question of how to reconcile female freedom with racial security. They stage the problematic of the government of self through economic figures that stress the costs of freedom and the transactions involved in the legal constitution of selves. In Gowanlock's narrative, the 'saved' woman repays a debt to society by producing value through a confessional narrative of entrapment and liberation. Delaney proposes a different economic transaction as a figure for social organization, framing her narrative as a form of advance payment that entitles her to claim the protection of the state. Her recommendation of this form of prudent investment to all Canadian women links a white woman's captivity narrative to the emergent governmental rationality of insurance. 15 It was also an economic savoir that reorganized understandings of prostitution and rape in the mid-1880s, as the dangers of abduction, seduction, and rape that had previously been linked to questions of inheritable wealth were reconnected to the economy through the reproducing body as a source of human capital. The problematization of white slaver)' in the 1880s shifted the meaning of rape from damages to a father's property lo interference with the race's means of reproducing itself, a crime that was now against the race as a whole. The slavery or exploitation that was thematized by this discourse was defined from the biopolitical perspective of a concern with population as a source of strength in a competition with other races; it referred to the wastage or contamination of national girlhood as the source of future life. b 'Exploitation' thus entered the vocabulary of middle-class moral reformers only when it appeared that 'women in general might become victims to those forces which had already "enslaved" the less fortunate members of society,' with whom these reformers had been much less concerned (McLaren 105-6; emphasis added). The campaign against the contamination of feminine virtue was conducted in Canada in the 1880s and 1890s through resolutions and petitions presented to the House of Commons by church organizations and '"thousands of ladies praying" for swift passage of ... legislation to protect women' (Backhouse, 'Nineteenth-Centurv' 229). D.A. Watt, a disciple of W.T. Stead and a pam-

114 Settler Feminism and Race Making

phlet-writer for the General Assembly of the Canadian Presbyterian Church, stressed the peculiar 'conditions of girl life in Canada,' which made the indifference of unreformed rape and seduction laws to the plight of 'poor and friendless' women - 'those without expectations or property' - an urgent problem in the dominion (qtd. Parker 217). The 'poor and friendless' woman whom Watt had in mind was the single female immigrant, whose poverty impelled her to turn towards the colonies (and Canada especially between 1880 and 1910) for respectable work. Thus, while it was in part the earlier British act that provoked the passage of an Act to Punish Seduction, and Like Offences, and to Make Further Provision for the Protection of Women and Girls in Canada in 1886, the act turned out to be only the first of a string of statutes that, by the end of the decade, made Canadian laws concerning the protection of women and girls the most comprehensive in the empire. From the Tears of the Father to the Words of the Daughter

The legislative reforms that I describe in this section freed daughters of empire from the status of paternal property, and enabled them to speak, instead of being spoken for by their fathers. By means of this liberation, however, they were inscribed in another economy as they were now required to account for themselves. What was offered to women as an alternative to the status of paternal property was a captivity within the bounds of moral character. The condition for the legal recognition of their own accounts of assault was their equipment with the voice of vulnerable sexual purity, a voice that carried an authority grounded in what Riley calls the 'over-feminisation' of speech, its excessive gendering as normatively symptomatic of the qualities of a feminine interior (4). These feminine qualities were translations of the quantities of services and property that had previously formed the basis of seduction and rape laws. And this translation from quantity to quality, from services and property to character, was fuelled by the imperative to defend racial purity. In a context of rapid industrialization and immigration, and of increasing mobility of women outside of the space of paternal protection, the daughter's newly authorized speech participated in the criminalization of failures to measure up to a standard of sexual selfcontrol, as well as to the mapping of more rigorous distinctions between those who belonged within the fold of 'civilized' society and those who did not. This newly authorized speech also demarcated the type of woman who could enjoy the protection of the expanded laws. By the

Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear

115

end of this process of legislative reform, a woman's claim on the legal protection of the state was predicated upon her convincing self-representation as a 'previously chaste character,' in a stipulation unique to Canadian legislation. Rape law inherited by British North America from England bore the imprint of the aristocratic daughter's position as the medium for the exchange of property. The law had been designed in relation to the scenario of the abducted and defiled heiress, with a view to protecting the line of inheritance from interference by social inferiors. Reforms to Canadian rape law began with the relaxation of the proof of 'carnal knowledge' required to secure a conviction (first in New Brunswick in 1829, then in Nova Scotia in 1836, and finally in Upper Canada in 1841); these early reforms introduced a shift from the sense of interference with the father's property interest in his daughter's reproductive capacity to a sense of the violation of the woman herself.18 The woman 'herself was, however, merely a vehicle for the transmission of racial purity: she represented a femininity transcending class distinctions, and peculiarly vulnerable to contaminating displacements. Before it became the source of her emotionally authentic speech and the legal basis for her legitimate claim to the protections of 'civilized' society, as we saw in chapter 1, a woman's 'chaste character' was the currency in which her father's grief could be calculated. It was not the woman but her father who 'recovered' following a seduction: the daughter was not required to testify, for there was quite literally no question either of her own desire or her damaged sexual integrity.19 The father in a seduction suit retained the right to claim compensation even if his daughter had clearly consented to sexual relations with the defendant; however, legal commentators agreed that the quantity of the father's grief should be measured, 'to a very great extent,' by the value of the daughter's 'previous character' (qtd. Backhouse, 'Tort' 62). The debt incurred by the seducer was informally calculated according to the estimated value of what he had ruined. In this unstable and reversible chain of signification, the daughter's character was signified by the father's performance of affect, which in turn provided the referent for the monetary sum to be paid out by the seducer. If there was suspicion that this anchor might be a mere prop for the extraction of a 'surplus value' - that the father's tears might be a performance producing the profitable illusion of 'chaste character' in his daughter - the laws nevertheless placed the daughter's character at the origin of the signifying chain.

116 Settler Feminism and Race Making

Corresponding to this early-nineteenth-century implantation of 'parental feeling' under common law, was the later race-inflected feminization of the woman under criminal law in the 1880s. The latter shift was the effect of the substitution of a biopolitical economy for the one in which inheritable wealth was at stake, a shift that can be grasped only when the legislative history is read in terms of normalizing power. Backhouse's conclusion that 'the predominant thrust of late nineteenth-century rape law was paternalistic' - in the sense of confining and capturing women under the guise of protection - does not quite grasp the productive edge of this capture, for this paternalism was not necessarily at odds with the view that women were responsible for their own sexual purity ('Nineteenth-Century' 236). The reforms positioned women as 'violatable' in such a way as to conjoin a new authorization of their voices with sexual self-discipline. Women were taken seriously as subjects of testimony as soon as their character became the object of adjudication. From the 1860s to the 1890s, rape law reforms in Canada were thus impelled by an intensive search for failures to conform to a standard of proper sexual conduct, even for those failures that did not involve sexual contact. In recognition of what Watt called the peculiar 'conditions of girl life in Canada,' the Congregational Union of Quebec and Ontario called for the punishment of 'all attempts on chastity ... as well as the completed offence' (qtd. Parker 217; emphasis added). Such attempts were often envisioned in the spatial terms of a removal across conflated domestic-national borders. Thus in 1890, Watt drafted a bill to convict anyone who 'procures or attempts to procure any girl or woman to leave the Dominion, or to leave her domicile or place of abode whether such domicile or place be within the Dominion or elsewhere, with the intent that she may ... have unlawful carnal knowledge' (qtd. Parker 218). The use of fraudulent representations or intoxicating substances as means of disarming a woman's defences was seen to be comparable to her abduction across such borders. Reforms would thus include, as well as heightened penalties for the intent to commit rape (while these were being lowered in England), a peculiar prohibition on husband impersonation that is presaged in Gowanlock's captivity narrative. The 1886 Act for the Protection of Women and Girls brought seduction within the realm of criminal law in Canada by criminalizing carnal connection with 'previously chaste characters.'20 The predication of the crime on the moral nature of the victim effectively substituted the figure of the white slave — the infantilized, essentially vulnerable and passionless woman - for the raped woman. (Female employees and ship passen-

Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear

117

gers - who were seen to be particularly vulnerable to abduction across racial borders - would shortly be added to the types of women declared off-limits.) While Graham Parker suggests that the specification of 'previously chaste character' made Canadian law less stringent than English law, I want to suggest that what was less stringent from the perspective of the male defendant was more stringent from the perspective of the woman whom the 1886 act aimed to protect from non-marital sexual relations, whatever her desire. 'Previously chaste character' was loosely interpreted as 'those acts and that disposition of mind which constitute an unmarried woman's morals'; it did not preclude a previous sexual self-surrender, as long as the woman's behaviour in the interval had demonstrated 'reform and self-rehabilitation in chastity' (qtd. Parker 236-7). The Canadian act was thus more productive insofar as it made legal protection a benefit, the claiming of which was conditional upon an ability to satisfy moral criteria of entitlement. Questions of the woman's mental capacity and vulnerability to trickery and impersonation could now be raised, and the matter of her normality or abnormality with regard to the emerging norm of feminine passionlessness put on the table. The notion of previously chaste character transformed the rape trial into a transaction between a woman and the society that bestowed protection - into a means of subjectijication. The rape trial thus gravitated towards the 'tort of seduction' that had been revamped in 1837 to address a 'family wounding.' Between the wound to 'parental feeling' and the violation of a woman as the member of a racial 'family,' the distance was not so great, for the female complainant who could now speak of her violation had simply been permitted to internalize the norms of parental feeling. Judith Butler's definition of subjectification in terms of a transaction in which the subject trades her submission to the rules of the established order for the privilege of being constituted within sociality, by virtue of her submission, is helpful here. Following Louis Althusser, Butler suggests that the submission in subjectification takes the form of a conscientious performance of self-mastery - 'performance' in the double sense of an activation and reproduction of pre-existing codes, on the one hand, and of a dramatic spectacle, on the other. Performance in the second sense involves a self-acquittal in which one 'defends one [self] against an accusation; quite literally, it is the accused's declaration of innocence' (Psychic 118). After the criminalization of seduction in 1886,21 when the seduced daughter is empowered to speak as the complainant in a criminal trial, society effectively collects a narrative from a

118 Settler Feminism and Race Making 'chaste character' who has adopted the paternal function of surveillance as a self-regulation according to the norm of feminine passionlessness. In 1886, then, society replaces the father as the injured party that has lost on an investment. The element of transaction in the 1837 tort of seduction - the collection of a debt - remains in 1886, but the daughter now assumes the indebted position previously occupied by her seducer. Precisely as she is 'summoned forth to stand a witness' - as the concluding quatrains of Gowanlock's captivity narrative will put it (62) - the transaction becomes one between society and the woman herself. The new weightiness of the complainant's voice after 1886 is thus inseparable from her indebtedness to society for its protection. If, prior to these reforms, in the words of one defence counsel, 'no jury could feel justified in convicting on the bare assertions of those who, while telling their story, themselves admitted that they were of the loosest grade and character,' now the telling would function as a kind of self-acquittal (qtd. Backhouse, 'Nineteenth-Century' 223). The 1886 act thus narrowed the arena of 'normal' heterosexuality by empowering certain kinds of women to claim legal protection; it rendered women accountable within a framework of racial financing and bound them to the interests of 'society as a whole.' A price was put on the new mobility of daughters outside of domestic space, and society would recover its costs from daughters themselves. The last chapter of Gowanlock's narrative, 'At Home,' concludes with a comment on the burden of norm bearing. Her final sentence ends with a half-hearted enunciation of divine necessity, "the lines are hard to bear - "Thy will not mine be done."' But this half-heartedness gives way to the direct citation of words that are bitter to pronounce. Gowanlock appends an anonymous, three-stanza poem in which the speaker recalls complaining to God that being summoned to 'stand witness / For the cause of truth betrayed' was too heavy a cross to bear. God the 'Master's' unrelenting reply is simply an injunction to 'Be a Simon' and carry his cross 'Up the slopes of Calvary' (Two Months 62). Indebted Subjectivity and Extorted Speech: The Narrative of Theresa Gowanlock Gowanlock's four-paragraph introduction to her narrative begins with the following negative assertion: 'It is not the desire of the author of this work to publish the incidents which drenched a peaceful and prosperous settlement in blood, and subjected the survivors to untold suffering

Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear

119

and privations at the hands of savages, in order to gratify a morbid craving for notoriety' (Two Months 5 [my emphasis]). Such demuring was not unusual in the prefaces that nineteenth-century women wrote to their own literary productions. 'Self-diminution' in 'negative and passive phrasing' that denied the author's agency in the publication of her work was, as Carole Gerson has shown, a gendered rule in the 'discourses of introduction' of Victorian Canada (57-78). A favoured strategy of feminine prefatory apologetics was the recourse to 'courtroom language,' which casts the reader as 'judge, of whom the poet requests "forbearance" and to whom she "pleads," "defends," and "atones"' (61). But the denial of agency in the announcement of Indian atrocities was also a form of national demuring. The sentimental captivity narrative's production of an 'imperialist audience' cohering around the sensation of melancholy pleasure depended on a careful 'subtraction of agency from the historical stage' as well as from the scene of writing (Burnham 94) ,22 The captivity narrative's capacity to accomplish this rested in its focus on loss, which permitted audiences to imagine themselves as unaccountable for colonial violence. As Michelle Burnham has argued, the sentimental captivity narrative offered a mourning free of responsibility, and even invested with a certain pleasure, by staging grief as a means of cathecting aggressive impulses. In Gowanlock's use of 'courtroom language,' however, feminine and national demurings conflict rather than coincide. The particular discourse to which Gowanlock has recourse is that of the woman invited to testify in the seduction trial, a trial that made her an object of adjudication and demanded that she perform a normative lack of agency extending to a condition of infantilization. The performance required of Gowanlock was a labour of self-acquittal, a 'display or proof of guiltlessness in the face of the demand for confession implied by an insistent accusation' (Butler, Psychic 118). Activated in Gowanlock's introduction, the language of the seduction trial shifts the focus of the captivity narrative from the representation of 'savages' to the representation of Gowanlock herself, as the emblem of an indebted disposition, a subject owing her existence to the protections of 'civilized' society. Gowanlock's conformity with the apologetic convention of 'courtroom language' is not just perfectly, but excessively exact. Its over-precision leaves little room for the staging of grief necessary to the production of imperialist affect; instead, it inscribes the contrariness of Gowanlock's desire and comes close to representing the act of narration as a situation of extorted speech. If the 'notoriety' that will attend the publication of

120 Settler Feminism and Race Making

Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear is not what she wants, the contrary, unfulfilled desire - the one that, as she announces, '[djuring all my perils and wanderings amid the snow and ice of that trackless prairie ... nerved me to struggle on' (5) - is the desire for the comfort of forgetting. Gowanlock had hoped that 'if rescued, [she] might within the sacred precincts of the paternal hearth, seek seclusion, where loving hands would help me to bear the burden of my sorrow, and try to make me forget at times, if they could not completely efface from rny memory, the frightful scenes' (5). This desire cannot be fulfilled precisely because the rescue from captivity and re-admission into the protections of 'civilized' society has forced her to incur a debt repayable only through an account of 'untold suffering and privations at the hands of savages.' Gowanlock's prefatory comments thus move immediately from apology into accounting, in the double sense of narration and calculation: Prostrated by fatigue and exposure, distracted by the constant dread of outrage and death, I had well-nigh abandoned all hope of ever escaping from the Indians with my life, but, as the darkness of the night is just before the dawn, so my fears which had increased until I was in despair, God in his inscrutable way speedily calmed, for while I was brooding over and preparing for my impending fate, a sudden commotion attracted my attention and in less time than it takes to write it, I was free. From that moment I received every kindness and attention, and as I approached the confines of civilization, I became aware of how diligently I had been sought after, and that for weeks I had been the object of the tenderest solicitude, not only of my friends and relations, but of the whole continent. (5)

The approach to the 'confines of civilization' is associated with Gowanlock's dawning awareness of herself as an object in the discourse of others, and her passage into those protective confines coincides with her assumption of the ready-made position of an indebted subject who (contrary to her most urgent desires) 'owes' an account of captivity. She would thus seem to specify 'freedom' - the protected enclosure offered to her as the alternative to Indian captivity - as, more exactly, a form of transaction. Gowanlock's introduction subtly contests the conceptual opposition of freedom and captivity by introducing an alternative opposition, one between freedom conceived as a location within neutral, protected space - a gift of the order to which one belongs - and freedom conceived as a practice of transgression within a space lined with constraints. The flicker

Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear

121

of this different possibility almost goes unnoticed in the passage cited above: it takes place in the parenthesis between the 'fatigue and exposure' of captivity and the diligence of 'friends,' 'relations,' 'the whole continent/ in the slow-motion approach to the position that will require the acknowledgment of a debt and a self-accounting. This is the retrospective fantasy of a moment prior to subjectification, a fictitious inbetween moment that is 'recollected' from within the 'sacred precincts of the paternal hearth/ Gowanlock identifies freedom with the pause before her assumption of the burden of bearing the norms of 'chaste character,' and thus with what Honig calls an 'otherness within the self that resists the discipline of moral responsibility' (65). This brief glimmer has more subversive implications than the kind of simple reversal of the terms of captivity and freedom that would resituate freedom in the captive's experience of an open space of trackless wandering. The reading of ambivalent significations under the signs 'captivity' and 'freedom' has been a favoured move in reappropriative readings of white women's narratives of Indian captivity. Lalage Grauer, for example, notes that 'Gowanlock defines her captivity as "wanderings" on the "trackless prairie" while to be freed from captivity is to "seek seclusion" "within the sacred precincts of the paternal hearth."' This imagery, she argues, 'suggests that the proper lady is bound to tell her story from within constraints which were not imposed in the camp of Big Bear' (136).23 This sort of reading saves the woman's captivity narrative from complete ideological encapsulation or compliant legitimation of colonial authority. It makes legible the narrative's invitations to read 'captivity' as a kind of 'freedom,' as the more consequential confinement is relocated to the sphere of domesticity and proper womanhood to which the woman is returned once freed from her Indian captors. In her version of this move, Burnham emphasizes the suspension of fixed values in the captive's liminal position 'between owners, between cultures,' in a contact zone defined by relations of inequivalence (19). The liberating in-betweeness that Burnham identifies is firmly located in the space of Indian captivity. Gowanlock's narrative, however, does not provide the grounds for a Utopian relocation of freedom in the space of the other. Instead, it situates an alternative to negative freedom between captivity and protection. Even Burnham's argument about the suspension of fixed values in the transculturated space of Indian captivity does not go so far as to question the function of the captivity/freedom opposition itself in controlling what Thomas Dumm calls the 'conditions of expression of freedom' in a liberal society (4). The representation of freedom

122 Settler Feminism and Race Making

as a space rather than a practice not only essentializes freedom (so that the historical and political contingency of its expression in the form of the 'paternal hearth' or racially 'pure' domestic heterosexuality goes unnoticed), it also shelters from view its disciplinary character. Gowanlock returns a sense of this disciplinary character to negative freedom when she fills 'freedom' in as the transaction in which the rules establishing the condition of inviolability are administered and the right to claim protection is predicated upon a successful achievement of 'normal' femininity.24 From this perspective, Gowanlock's narrative can teach us how 'previously chaste character' could signify an embodiment of accountability, an ability to repay and promise, a subjection through the conscientious self-acquittal of testimony against a violator. Gowanlock's demarcation of a position in between, a space through which one passes after captivity and before rescue, begs the question of what, precisely, holds violation and protection apart. The distinction that the captivity narrative is supposed to reconfirm is rendered suspect, especially as protection begins to look like a coercive transaction. Gowanlock's introduction refuses to identify freedom with truth speaking. It explicitly contrasts the instant of freedom with the current arduousness of writing a narrative. Gowanlock marks the onerousness of the task of narration by observing that in the moment of rescue from her captors, she was free 'in less time than it takes to write it. 'This declaration so outdistances the requirement for self-diminution in a female author that Gowanlock's recourse to the language of indebtedness and repayment begins to look like a protest against the pound of flesh required as the price of her readmittance to society. [I]t is my bounden duty to give to the public a truthful and accurate description of my capture, detention, and misfortunes while captive in the camp of Big Bear. The task may be an irksome one and I might with justice shrink from anything which would recall the past. Still it is a debt of gratitude I owe to the people of this broad dominion ... And I gladly embrace this opportunity of showing to the public and especially the ladies, my appreciation of their kindness and sympathy in my bereavement, and their noble and disinterested efforts for my release. In undertaking a task which has no pleasures for me, and has been accomplished under the most trying difficulties and with the greatest physical suffering, I have embodied in the narrative a few of the manners and customs of Indians, the leading features of the country, only sufficient to render it clear and intelligible. I make no apology for issuing this volume to the public as their unabated interest

Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear

123

make it manifest that they desire it, and I am only repaying a debt of gratitude by giving a truthful narrative to correct false impressions, for their kindness and sympathy to me. (6)

There is a disjunction between the boldest of the claims and its effects, and not simply because Gowanlock's assertion that she 'make[s] no apology' comes in the midst of an apologetic preface. When the task of narration is assumed 'under the most trying difficulties and with the greatest physical suffering,' making no apologies for it becomes an almost excessive assumption of the task's demands. The excessiveness of Gowanlock's accession to these demands enables her to display their costs. In short, she embraces the required lack of agency so wholeheartedly that this lack begins to involute into its opposite - into critical agency. She assumes the stance of gratitude so emphatically that the figure of indebtedness is swamped by its vehicle, and debt assumes the cold materiality of book balancing, a payback with interest. What are we to make of Gowanlock's minimization of the distinction between the 'suffering and privations' of captivity and the 'greatest physical suffering' within the space of protection - exacted by the 'unabated interest' of the public? There is a manifest tension between the 'disinterested' efforts of the women of Canada - which would situate this exchange in the purity of sisterly affect- and the 'unabated interest' of a public, requiring payment in the form of truth. At stake in the tension between disinterest and unabated interest, between Gowanlock's simultaneously exact and disturbingly extravagant compliance with 'courtroom language,' is the very nature of the justice figured by her text. The transaction between women (which the title page of Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear represents in a dedication 'to Our Sisters the Ladies of Canada') figures a horizontal relation between a grieving wife and her national sisters, within which the text is issued as a heartfelt expression of gratitude for sympathy in bereavement. But if the grieving wife is the more common topos of the sentimental captivity narrative, the figure that governs representation more forcefully here is that of the violated daughter, who is not so much a mourning heroine as a marginal subject requiring a normalizing reincorporadon within 'civilized' society. It is this transaction with the wider entity (of unspecified gender) that positions Gowanlock's audience as an investor reaping returns. In this transaction, the 'interested' public extracts surplus value through a claim of financial 'loss' that is thinly dressed up in the qualitative terms of feeling. The foregrounding of debt instead of loss thus brings into relief the rela-

124 Settler Feminism and Race Making

tionship between Gowanlock and her audience, instead of the relationship between this audience and insurgent natives. And Gowanlock suggests that normalization is a cruel form of justice, as she draws our attention to the 'most trying difficulties and ... the greatest physical suffering' required to convert her desire to forget into a will to remember for the sake of her readers. When indebtedness is emphasized at the expense of loss, the martyrs of rebellion, rather than being the white men lost in the battle, begin to appear to be the narrating women, in their present condition. Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear attempts to compensate for this weak promotion of imperialist affect by supplying supportive bookends for the narratives of Gowanlock and Delaney. These sections, appended at the conclusion of each of the narratives, insist that loss is the centre of meaning. They consist of brief, unsigned biographical sketches of the 'Frog Lake Martyrs,' which underline the selflessness of the white men's labours and their honourable characters ('[a]n oath was never uttered by (John Gowanlock], nor did he know the taste of drink, a temperance man in the full meaning of the term' [68] ).25 These were men 'who had left comfortable homes in the east in order to carry civilization into the remote places of the west'; their work had been "calculated to elevate the Indian and make him a better man' (65). But this appending of male self-sacrifice to the women's narratives succeeds neither in enlisting Gowanlock and Delaney as the vehicles of their husbands' martyrdom nor in interpreting their narratives as texts of grieving. The discrepancy between the reference to 'fiendish' murders in the 'Frog Lake Martyrs' section and and the thinness of the two women's claims to having been violated by their captors makes the joining of colonial selfsacrifice to female victimization here very tendentious (65). Loss is only feebly invoked against the violence of the transaction in the present moment. Gowanlock suggests that she has had to produce the will to remember necessary to a sense of indebtedness through a toilsome regime of selfdiscipline. Nietzsche reminds us that such self-mastery is the result of an internalization of the terror that at one time attended entry into a contractual relationship. When the commission of a crime occasioned not the punishment of a responsible individual but rather a transaction between a creditor and a debtor, in which some compensation for injury was extracted, the pain of the debtor was considered an acceptable equivalent for the loss to 'money, land, possessions of any kind' that the other had sustained (64). In order to 'impress repayment as a duty ...

Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear

125

the debtor made a contract with the creditor and pledged that if he should fail to repay he would substitute something else that he "possessed," ... for example, his body' (64). The preventative internalization of the cruelty that an injured creditor might inflict created the capacity to remember and thus to promise one's future accountability. The logic governing the equivalence of the creditor's injury and the debtor's pain was the pleasure to be had in the infliction of pain, 'the voluptuous pleasure "de faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire"' (65). The possibility that emerges through this detour into the Nietzschean excavation of the exchange embedded in punishment and the cruelty involved in the production of memory is that Gowanlock's introduction confronts its readers with the fact that the pleasure they demand so insistently is not just that of reading of her 'prostrat[ion] by fatigue and exposure, [and] distract [ion] by the constant dread of outrage and death.' The pleasure Gowanlock's readers demand is also that of subjecting her to the pain of remembering in the instance of discourse. 'To see others suffer does one good,' Nietzsche observes; 'to make others suffer even more' (67). Cross-Cultural Debt and Contamination Loss 'can only be mourned or revenged.' 'Debt, on the other hand, can only be repaid or forgiven and inspires the responses of anxiety and accountability' (Burnham 112-13). Burnham's observation speaks to the troubling ambiguity of debt in Gowanlock's text. Her rescue from captivity has forced her to incur a debt to 'civilized' society. But the uncertainty of what, exactly, it was that she was rescued from gives a potentially disturbing cross-culturalism to this relation of indebtedness. At the end of her introduction, Gowanlock expresses her 'sincere and heartfelt thanks to the 'half-breeds' who befriended her during her captivity' (6), in an acknowledgment that this captivity was a condition of protection. As Carter has explained, while Gowanlock and Delaney were with Big Bear's band, they were held under the protection of John Pritchard, the 'half-breed' interpreter of the Frog Lake Indian agent.26 When they were first interviewed after their rescue, the women credited their 'half-breed' protectors with their safety in the space of captivity and explained that Pritchard, Adolphus Nolin, and Pierre Blondin had traded horses with the Cree in order to purchase Gowanlock and Delaney into protective custody (Carter 61, 66, 84). Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear, however, demonstrates that mixed-race protection was unrepresentable in 1885. When it comes to writing her captivity narra-

126 Settler Feminism and Race Making

tive, Gowanlock figures Blondin and another Metis, Gregory Donaire, as carriers of the 'virus' of rebellion and suggests that her sale into mixedrace protection was an attempt at sexual procurement and an act of virtual enslavement. The chapter preceding her account of the murders at Frog Lake on 2 April establishes a moral differentiation between Wood and Plains Cree, thereby preparing the reader to understand the uprising as the expression of the 'worst characters,' whose 'tastes lie in a direction the opposite to domestic' (20). The violence of those Cree who had refused the 'positive' influence of reserve containment and farm instruction affirms the Tightness of a 'civilizing' strategy. Following the account of the events at Frog Lake, Gowanlock's narrative turns to strenuous differentiations between the favourable 'restrictions of civilized life' and the 'unclean' habits forming the 'free life of the red man' (20), and between 'Indians' classified as good and bad characters with reference to a norm of domestication. The truth of Indian character can be grasped neither from 'the deck of a steamer as it glide [s] along the large rivers and lakes of the Indian country, [n]or ... within the pages of a blood and thunder novel,' she argues, calling for closer diagnoses of such 'bad and vicious men' as Wandering Spirit, and an amalgamated, interdenominational effort at Indian evangelization (48, 43). She negotiates the difficulty of representing an experience of protection in terms of captivity by delineating the revulsions and hardships of 'bad domesticity' within a 'half-breed' tent.27 It is not the Pritchards' delicate maintenance of a neutral, intermediate space between cultures that is important, but rather the unhygienic habits and environment to which their protection exposes her. In a chapter entitled, 'Cooking for a Large Family,' she announces: 'My experience of camp life was of such a character, that I would rather be a maid-of-all-work in any position than slush in an Indian tepee, reeking as it is, with filth and poisonous odors. There is no such thing as a health officer among that band of braves ... As in every other part of their life, so in the domestic they were unclean' (35). The passage continues with the description of an occasion on which, despite Mrs Pritchard's scolding, Gowanlock refuses to partake of the remainders of a meal consumed by Big Bear's family, after she has washed the dishes they have left behind. 'I went without my supper that night'; she declares, 'I would rather starve than eat after that dirty horde'; likewise, she represents herself as foregoing Mrs Pritchard's cooking, when an anticipated 'good meal' turns out to be a 'rabbit in the pot boiling, ... all there, head, eyes, feet, and everything together'

Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear

127

(35). But starve she will not, for the rules of 'civilized' behaviour that she improvises in the space of 'half-breed' protection include the rule that she must eat 'only to keep myself alive and well, for if I showed signs of sickness, I would have been put with the Indians, and they would have put an end to me in a short time' (35). Whether through its refusal or its consumption, food carries the weight of the imperative of preserving racial boundaries in this intermediate space.28 Prior to the experience of captivity that Gowanlock's position of indebtedness requires her to construct as an experience of violation, the boundaries distinguishing the 'civilized' from the 'uncivilized' in her narrative are relatively flexible. She describes the 'half-breed's house' in which she and John Gowanlock spend a night on their way to their new home at Frog Lake as a scene of orderly and hygienic domesticity: 'everything appeared nice and tidy within; a woman was making bannock ... then she spread a white cloth over the table and we all enjoyed our supper together after the long ride. The squaw gave us a nice clean bed to sleep in' (14). Her representation of an early encounter with the Cree focuses upon the self-estrangement that comes from identifying with a gaze in which she is an object worthy of ridicule. 'The Indians came and shook hands, and laughed, and the squaws thought my costume was rather odd and not in keeping with that of the fashionable north-western belle. The squaws cut off about three yards of print and make the skirt; while others take flour sacks and cut holes through for the waist and have legging and moccasins; they would disdain to wear such an article as hose' (11). '[TJo look at these "shrimpy-looking" women trotting along with their brown babies slung in a sort of loose pocket dangling away behind their backs,' she observes, in a remark which slides immediately into imagining the reverse-gaze, 'it was comical in the extreme, they would stop and look and laugh at us, our appearance being so very different to their own dark skin and sharp eyes' (18). The women's laughter is attributed to the reciprocal gaze fastened upon the spectacle of European femininity in these moments which seem to open at least the possibility of a vantage point from which the codes of Gowanlock's own culture might be grasped in their arbitrariness. This perspective turns out to have been predicated upon a comfortable distance, however, for when Gowanlock is later forced to assume the uncertain status of a white woman earning her keep in a 'half-breed' tent, the laughing exchange falters on the ideological necessity of producing a surplus signification out of her assignment to Cree women's labour. Mrs Pritchard now assumes the shape of an unsympathetic task-

128 Settler Feminism and Race Making

master who turns protection into exploitation by delegating her woodcutting, water-carrying, and sewing responsibilities to the white women in her husband's custody (36). In order to affirm the desirability of norms of white femininity, Gowanlock discovers the cause of her 'exploitation' in the rancorous envy of these other women, who walk and carry bundles during camp displacements as she and Theresa Delaney ride beside them. 'We rode on a lumber wagon, with an ox team, and some of the squaws thought we did not work enough. Not work enough, after walking or working all day, after dark we were required to bake bannock and do anything else they had a mind to give us. They wanted to work us to death' (36). The 'they' hovers between the Cree captors in general and the Cree women in particular, but it is the explanation of the white women's labour as the effect of Cree women's resentment that invests this labour with the additional weight of racial degradation. The possibility that the norm of feminine delicacy might be unsettled in the representation of a white woman's adjustment to the requirements of mobile camp life is pre-empted by this ascription of envy. Gowanlock's rigged anthropology plants what it discovers, ensuring the stability of the norm through Cree women's want of it. Racial identity is at stake in bannock making and wood gathering, which are not simply tasks to be performed but fundamental degradations, violations of the boundaries of proper domestic labour. The alternatives established in the first sentence of 'Cooking for a Large Family' - assuming the duties of a 'maid-of-all-work' or 'slushing in an Indian tepee' - register the distinction between a mere subjection to taxing labour and the far more consequential submersion in 'filth, and poisonous odours' that organizes Gowanlock's proto-critique of white female exploitation, a critique conducted within the terms of racial endangerment. The surplus signification of Gowanlock's overwork is predicated upon the impurity of the domestic context that it serves: it is not the overwork itself that is objectionable but rather that it contaminates the worker. The racial context tips wood gathering and water carrying towards enslavement, and permits the invocation of forced labour to call up a history of crossings of the figures of slave and woman in which the racial problematics of slavery are made to speak of sexual oppression, the degradation and exploitation of the female body specifically. Enslavement thus functions as a substitute for the sexual violation to which, contrary to reports of their having suffered 'the nameless horrors of Indian indignity and savage lust,' Gowanlock and Delaney do not appear to have been subjected (qtd. Carter 87). The trope of enslave-

Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear 129

men t was able to speak of sexual violation because the problem of female slavery had been constituted in white feminist and abolitionist discourses (from a point as early as Harriet Martineau's reference to the 'white slaves of the north' in Society in America) as a specifically sexual form of subjection. The 'reciprocal and appropriative strategies' at work in nineteenth-century feminists' use of slavery as a trope for sexual oppression focused on the slave woman's 'inability to keep her body and its uses under her own control' (Sanchez-Eppler 97). Thus, a Kingston minister campaigning against attempts to acknowledge the assistance Gowanlock and Delaney had received from the Metis found it expedient to argue that after the two women had foiled their captors' 'base plans' through 'resolute conduct,' they were made into 'literal slaves' (Rev. Hooper qtd. Carter 88). Catachresis and a Coat: 'Husband Impersonation' in the Space of Treacherous Protection

If the emphasis on her degradation at the hands of the Pritchard family helps Gowanlock to edge mixed-race protection towards enslavement, her representation of the ambiguous, reversible protection offered by another mixed-race man, to whom she 'had a great aversion' and at whom she was 'afraid to look,' more clearly frames a sexual danger with consequences for racial purity (50). Gowanlock's narrative figures the double, sexual and political, threats of 'illegal combination' in the Northwest - the threats of miscegenation and autonomous Metis government 29 - by means of references to this man's offer of a covering, In Gowanlock's representation, this act condenses the literal and figurative senses of covering as protective material, on the one hand, and 'coverture' (the nineteenth-century common law that incorporated a wife's legal existence into that of her husband) on the other.30 Pierre Blondin is first introduced in Gowanlock's narrative as one of two shady characters who arrive on the scene from Duck Lake shortly before a confrontation there between the Metis and North-West Mounted Police/1 These two men move 'continually ... to and fro among the Indians' in the weeks prior to the uprising at Frog Lake, while employed at the mill owned by Gowanlock's husband (19). In the midst of the attack on Frog Lake, Blondin purchases Gowanlock from members of Big Bear's band for the price of '$30 and a horse' (60), an exchange that Gowanlock represents as an attempt to capture her within a substitute marriage. 'Oh! God I saw it all. He had everything arranged

130 Settler Feminism and Race Making

for me to live with him. All my husband's things; all my things; and a tent. But I refused to accept him or his conditions. I resented the infamous proposals as strongly as I was able, and appealed to John Pritchard for protection' (60). It is Blondin's protection and not Pritchard's that raises the spectre of a seeming domesticity that uncannily repeats the setup lost when Gowanlock's home was burned to the ground. In the system of racial boundaries that she has improvised within the ambiguous space of captivity, protection by an English 'half-breed' is all that will save her from the 'life worse than death' proposed by the Metis Blondin (61). He put up a tent and asked me to go with him, but I refused; and he became angry and did everything he could to injure me. That man treated me most shamefully; if it had not been for Pritchard I do not know what would have become of me ... After I had been a prisoner three days, Blondin came and asked me if I could ride horse back, and I said 'yes,' and he said if I would go with him, he would go and take two of the best horses that Big Bear had and desert that night. I told him I would never leave Pritchard until we all left, saying 'I would go and drown myself in the river before I would go with him.' (28)

The difference between the 'half-breed' and the Metis man rests on the distinction between assimilable and unassimilable difference. Not only is Blondin's relation to the Cree (as captive or collaborator) uncertain, but within Gowanlock's representational system he is himself the result of precisely the kind of dispersal of racial property that she attempts to stem by frantically gathering broken and orphaned possessions 'scattered around in the dirt' (36). Blondin's availability as a figure for the joining of protection and violation stems from his racial status. He figures the combination of First Nations and French-Canadian 'blood' that at this moment represented a threat from within the boundaries of the nation - what the Orange Order lobby in Ontario was busily constructing as the impending danger of a 'complete reconquest of Canada, the establishment of a firm and lasting basis of French ascendancy throughout the Dominion,' starting in the Northwest (The News [Toronto], 27 Mayl885, qtd. Silver 41). The 'panoramic view of the whole' that concludes Gowanlock's narrative suggests that she was 'transferred' to the Metis man who 'had everything arranged for me to live with him.' While she insists that Blondin was able to 'mete out' his 'shameful treatment' only in Pritchard's absence, in detailing this treatment Gowanlock situates herself inside

Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear

131

Blondin's tent. The representation of her violation in this space turns on her witnessing a blasphemous struggle over her dead husband's clothing, a struggle in which the abuse of possessive pronouns proves to be so disturbing as to provoke a wish for death. In the verbal outrage of catachresis - the rhetorical violence of words wrenched away from their proper usage - Gowanlock seems to hear a dangerous mimicry of European coverture.32 Two men came in one time while Blondin was asleep and took one of my husband's coats out of his sack and went out; Blondin upon missing it got very angry and swore before me, saying that some person had come in and taken one of his coats, and all the time I knew whose coat it was they were quarrelling over. 1 wished then I could close my eyes and go home to God. I went outside the tent and saw this other half-breed named Gregory Donaire with my husband's coat on and pants, and just as I looked up I thought it must be my own husband, and to see the fellow laugh in my face, he evidently had an idea about what I was thinking. (33)

What was she thinking? It is not just that John Gowanlock's coat has become a disturbing metonym, a substitute for his corpse, which had also been 'dragged back and forth by th[e] demoniac savages' (30). The relay from the squabble over 'property' inside of the tent to the misrecognition of a 'husband' registers Gowanlock's own uncertain status as an appurtenance in an eerily familiar set-up. This arrangement puts into question not who, but rather whose Gowanlock is. Blondin's tent is a space in which property relations iu marriage are disturbingly cited, for Gowanlock would seem to come with 'all [her] husband's things.' Because Gowanlock herself is a repossessed commodity, her private preservation of the proper - silently and resolutely knowing all the while whose coat they were quarrelling over - must also be read as a self-defence. But the fetishization of her dead husband's property proves to be an insufficient defence against the confusion of identities produced by the impersonation of her husband. Gowanlock's representation of this instant of confusion anticipates by just four years the inclusion, in the legal codification of new sexual offences against women, of a purported feminine vulnerability to fraudulent representations. One of these offences, instituted in 1890 as an amendment to existing criminal law, was the rape of a married woman achieved through the cunning and trickery involved in successfully 'personating her husband.' 33 The amendment refined an aspect of the 1886

132 Settler Feminism and Race Making

Act for the Protection of Women and Girls, which had prohibited 'carnal knowledge of any female idiot or imbecile woman or girl, under circumstances which do not amount to rape, but which prove that the offender knew at the time of the offence that the woman or girl was an idiot or imbecile' (49 Viet. c. 52 s. 2). In 1890, as Backhouse suggests, legislators 'wished to broaden the coverage of the rape laws to provide protection to women who did not put up resistance either through mental incapacity or [what was the same thing, subtly generalized] because of trickery on the part of the rapist' ('Nineteenth-Century' 218). The 1890 amendment would eventually become part of the definition of rape in the Criminal Code as 'the act of a man having carnal knowledge of a woman who is not his wife without her consent, or with consent which has been extorted by threats or fear of bodily harm, or obtained by personating the woman's husband, or by false and fraudulent representations as to the nature and quality of the act' (55-56 Viet. c. 29 s. 266; emphasis added). Husband impersonation was the means of figuring a misapplication of duty in the place of a transgressive desire. According to the 1890 law, there was no question of a woman's consenting: the married victim of rape through husband impersonation had simply mistaken the rapist for her husband and performed her 'marital duty' in a context misunderstood as felicitous.34 Where Gowanlock's testimony most clearly fulfils the task of repaying her debt to society is in its rendering of the details of her violation in the husband impersonations of Metis men. The law against 'personation' is prefigured in her representation of an 'outrage' that leaves her pure by involving, on her part, the strictly correct (near) mistake of misrecognition. But the wayward desire that she does not quite not own in this passage (it is Donaire who 'evidently' has the 'idea about what [she is] thinking') will be more carefully ruled out by the 1890 law, which allows for nothing but chaste mistakes. While Gowanlock's narrative conceives of the danger of husband impersonation, it also closes the loophole that the law leaves open, as it overextends itself in its anxious administration of the norm of feminine passionlessness. Gowanlock ultimately insists that she is capable of deciphering fraudulent representations ('all the time I knew'), but this was a capacity that the 1890 law would not allow, since it would have been tantamount to recognizing the possibility of an autonomous female sexual desire. All of this prepares the way for Gowanlock's representation of the offer of a coat as an 'infamous proposa[l]' that carries the weight of insinuated substitulability - the substitutability of Metis protector for

Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear

133

murdered husband, and of Gowanlock herself for an appropriated coat. The insult in Blondin's offer of'his' overcoat in the passage that follows is carried by the possessive pronoun. The pronoun disrespects not just a dead man's property, but the rule of the proper that gives substance to racial classifications generally. Wearing, offering, and speaking about the coat here acquires the additional determination of race impersonation, a danger that Blondin already figures as a pseudo-captive who moved 'to and fro among the Indians' before the massacre. What Gowanlock would seem to refuse in her emphatic reply to this offer, then, is Blondin's lack of differentiation between her husband and himself. Contrary to the suggestion of female imbecility in rape law, Gowanlock's 'no' asserts that she is able to decipher the difference. That is the implication of her refusal insofar as the coat is the vehicle of an 'infamous proposal.' Insofar as it is still her husband's coat, her refusal has other, contradictory implications. Blondin wore my husband's overcoat, and all I had was my little shawl and nothing to wear on my head, and the rain pouring down in torrents on me; this fellow would walk beside the waggon [sic] and laugh, and when it quit raining asked rne if I wanted his overcoat; I told him no, I did not mind being wet as much as he did. That night Mrs. Delaney and I lay down in one corner of the tent until morning came and then we had all the baking to do. We dug a hole in the ground and started a fire, taking flour, we stirred in water, kneading it hard. We then with our hands flattened it out and placed it in a frying pan, baking it before the fire, and by the time it was baked it was as black as the pan itself. We dined on bannock and bacon for two months, and were very thankful to get it. (33—4; emphasis in original)

Why does the representation of an attempted violation turn into a recipe for bannock? Gowanlock's fetishization of property claims is an attempt to resist the appropriation and dispersal of the white possessions that she sees all around her — in a Cree man's sporting of a captive's glass eye, in her own lace handiwork on the Pritchard children's aprons, and in the children's redeployment of'keepsakes that my mother had given to me when a little girl, [as toys which] I had to look and see ... broken in pieces' (a redeployment in which Gowanlock reads the possibility of her own reuse) (37, 36). At a certain point, however, Gowanlock's resistant agency is overexerted. The toughness that she performs in her repudiation of Blondin's chivalry is internalized, and her stern maintenance of racial boundaries becomes indistinguishable from her

134 Settler Feminism and Race Making

own metamorphosis into a 'squaw.' The affirmation of her capacity to spot an impersonation and thus to defend herself spills over into what is an almost defiant, performative assumption of the identity of a First Nations woman. The anaphoric repetition in the description of bannock making stresses the position of the two white women as the collective subject of a First Nations woman's actions. The slide from the repudiation of a fake husband to the action of bannock making seems to point to precisely the danger that the antipersonation law rules out, as it insists on a normal feminine imbecility with regard to fakes. The law forecloses on the very possibility of consent to extra-domestic sexual relations, even at the risk of opening a loop hole through which the incapacity to recognize an impersonation might serve as an alibi for sexual transgression. It does so in order to frame a new sexual offence without having to concede the possibility of a female desire independent of 'marital duty.' The disciplining of the victim of husband impersonation, who has simply misapplied her sense of duty, is thus achieved by means of normalization, while outright punishment is reserved for the man in whose hands the agency of both desire and (mis) representation is carefully placed. The surplus of agency contained in Gowanlock's emphatic no (and the emasculating reverse chivalry in her suggestion that Blondin keep the coat for his own shivering self) is, finally, irreconcilable with a normal female imbecility. Gowanlock's credibility as a 'chaste character' is, however, contingent upon her helpless inability to decipher a misrepresentation and, by extension, her inability to consent. Perhaps this becomes evident to Gowanlock herself, for she begins the next chapter by pulling back from the brink of a total metamorphosis into a First Nations woman, with the counter-protestation that she 'would rather be a maid-of-all-work in any position than slush in an Indian tepee' (35). It is not necessary to read a Utopian freedom in Gowanlock's representation of her captivity in order to credit her with a subtle critique of the constraints faced by the freed 'proper lady.' The space of captivity works to anticipate the doubtful freedom that will be on offer within the father's house. In this sense, Gowanlock's narrative stages its critique by way of resemblance rather than opposition. Just as her introduction suggests some continuity between the 'suffering and privations' endured during the months of captivity and the 'greatest physical suffering' involved in producing the narrative, the representation of treacherous Metis protection raises questions about the freedom of indebtedness and begs the question of how protection is to be differentiated from vio-

Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear

135

lation if a woman is incapable of consent and unable to decipher the difference between her husband and a rapist. The 1890 rape law's construction of women as gullible imbeciles incapable of deciphering fraudulent representations might be seen as a retrenchment following the granting of at least a theoretical right of property ownership to married women in Ontario in 1884- a redoubled normalization compensating for a loosening of restrictive juridical power. What the rape law argued for was a 'normal' femininity whose freedom was secured through a paternalistic protection that deprived women of civil capacities. This condition, reconciling protection and violation, was shared by white women and First Nations people, for both of whom legal protection was predicated upon a conferral of disabilities that deprived them of opportunities for political agency. First Nations people were constituted as wards of government, and then deprived of the franchise, on the grounds, precisely, that this dependency made them especially vulnerable to the manipulations of power.35 In the midst of the uprising in the Northwest, when an Electoral Franchise Bill that proposed the establishment of uniform qualifications for the federal franchise and its extension to widows, unmarried women, and unenfranchised 'Indians' was presented to Parliament (by a Conservative government attempting to absolve itself of responsibility for discontent in the Northwest), the vigorous objections mounted in response included arguments that: to give the franchise to women would interfere with their proper position, ... it would be a burden instead of a benefit to them. This, I believe, to be exactly the case as regards the Indians ... The Indian is in an exceptional position, and while he remains in that position, a ward of the Government, it will be doing him an injury rather than a benefit to give him a power which neither by training, education nor instinct he is able to appreciate and to wisely exercise. (Fairbanks, House of Commons Debate, 2 May 1885, 1532) [W]hy the hon. gentleman should be anxious to confer the electoral franchise upon a portion of the community who are not taxed, who are not subject to any burdens in the conduct of the Government of the country, who are not permitted to buy or to sell or to make contract on their own behalf, who are dealt with by the Government precisely as children are dealt with, ... a great many people will not be able to understand. (Mills, ibid.,30 April 1885, 1485)

136 Settler Feminism and Race Making These arguments could represent the granting of the franchise to women and First Nations people as an abuse of power only because these groups had already been equipped with special vulnerabilities. Women and 'Indians' were incapable of responsibly exercising a right to vote because they had been incapacitated in discourse and through government policy. Nevertheless, while Gowanlock and Delaney were with Big Bear's band, eastern Canadian newspapers appeared almost ready to grant the vote to white women, so outraged were they at the prospect that murderous 'Indians' might be given the franchise before some of Canada's 'intelligent' women (Carter 80). At the end of May, however, the legislature passed a carefully amended Dominion Franchise Act that excluded women, 'Indians' west of Ontario, and 'person [s] of Mongolian or Chinese race' (Statutes of Canada 1885, c. 40 s. 2). In light of this important adjustment of the original proposal and its reconfirmation of the special disabilities of 'uncivilized' races and women of any status, it is important to note that the strategy of the first narrative in Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear is not to replay the pitting of 'intelligent' white women against First Nations people. Instead, Gowanlock's narrative highlights the treachery of the protection coercively offered to both. A link between sexual and political consent is inscribed in Gowanlock's protest that, in spite of her momentary failure to recognize a fraudulent representation (and contrary to the norm of feminine imbecility) , she is capable of deciphering a husband impersonator or illegitimate 'cover' for her being under the law, to use the language of the law of coverture. As Uday Mehta reminds us, subjects who fit into the category of protected wards on the basis of their purported inability to consent to being 'covered' are excluded from the liberal order of 'free' individuals by the earliest liberal political philosophers. John Locke's Second Treatise on government argues that 'lunaticks,' 'ideots,' and children must be excluded from consensual politics because their incapacity to know the laws of nature and thus to reason prevents them from expressing the consent upon which the legitimacy of political authority is grounded (Mehta 436). But even more to the point, the chapter of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan entitled 'Of Persons, Authors, and Things Personated' insists on a relation between the capacity to 'author' actions and the capacity to be 'personated" or represented by an 'actor.' Hobbes draws 'person' from the Latin persona, 'the same that an actor is, both on the stage and in common conversation; and to personate, is to act, or represent himself, or another; and he that acteth another, is said to bear

Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear

137

his person, or act in his name' (125). '[Cjhildren, fools, and madmen that have no use of reason, may be personated by guardians, or curators; but can be no authors,' in much the same way that inanimate objects 'cannot be authors, nor therefore give authority to their actors: yet the actors may have authority to procure their maintenance' (127, 126). It is not that children and fools (and women and 'Indians') cannot be represented, therefore, but rather that they are ill-equipped to author or evaluate such representations. They are not 'persons' in what is, interestingly for Hobbes, the defining, performative sense of the individual capable of carrying a form of surrogate agency - capable of personating or acting ('to personate, is to act, or represent himself, or another').36 If it is conceivable that a woman might mistake a rapist for her husband - that she might mistake an illegitimate for a legitimate 'cover' - this has everything to do with her prior discursive construction as a being that is, by nature, unable to consent. To 'injure' such a being by giving her the right to choose her representative would thus be to subject her to the risk of violation. Miscegenation and illegitimate 'personation' - Blondin's sham coverture and Riel's provisional government - would be the outcomes of the bestowal of the right to elect a representative on those subjects incapable of deciphering illegitimacy. The husband-impersonation passage in Gowanlock's narrative seems to support contemporaneous Orange Order arguments that connect legitimate government to the perpetuation of racial purity. However, this support is anything but stable. The narrative's figuration of treacherous protection within a citation of patriarchal marriage raises the possibility that it is the wardship arrangement of marriage itself that violates. The husband-impersonation passage draws attention to a contradiction at the heart of the testimony of the 'previously chaste character.' In order to be credible, a testifying woman must infantilize herself. In exchange for her authorization to speak on her own behalf, what is demanded of her is a helpless inability to decipher misrepresentations. The woman must therefore account for herself as unaccountable. This contradiction is underpinned by the suspect temporality of indebtedness, for when the violated woman steps forward as a complainant, to offer a narrative in exchange for society's protection, she is indebted for a protection that she can claim only because, as a 'previously chaste character,' she is already an indebted subject. She conducts herself according to an understanding of freedom as a condition of protection bestowed by the social order to which she belongs. Indebtedness is a 'self-ordering mantra' (Honig 132) as well as a transaction that permits

138 Settler Feminism and Race Making

society and the state to recover value from subjects returning from the margins. What turns the abstract quality of chastity into the more concretely inhabited form of indebtedness is the reflexive turn back upon the self, as the material of an incessantly reproduced display of purity. Gowanlock's focus on the transaction of debt repayment that generates her first-person narration serves as a means of protest against the subtle coercions of an indebted subject position. Her excessive assumption of the subject position on offer to her within the discourse of rape can be read as a performative critique of the politically neutralizing operation of protections that reconstitute potentially resistant subjects as dependants. The insistence on the language of indebtedness permits her narrative to speak of the moral performances extracted in exchange for paternalistic protection from women and First Nations people alike. But the structure of Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear immediately recuperates the force of this critique of treacherous protection, by coupling Gowanlock's narrative with that of Theresa Delaney. Delaney resists the position of the violated object of rebellion, but only to become an advocate of the moral government of racial 'inferiors.' The text as a whole thus stages a developmental narrative, moving from a revirginalized daughter to a foster mother with 'social' expertise. Refusing the position of the violated white woman and instead constructing a discursive platform out of her unofficial role as a tutor of First Nations women at the Frog Lake settlement, Delaney will embrace the liberal contract as a means of social insertion. From Sexual Vulnerability to Supervisory Expertise: The Narrative of Theresa Delaney The father's house to which Gowanlock returned was, in a sense, the Parkdale Times Publishing Company of her two brothers-in-law. This was the place from which it would become necessary for her to produce a 'panoramic view of the whole' of her experience in the form of a narrative circuit 'from the day I left my father's house full of happiness and joy, until I entered it full of sorrow and suffering' (58). The younger woman's intimate account of an excursion out of and back into confinement within the 'sacred precincts of the paternal hearth' clearly locates the point of enunciation of her narrative within that safe space. Her narrative moves towards the collapse of the narrating T with the figure of feminine vulnerability at the centre of the story. Conforming to the signifying obligations of the protected daughter in a transaction with soci-

Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear 139

ety, Gowanlock's voice is sounded to enable the publishers of a paper 'devoted to the family' (as it described itself) to collect payment for a wound to family feeling. As I have argued, however, Gowanlock exceeds these obligations, with an emphasis on indebtedness that comes close to casting her narration as extorted speech. In Part 2 of Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear, Theresa Delaney's resistance to this extortion takes the form of a claim to an entirely different discourse: it stages a critique of exploitation, but locates this exploitation in the trading practices of the Hudson's Bay Company, practices which are responsible for fomenting 'the hydra of disunion or rebellion,' because of their disregard for the re-education of 'Indian character' (129, 102). The benevolent perspective of government is the alternative that Delaney's narrative proposes to this dangerous exploitation, and it is also what enables Delaney to propel her voice beyond the confines of autobiography. Almost twice the age of Gowanlock, Delaney had been installed at Frog Lake for two and a half years before Gowanlock's arrival just a few months prior to the disturbances. She was not just the only white woman from eastern Canada, but the wife of the Indian agency farm instructor, with a farm instructress's responsibility for tutoring First Nations women in the arts of housekeeping.37 The domestic life that was aborted for Delaney in April 1885 was thus of a different nature from that of Gowanlock's, for, as part of the Frog Lake Indian agency, the Delaney household was a private space opened by a pedagogical function, a kind of proto-institutional set for the rehearsal of 'civilized' life. Delaney's 'own sphere' contained Cree women in relation to whom her role combined the functions of a mother and a teacher. I was often quite amused with the young squaws. They used to do my house-work for me. I would do each special thing for them - from cleaning, scrubbing, washing, cooking to sewing, fancy work, &c. and they would rival each other in learning to follow me. They would feel as proud when they could perform some simple little work, as a child feels when he has learned his A. B. Cs. With time and care, good house-keepers could be made of many of them. (103)

If the Delaneys were without their own children, therefore, they had only to look to their 'Indian protegees' for the completion of this expanded home (104). Delaney's infantilization of her pupils replays a common theme in the household-management guides of the nineteenth-century colonial memsahib. As Rosemary George has observed,

140 Settler Feminism and Race Making

these guides were written in a peculiarly confident female voice combining the language of nursery rules with that of state management; they recast the aspirations and resistances of Native people in terms of the juvenile behaviour of unruly children (112). 'When I look back over these three years, I feel a pang of more than sorrow,' Delaney writes. 'I felt at home; I looked upon the place as my own, and the Indian children as my children; the same as my husband looked upon the men as his care, and they regarded him as a father' (104). What the return to Ontario threatened for Delaney was thus the loss of a semi-public domestic function, a social death that she figures in terms of the quiet passage into a 'haven of rest' (5, 89). The addition of Delaney's narrative to Gowanlock's makes Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear a. two-sided machine, conjoining sexual vulnerability and supervisory expertise in an apparatus for reappropriating resistance. Gowanlock's detailing of the 'infamous proposals' that she endured in the space of captivity compensates for Delaney's scant autobiographical recollection; conversely, the disruptive effects of Gowanlock's overemphasis on the position of indebtedness are absorbed by Delaney's affirmation and generalization of the contractual mechanism as the necessary precondition for the security in which all Canadians have a stake. The implicit developmental narrative of Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear moves from the negative accounting of the 'chaste character' to an active assumption of self-government, from a recovery of debt to an insurance transaction, from paternalism to an embryonic form of maternal authority. Delaney's resistance to confessional recollection will open an entry point into the discourse of nation building, as she redefines virtue in the positive, active terms of investment. Inscribing 'Inpsychation'

Delaney's narrative does not inscribe a clear circuit out into the space of endangerment and back, and fails to situate her voice firmly within the confines of the diegesis. In place of Gowanlock's circuit, Delaney offers a listless indifferentiation between the moments of departure and return, 'the first occasion [when] there were tears of regret at parting, and smiles of anticipated pleasure and happiness - [and] the second occasion [when] there are tears of memory, and yet smiles of relief on my escape, and happiness in my safe return' (127). This indifferentiation produces trouble at those moments in the narrative in which a clear demarcation of boundaries might be expected - not just at the

Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear

141

completion of the circuit that brings the freed white woman home, but also in the very moment of rescue from captivity, which Delaney represents as a half-hearted and meandering escape. In Gowanlock's narrative the long-awaited appearance of governmentemployed scouts is described in terms of the arrival of galloping liberators - 'Rescued! at last, and from a life worse than death. I was so overjoyed that I sat down and cried' (54). In Delaney's, the event is deprived of such clear contours. Instead of a resecuring of identities through liberation from 'squaw labour' ('I threw the trimming work to the other end of the tent, and Mrs. Delaney called upon Mrs. Pritchard to finish making the bannocks herself,' Gowanlock writes [52]), for Delaney the arrival of the search party occasions a misrecognition attended by the risk of death. 1 had just commenced to make a bannock for our tea, when Pritchard ran in and told me that the police were outside and for me to go to them at once. I sincerely believe that it was at this moment we ran the greatest of all our risks. The police had taken us for a band of Indians and were on the point of shooting at us when I came out and arrested the fact. When they found out who we were, they came in, placed their guns aside, and gave us some corned beef and 'hard tack,' a species of biscuit. These were luxuries to us, while our tea and bannock were a treat to them. We all had tea together, and then we went with them to the open prairie, where we travelled for about two hours. (125)

The discovery of 'who we were' is succeeded by a re-entry into the intermediate space of the tent and an exchange of food in which Delaney casts herself as the hostess and recipient of exotic non-indigenous refreshments. The 'end' to captivity is represented as a humble feast shared between ambiguous subjects: a 'half-breed' interpreter, Metis scouts, and partly transculturated, bannock-making white women. Delaney's spare account of the 'rescue' takes us from the enjoyment of 'luxuries' in this ceremony to the recollection that the music of the military band at Fort Pitt the next day 'was quite an agreeable change from the "tom-tom" of the Indians' (125). This minimal registration of the passage into 'civilized' space suggests that what Delaney is saved from, instead of a 'life worse than death,' are offences to taste. More difficult to shake off are those ambiguities of identity in racially intermediate space, which seem to trail her on her homeward journey, causing her to mistake crowds of well-wishers at Moose jaw for 'Riel and his followers... come to take us prisoners' (126).

142 Settler Feminism and Race Making

This refusal to mark moments of return and rescue is part of the wider protest staged by Delaney's narrative against the task of recollection. If Gowanlock protests against this task through reminders that her desire is to forget the 'frightful scenes,' and through an excessive assumption of the task's cruel demands, Delaney refuses to give up the comfort of forgetting associated with what Nietzsche calls 'inpsychation,' or the 'positive faculty' of repression that permits the unconscious digestion of experience (57). Delaney's protest is most explicit when the intimate and confessional voice of a vulnerable subject of sentiment is demanded. At these points, the failure of the intradiegetic T to observe is significant: 'As far as the first portion of our trip is concerned I have little or nothing to say, I could not see much from the car window and every place was new to me and, in fact, one place seemed as important as another in my eyes ... One has not time, or inclination, when situated as I was, to take a cool survey of all that passes and commit to memory every word that might be said or remark that might be made' (91, 107). This failure is compounded by her unwillingness to repeat the trauma of remembering. Delaney situates this trauma as internal to the diegesis. Thus, 'memory was not sleeping' on the journey back to Ontario when the two women 'had too much to think of to permit our enjoying the trip as it could be enjoyed' and Delaney declares herself unable to offer a description of what, for any other traveller, would have been a 'glorious trip on the bosom of the immense inland sea' of Lake Huron (126). But because traumatic memory is already internal to the experience that she is called upon to describe, Delaney also positively refuses to remember for the benefit of her readers. Her representation of the moments immediately following her husband's murder emphasize the inadvisability of looking back. I got one glance - the last - at my poor husband's body and I was taken off. After we had gone a piece I tried to look back - but the Indian gave me a few shakes pretty roughly and then dragged me through the creek up to my waist in water - then over a path full of thorns and briars and finally flung me down in his tent. I will not now stay to describe my feelings or attempt to give in language, an idea of the million phantoms of dread and terror; memory seemed but too keen, and only too vividly could I behold the repetition of the scenes that had just passed before me. (116)

The paragraph shift following the description of the acts of force that

Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear

143

place her in the Cree man's tent opens a space into which the reader is invited to project a scene of violation. But the immediate movement into the intradiegetic memory of the 'scenes that had just passed before me,' in the ensuing paragraph, both invokes and withholds such a scene of violation. Only too vividly could Delaney recollect her feelings now for the benefit of the reader, but 'could' in this second, implied sense, is conditional upon a willingness, and as she declares, she 'will not.' This refusal 'to stay to describe my feelings' works to underline the hypocrisy of an audience that requires an eruption of grief- asks her to look back and risk turning herself into an emblem like Lot's wife (a fate from which she is saved within the diegesis) - at the same time as it demands of her the restraint and discipline necessary to produce a narrative. The flicker of the identification with Lot's wife in this passage registers all the differences of Delaney's situation.38 She leaves the scene of the massacre, not with her husband but with the captor who attempts to take his place, and she is propelled forward not towards a holier life but rather an uncertain fate within the tent of a 'painted devil' (117). What is remarkable about this rewriting of the biblical lesson is its inscription of the agency of the warning against looking back in the captor, whose rough shakes initiate a baptism (as he drags her 'through the creek up to my waist - then over a path full of thorns') into defensive forgetting and forward movement. In the next paragraph, which clearly identifies involuntary 'repetition of the scenes' with suffering (although she does not 'stay' to look back, she is tortured by memory), Delaney announces that she has now succeeded in internalizing her captor's lesson. It is to this painful baptism that she owes the capacity to perform her duty in the present instance of narration. The repudiation of grief in favour of extravagant expressions of gratitude in the narrative's final paragraphs will likewise owe something to the lesson of the 'painted devil' in the duty of forward movement. Just as a memory of painful remembering explains the impossibility of recollection in the moment of narration, at other points the immediacy of captivity is displaced to the place and time of enunciation, in the form of 'pictures' to which the reader will not be granted access: as I enter upon my description, faint and imperfect as it may be, I feel my hand shake with nervous excitement, my pulse throb faster, my heart beat heavier, as scene after scene of the great drama passes before me, clear and perfect as when first enacted. Had I only the language at my command, as I have pictures before me, at my summons - I feel that I could do justice to

144 Settler Feminism and Race Making the subject. But as I was never destined to be an authoress and my powers of composition were dealt out to me with a sparing hand, I can but express my regret that an abler writer does not hold my pen. (87-8)

The final sentence in this passage has been read as 'a clue that Mrs. Delaney may have received some assistance with her narrative' - that, in other words, some 'abler writer' did occasionally hold the pen (Carter 111). I prefer to read the suggestions of straining or inauthen deity in Delaney's narrative as indications of the anonymity and conventionality of a discourse that does not emanate from its speaker as personal expression, even though she functions as its author. It is clear that Delaney holds affect at a distance by carefully preventing her intradiegetic and narrating I's from cohering. As long as personal experience is the object of description, she performs an inability to command language. Through these evasions of recollection and description, the text refuses to authenticate itself by attesting to a perfect fit between the I of the narrative (the subject at its centre) and the narrative's source of enunciation. Delaney will not activate her subjectivity through an unequivocal inhabitation of the subject position demarcated by the first-person pronoun of testimony. Either the content of her narrative is overwhelmed by the instance of discourse, and the impossibility of moving beyond the moment of writing prevents the narrating I from recovering the I of experience, or the instance of discourse fades out entirely as Delaney produces a generic and anonymous voice that can utter only second-hand expression.39 Always, she holds something in reserve as she situates a part of herself somewhere else. Thus, instead of safely returning its narrator-protagonist to the 'sacred precincts of the paternal hearth,' Delaney's narrative seems to locate her in a placeless afterlife. Her hand shakes, her pulse throbs faster, and her heart beats heavier after what she describes as the final of her 'three distinct lives,' the 'last and most eventful ... that of three months - April, May and June, 1885' (85-6). The time of writing consists of a profound disturbance that Delaney's narrative will end by affirming as a duty performed on behalf of the nation. By refusing to speak as the subject of her own narrative, and by inscribing herself, instead, as the site of division or negativity, Delaney emphasizes that the testifying voice of the female captive is a 'reading voice, one which repeats what has always already been written or spoken elsewhere' (Silverman 319). This refusal of the codes of authentic expression might be read as a resistance to a feminized form of testimony that carries not so much authority as 'somatic authenticity,' inso-

Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear 145

far as it demands that its speaker 'implicate] her body at every turn of phrase' (Silverman 318) .40 The rigorous codification of the speech of the female confessor is most concentrated at the moment at which she comes closest to the complainant in an 'offense against chastity' case, as she is called upon to attest to an experience of violation. Like Gowanlock, Delaney must retrieve from memory some equivalent for the 'fate worse than death' to which she was not in fact subjected. Delaney's narrative benefits from the prior answer to this requirement in Gowanlock's representation of the horrors of husband impersonation, which lessens the burden for the second narrative in Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear. Gowanlock's prior covering of this ground also works to invest Delaney's brief allusion to her memories within the captor's tent with details that do not need to be spoken. She can thus simply declare that she was saved from 'inhuman treatment, and even worse than a hundred deaths' by John Pritchard, who 'proved himself a sincere friend and a brave fellow ... a perfect gentleman ... A TRULY GOOD MAN') (117). Having credited Pritchard for her safety, Delaney goes on to locate the agency of her near-violation in the plural entity of 'Indians.' But she deprives this entity of any objective status preceding its representation in colonial discourse. The horror that substitutes for rape in Delaney's narrative - a nighttime watch by a penetrating gaze - is constituted by way of intertextuality. It acquires its terrifying force only through the reciprocal violence of the densely citational gaze that is returned by Delaney herself. For three weeks I was watched as a cat would watch a mouse. All night long the Indians kept prowling about the tent, coming in, going out, returning; they resembled at times, a pack of wolves skulking around their prey, and, at times, they appeared to resemble a herd of demons as we see them represented in the most extravagant of frightful pictures. However, Pritchard spoke to them and their attentions became less annoying. They may have watched as closely as ever and I think they did, but they seldom came into my tent and when they did come in, it was only for a moment. I slept in a sitting position and whenever I would wake up, in a startled state from some fevered dream, I invariably saw, at the tent door, a human eye riveted upon me. (117)

The passage continues with a direct appeal to a specifically feminine reader for empathy. 'Imagine yourself seated in a quiet room at night, and every time you look at the door, which is slightly ajar, you catch the

146 Settler Feminism and Race Making

eye of man fixed upon you, and then try to form an idea of my feelings' (118). This is the point at which Delaney comes closest to conforming to the signifying obligations of the violated object of rebellion, translating political struggle into an affront to feminine purity by figuring the insidious gaze of a 'naked eye' from which there is no escape (118). In the end, however, this scenario of surveillance is all that her narrative offers in the way of detail for the kind of fate that readers of newspapers such as the Charlottetown Daily Patriot, which had announced that Delaney was 'carried off a prisoner by the blood-thirsty fiends,' would have been prepared to find in her text (qtd. Carter 68). The 'eye of a man fixed upon you' is not even the kind of racialized gaze that served as a euphemism for sexual violation in white slavery narratives (the 'queue of coolies form [ed] up to feast their eyes on the limbs of a drugged, stupefied white woman' [MacKirdy 184, 88]). The source of this surveillance turns out to be Delaney's own hallucination of God's eye: I heard that the human eye had power to subdue the most savage beast that roams the woods; if so, there must be a great power in the organ of vision; but I know of no object so awe-inspiring to look upon, as the naked eye concentrated upon your features. Had we but the same conception of that 'all seeing eye,' which we are told, continually watches us, we would doubtlessly be wise and good; for if it inspired us with a proportionate fear, we would possess what Solomon tells us is the first step to wisdom — 'The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.' But I never could describe all the miseries I suffered during those few weeks. (118)

The passage places its narrator in the position of the 'savage beast' subjected to the sublime intimidation of a human eye more 'awe-inspiring' than the thought of God's. A passage that begins as an account of violation thus ends as a rumination on the disciplinary effects that would attend belief in God. In the absence of such a belief, Delaney frees herself from present pressures to self-disclose. The 'reading voice' that is hinted at when Delaney refuses to own her discourse and repeatedly stresses that the scene of 'prowling' Indians was received from 'the most extravagant of frightful pictures,' emerges even more clearly in her practice of dense citation. Her narrative is as thick with quotation, literary allusion, and (frequently overwrought) figurative language as it is with humble protests of literary inadequacy. This recourse to second-hand language is a subtle form of protest mounted in

Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear

147

the form of equivocation (L. aequus + vocare) inscribing 'equal calls' in divergent directions. The citations are occasionally highly equivocal ambiguous and evasive - but they are also equivocals, that is, nominal equivalences that perform a minimal good form, allowing meaning to skid loose. The 'assistance' that is brought in in Delaney's narrative is thus not that of an anonymous ghostwriter but rather that of ironic double-voicedness. The citations are nowhere as ambiguous in their implications as in Delaney's description of a Cree war dance. Like the passage describing the watching eyes, this passage fills the period between purchase into 'half-breed' custody and escape with a description that is assigned a reiterative value, instead of being located at a specific moment in the chain of events. Narrative frequency leans dangerously towards the suggestion of reiteration at the level of discourse itself here, suggesting that what the 'description' describes is the generic war dance in European representations of the 'savage.' The status of the war dance is as suspect as that of the night-time surveillance by men resembling a 'pack of wolves,' not simply because Delaney is unlikely ever to have witnessed such an event, but also because its representation is once again structured as simile - a sort of para-description that attaches itself to the event only by means of comparison. 'Is the likeness too vivid or too true?' Delaney asks her reader, after offering the following description: A huge fire throws its yellow, fitful light upon the grim spectre-like objects that bound, leap, yell and howl, bend and pass, aim their weapons, and using [sic] their tomahawks in a mimic warfare, a hideous pantomime, around and across the blaze. Their gesticulations summon up visions of murder, horror, scalps, bleeding and dangling at their belts, human hearts and heads fixed upon their spears; their yells resemble at times the long and distant howl of a pack of famished wolves, when on the track of some hapless deer; and again their cries, their forms, their actions, their very surroundings could be compared to nothing else than some infernal scene, wherein the demons are frantic with hell, inflamed passions. Each one might bear Milton's description in his 'Paradise Lost,' of Death. (120)

The reference to Milton's description of Death at the end of this 'infernal scene' of inflamed passions bears a more precise allusion to the moment in Paradise Lost at which 'Satan with thoughts inflamed of highest design' approaches the gates of hell only in order to find these attended by a 'foul' and 'scaly' female form, in the process of being penetrated by a

148 Settler Feminism and Race Making

pack of 'hell-hounds' (II: 630, 650-69). Folded into this 'likeness' of unruly natives in Delaney's appropriation, then, is the figure of the woman in need of government, the subject addressed by the reflexive, normalizing force of the narratives in Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear. This is a force that Delaney will ultimately claim to be able to administer. Delaney's narrative then transposes this generic war dance of the European imagination onto the events at Frog Lake, returning to ' [t]he scenes at the little church the morning of the second of April' by way of Milton's demons (120). Finally, 'the trying scenes of the sad and eventful month of April' are retrieved from her memory - but they are retrieved, again, as simile. The passage concludes by declaring 'with Freneau': And long shall timorous fancy see, The painted chief, the pointed spear; And reason's self shall bow the knee, To shadows and delusions here. (121)

The quatrain is from Philip Freneau's poem 'Lines Occasioned by a Visit to an Old Indian Burying Ground,' written during what the critic Richard Vitzthum has described as a period of 'corrosive irony' and resignation at humanity's capacity for self-deception in the career of the poet (87) .41 The figure of the Indian chief in this poem serves as the displaced target in a debunking of Christian beliefs about life after death. The speaker contrasts his own uncompromising conviction that, in effect, dead is dead, with that of the chief, who, 'when from life releas'd / Again is seated with his friends / And shares again the joyous feast,' in order to point out the childishly optimistic, if not fraudulent, nature of the Christian death mythology associated here with the 'fancies of a ruder race.' By the final stanza (the one that Delaney chooses to cite) the 'timorous fancy' in question has become that of the speaker himself, who sees 'shadows and delusions' within the circle of romantic fancy, as his reason is conquered by self-delusion. That Delaney should choose to complete her representations of demonic natives in the night-time surveillance and war dance passages with this reflection on self-deception is very suggestive. If she cites rather than remembers 'the painted chief, the pointed spear,' perhaps it is because these untrustworthy images are not hers. They belong, rather, to the irrational apparatus of justification that demonizes rebellious natives in order to vindicate the moral authority of colonialism. Delaney has in mind a different solution to the problem of native indiscipline.

Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear 149 The Assumption of Accountability as the Appropriate Exercise of Freedom

Delaney implicitly acknowledges the fraudulence involved in constructing a generalized Indian villainy as the source of the rebellion when she asserts: 'I have my own private opinions upon the causes of the rebellion but do not deem it well or proper to express them. There are others besides the half-breeds and Big Bear and his men concerned with the affair. There are many objects to be gained by such means and there is a "wheel within a wheel" in the North-West troubles' (102). This far less 'timorous' voice is adopted in the middle chapter of Delaney's narrative, a chapter that she promises to devote to her 'marriage life,' the 'second important period in my career.' However, the promise is unfulfilled, as she assigns the bulk of the chapter to a proto-sociological commentary entitled 'The Indians as They Are.' This diversion from the autobiographical comes on the heels of terse pronouncements that announce her refusal to 'dwell' upon the sentimentalized moments of a female life-narrative: 'My wedding took place in the usual manner; the same congratulations, presents, kisses, well-wishes all the world over. I need not dwell upon the event any further' (91) - pronouncements that repeat the preceding chapter's lack of interest in providing an account of Delaney's life before marriage: 'This first chapter must necessarily be short, when one has nothing to write about it is hard to fill up pages, and my life, and that of my husband, so far as I know, were most uneventful up to the day of our union' (87). Instead of offering reflections on the difficulty of filling up pages, however, the second chapter provides a three-part disquisition on 'farms and farmers,' the Delaney 'home and its surroundings,' and 'the Indians under my husband's control' (93). The third section is the longest, and it is here that Delaney dispenses with equivocation in order to assume the voice of the farm instructress in defiance of the subject position of the vulnerable female captive. In this section the detachment that she has cultivated in earlier sections of her narrative pays off, by permitting her to authorize herself as a different kind of speaker. This is also the point at which the resistance that she has thus far mounted to the terms of the discourse on offer begins to involute into an assertive claim to a particular kind of right, the legitimate claim to which depends upon a previous performance of duty. What Delaney is literally claiming is a government pension, for, as the widow of the government-employed Frog Lake farm instructor, at the time of writing she is in a position to expect compensation for the loss of

150 Settler Feminism and Race Making

her husband. Indeed, in November 1885, shortly after the publication of Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear, an order-in-council granted Delaney a military widow's pension of $400 a year. A pension for Theresa Gowanlock, the widow of the Frog Lake settlement's private mill operator, was not granted until 1888, after some special pleading (which nonetheless did not subject Gowanlock to the terms placed upon the Indian agent's Cree widow, who was granted $12 a month 'upon the understanding that she would lead a moral life' and remain on reserve [Carter 124-6]). What Delaney does with the anticipated widow's pension in her narrative, however, is to turn it into something that she has earned, not just as the unofficial adoptive mother of 'squaws' but as the contributor of the second half of Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear, which she figures as an insurance contribution, an investment in a general security that entitles her to some form of return. 4 Delaney's reframing of her compensation as an entitlement based on individual conduct enacts the historical redeployment of the concept of legal rights in the government of marginal populations, a redeployment that transformed the administration of relief into a technique of contractual implication. As Hartley Dean argues, the central principle of latenineteenth- and early-twentieth-century social insurance schemes was the subjection of beneficiaries to a set of behavioural rules. The figure of the contract, newly introduced to this arena, made these rules appear as the natural correlatives of the social benefit in question, instead of authoritative impositions. Delaney's writing, I am proposing, can be understood as a claim issued within this disciplinary framework of insurance. As it is reconnected to the political technology of insurance in Delaney's narrative, freedom-as-protection loses its local connection to a vulnerable white femininity and becomes a right to be claimed by all 'chaste characters.' At this point it is no longer the narrowly sexual self-regulation of the 'chaste character' that is at issue, but rather a wider political hygiene, a prudent self-management in the interests of preventing future uprisings. Delaney's 'insurance contribution' takes the specific form of the construction of a 'politically innocent' perspective on the necessity of domesticating natives. She achieves this construction within a captivity narrative by replacing the twin terms in the discourse of white slavery - vulnerable white femininity and racially contaminating violator - with unprotected natives and an exploitative Hudson's Bay Company. Her entitlement to a return on her investment (her right to a pension) will thus rest on her narrative's production of a form of social legitimation. By locating the issue of the justice of the current political settlement

Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear 151

as beyond her intellectual grasp, Delaney is able to propose the question of 'Indian' character as a matter reserved for the pre-political expertise of the woman favourably situated to draw conclusions from close observation of behaviours and temperaments. Through this kind of demuring, performed not as an unwillingness to write but as a confinement of the source of her authority to the politically disinterested domestic sphere, she draws upon the culturally sedimented authority of the nineteenth-century domestic woman, whose explanations of social relationships gain their forcefulness from a gendered moral perspective from which worldly conflicts have been carefully sifted out,43 It would not become me, perhaps, to comment upon the manner in which the country is governed, and the Indians instructed, for I am no politician. In fact I dont [sic] know one party from another except by name. But I cannot permit this occasion, the last I may ever have, to go past without saying plainly what I think and what I know about the north-west and its troubles. The half-breeds, or whites or others may have real or imaginary grievances that they desire to see redressed. If they have, I know nothing about them; I never had anything to do with them and maybe I could not understand the nature of their claims, even if explained to me. (99) By means of this demuring, Delaney's narration effects a shift from the political question of whether government is sought or imposed to the technical question of whether or not it is delivered as energetically as possible. Are the 'Indians' protected and governed enough? Has the dominion government undertaken to re-educate their desires? Comfortable on the ground of questions of assimilative instruction, Delaney can positively assert that 'the Indians have no grievances and no complaints to make (100). The government spares no pains to attempt to make them adopt an agricultural life, to teach them to rely upon their own strength, to become independent people and good citizens. Of the Indians I can speak openly for I know them thoroughly. There may be, here and there, a bad man among them; but as a people they are submissive, kind, and, if only from curiosity, they are anxious to learn. My husband remarked that according as they advanced in their agricultural knowledge that they commenced to have a liking for it. And I noticed the same in the young squaws whom I undertook to instruct in household duties. (100)

152 Settler Feminism and Race Making

The events of the spring of 1885 thus indicate the necessity not of punishing natives but of protecting them from exploitation. What is unjust, the narrator proclaims, is 'to lead these poor people into a trouble which can but injure them deeply!' (100). Her attribution of discontent-breeding exploitation to the Hudson's Bay Company begins as insinuation - 'I consider it a great shame for evil-minded people, whether whites or halfbreeds, to instill into their excitable heads the false idea that they are presecuted [sic] by the government' (100-1) - but eventually takes the form of outright accusation. The interests of the 'two governing parties ... the Hudson Bay Company and the Dominion Government' are 'directly opposed' (101). While the company exploits and profits, the government protects and governs; while the company relates to 'Indians' as cheap labour and captive consumers, the government relates to them as wards, wanting nothing but a 'race that can become worthy of the dignity of citizens in a civilized country. So much the worse for the Government if the Indians rebel and so much the worse for the Indians themselves' (102). The interests and well-being of government and 'Indians' are reciprocal and identical. Rebellion thus disappoints, rather than challenges, a paternalistic state that has no goal but the welfare of its population. Here Delaney formulates the macro-logic of liberal government according to which the strength of the state is measured by the extent to which it has rendered the individual members of a population useful and calculable. In the successive nineteenth-century Indian Acts, as John Tobias notes, this logic was formulated in terms of the goal of training First Nations people into the 'dignity' of 'imitation Europeans' ('Protection' 132). At this point in the text, what has happened to Gowanlock's critical apprehension of the individualizing, normalizing procedures that underwrite this apparent identification of interests - the procedures that differentiate between the members of a population on the basis of imputed capacities and deficiencies, administering coercive protection and specialized forms of inclusion, and only then on the condition that individuals govern themselves according to received identities (probationary landholder, 'previously chaste character')? Gowanlock's critical observations have now been uncritically assumed as a form of expertise in government. 'Gowanlock' and 'Delaney,' or the two sections of Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear, can thus be understood to figure the sense in which '[wjomen both come under and direct the public gaze in the nineteenth century as sociological subjects in a double sense,' as the objects and agents, the 'ignorant saboteur[s]' and the 'investigators and

Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear

153

managers' of the field of the social constituted by the extension of normalizing power (Riley 50-1). If 'Gowanlock' represents the white femininity whose sexual regulation was a point of concentration for colonial race making, 'Delaney' represents the point at which this racialized identity becomes the basis for governing others. In disseminating the gender-based behavioural norms of'chaste character' to racial 'inferiors,' late-nineteenth-century advocates of social hygiene 'establishe[d] one class of people whose women met certain standards of femininity that qualified them to care for other social and cultural groups whose women were improperly gendered' (Levy 12). If Gowanlock's narrative subtly refocuses outrage at 'Indian' atrocities on the 'outrage' of coverture, then, the deflection carried out by Delaney's narrative subdues rather than incites critical energies, as she argues for patient race making rather than punishment. Delaney emerges from evasion and equivocation only to racialize the native insurgent, not in relation to a violated white femininity, but rather through the depoliticizing individualization of a farm instructress's scrutiny of character. This manoeuvre permits Delaney to assume the position of a spokeswoman for the 'civilizing' project. 'Take the negro from the south,' she suggests as she interpellates her reader as a fellow player in the liberal game of making up people, place him amongst the ice-bergs of the arctic circle and strive to make him accustomed to the hunting of the seal or harpooning of the walruss [sic]; or else bring down an Esquimaux and put him into a sugar-cane plantation of the topics [sic]. In fact, take a thorough going farmer from the old-country and attempt to accustom him to hunt moose and trap beaver. He may get expert at it; but give him a chance and he will soon fling away the traps and pick up the spade, lay down the rifle and take hold of the plough. So it is with the Indians - they may get a taste for farming but they prefer to hunt. (102—3)

That some people are pawns and others players in this game is irrelevant; the division does not impede the purely technical rationale of the argument, which individualizes political resistance to the discipline of race making as a stubborn character flaw. 'Indian' misbehaviour is, finally, merely a sign of deficiency in the capacity for rational deliberation and economic self-management. 'Indians' are 'easily instructed, quick to learn, (when they like to do so), and very submissive and grateful. But they are very, very improvident. So long as they have enough for to-day, let to-morrow look out for itself,' Delaney pronounces (103).44

154 Settler Feminism and Race Making

By identifying the moral attitude of improvidence as the central flaw in 'Indian' character, Delaney not only individualizes the cause for discontent in the 1885 rebellion (the Cree would have had no cause for revolt if they had had the will power necessary to economize in their consumption of rations), she also draws the 'Indian problem' within the scope of the political technology of insurance to which she voluntarily subjects herself. A 'generalizable technology for rationalizing societies,' Daniel Defert suggests, 'insurance is like a diagram, a figure of social organization' that subsumes political conflicts within the homogenizing perspective of an economic ordering of the future based on the calculation of insecurities and their costs and a receding of social classes as populations defined by the nature of the risks that they pose (215). Nineteenth-century benevolence 'made its advances' upon forces of resistant solidarity through an effort of 'dissociation and reconstitution of the social fabric'; this effort was achieved precisely by means of the imposition of the solution of insurance, with its neutral classifications according to dangerous behaviours, and its substitution of individual contractual linkages to a central point of management for older, horizontal and politicizing associations (Defert 230, 213). Improvident behaviour is thus not just a disinclination to save resources (including, in the case of the careless white woman, the self as a form of racial capital); it is the refusal of a form of sociability that consists in identifying with the advantages of a general security. Upon their return to Ontario, Gowanlock and Delaney were met and accompanied to Toronto by Gowanlock's brother-in-law, the future publisher of Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear. Delaney was able to continue on to her 'old home on the Aylmer road' near Ottawa (89), and thus to escape direct pressure to provide evidence for the claim to wounded family feeling that was to be circulated by the Parkdale Times Printing and Publishing Office. What was for Gowanlock a painful extortion of speech bent to the contours of a script became for Delaney a kind of platform, a strategy of self-authorization that she would end by recommending to all Canadian mothers, sisters, and daughters, as she called upon them to 'pay' their tributes in like fashion. Like Gowanlock, Delaney repudiates a sentimental focus on loss - '[ajlthough we are often disappointed in our expectations of happiness, and fail to attain all we desire, yet we have much to be thankful for,' she writes (128) - but in her case this refusal allows her to exceed the narrative mandate of the violated woman and to assume the voice of the government-sponsored adoptive mother of 'squaws.' Insofar as her resistance involutes into this form of self-assertion (bound to the 'dignity of citizens in a civilized country'),

Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear 155

Delaney's very agency might be said to inoculate readers of Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear against some of the more subversive implications of Gowanlock's excessive performance. The freedom that Delaney's narrator claims (for herself and others) is no more than the freedom to promise herself to the project of race making - and the right to promise, as Nietzsche suggests, is achieved only through the work of self-mastery, through which one constitutes oneself as regular and accountable. Embracing the freedom to promise oneself in this way ultimately renders 'life itself ... repugnant,' Nietzsche contends (67); hence Delaney's location of herself in a 'haven of rest,' beyond the last of her three lives (89, 86). Delaney's narrative effects a generalization of the daughter's position of indebtedness into a norm (negatively displayed in the behaviour of 'improvident' 'Indians') of individual investment in the future of a 'great and solid nation' (129). While Gowanlock's account concludes with a 'panoramic' summary underlining the threat of a 'life worse than death' posed by Pierre Blondin, Delaney uses her conclusion to assign her narrative a function in the permanent battle against the 'internal enemies' of the nation. She figures these threats in organic terms by comparing them to an upas tree, which, if allowed to 'take root and grow ... would soon become alarming, while its poisonous influence would pollute the atmosphere' (128, 129). The sexual-racial danger of contaminating violation has thus become generalized, as the permanent potentiality of indiscipline. Delaney's narrative is offered as a form of insurance against this future threat. [Tjhese few papers, should they by any chance, survive the hand of time, will tell to the children of the future Canada, what those of your day experienced and suffered, and when those who are yet to be, learn the extent of the troubles undergone, and the sacrifices made by those of the present, to set themselves examples worthy of imitation, and models fit for their practice, to build vip for them a great and solid nation, they may perhaps reflect with pride upon the history of their country, its struggles, dangers, tempests, and calms. (129)

The passage accomplishes a generalization of 'chaste character' and a diffusion of the 'sacred precincts of the paternal hearth' by proposing that all citizens examine themselves according to the principle of indebtedness, with its double requirements of remembering and promising, figured in the split narrativization of Two Months in the Camp of Big

156 Settler Feminism and Race Making Bear. The self-mastery necessary to the creation of a 'great and solid nation' demands a guilty gaze back at the investments made by others in the past so that one comes to see that 'it is only through the sacrifices of the ancestors that the tribe exists and one has to pay them back with sacrifices and accomplishments' (Nietzsche 88-9). By proposing insurance against insurrection as the framework within which she writes, Delaney also projects onto the others of the future an indebtedness to her as a sacrificing ancestor who invested herself as an 'exampl[e] worthy of imitation.' Rather than the retroactive payment of a debt, the writing of her narrative has been a forward-looking duty, an advance payment anticipating a return. By means of this apparently minute shift from the daughter's repayment of a debt to the public woman's performance of duty, she can inscribe her narrating activity in an economy in which it makes sense for her to look forward to being 'doubly repaid' if her 'little sketch should prove instructive or even interesting' to others (82). The second half of Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear thus appends to Gowanlock's account of herself as a 'chaste character' who refused to succumb to sexual advances, Delaney's minimal performance of good generic form and her emphasis, instead, on the instance of discourse as the fulfilment of a duty. Activating indebtedness as duty, transforming payment into claiming, Delaney completes the process through which freedom-as-protection becomes a benefit subject to a transaction between the 'chaste character' and society. She does so by becoming an advocate of government. In the chapter that follows I shall further explore the dynamic through which the act of claiming freedom turns the claimant into a producer of social legitimation, by considering the career of an earlytwentieth-century Canadian feminist and social reformer who builds Delaney's unofficial role as a farm instructress into the official function of a 'Janey Canuck.' A writer of 'judicious' sketches of the citizen-material settling the Canadian West and a judge who imports the enculturating function of literature into a new kind of courtroom, Emily Murphy assumes and administers the freedom-as-artefact-of-government that the present chapter has described. Her literary and correctional work, like Delaney's 'insurance contribution,' finds its rationale in insistently economic metaphors of race making, including the 'investment that promises larger, surer, ... speedier returns for the future' - the mission to 'Canadianize the foreigner' (Robertson 62)45 - and the project of saving vulnerable and dangerous female racial capital through the inculcation of values of economy, prudence, and self-restraint. Just as Two Months in

Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear

157

the Camp of Big Bear figures a movement out of 'captivity' into a 'freedom' consisting in a re-encapsulation within normalizing structures, the collection of texts I read in the following chapter figure racialized oppositions between spaces of 'captivity' and 'freedom.' They participate, more precisely, in the constitution of secure enclosures within which women can circulate in the 'free' space of civil society.

This page intentionally left blank

chapter three

Inducted Feminism, Inducing Tersonhood' Emily Murphy and Race Making in the Canadian West

A reader of Canadian newspapers and periodicals in the 1910s and 1920s would have found it impossible to escape the pervasive pronouncements of a woman who signed her pieces Janey Canuck. Her material ranged from feature articles with titles such as 'Fighting the Drug Menace' (1920), 'Are Parents What They Used to Be?' (1927), and 'Why Do Wives Leave Home?' (1926) to essays and addresses urging the sterilization of the insane (1932) and the appointment of psychopathic experts in schools (1918).1 In Edmonton, where the author of these pieces resided, a reader of the daily newspaper would have encountered on the front page each morning a concise recipe for moral and efficient living ('Self control is strength,' 'Horse or man or dog aren't much good until they learn to obey,' 'A man to see far must climb ... some height'), under the banner 'The Day's Motto, by Janey Canuck.' 2 In her daily life, this diffuser of normalizing perceptions and prescriptions was, everyone knew, Emily Ferguson Murphy, the first female magistrate in the British Empire. Between 1916 and 1931, she presided over a women's court where her stock-in-trade was composed of the fallen women, juvenile delinquents, and defective parents of Canada's recently settled West: the woman, the child, and the 'foreigner,' who constituted the three forms of dangerous vulnerability or unfinished selfhood posing potential threats to racial and political security. Murphy's adjudications in the Women's Court were meticulously reported in local newspapers and it was not uncommon for these pronouncements to address such 'Questions of Importance to Native Sons' (as one headline put it) as '"What Is a Canadian?" and "Can a Woman Reform?"'3

160 Settler Feminism and Race Making

In this chapter the space over which Emily Murphy presided is situated within a governmental machinery for operating on the psychophysical life of the population. In early-twentieth-century Canada, this machinery was constructed by linking 'public' and 'private' spaces through the enlistment of agents capable of carrying public institutions into domestic life. In order to describe the 'topographical technology of civilization' (Rose, Powers 103) that was Emily Murphy's domain, it is necessary to retrace the lines connecting the Women's Court to the foreign missions' zenana, the rural schoolroom, and the rescue home. These enclosed sites for the manufacture of character and the inculcation of a regulated freedom were strung together by means of their mutual reference to a 'real home,' as a series of home simulacra. I suggest that they were linked by a feminized expertise and technique of exemplarity that crossed such apparently unrelated practices as the authorship of 'character-building' fiction and the work of the first female magistrate in the empire. Transformations in the machinery of government, as Gilles Deleuze points out, are accessed not by means of a global analysis but rather through the scrutiny of particular scenes. 'As sometimes happens when one studies an engraving through a magnifying glass,' it is only through such scrutiny that one 'discovers a different organization of space, other ends, other personages, even though the last are disguised or assimilated' ('Rise' ix). This chapter's study of the work of the Edmonton Women's Court unearths its predication upon the prior instrumentalization of a literary figure and the deployment of a feminist struggle. In the years that roughly match the span of her career as magistrate, from 1916 to 1929, Murphy was busy on a second front. She was the hero of a much-publicized feminist quest for the recognition of Canadian women as 'persons,' a campaign with a legendary stimulus in a male defence lawyer's challenge, on her first day in court, to the jurisdiction of a magistrate who was not a 'person' under the terms of the British North America Act.4 It is the crusade for recognition of women as a 'persons' for which Murphy is now remembered, by means of the public memory technology of a 60-second televised 'Heritage Minute,' a nationalist 'infomercial' jointly sponsored by Canada Post and the charitable Bronfman Foundation. Dressed in the robe of a magistrate, the actor Kate Nelligan formulates the outrageous contradiction that spurred Murphy's crusade - 'I, Emily Murphy, author of thejaney Canuck books, pioneer in the war against narcotics, first female magistrate in the empire, but not a person' - before recalling her victory on behalf of present and future Canadian women with the 1929 British Privy Council decision in favour of women

Emily Murphy and Race Making in the West 161

as persons. What this memorialization does not account for is the way in which the persons crusade found its proving ground in the scene of person makingofthe Women's Court, and the way in which Murphy's desiring relation to the category of person would have served to legitimate her wearing of a magistrate's robe. As the title of this chapter suggests, the approach to others as 'inferiors' whose moral development required inducing (from the Latin inducere: to lead, influence, initiate artificially or by an external agent) drew on the induction (an introduction into office, a conscription) of a figure of feminism. Ironically, the figure of Janey Canuck was able to stand as the source of a person-making project within which she was in fact produced. My examination of the Women's Court 'through a magnifying glass' thus attempts to grasp the complexity of a victory for liberal feminism in Canada as a moment at which women were in fact unleashed to argue for their normality and empowered to serve as experts in the enculturation of racial 'inferiors.' As Nikolas Rose has argued, in the early-twentieth-century 'state of welfare,' a new 'mentality of rule' empowered a certain type of individual to set out norms of conduct, creating at the same time a new ethos of authority and new objects on which it could act ('Government' 285, 293). Authority must itself always be authorized by some claim to wisdom, virtue, and diagnostic efficacy, and it was here that the literary figure of Janey Canuck came into play, embodying the expertise in the 'normal' that I call maternal authority. This term is close to the one sometimes used to describe the conservatism and essentialism of first-wave feminist politics, 'maternal feminism.' The verbal proximity is intentional, for I aim to bring a different set of questions to the same historical terrain. Maternal feminism names the sense in which the first wave launched women into public space through arguments for the social utility of a traditional gender role; in this sense, the term redeploys the discourse of the period to name a historical tendency. What I want to grasp, however, is the effectivity of maternal feminism. I therefore use 'authority' in the technical sense of an agent accorded a benevolent and neutral capacity to speak the truth about human nature, at a calculated distance from political rule.5 I isolate exemplarity as the technique through which maternal authority operated at such a calculated distance. With the appointment of the first female magistrate in the empire there was a local transformation in the exercise of legal authority, which became a matter of improving the capacity of racially 'inferior' individuals to regulate their own conduct. The unusual form of justice that was dispensed in the Edmonton Women's Court, where the prisoner's dock

162 Settler Feminism and Race Making was replaced by an armchair, was a justice concerned with the 'reclamation and conservation' of human material. This was a justice dealing not so much in punishment for law breaking as preventative and reformative work predicated on a patient examination of individual cases of moral deficiency. The template for the self requiring such attention was the girl whom Murphy called the 'basic material of the race [,who] must not be permitted to decay from any cause whatever.'7 The special place of Canada within the British Empire - as the first dominion and, in this period, as the source of hope for a regenerated British race - made the white girl the focal point for late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century moral and social reform projects. It was often in relation to the white girl that new forms of regulation, surveillance, coercion, and discipline were invented and refined.8 As Carolyn Strange has demonstrated, the girl unleashed from parental authority combined the seemingly contradictory attributes of vulnerability and danger, for her potential victimization by moral corruptors and sexual predators made her a potential carrier of venereal diseases, a miscegenating womb, a source of moral and biological contagion (56). It was thus as a problem of race that she was seen to require sympathy and judgment, protection and control. The discursive shift from the figure of the victimized white slave to the working girl who was always on the verge of becoming an 'occasional prostitute' was intimately related to the rise of the public authority of feminist organizations such as the National Council of Women of Canada (NCWC). Likewise, it was by delineating the special circumstances of the criminal 'Eve,' who was both always already condemned and too lightly punished through a 'lax and sentimental' treatment, that Murphy would carve out a special function for the police court that she would rename her 'casualty clearing station' ('Straight Talk' 56). In this setting, Murphy focused on an 'unsentimental' treatment of the vulnerable and dangerous white girl who, in her view, had 'almost invariably ... put herself in the way [of temptation] by visiting Chinese chop-suey houses, or other places of business' (Black Candle 233).9 Strange reads the constitution of the 'girl problem' as a particular moment in the class contradictions of Canadian feminism. Her project is to recover working girls' voices and resistances to those middle-class, professional feminists who made their 'careers out of judging workingclass women' (51). I come at the 'girl problem' somewhat differently, for the project to recover resisting voice and agency by-passes a crucial opportunity to examine a fundamental and continuing bind for femi-

Emily Murphy and Race Making in the West

163

nism, centred on the relation between feminism and government. This bind does not become visible through a class analysis that fails to problematize voice and agency themselves. If the 'girl problem' surfaces inside forms of regulation invented and refined with feminist assistance, under the banner of maternal authority, it is not the recovery of the girl's voice that will alert us to continuing contradictions for feminism. A closer look at the particular strategies elaborated with the authorization of feminism in this period might prove to be a more promising way of grasping historical contradictions in the name of a self-conscious and critical feminism in the present. The vulnerable and dangerous girl is of interest to me, then, as the problem in relation to which new governmental solutions were invented and refined: the point of expansion for race-making strategies predicated upon maternal authority. An alternative critical gesture generated out of the analysis of class contradictions in first-wave Canadian feminism has been the move to conclude that, as Carol Lee Bacchi writes, the Canadian suffrage movement 'was less a "woman's movement" than an attempt on the part of particular men and women, predominantly urban professionals and entrepreneurs, to supervise society' (123). Bacchi argues that first-wave feminism lost its original association with feminist ideas and causes as it became dominated by social reformers, but she leaves aside the question of how the projects of feminism and social supervision came to be articulated together. The identification of middle-class women's motives of professional self-advancement does notjustify the conclusion that this was a historically circumscribed case of hijacked feminism and not a women's movement. 10 In its attempt to preserve an original, uncompromised feminism, this approach fails to consider how a certain feminism comes into being as a project to supervise society. The story of the corruption of feminist ideas by class interests is, furthermore, only nominally materialist, for in place of an examination of overdetermination and contradiction, it substitutes a narrative sequence that separates, by making consecutive, 'feminism' and 'class interest in supervising society.' It is not simply the name of feminism that is at issue here but, more fundamentally, the question of what kind of analysis will most effectively forge a connection between historical moments in order to open the way for disidentification from received categories and truths in the present. A history of the present, as Graham Burchell describes it, is necessarily committed to a form of description that dismantles the coordinates of the researcher's starting point; it aims to return a sense of contingency to present truths and fields of experience, in order to make

164 Settler Feminism and Race Making

possible other ways of objectifying and governing ourselves ('Liberal'). Thus, the problem with a 'systemic analysis' that regroups the various elements of a history around the form of patriarchal capitalism, as in Rosemary Hennesy's proposal for a feminist materialism (124), is that it already knows how to locate power, where to draw lines offeree, how to calculate interests and map them onto social actors. Such an approach may not be able to grasp the unexpected forms of feminist implication in oppressive social relations. Thus, I suggest, we should pursue questions of how feminist subjects of particular interests are produced and enlisted. What was involved in the individualization of the subjects passing through the Edmonton Women's Court was an evaluation in accordance with norms of character and conduct, and a prescription for work on the self to achieve 'normality' under expert guidance.11 In the late nineteenth century, as Rose has observed, the expert in conduct moved from the representative of religious authority to 'all manner of reformers, child-savers, [and] campaigners for social purity,' before coming to rest, in the early twentieth century, in the 'scientific' expert who claimed to ground codes of conduct in objective observation (Powers 76). As the daughter of a prominent Canadian Orange Order family, a woman involved in virtually all of the social campaigns of first-wave Canadian feminists,12 and, eventually, a 'magistrate-physician' positioned 'closer to the human side of [the] city than anyone in it' (Murphy 'Straight Talk' 10, 9), Emily Murphy could lay claim to a densely sedimented expertise in the 'normal.' But the work of cultural 'influence' that was the specialization of the Women's Court was also predicated on discursive figurations of her gender as an instrument for the gentle permeation of reformable 'deviants,' their opening to the 'healing, affirmative forces, and ... fine spiritual qualities of others' ('Straight Talk' 56) - figurations to which Murphy contributed as a writer of popular non-fiction, under the pen-name Janey Canuck. Before her appointment as magistrate, Janey Canuck was strictly a literary figure. Her pronouncements were confined to ethnographic descriptions of the heterogeneous field of others populating the Canadian West at the turn of the century. She was the narrator of three collections of such sketches, published between 1910 and 1914 in one of the short-lived golden ages of Canadian literary publishing: Janey Canuck in the West (1910), Open Trails (1912), and Seeds of Pine (1914). My project is not to blow the dust off these forgotten texts to put them forward as new candidates for inclusion in a Canadian canon. It is rather to ask how it

Emily Murphy and Race Making in the West 165 was that the authority to pronounce judgment upon conduct in the Women's Court, in effect to manage a clearing house for the unfit and unruly, could have been derived from a woman's literary practice. These texts were both the embodiments and the exponents of a bracing literature that promised to 'sway the souls of... citizens unto high endeavour' and to make readers feel as though they had been 'out in the ozone of the West,' as the cover of Seeds of Pine proclaimed. The prelude to Murphy's three best-selling texts on western Canadian life - the text in which she introduced the figure of Janey Canuck - was The Impressions ofjaney Canuck Abroad (1901), a diary of the year 1898-9, in which Murphy accompanied her husband, the Reverend Arthur Murphy, on a trip to England.13 The year is spent touring the philanthropist's market of degenerate poor and bearing witness to the encroachments of 'Romish ritualism' into the Church of England, as Janey Canuck lays wreaths in memory of her own 'good ancestors, who suffered and died for the sake of the Protestant religion, and the liberties of England' (Impressions 79). The Impressions contributes to the disqualification of the urban English emigrant that formed part of Canadian immigration policy between 1896 and 1905, when the privileged candidate for the settlement and cultivation of the West was the European peasant.14 As Murphy's collections of western vignettes would assert, however, this European peasant required a careful Canadianization at the hands of the Anglo-Protestant woman. Janey Canuck in the West promotes the Anglo-Protestant woman as the agent of this enculturation by transplanting a central figure in the discourse on foreign missions - the zenana-visitor who penetrated spaces of female seclusion beyond the reach of male missionaries — onto the Canadian West. Janey Canuck in the East and the West Romanism and Race Degeneration: The Impressions ofjaney Canuck Abroad The Impressions ofjaney Canuck Abroad aims to represent England through the eyes of a dominion daughter but, in a turn that becomes characteristic of all ofjaney Canuck's travel writing, inscribes most forcefully of all the 'temperament' of the narrator herself. The preface promises the reader 'little in the semblance of novelty ... except perhaps a different insight, for we all see through our own particular prejudices and temperament. We LOOK physically but SEE mentally' (n.p.). This mental seeing begins with a satirical representation of English passengers on the

166 Settler Feminism and Race Making

ship out from Montreal, a representation that allows Janey Canuck's 'Canadian bluntness' to be affirmed as a capacity for sharp retort and biting sarcasm, deployed in the deflation of the superior airs assumed by a English gentleman traveller (5). On the return trip to Canada a year later, the 'temperament' of the daughter of empire is figured in relation to the 'swarm from the European hive' in the steerage, as a pride in the 'better land of Canada' that allows these emigrants to escape 'fetid slums[,] rotting tenements [and] rural serfdom' (182). The Impressions of Janey Canuck Abroad thus dramatizes the transition from seeing England with a Canadian's eyes 'strung to higher lights' to seeing the future material of Canada with the eyes of a reformer, trained on the degenerate material of England (44), The Impressions divides Englishness between the two poles of underand over-civilization. If the Englishman is rich, Janey Canuck observes, he wears Balmorals and hunts tame deer, if poor, he wears hobnails and kicks his wife. It is sport anyway, for it causes suffering to others and amusement to himself. Nevertheless, you cannot but admire these strapping, hardy Englishmen. It is their grain of cruelty and lust of blood that has given them such wonderful stamina, virility, and the indomitable rugged energy, without which, they could never have attained the proud position of the World's Destiny Makers. A nation or people become ultra-delicate and refined consequently, being the losers in vigor of thought, force and brawn. (39)

The theme of aristocratic ultra-delicacy is given a distinctly sectarian flavour in these diary entries, for it is developed as Janey Canuck attends a series of sermons and revival meetings focused on the denunciation of 'Romish practices' and 'spiritual wickedness in high places' (81, 129). Running through her praise for the speeches of such reformers and preachers as John Watson, Dean Farrar, and W.T. Stead15 is an appreciation for language transformed into 'live matter,' the vehicle of a 'personal magnetism' (14). This communication of vitality is opposed to 'playing at religion' through 'tricks of scenic devotion' and a 'succession of tableaux and burlesques,' which she discovers in her infiltration of 'Ritualistic* churches, where the 'live' power of personality is replaced by a parade of costumes and poses: a 'person of ambiguous sex, dressed in a cassock, surplice and red girdle entered and lit the candles,' a 'magnificent individual with trimming of scarlet and lace, entered swinging a censer ... and lastly, a most ornate person with his hands clasped in

Emily Murphy and Race Making in the West 167

prayer and showing the whites of his eyes' (16, 15). In the course of The Impressions, Janey Canuck's sharp retorts to the condescension of an English gentleman on the passage to England thus turn into an 'unholy laughter' at 'Romish' spectacle (87), an Orange-coloured phonocentrism linking the 'fall' into empty signs with the process of race degeneration.16 Commenting on a High Church clergyman's ritual, she suggests that the 'gross atoms of ashes he held, from which the beautiful ethereal parts had disappeared leaving only ruin and death, graphically symbolized the spiritually oxidized religion he taught. It is a religion barren, and without life - a mere refuse' (87). 'Ritualism,' she concludes, 'is simply a recurrence of the lifeless Pharisaical religion of Judaism in the heart of the Church of England' (137). The criticism of High Church ritualism is connected to a parallel critique of antiquated gender proprieties in the old country. Just as Janey Canuck finds that the 'ritualistic' church allows 'no impudent commingling of males and females,' seating them in a manner that suggests that 'to overstep the line of demarcation would be too bold an act to even contemplate,' while sea bathing in Leigh she learns that male accompaniment to one's 'matudinal bath ... is not the rule - not even the exception in England. Such naughty, uncivilized doings are relegated to all the rest of the world' (15, 26). The accounts of her infiltrations into 'ritualistic' quarters permit the organic individuality of the daughter of empire to be filled out with the 'spirit' of militant Protestantism, circuitously linked to the struggle for cultural and political hegemony at home in the dominion. While Emily Murphy toured the churches of England, The Presbyterian Record described French-speaking Catholics in Canada as 'slaves to the Romish system,' a 'down-trodden race which groaned in the chains of Romanism' while the 'Protestants of Britain and of Canada ... delayed ... to break in upon this mediaeval darkness' (Amaron 7). French-speaking Catholics who argued for separate schools were constructed as enemies of the dominion, a '"subversive element" that owed its first allegiance not to the government of Canada but to a foreign ecclesiastical potentate' (Watt 48). The trope of enslavement that inscribes the degeneracy of England's ruling class, 'drunk with the dust of their idols,' in The Impressions, was thus also used to construct the objects of Protestant campaigns of evangelization in Canada in the 1880s and 1890s (Impressions 86-7). Janey Canuck's horror at ritualistic practices in the heart of England's national church also anticipates her later concern with another racial threat from within the boundaries of the Canadian nation, one that

168 Settler Feminism and Race Making

would partake of discursive connections between the 'internal enemy' and the paraphernalia of entrapment and disguise. In the 1910s, the devious 'Chinaman' lurking in 'heavily-curtained, evil smelling' interiors behind the front of a cafe or laundry, into which he had lured the unprotected white woman - that weak point in racial and national security - became a recurring figure in the popular Toronto weekly Jack Canuck, from which Murphy borrowed her pen name (Jack Canuck, 10 February 1912, qtd. Pon 93).17 He also became a central figure in Murphy's 1922 anti-narcotics polemic, The Black Candle, a text signed not with the maiden name connecting its author to the Canadian Orange Order, but with the more complexly layered authority of 'Emily F. Murphy, "Janey Canuck," Police Magistrate and Judge of the Juvenile Court, Edmonton, Alberta,' who concerns herself with the physiological, rather than spiritual, degeneration that she unveil as she infiltrates of the 'drug dens' of Vancouver's 'Shanghai Alley,' where she finds a systematic degradation of the 'basic material of the race' taking place (Black Candle 29-30). Madge Pon has observed the centrality of the figure of the screen in early-twentieth-century descriptions of dangerous 'Oriental quarters.' The screen serves as a metaphor for the false front presented by the 'bland smiling Oriental' who distracts the unsuspecting 'white' girl with 'Oriental treasures' while administering intoxicants that permit him to perform his 'evil deed' (qtd. Pon 94). Janey Canuck's description of 'Oriental quarters' in the heart of a Catholic church in London in The Impressions ofjaney Canuck Abroad suggests a precedent for this code of racial danger: 'Yesterday, I went to a Ritualistic Church and found myself in Oriental quarters. The church was dimly lighted by wax-tapers and colored lamps, which were suspended from the ceiling by chains. Curtains of scarlet plush were hung on rods and angled out from the walls as screens, against which were erected marble crucifixes. It is astonishing how prevalent scarlet is among the Ritualists' (31). It is interesting to compare this description with the standard description of a brothel in a white slavery narrative: 'The room opened to them was in the very back of the house, but when the maid ushered them in they noticed that it was handsomely furnished in mahogany, red oriental rugs, and red silk curtains. It was a large room, and yet with all the red trimmings and furnishings, it seemed stuffy' (Roe 16).18Just as the threats of the 'devious' Chinese launderer and the white slaver were focused through anxieties about the gullibility or social illiteracy of the unprotected white girl, the perceived danger of the spread of Catholi-

Emily Murphy and Race Making in the West 169 cism among new Canadians in the West was concentrated in the figure of the Catholic nun who 'disguised' herself as a teacher or nurse by removing the regalia of the cloister. In 1920, the Orange Sentinel-warned that the 'Roman Catholic Church is asking the women to do what the Roman priests have failed to do - hold the Roman Catholic immigrants ... The "Sisters of Service" are trained to practice deception. They are under the same vows as nuns, but they are sent to foreign districts as teachers, nurses, etc., without any distinctive garb ... [A]ny Roman Catholic nurse may be a disguised nun, interested more in the promotion of Romanism than in caring for her patients' (cit. Pennefather 125-6). The nun in disguise, like the 'bland, smiling Oriental' described in the pages of Jack Canuck, or the white slavery procuress in widow's weeds described in 'Canada's War on the White Slave Trade,' figured a racial threat in the form of a deceptive appearance. At the end of The Impressions ofjaney Canuck Abroad, returning to Canada with the 'swarm from the European hive,' Janey and the husband, whom she playfully calls 'the Padre,' pay a visit to the female passengers in the steerage. Already we can glimpse the developing inclination of a minister's wife for a very practical form of ministering that attends to the embodied soul. This form of ministering is established in a supplementary relation to the Padre's more distant approach.19 It turns on the 'presence'-effects displayed in the 'live' style of narration of Janey Canuck. If this narration cannot actually be addressed to the foreign 'hordes' (they cannot read the books that have been donated by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, Janey observes), it can at least be dramatized as an expertise appropriate to supervising and 'improving' them. In the following passage, then, Janey Canuck demonstrates the role she has discovered for herself during her year abroad: Here lay a dark-eyed woman of magnificent physique, her breasts fully exposed. Further on were decrepit old crones from Asia Minor. Their deeply-lined and repulsively ugly faces, and their skinny claws caused you to associate them with harpies. Poor souls! with only a limited dole of water, their dirt is not so much their fault as their misfortune. There were a number of English girls too, whose fresh complexions looked like nothing so much as a mixture of coffee and milk. Some of them were very ill, and as the Padre poured the oil of wine and sympathy into their bruised hearts, I fed them with oranges and apples for 1 have a clear, well-defined idea, that women are not all soul; that they have a way of hungering after bread, even before they hunger after righteousness. (185)

170 Settler Feminism and Race Making

When the triumphant 'Westward Ho!' of this final diary entry is carried into Janey Canuck in the West, as the title of its first chapter,20 and the return trip to the New World is extended to a trek into the Canadian West, Janey Canuck's travel writing becomes a form of exploration literature devoted to charting the dominion's human resources. What Janey Canuck carries home in 1899 is a 'live' style of narration suitable for the representation of a dominion, the setting for the revitalization of a race 'drunk with dust.' The West, the Future, and the 'Girl of the New Day'

In the theory of race degeneration, the theme of acclimation provided an explanation for the cause of racial decline in the movement of racial 'types' out of their natural geographical zones. White colonials in the southern hemisphere were believed to be at risk of a 'tropicalization' that would be signalled by intellectual decay, indolence, the loss of 'nerve tone,' changes in character and habits, a high mortality rate, and decreased fertility in future generations (Stepan). Already in 1851, the first Anglican bishop of the Red River Colony in the Canadian West remarked that the harsh northern climate promoted a laziness that 'cre[pt] over European minds after a long sojourn' (qtd. Owram 14-15). This view of the Canadian West as analogous to the tropics in terms of its effects on those who attempted settlement was countered by eastern Canadian expansionists who represented the region as fertile and habitable and used the figure of the unprotected and ill-treated native to support arguments for the moral imperative of western settlement. After 1870, when the territory called Rupert's Land was sold by the Hudson's Bay Company to the government of Canada, Bishop George Berkeley's famous pronouncement on the westward course of the British Empire came to refer more specifically to the Canadian West's status as the future of that empire, and, for Canadians, to the dominion's special place as an equal partner in the imperialist project. The West was represented to prospective emigrants as a biological paradise where unborn millions would thrive upon the grain that symbolized the 'character and fate of nations,' producing the 'highest type of manhood ... [Refinement, fortitude and enterprise' (qtd. Owram 112-13). Essential to this representation of the West as the vehicle for the revitalization of a dissipated British race was the idea that the fate of the dominion would rest upon the character of this 'Britain of the West,' a character that would display itself in a mission to protect and 'civilize' natives. As the West

Emily Murphy and Race Making in the West 171 started to appropriate the sense of mission that had been part of eastern-Canadian expansionism, laying claim to a heroic history of 'sturdy stand[s] for principle' and an advanced moral and social life, it also became the terrain for the improvement of British traditions and institutions (Owram 214). The Canadian West's heightened form of'civilization' would measure itself against those 'backward societies' in which women remained 'beasts of burden,' as well as against those decadent societies characterized by a femininity that had - in the words of the British obstetrician and sociologist Caleb Saleeby - overspecialized into a race of 'fertile fools or sterile wits' (Woman 85). The aberrant women to whom Saleeby referred were those who refused both motherhood and the professions of 'foster-motherhood,' in favour of employments that allowed them to withdraw their services from race making altogether (21 ).21 In a move reminiscent of Malthus's framing of the 'deeper seated causes' of social malaise, Saleeby calls for a focus on a 'real economy' concerned with 'first principles' - 'the making and preserving of life and the means of life ... the questions of the birth-rate and the wheat supply - the relations not between man and man, or class and class, or sex and sex, but mankind, living and dying and being born' (Methods 344-5). Although he denounces aberrant women, Saleeby assigns women in general a crucial role as the central form of racial capital, nature's 'organ of the future' (Woman 35). In the several decades before Saleeby's attempt to outline the principles of a 'eugenic feminism' in Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles (1911), many British feminists had drawn on theories of heredity and evolution for ways of speaking about female agency. As Lucy Bland has argued, feminists discovered in these new theories both an explanation for the origins of patriarchy and a prophetic guide to a post-patriarchal future that they would have a decisive role in bringing about. Some feminists used late-eighteenth-century biologist Jean Baptiste Lamarck's theory of acquired characteristics to suggest that the 'original sin' of male sexual incontinence had become implanted into men's very beings through heredity. It was the role of women to educate men in the 'natural' moral laws of cleanliness and self-restraint and to maintain a strict intolerance for the double standard of sexual morality. This would also require an education of female desire according to a 'natural' 'eugenic sense.' The 'subject position on offer' to women in the discourse of eugenics thus made women 'not simply the objects of eugenical direction, [but] also the subjects of eugenical didactics - the educators of

172 Settler Feminism and Race Making

other women and girls in their reproductive duties' (Bland 230). This was a subject position organized around a recasting of the feminist demand for self-ownership in terms of the world-historical responsibility to practise a care for the self as the 'supreme organ of the future.' Saleeby's emphasis on the importance of the fitness of women to the maintenance of empire is peculiarly suited to the dominions. In England, as Anna Davin has argued, the preoccupation was with sons fit enough to serve as the future colonizers and soldiers of empire, and widespread anxieties about ignorant and irresponsible mothers were produced as an extension of this concern with the production of a British military and administrative elite fit for the rule of the Crown colonies. Saleeby departs from the standard call for remedies to maternal ignorance with an emphasis on the education of a girl's desire- on teaching her to 'honour and care for herself accordin [g]' to her essence as the 'temple of the life of this world to come' (Methods 17). In this departure, he formulates the relationship between female agency, race regeneration, and empire that inflects the term 'daughter of empire' by articulating the telos of colonial self-rule with the realization of woman's 'essence' as the 'organ of the future.' The education of a girl's desire has repercussions reaching as far away as 'the nations to come in our Colonies,' for in the settler colony, the education and exercise of the 'racial instinct' will determine the difference between a 'bachelor generation' that would ultimately lose the colony to another race, and a thriving extension of the British population (Woman 270). Against the view of women as undifferentiated matter, as mere vessels and sucklers, therefore, Saleeby proclaims that '[t]here is no real reason to suppose that woman is less complex or less variable than man'; as a consequence, she is entitled to 'those conditions in which her particular characters, whatever they may be, shall find their most complete and fruitful development.' In short she has rights to liberty, happiness, and 'opportunities for the best development of self; whatever that self may be' (Woman 8990,9). Saleeby gives this validation of woman the authority of science by drawing proof from the theory of the sexually differentiated conservation of 'vital energy,' a theory that contended that the 'balance of debtor and creditor [was] the more favourable one' in the female (qtd. Saleeby 69). Since 'a higher proportion of the vital energy is expended upon or conserved for the future and therefore, necessarily, a smaller proportion for the purposes of the individual ... [the] enrichment and development of the individual life is best and most surely attained by

Emily Murphy and Race Making in the West 173

parenthood' in women (65-6). The individuality that Saleeby grants women thus distinguishes them from mere matter by opening up a space of consciousness and intention. As Strange notes in her history of the moral regulation of the early-twentieth-century working girl, what was new in the approach to the government of women in this period was the necessity to govern through their agency, to operate on them as subjects of choices and desires. Injunctions to play healthily and inducements to 'hygienic' desiring were crucial elements of a strategy designed to harness the freedom of the young working woman to social imperatives (206-8). Saleeby cites approvingly a letter written to the Times by an Englishwoman concerned with the scarcity of white women in western Canada. The consequences of a continued shortage of white women, Sophie Bevan reports upon her return from a tour through North America, are indicated south of the Canadian border, in the 'appalling number of half-castes, a blot on the civilization of the States, but a blot for which Europeans are responsible' (Woman 269). Bevan urges women to take up their 'vocation' in Canada, for 'the absence of white women is answerable for the worst type of population': 'unless we can induce the right sort of British women to emigrate we shall not have the Colonies peopled with our own race or speaking our own mother tongue' (269). Saleeby's citation of this 'admirable letter in which a finger is put upon the heart of the question' allows him to accommodate feminist demands for participation in the public sphere through an acknowledgment of the originality and indispensability of feminine expertise (Bevan's insight into a question of population) even as it permits him to naturalize the relation of this expertise to its subject matter. The letter installs women at both ends of interventions in the name of the 'real economy.' Thus, when Saleeby comments in his appreciative gloss that '[bjefore nations can be founded the cooperation of women is indispensable,' 'cooperation' slides between the contribution of feminine expertise in policy questions of 'vital imports and exports' and the sort of 'cooperation' that Bevan recommends to other women - that they should lend their 'vital energy' to the regeneration of the race through breeding (270,271). This mapping of female potential onto the West-as-future also informs a guidebook for young Canadian women written by the principal of Havergal College in Toronto in 1919. The Canadian West is no place for the pampered 'Lyclia languish of yesterday,' Ellen Knox counsels her young readers; it is, rather, for the girl who 'evolves schemes

174 Settler Feminism and Race Making

faster than she can digest them' (20). Such a 'girl of the new day' is conscious of her difference from the foreign 'nervous girl,' short on foresight, self-control, and self-reliance: You of all women in the world ought to have this inborn clean power, for at the very time when Jane Austen's heroines were fainting, and Coleridge was saying that the greatest charm of women lay in their being 'characterless,'22 your Canadian ancestors were as keen-witted and resourceful as the day, spinning their own garments, grinding their own corn, carrying it to the mill, and managing ably from morning till night. You have never been shut up like an English girl in a nursery, but have shared your father's and mother's thoughts and been in the family counsels ever since you can remember. (186-7)

Knox underlines the special mission of women in the West by offering tales of bachelors degenerating for want of a proper social life. The project of 'turning some lonely man's shack into a comfortable home' by replacing the First Nations or Metis woman married 'as a simple expedient for obtaining a housekeeper' was not to be merely one of homemaking. It was a peculiarly social mission, requiring 'gentle women who are capable of rough, disagreeable work, but who possess social instincts, cultured minds and common sense.' The very presence of such women in the West 'helps to bring cleanliness and order and sobriety into a community' (Knox 205, 209) .2S Radiating influence, the daughter of empire does not stop at 'turn [ing] the shack into a home, [but] draws together isolated individuals and families, and makes of them a society' (209). By 1929, when a group of Albertan women led by an exemplary 'girl of the new day' won 'person' status for Canadian women, such a victory could thus be represented as a sign of the West's departure, in advance of the rest of the world, from 'days more barbarous' ('Women Are "Persons'" 1). Prophylactic Literature

In order to establish the sense in which, for Emily Murphy, fiction could be built for moral pedagogy, I want to consider briefly her foray into the Alberta Provincial Legislature's school library book supply centre on behalf of Canada Monthly magazine in 1916. In the article 'The School Library in Alberta,' Murphy frames her inspection of the school libraries' equipment for inculcating the 'great Anglo-Saxon ideal' of self-governance as a response to the following problem:

Emily Murphy and Race Making in the West

175

For several years now, in this right pleasant province of Alberta, we have been anxious because of the incoming hordes of foreigners who have been trekking into this land in long and lustful lines. As we stare at them with wonder-wide eyes and consider the environment from which they came, their dull unawakened minds and their ingrained prejudices, our hearts fail us with fear, for the task of welding this rude conglomerate mass into a coherent and definite whole seems a well-nigh titanic [one]. To neglect these people is to do so at our peril. (17)

What school libraries should have to do with these 'long and lustful lines' had already been established by a general linking of the production of a national literature with the goals of racial and political security. A 1925 Calgary Herald article was not remarkable for concluding its denunciation of Canada's sad lack of interest in its own authors with the cry 'Let Us Wake Up!' and a description of the 'foreign-born in the cities of this province ... carrying on regular sessions for the teaching of their young along lines which are very far removed from the ideals fostered by true Canadianism.'24 With this image in mind the writer of this article privileges the production of a national literature over the writing of laws as the best safeguard against 'the disintegration of our national life.' In Murphy's article on the first rural library system in Canadian public schools - for which system's emphasis on fiction she credits her own suggestion, injaney Canuck in the West- the effectivity of well-executed laws is similarly compared with the softer approach of careful instruction. Murphy decides in favour of the latter for, 'in the end, Rousseau's dictum holds good that those people are best governed who are least governed. The inculcating of the great Anglo-Saxon ideal must, therefore, be a long and painful process ... line upon line, precept upon precept' ('The School' 17). The way of 'least governance' consists in reaching the 'hordes' through the literary education of their children, for 'if the child be deeply interested he or she has the right to take the volume home to display the picture there [and] [i]t is by these means that a long and steady course of instruction is brought into numerous homes that must otherwise have remained in apathy and ignorance' (18). As Jacques Donzelot has argued, the child had by this time become a privileged object of intervention as the 'social' disciplines expanded their specializations from abnormal individuals to the self in its developing stages. A disciplinary jostling for a position from which to stake an 'expert' claim on the entire social body produced a 'redistribution in the market of maladjustment' in which the child was grasped as the root of

176 Settler Feminism and Race Making

all abnormalities and pathologies (129-31, 136). In the space of the dominion, the observation of symptoms in the child was also a quick route to the diagnosis of insufficiencies and anomalies in the racially 'inferior' immigrant family. Such family deficiencies are presumed in Murphy's article, and the path to their correction begins with the child who, as the new pedagogical theory proclaimed, 'appear[s] to understand ... far better than older people' the pedagogical value of play (qtd. I. Hunter 65). Literature, then, becomes the privileged support of a flow of authority in which the beneficiary of an expert parenting at school carries this 'social' work home, as a little ambassador of the 'great AngloSaxon ideal.' 'As the child learns the lesson in the school,' Murphy writes, 'he teaches it to his parents in the home and so reverses the processes of instruction, which usually prevails in the average English-speaking home' ('School' 17). What is crucial about this pedagogical scene is the way in which the book itself is bypassed through the simplicity of live, 'humanizing' paraphrase. Children carry home the 'unconquerable might and masterhood of the British Empire' as little dramatists. Having 'grasp[ed] the vital side of an historical episode [they] recreat[e] it as biography in the minds of [their] auditors' (Murphy, 'School' 18). Murphy links this translation into biography with the 'new pedagogic method,' according to which it is 'now the aim of every teacher ... to humanize the incidents,' but in this article it is 'foreign' parents who benefit from the 'vital' pedagogy of their Canadianized child (19, 18; my emphasis). This 'humanizing' pedagogy is also at work in Murphy's Janey Canuck sketches, which similarly attempt to evacuate the book from the scene and to engage the reader by means of 'humanized' material and the charming presence of the narrator. One English reviewer of Janey Canuck in the West marvelled that the text had achieved the 'apparently impossible,' for it 'is the kind of book that makes one exclaim: "Yes, that is the life; but how on earth did she get it down on white paper?"'25 As narrator, Janey Canuck meets the requirements of the English teacher 'equipped with an eye and a voice capable of personifying the whole moralizing force of "great literature" in the classroom' (Hunter 126). Her productions belong to that strangely anti-literary type of literature - 'good reading material' - that would almost rather be social work. In this sense, the Janey Canuck texts anticipate their writer's move onto the magistrate's bench, from which she will later proudly proclaim that she has 'no time for the reading of romance, or the seeing of plays,' having found substitutes in the 'thrill of the drama in watching ... struggles for betterment [and] the happy

Emily Murphy and Race Making in the West

177

ending of a tragic episode' ('Woman's Court' 27). In a 1924 article entitled 'Wholesome Writings,'Janey Canuck in the West is included among a number of texts by Canadian women writers said to demonstrate 'how sound and simple, wholesome and optimistic Canadian life is at its core.'21' Several years later - in an article in which the chief librarian of Toronto public libraries is interviewed for his response to the question are women writers more loyal to Canada than men? - Janey Canuck is included in a group of women writers whose texts are singled out for their peculiarly strong 'human appeal.' According to this article, Janey Canuck emerges as the best example of the 'thorough-going Western woman [who] sta[ys] home, to write of Canada for Canadians,' instead of seeking fame abroad.2 Perhaps, the librarian muses, 'it is the spirit of Motherhood which makes her think of the Canadian reading public as her child, crying: "Tell me a story!"' Indeed, it was in a very real sense Janey Canuck and not Emily Murphy who was appointed as magistrate of the new Women's Court in 1916, and whose superintending eye those passing through the court 'discovered' as their own conscience, when they wrote letters to 'Mother Murphy' from the reformatory reporting on their progress and, after their release, strove to emulate her by reporting suspicious and endangered individuals in the neighbourhood. Emily Murphy had no formal legal training before her appointment to the magistrate's bench. But her feisty and progressive female narrator personified the agency of an apparatus for administering the formation and correction of cultural attributes in an increasingly heterogeneous West. The irony is that Janey Canuck loaned herself to this apparatus of 'person' making, as its human face, before she had succeeded in winning recognition of Canadian women as 'persons.' The long struggle against the arbitrary authority that withheld this recognition was staged from within an apparatus that had already appropriated the struggle. While Janey Canuck in the West partakes of the documentary quality of early Canadian writing, blending the genres of diary, field notes, and guidebook, it replaces what Germaine Warkentin has described as the rigorously impersonal, 'ragged, stumbling' prose of an earlier, masculine literature of exploration (xix) with an intimate second-person address, a flirtatious solicitation to join in witty repartee and rousing apostrophe. A best-selling text, it was praised for its 'admirable discursiveness' and 'intense sympathy with the varied people it describes'; for a '(r)esourceful and versatile, observing and shrewd, philosophical and gay' brand of optimism 'that suits the newer conditions.'28 Reviewers

178 Settler Feminism and Race Making

evaluated not the language of the text but something like its temperament, as if to suggest that the subject of the book was not so much life in the West as Janey Canuck herself, 'the embodiment of the very best spirit of Canadian life.'29 Indeed, this 'subject' would constitute the formula for Murphy's following two works, which continued to be read for what they modelled and praised for their healthful effects. Struggling to situate Seeds of Pine generically, a Hodder and Stoughton publicist would settle with assigning the text a 'foremost' place 'in the files of literature of "open spaces" with the fine nobility of character evolved therein': 'We cannot describe Seeds of Pine as a novel. It has no regular plot line, although it has a life line, and a head line, and a heart line. It is - and this places it exactly - a very human document dealing in a fascinating way with the vital interests of existence in West-Canadian life, as pictured here, in full and bounding vigour.'30 If 'human document' falls short of placing Janey Canuck's narration 'exactly' within a literary genre, it nevertheless points to the text's paradoxical striving for the effects of presence through a relentless practice of citation. Janey Canuck in the West weaves into its note taking a dense web of epigrams and turns of phrase drawn from a literary and philosophical repertoire stretching from Saint Jerome to Rudyard Kipling. This citational enthusiasm develops Janey's presence as an urbane wit and repository of 'civilization': a 'fund of epigrams of which no one need be ashamed,' representing a 'mind well-stored with the thoughts of master pen-men.'31 This 'fund of epigrams' was developed when, at the suggestion of her husband, Murphy began to gather and record citations in a 400-page ledger book that would serve as a reference for Arthur Murphy's sermon writing. Her responsibility was to supply the 'similes for salvation, colourful, dramatic, vividly interesting' that would eventually bring Arthur Murphy local fame as a compelling preacher (Sanders 35). Transferred to her own writing, the practice argued for her texts' instrumental value as sources of useful thoughts. However, this citational density also risked relegating Janey Canuck's enunciating situation to the background. The effects of immediacy in her narration-onhorseback were important, for Murphy's texts were forced to negotiate with their contradictory status as printed books urging readers to get out into the brisk, chill air. They praised the type of the vigorous woodcutter who 'drinks life from the pines and highly ozonised atmosphere' against the 'aesthetic feeblin [g] of the pictorial stamp' by means of the resolutely sedentary, indoor practices of reading and writing (Janey 90,

Emily Murphy and Race Making in the West

179

72). In order to press the borrowed phrases into serving the characterization of Janey Canuck herself, Murphy has her narrator draw on her repertoire of citations with a cavalier disregard for exactitude in the naming of sources. She pulls up quotations by means of such phrases as 'someone, I cannot remember who, has opined ...' and 'as some old poet once said ...' This bookless citation puts Janey forward as a 'wonderful personality ... radiat[ing] from her written pages and communicat[ing] itself to the reader' and also serves as a defence against charges of overcivilization.32 Soon after crossing from Ontario into Manitoba in Janey Canuck in the West, Janey observes, 'I find almost as much joy in losing my knowledge as I did in acquiring it. The 'ologies and 'osophies, the big causes, cultures, and cants are not so sweet to my taste as "The lore o' men that ha' dwelt with men, / In new and naked lands'" - a telling recourse to unattributed quotation in the very attempt to emphasize the unmediated quality of experience in the West (27).33 It is as if the 'vital' energy of the practice is being displayed over and above the denotative value of the quotation itself. Indeed, this 'citing personality' - an energetic relayer of useful language - is what Janey Canuck becomes after her appointment as magistrate, and not just through the contraction of the western vignettes into the daily supply of mottoes for the Edmonton Bulletin, but in Murphy's discourse from the bench, which would continue to administer a form of proverbial wisdom, advice, and admonishments in borrowed phrases.34 Enculturating expertise is demonstrated in Janey Canuck in the West in an amateur ethnographer's organization of individual specimens into classes and types. The narration assigns this human material to two evolutionary tenses, both outside of the intimate deixis of a repartee with the reader interpellated as 'you.' There is, first, the 'taxidermic time' of the native, whom we encounter as the representative of an already vanished race.35 'Regarding his future, we may give ourselves little uneasiness. A few years hence there will be no Indians. They will exist for posterity only as waxwork figures and in a few scant pages of history. However brave and game they may be, there is nothing for them in the end but death' (77). First Nations are here the eminently ethnographiable objects of a natural history, classified alongside the overcivilized European 'races' 'who have been polished till all the fibre is rubbed away' (90); they anticipate the hopeless specimens whom, years later, Murphy will commit to the asylum. Their children, however, fall within a temporal zone reserved for those human resources that seem more promising

180 Settler Feminism and Race Making

as citizen material. In this capacity, they enter into the set of exchanges between the vulnerable and dangerous female requiring socialization, the primitive child of the new pedagogy, and the educatable 'foreigner.' Thus, just as Saleeby prescribes recreational games and exercises for the girl lacking self-control, in order to help her 'learn to combine, to be unselfish, to avoid petty deceits' (Woman 114), Janey Canuck suggests that it should be possible to foster an ideal of sportsmanship in First Nations children by means of which they could be trained to face settlers 'in the sterner affairs of life' with the equanimity of players on the field (Janey \yj). Doukhobor settlers, however, are the pre-eminent residents of the future perfect tense of Canadianization, on the verge of the historifiable, and it is in relation to them that Janey demonstrates the 'forgiving smile over ethical idiosyncrasies' remarked upon by one of her reviewers.36 Defending the Doukhobors against the criticisms of their 'misinformed detractors,' Janey Canuck locates in them the raw material of the 'kindly' magistrate. 'The children are bright, receptive, and keen for work, and will be singing The Maple Leaf before another decade ... I am convinced that these people from the shores of the Black Sea will make excellent citizens. They do not steal - or very seldom - fight, drink intoxicants, smoke, or swear. Their lives are saturated with ideas of thrift and small economies' (47). Explaining the Doukhobor practices of communal farming, vegetarianism, and teenage marriage as a matter of 'geography, of religion, of circumstances' destined to be swept away by the force of progress, Janey Canuck demonstrates the brand of judicious 'tolerance' required by a professional diffuser of norms, who will similarly insist that the apparently outcast and irretrievable girl is merely ignorant (55). Writing of the work of the Women's Court in 1920 for Maclean's magazine, Murphy will propose 'a wider tolerance and a fuller knowledge of human nature' as the essential qualifications of the magistrate: 'With one's sense of decency outraged, and with anger uppermost in one's mind, it isn't easy to be tolerant with the fool, the criminal, the ingrate: it isn't easy to divine the human quality behind the dull or crafty faces of the neglected and degenerate, and yet, the most astonishing thing about these unfortunate persons is the ease with which they yield themselves to healing, affirming forces, and how they absorb the fine spiritual qualities of others ('Straight' 56). Murphy's Maclean's article offers a new vision of the magistrate's role, derived from her experience in the Women's Court but generalizable to all police courts and, even further, to a strategy for the protection of the

Emily Murphy and Race Making in the West

181

nation's strength. This generalizability is suggested in Murphy's approving citation of a male magistrate's confession of his reliance upon 'intuitive feeling' ('[s]poken like a woman,' she imagines as the response of 'certain contemptuous critics') and in her article's movement from the delineation of the special circumstances of the criminal 'Eve' to the case of the 'foreigner.' The move from the vulnerable and dangerous white girl to the 'New Canadian' reverses the substitution that actually permitted Janey Canuck's move to the magistrate's bench. In the ethnographic sketches, the place of the criminal 'Eve' is occupied by the 'strangers' and 'aliens' whom Janey Canuck exhorts her readers to regard as valuable raw material to be 'weld[ed] [into] a seemly and coherent whole'; to turn 'these husky peoples' away, she insists in Seeds of Pine, would be 'as foolish as the farmer who would fear a large yield of wheat lest he could not thresh it, or a banker who dreaded an inrush of gold less he could not count it' (71-2). In all of her journalistic writing on the Women's Court, Murphy attributes that court's elaboration of new approaches to punishment the substitution of the armchair for the prisoner's dock, of the female magistrate and other women willing to play 'role of the bigger sister,' 'ready to stand by the girl and let her save herself,' for the impatient prosecutor and the audience of'blackguardly persons ... responsible for the white slave traffic' ('Woman's' 27) - to the fact that 'no ordinarily decent woman could sit, day after day, coldly passing judgment upon persons of her own sex without attempting to sting them awake.'37 The female magistrate's special knowledge of a woman's difficulties of social reinstatement lead her to a different application of punishment, one requiring a 'patient and intensive study of the woman's history ... in order to rehabilitate her in the light of her disabilities, capabilities and adaptabilities.' w In the absence of 'manuals for magistrates other than those dealing with matters of law and procedure,' as well as 'instruction in psychology and the sociology of criminals, [and] clinical studies in jails, asylums, and hospitals,' this intimate feminine knowledge of character must stand in ('Straight' 56). The missing magistrate's manual, which would treat matters 'other than ... law and procedure' in Murphy's case, was found in the amateur ethnography of Janey Canuck, ethnography that Murphy continued to produce in a slightly different form in the records of her judgments from the bench. In June 1916, shortly after her appointment, Murphy wrote to the Alberta deputy general requesting the reading materials necessary to prepare for her new work as magistrate. The reply she received was that

182 Settler Feminism and Race Making she would be supplied with nothing but the Criminal Code.39 Murphy would supplement the code by keeping personal police magistrate's notebooks. These notebooks were the best approximation of the sort of manual that would have supplied the clinical knowledge required by the female police magistrate. Murphy's notebooks combine definitions of terms such as 'prostitution,' 'public place,' and 'ignorance' - copied out from various legal guides - with notes from the cases that came before her court. In the alphabetically thumb-indexed first half of the notebook, she entered the corresponding page numbers of the legal definitions and case notes in the second half. The notebooks thus inscribe the narratives and testimonies of 'abnormal' and unruly settlers in an ad hoc reference text for the conduct of conduct. The case notes include not just Murphy's adjudications and their entailments - 'Reported to Dept. Neglected children,' 'Sent to Welfare Board' - but also the first-person speech of complainants and accused, interspersed with indirect discourse, evaluative commentary, and parenthetical observations - 'Impudent manner,' 'Have not been taught to speak English,' 'seems to be a respectable woman.'40 The Zenana in Canada: Janey Canuck in the West If the present-tense imagined conversation with the reader in Janey Canuck in the West is set off from the taxidermic and future perfect tenses, the boundaries of this I/you intimacy are also established through the exclusion of that vaguely ridiculous, slightly intimidating relic of outmoded eastern Canadian patriarchy, that butt of jokes between Janey and the reader, the Padre. The Padre's absence or distance from this space of intimacy is continuously marked in a way that is crucial to the establishment of Janey's identity as the determinedly social half of the team, who ventures conversation with strangers on the passage to England while the Padre 'scowl [s] at [her] as his natural enemy' and protects himself from 'troublesome intrusion' by thinking '"long thoughts" on sermons and things' (Impressions 3), or as the irrepressibly independent, westward-travelling woman who shocks her fellow train passengers by responding to their inquiries as to her marital status with the reply, 'Oh yes! I have a husband up here, somewhere - a big, fair man - I wonder if you have seen him' (Seeds 8). The speech of this missing person never accedes to direct representation, and his very appellation gently undercuts the status of a church 'father,' associating it with a generalized paternalism that serves as the screen for Janey's playful disobedience.

Emily Murphy and Race Making in the West

183

M'sieur Squirrel is a curious combination of this antithesis in life - the idler and the man of action. The Padre flatly contradicts me. He declares M'sieur to be a carpenter, for does he not carry a chisel in his mouth? 1 will not be thus contradicted, and so I declare the squirrel was originally a preacher, and I won't give my reasons for the statement. The years have taught me how not to pique the Padre. They have also taught me how best to. (Janey Canuck 1910 102-3) Piquing the Padre establishes a triangulated structure that is essential to the construction of the space Janey shares with the reader, a space encoded with a sneaky, conspiratorial disobedience in relation to a father figure. The distinction between the remote Padre and the thoroughly social Janey established in The Impressions of Janey Canuck Abroad is further developed in Janey Canuck in the West as the narrator's 'unholy laughter' is turned towards an 'irresistible feeling of the ludicrous' a little closer to home than the ostentatious authority of the High Church clergymen in England. However, the space of daughterly disobedience also infantili/es that laughter, in such a way as to preserve an affectionate relation to the Padre, who is excluded without ever being erased. When separation of the narration's intimate deixis from an othered, 'outside' maleness is not mediated by the trope of a father-daughter relation, the division is much sharper. At one point Janey is the only woman on a train of engineers and other workmen, heading towards the termination of a newly laid track. When 'one rueful rascal' delivers a 'bitter monologue' on the subject of suffragists, she refuses to be engaged and reserves her reply for the reader, to whom she confesses her identification with one of the men's caged pets, on the basis of its captive condition (Janey Canuck 37-9). The exclusion of the Padre from the space of intimacy with the reader is precisely what grants Janey access to the inner reaches of communities of others, and permits her to move into the homes of an infinitely expandable congregation, in order to see to the development of sound habits through a forceful exemplarity. The staging of this logic in Janey Canuck in the West permits the model of zenana work that was constructed in the campaigns of organizations such as the Women's Foreign Missionary Society (WFMS) between the 1870s and the 1910s to be transplanted to the Canadian West. As Ruth Compton Brouwer has argued, although the majority of women in central India did not live in strict seclusion, the discursive construction of the zenana by organizations such as the WFMS provided the strongest argument for the single woman's presence in the

184 Settler Feminism and Race Making

foreign mission field (101). Zenana work is described in an 1885 issue of Canada Presbyterian by Dr Margaret Patterson, a medical missionary to India, in terms of the special pedagogical task of bringing 'useful knowledge, [and] the teaching of the New Testament' to the sequestered and 'self-immolating' Eastern woman (761). Patterson would later become the magistrate of Toronto's Women's Court, four years after Murphy's appointment in Edmonton. The 'pioneer work' of removing 'prejudices and false notions' in Eastern women (Patterson 761) would thus come to be institutionalized in 'home missions' concerned with the reclamation and conservation of Canadian women.41 In chapter 9 ofjaney Canuck in the West, 'With the Doukhobors,'Janey and the Padre visit the Manitoba village of Vosnesenia. When the Padre leaves her alone for a moment, Janey is immediately 'surrounded by men, women and children, and borne triumphantly indoors, all the while feeling that I was being examined with a directness that was disconcerting' (40). 'They took off my headgear, fur coat, and gold-jacket, and finally tackled my footgear. Then they all laughed at the great heap of dry-goods I had shed. My hatpins afforded them especial amusement. They pushed them in and out of my cap many times' (40-1). This moment of anthropological humour, centred on the innocent wonder of the 'primitive,' also figures the porous boundaries characterizing the relation between Janey Canuck and the objects of her expertise. The Doukhobor woman is, according to Janey, not essentially different but only a little further back along a feminist scale of progress - 'a housewife only ... not expected, as our women are, to be a combination of Mary, Martha, Magdalen, Bridget, and the Queen of Sheba' (57). The 'tolerant' understanding of difference in terms of maturational lag puts the Doukhobor woman in the position of a female child. It also makes her the beneficiary of an influence exerted in women-only space, where Janey can get up close by means of a naturalized, non-verbal language of feminine intimacy. The narrator's relationship with these eastern European peasant women in Janey Canuck in the West will turn out to be the technique of Canada's first women police 'matrons,' who, instead of being granted powers to arrest, were invited to make use of their gendered powers of moral suasion and their special abilities to access sensitive spaces in which unruly women were most in need of supervision (Strange 150). In the following scene of cross-cultural undressing, the technique of the zenana-missionary, the 'English lady [who] ... comes down from the height of nineteen hundred years of Christian culture and becomes, as

Emily Murphy and Race Making in the West 185 far as she can, a Hindoo woman' in order to 'gain influence to break down and build up' (Patterson 761), is figured as a technique appropriate to home missions. 'Influence' is transmitted in an exchange between a tolerant Canadian mother and Doukhobor women positioned as curious children. While I was undressing, the women returned and examined my clothing with apparent interest. My gold-skirt, with brilliant plaid lining, and my underskirts were handed round, rubbed between the fingers and commented upon. They seemed much pleased with the ribbons running through my underwear, but were shocked and, at the same instant, amused by my corsets. They nudged each other, grinned, and shrugged their shoulders. These corsets were of the long-hipped style, had two pairs of yellow suspenders, and carried a patent busk-protector. Then they showed me what they wore. Taking all things into consideration, I wouldn't exchange. (43-4) Forbearance and openness are rewarded with access to the other, as barriers to the absorption of influence are lifted. The pedagogical value of such an embodiment of 'open' authority was also imagined by David Stow, the Victorian educational reformer and author of The Training System, the Moral Training School, and the Normal Seminary (1850), who recommended to those 'desirous of gaining the confidence of ... children' a 'bending to, and occasionally engaging in, their plays and amusements' (qtd. I. Hunter 126). But what is striking about Murphy's figuration of tolerance is its embodiment in insistently feminine terms, as opening and permeability. Added to the childlike, tactile play of the initial encounter is an increasingly detailed description of feminine attire, as the fingers venture further and further underneath. The delight is over women's things, and the description of Janey's underwear culminates with a statement interpellating the reader as a feminine like, familiar with the intricacies of corset styles and the latest innovations in busk design - and secure enough in her own corsets, suspenders, and busks to identify with the humorous understatement in the final line. The space of intimacy injaney Canuck in the West, predicated upon the exclusion of the Padre and a porosity favourable to a 'yielding' to 'fine spiritual qualities,' assumes a concrete form in Murphy's courtroom. Under a photograph of the Women's Court captioned 'A fully organized Court, with no man present,' a short notice in the 1927 Annual Report of the Alberta Department of Dependent and Delinquent Chil-

186 Settler Feminism and Race Making dren reads: '[Women commissioners] naturally take a greater interest in the members of their own sex who get into difficulty, and are able to exercise a motherly influence over them. Not infrequently they gain the confidence of the girl as a male commissioner could not hope to do. In this way they glean from them their full life history and are able to make a much more satisfactory adjustment of the difficulty than would otherwise be possible.'42 If the transplanted zenana of Janey Canuck in the West demonstrates a specialized ability to access, the technique for the achievement of 'satisfactory adjustments]' within the object of race making is demonstrated more precisely in the representation of Janey's relationship with her 'greasy, but amiable' cook, Anna. This representation stresses the technique of exemplarity that was also urged by such contemporaneous texts as Some Practical Suggestions on the Conduct of a Rescue Home (1903), written by an American minister's wife who had a degree in medicine. The manual suggests that the female inmates of the rescue home should be forced to break all outside ties in the interest of discovering 'resources within themselves.' These 'inner resources' turn out to be the attributes and demeanour modelled by the rescue-home matron, who operationalizes norms of character and conduct through a non-coercive form of relationship in which the girls are encouraged to evaluate themselves according to norms whose very inaccessibility establishes a relation of constant emulation. " The rescue-home matron displays herself as an example in everything from taste for plain dress and wholesome conversation to a spirit of self-sacrifice. Any progress in character reformation is defined in terms of resemblance to the matron, whose 'wise discernment of character coupled with Christ-like patience and sympathetic firmness' substitute for more specific qualifications (Barrett 55). The matron's self-regulation as an honest, prudent, 'saving' personality overlaps with her supervisory relation to each girl, who internalizes these norms of conduct through the desire to be like the matron. The reward for successful emulation is admittance to an 'Honor Class' distinguished by the privilege of being 'looked upon [in turn] as one worthy of imitation' (53, 35). All charges are tutored in self-respect by being addressed in the language of fair exchange: just as they repay the home in the present 'by showing a willing spirit,' in the future, each one 'will have an opportunity when she has been established in right paths to repay to the Home all that it has done for her, and not only that, ... she will be able to do for others who may need a home' (17-18). Janey Canuck's relationship with her cook in Janey Canuck in the West

Emily Murphy and Race Making in the West

187

establishes the way in which the correctional work of the rescue home can be conducted through a textual mediation of exemplarity. 'Just now I am struggling womanfully with an ignorant, wasteful, dish-breaking Swede/ chapter 34 begins. The point of this chapter will be not so much to provide a vivid picture of the cook herself as to sketch Janey's 'womanfully' 'struggling' with her. It concludes with the following anecdote: Anna frequently sits her[self] down in a heap of grief and dirty dishes to write me explanatory notes. She would have me understand that she is not 'mad' at me - not a bit of it. It is her soul that concerns her. She has committed the unpardonable sin, and is quite sure she is lost. Although I have questioned her closely, she is not quite clear as to what the sin is, but she heard a good deal about such a sin at some meetings she has been attending. She has been going to church six times a week. I cut off three meetings and have substituted a course of modern fiction - largely humorous. The results are clearly salutary, but in certain church circles it is whispered that I am a monster of wickedness and tyranny. (183—4)

In this substitution of recreational reading for severe self-scrutiny, Janey prescribes her own influence as a remedy, the 'modernity' of which is brandished with relish as she imagines her designation by the whispering church circles as another unpardonable sinner. What the sketch stresses is the potential effectivity of readerly identification as a 'soft' means of enculturation. The dose of Janey Canuck as a sympathetic and accessible figure of authority and the course of 'largely humorous' fiction are both positioned outside of the frowning and punitive church circles. Their 'salutary' effects are tracked as Anna passes from epistolary confession to reading under Janey's supervision. In the curriculum for the normalization of the 'greasy, but amiable' Swede, the relationship between the confessing letter-writer and the morally authoritative addressee of her 'explanatory notes' progresses to the auto-regulation of reading. In order to fit herself for the enjoyment of humorous modern fiction, Anna must have internalized Janey Canuck's image as her own conscience. The condition for the operation of recreational reading as correction is her ability to recognize herself as the addressee, the normal person who shares the humour of the narrator. Since the 'salutary' effects of such reading material are being represented here, in a book of humorous sketches, it is safe to say that the mature Anna will have successfully internalized as her own moral conscience the Janey

188 Settler Feminism and Race Making

Canuck who narrates this anecdote for the enjoyment of the reader of Janey Canuck in the West. The sketch thus figures the condensation of a relationship with a 'kindly' supervisor into the activity of reading, showing how recreation might be enlisted within a preventative strategy of character reformation. When the exemplary character of Janey Canuck depicted in Murphy's ethnographic sketches was transplanted to the Women's Court, literary character was equipped with an institutional function. If readers of Murphy's fiction encountered the effects of presence in the 'live' narration of Janey Canuck, those passing through her courtroom encountered a presence that could be carried away as the supervisor of a practice of epistolary correction. 'My dear friend Mrs. Murphy,' one young woman would write from a Fort Saskatchewan jail, 'will now write you a few lines to let you know I am being a good little girl.'44 Murphy's personal papers and court records suggest that the trading of places, through which Anna progresses from the one addressing Janey as 'you' to the one recognizing herself as the 'you' of Janey's discourse, actually functioned as a curriculum of moral correction. The archives contain letters from women whom Murphy had convicted of such failures of self-government as vagrancy and sexual immorality, who offer her evidence of their successful reformation by reporting on vulnerable and dangerous girls and suspicious 'foreigners.' To a letter recommending that she have a country girl who had fallen into bad company in Edmonton arrested in order to 'give her a scare of her life' and 'save her from a life of shame,' Murphy has clipped the note, 'From a woman I had sent to jail for corrupting a juvenile ... [R]eformed and became quite a nice woman.'45 Voluntary support for race making was proof that such charges had come under the 'influence' of Janey Canuck to the extent that they could replicate her function in the open sphere, beyond the characterological laboratories of the Women's Court and the reformatory. Saving Girls The Girl Who Reappeared

The moral reformation of Janey Canuck's Swedish-Canadian servant turns on the replacement of evangelical church meetings with a course of 'modern fiction.' This substitution of enlightenment for condemnation was precisely what distinguished the feminist approach to white slavery from that of evangelical organizations that focused on the 'sin and

Emily Murphy and Race Making in the West 189 depravity of the human heart' (Valverde, Age99). The feminist approach focused, rather, on the problem of the double standard of morals and pointed to the re-education of men and the preventative training of women as solutions. It promoted the problem of the fallen girl's asociality - her disappearance to a place beyond the reach of normalization - as the primary cause of white slavery. In this section, I turn to a white slavery narrative concerned to demonstrate the great potential of the fallen girl given the chance to make a social reappearance. Published in 1914, four years after Janey Canuck in the West and two years before the creation of the Edmonton Women's Court, The Girl Who Disappeared: A While Slave positions maternal authority as the culmination of a process of rehabilitation, figuring the replication of the mission to save girls in the saved girl, which will also be the project of Murphy's Women's Court. Written by the Clifford Roe, who was president of the American Bureau of Moral Education and a Chicago prosecutor devoted to the 'suppression and prevention of commercialized vice through the promotion of knowledge of the social evil, its effects and results' (The Girl 10), this narrative performs a renunciation of sensationalism and melodrama in favour of the discourse of social science. Besides the colonial responsibility for race regeneration (which The Impressions of Janey Canuck Abroad draped in Orange Order colours), the space of the Women's Court was outlined by a progressivist discourse of moral reform that came by way of urban American investigations into the social 'disease' of white slavery. As Strange has noted, this discourse was marked by its privileging of the sort of investigative data gathering and 'undercover anthropology' of the 1911 Report of the Chicago Vice Commission, The Social Evil in Chicago, which became the reference text of urban reformers across North America in this period (103-4). Although Strange suggests that in western Canada, 'attempts to humanize progress were cast in [the] explicitly Christian tones' of the social gospel, it must be remembered that the first Canadian Women's Court was created in Edmonton, five years after a Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) campaign to rescue girls in that city from white slavery and two years after an inquiry into police collusion with prostitutes (Valverde, Age 85-6). In the West, debates about prostitution were sharply inflected with racial anxieties about First Nations women on reserves near 'white' towns and bachelor Asian men in the cities. Western cities, the Presbyterian Toronto reformer Rev John G. Shearer proclaimed after an investigative mission to Winnipeg in 1910, were full of 'dens of vice' 'owned by Chinese and Japanese' (qtd. Valverde 57).

190 Settler Feminism and Race Making

The Girl Who Disappeared is a fragment of the discourse of moral reform that moved across the Canadian-American border in the 1910s. Its white slavery narrative traces the path of a vulnerable and dangerous girl from captivity within a brothel to liberation within an alternative enclosure, a new 'inside' space offered to women as the 'outside' of domestic space: the department store. In this new enclosure, the reformed white slave is promoted to the position of a rescue home matron-at-large. The Girl Who Disappeared thus figures the transplantation of the techniques of character reformation employed in the rescue home into the open sphere into a space designed to encapsulate women within 'normal' desiring and exchanging relations, a space representing an ideal unification of the practices of spending and saving. The protagonist's transformation from a naive country girl lured into white slavery to a source of expert knowledge of the methods of white slavers and the characterological deficiencies of their victims furthermore resituates the problem of white slavery within a 'scientific' frame in which the vulnerable and dangerous girl becomes something about which authoritative knowledge can be gained. The anomalous nature of The Girl Who Disappeared lies in the very slim portion of text that it devotes to the horrors of the brothel. That part of the narrative is neither lengthy nor detailed enough to provoke the sort of readerly outrage at the depths of male 'beastliness' enlisted by earlier, sensationalist white slavery narratives in campaigns for stricter controls on prostitution. The wider agenda of The Girl Who Disappeared is hinted at as soon as the protagonist's captivity turns out to be an occasion for observing the degenerate habits of other white slaves in the brothel. More than simply conveying information about the 'social evil' by means of a witness who dares to 'give the world the facts,' The Girl Who Disappeared holds out a narrative lesson, for Jane's temporary 'disappearance,' instead of ruining her, is the prelude to a social reintegration that culminates in her assumption of a position of authority in relation to other girls outside of the brothel, a position that operationalizes both the expertise derived from her first-hand knowledge of the 'social evil' and the exemplary status that, paradoxically, she already displays while still one of its victims. The text's reworking of the white slavery narrative represents the relation between the problem of the unfortunate girl and the solution of maternal authority as a progression. It demonstrates that the girl who successfully internalizes norms of conduct will one day become an exemplar to other girls (even though the text must proleptically transpose that status into the scene of the brothel so that she is never really a

Emily Murphy and Race Making in the West 191

'slave' to begin with). The former white slave is thus allowed to appear as the originator of the moral campaign to which she owes her existence as a construct. The mechanisms of narrative allow a discursive object to be repositioned as the subject of discourse. Later on, I shall argue that a similar process can be deciphered in the relationship between Murphy's famous campaign for 'person' status and her identity asjaney Canuck. The first few pages of The Girl Who Disappeared announce the predictable unfolding of a white slavery narrative. Jane, a small-town girl is lured into Chicago by a 'theatrical agent' who promises her a career on the stage and an opportunity to earn an enormous income, only to deposit her, once they have arrived in the city, in a plush 'boarding house' where she is led to a back room, invited to change into a gauzy gown, and plied with wine. She awakens several days later to discover that she has become a white slave and is to be held captive in the brothel indefinitely, by means of an insidious debt system. So far the text adheres to all the conventions of the white slavery narrative; however, at this point - instead of relating the girl's experiences as a victim of white slavery - it suddenly grants her interiority and appoints her as an eyewitness. As the narration shifts to free indirect discourse presenting Jane's thoughts on the fate of girls made to trudge down the 'crimson path,' she is separated from the other 'poor creatures' in the brothel and transformed into an amateur sociologist. It is not just the eyewitness reporting by the white slave herself that makes this narrative unconventional, however, but the particular explanation which that reporting offers, through Jane, for the cause of the 'social evil.' Her authoritative discourse identifies as the root of the problem the double standard of morals, which encourages immorality in men and causes ignorant girls to be cast out of society permanently, without hope of a second chance at goodness. The necessary other side of this freeing of the white slave from her status as a permanent outcast into a reformable girl is a preoccupation with her conduct and character. If there is something to be salvaged from the brothel, some material to be worked on, it now becomes important to ask what kind of characterological deficiencies make the girl responsible for her fall into white slavery in the first place. As Jane observes her surroundings in the brothel, she remarks that the other girls are 'slaves not only of a debt system but also of drink and other habits' - habits that she herself has been able to resist (26). Resolving to become one of the brave 'few who dare to face the world again, the few who contrive to escape from utter ruin [to] give the world the facts' (26), she persuades a sympathetic client to

192 Settler Feminism and Race Making

help her, and by the end of the first chapter, she has been liberated from captivity. But the text continues for another three hundred pages, and ends only when Jane and her liberator speed away from the city to be married, pledging themselves to fight 'for the freedom of white slaves ... to free women from the bondage of the dual standard of morals, and children from the hypocrisy of false modesty' (Roe 332). Once liberated from her captors, Jane is forced to contend with the prejudice of a society that has not yet learned to distinguish between the 'herd of thieves and degenerates' and an unfortunate girl who 'want[s] to be good and straight and honest' (48). The means of social reinsertion proposed by the text is that of capital therapy. Jane will 'recover' by being inserted within capitalist exchange relations, through the selling of manufactured goods (rather than sexual services), and through the feminized labour of consumption. She eventually finds work in a department store of 'colossal proportions' reminiscent of 'Zola's description of the first great department store ..., "The Ladies' Paradise," ... [whose] "working staff would have peopled a town"' (140). The 'Mammoth Store's' 'immensity of space,' however, leaves shopgirls 'open to the observation and approach of all kinds of people,' a fact that 'calls for the most careful watching and guarding of the young female employees against... seductive schemes' (141-2). Jane is ostracized by the other shopgirls when her past becomes known, but before long the store superintendent recognizes her brave struggle to re-enter society by placing her in charge of a new in-store Bureau of Social Service, created with an eye to a 'closer' relation between employer and employee. The department store is thus transformed into an expanded rescue home for girls at risk of going astray. What qualifies Jane to serve as the matron of this expanded rescue home is her knowledge of 'what it is to be treated unkindly,' a specialized knowledge that makes her a sympathetic and trustworthy interlocutor for troubled girls (111). As soon as Jane is inducted, the 'girls and women beg [in] coming to her with their confidences' (111-12). Within this space of intimacy, she isolates the positive characteristics of problem girls in much the same way as she did in the brothel. Maintaining a protective watchfulness over other employees, she acts as 'some one to whom they can go and talk confidentially about their affairs and their troubles,' 'mak[ing] notes of their complaints or misfortunes ... comfort[ing] ... and help[ing] them' (111). She hears the shopgirls' charges against customers and other employees, and holds private conferences with their concerned parents. Her technique involves a careful alterna-

Emily Murphy and Race Making in the West 193

don of sternness and sympathy, as she extracts tearful confessions, extends comforting gestures, and offers second chances in exchange for promises of good behaviour. In the following conference, she deals with French immigrant old enough to be her mother, but far younger on a scale of moral evolution. 'If a girl or woman has the right stuff in her she'll starve before she will submit to wrong doing. Women like you are too anxious to put the blame for your misdeeds upon somebody else. Of course, I know it is hard to get along and live very well on seven dollars a week, but if one looks around, there are plenty of places where one can live decently even with that salary. Now, you are old enough to know better, and the thing that I am most interested in, in your case, is the fact that you are putting the same ideas into the younger girls' heads down in your department. Your conversation is often obscene and you have induced at least one young girl that I know of, to be bad.' 'You can't prove that,' cried the woman. 'Oh yes 1 can,' calmy replied Jane. Til just send for Nora Kelly and we will see about that.' 'How did you know about me and Nora Kelly? You've been having some of these blamed store detectives following me, that's what you've been doing!' yelled the woman. 'Then you admit that it is true, don't you?' The woman nodded her head. Having made this acknowledgment of her guilt, the woman broke down and began to cry. Jane arose, put her arms around her, patting her gently on the shoulder, and told her that she sympathized with her in her difficulty. Then she pointed out to Mrs. Pallet how wrong it was for her to lead other girls astray, for there were temptations enough surrounding them in the outside world without meeting them in the store. She said that every woman ought to be a protector to every other woman instead of a snare. When Jane had finished talking Mrs. Pallet grasped her by the hand and told her that she wanted to do the right thing. So Jane promised to keep her. (115-17)

More than simply providing such feminized pastoral care, Jane acts as a relay point between the shopgirls and the store detectives, and between the Mammoth Store and the Association for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic, sending detectives out to follow girls into restaurants and movie houses when they are reported to be leading wayward lives away from work, and referring serious cases to white slavery prosecutors. She sees to the firing of overly familiar male employees and of

194 Settler Feminism and Race Making

those shopgirls with stubbornly 'irregular habits' who show no inclination to reform themselves. Insofar as they suffer from a taste for the attractions of dance halls and movie houses, and the lack of a 'sane, moral education, shaping the customs and moulding the habits,' the shopgirls are threats to the health and vitality of the population (128). The narrative shows the hopeless cases to be the products of an ignorant and backward parenting represented by such figures as 'Sadie's mother, evidently a German, stoop shouldered and bent from hard work,' who receives Jane's lecture on the importance of providing daughters with a positive knowledge of the 'purposes, problems and perils of sex' with a 'blank, dumb expression' (121, 124).46 By means of such encodings of defective parenting in terms of a backward 'otherness,' The Girl Who Disappeared shifts the racism of the white slavery narrative from the 'beastliness' of the slaver to the racially inferior family - and more particularly to the mother who serves as a poor example (131). The conventional white slavery narrative condensed into the first chapter of The Girl Who Disappeared is only the prelude to an argument on behalf of the education of 'alert, strong, virile, active' virtue as an alternative to the kind of mothering that does not recognize its duty to train daughters in the 'true mother knowledge' 'the knowledge of self-respect and self-protection' (199, 136, 131).47 The text proposes the Mammoth Store Bureau of Social Service, headed by an exemplary young woman with very particular claims to expertise, as the solution to the problem of the unprotected, unconscientized girl in whose 'body and soul' the future of the race is at stake. The new imperative of visible, exemplary government (contrasted with the invisible government of corrupt public officials) comes into play, then, with a turn towards positive forms of virtue embodied and manifested in the conduct of a normalized girl like Jane. One of the 'improvements' in working conditions that Jane brings about for shopgirls is the provision of 'an opportunity of bettering themselves by giving them comfortable rest rooms, in which they c[an] find good reading material' (268—9). This 'good reading material' is simply one further remove in the production of a calculated distance between authority and rule, a further remove in which Jane's actual presence is no longer necessary, and the reformation of character can occur through the solitary activity of reading, in that space set aside for the working girl's recreation in comfortable surroundings resembling a 'real home.' If the department store is itself an 'inside' outside of the domestic enclosure, through a process of infinite regress the narrative

Emily Murphy and Race Making in the West 195 redoubles this re-encapsulation of an 'outside' within the supervised space of the department store, with the creation of spaces designed to direct the recreational time of shopgirls to the practice of reading educational texts like The Girl Who Disappeared.^ The restrooms are modelled on the rescue home sitting room devoted to cultivating the 'habit of reading' - in girls given to 'lewd conversation' - through their exposure to 'simple books on Hygiene, Child Study, and Self-Culture' that will supply more 'wholesome subjects of conversation' (Barrett 8-9), A text like The Girl Who Disappeared does not aim to cultivate a pious reserve on matters of sexuality, but rather an appropriate verbosity counterposed to the 'chains of silence' (Roe 131). As Strange has argued, recreation was used by early-twentieth-century penologists to channel deviant impulses into productive pursuits. Networks of leisure clubs and residences for working girls maintained by organizations like the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire, and the YWCA widened this recreational tactic into what Strange calls a 'pleasure discipline' for the working girl. This 'pleasure discipline' was designed to ensure the conservation of energy for work duties and the development of leisure habits that would make for a smooth transition to marriage and motherhood. If the rescue home provided a brand of control consisting of the sort of rules prevailing in a Christian family, in the working girls' residences and leisure clubs these rules were developed by the girls themselves, who demonstrated the capacity to be their own 'commanding officers' in their free time by governing themselves 'freely,' through democratic structures (180-7). Between the rescue home with its special space set aside for independent 'self-culture' and the recreational club for the 'free* girl, there is the department store restroom and the habits and desires formed around its 'good reading material.' The three spaces are connected as sets for the corrective and preventative dramatization of good conduct. Instead of a recession away from the real and into the realm of the fake, what I am describing here is a relay between different spaces designed with reference to a 'normal' home. This relay includes the 'real' home, which does not escape becoming a set for the performance of institutionally tested norms, through a return-movement. In The Girl of the New Day Ellen Knox suggests that the work of the young white woman in the West extend beyond the walls of the western bachelor's shack to the transformation of 'isolated individuals and families' into a society; yet, in a move in the opposite direction, she recommends that every woman who would face her work as wife and mother with strength of mind

196 Settler Feminism and Race Making

should carry into her home the 'regularity and common sense rules of institutional life' - the nurse's 'healthy, old-fashioned experience [of] practical work,' of 'being in subjection,' free from great decisions, attached to a carefully mapped daily routine, and absorbed in a great cause (209, 25-7; emphasis mine). If the alternative to the brothel in The Girl Who Disappeared is the department store reconstructed as an expanded rescue home, Murphy's Women's Court was another early-twentieth-century space that confused the public/private division. The kind of space that the Women's Court aimed to remodel as a space of liberal order and foster mothering was one linked to the state rather than the market. Like Jane's one-woman Bureau of Social Service, the courtroom over which Janey Canuck presided was a space in which pronouncements upon conduct entailed sentences to corrective normalization. Wayward girls may have passed through the Women's Court to more diffuse positionings than those imagined by The Girl Who Disappeared, but the Women's Court was similarly designed as a set for the practice of moral conduct, a stage for dramatic 'struggles for betterment, the unfolding of a girl's potentialities, ... the happy ending of a tragic episode' (Murphy, 'Woman's Court' 27). Desiring Personhood: The Women's Court and the Crusade for 'Person' Status The Edmonton Women's Court was established in 1916 through the pressure of the Local Council of Women. The council's demand for a separate court in which female offenders might be tried by a woman in the presence of other women was inspired by suspicions of police corruption as well as by a desire to protect testifying women from the threatening presence of pimps and procurers in the audience of an open courtroom. The demand for a Women's Court was granted, however, as a concession to a concern other than those which had mobilized the council. Council members had attempted to sit in on a case involving women charged with prostitution and were asked to remove themselves from the courtroom on the grounds that 'decent women ... could have no desire to hear the evidence in these cases' (Murphy, 'A Woman' 34). After this experience, the council decided to take up, as a tactic of persuasion, the problem of spectacular and titillating female speech exceeding the bounds of propriety in a mixed courtroom. Emily Murphy was dispatched to make the case for a separate court to the Alberta attorney-general on these grounds. As it turned out, the case was not a

Emily Murphy and Race Making in the West 197

difficult one to make, as its proponent was almost inducted into public office on the spot.49 Several months later, Murphy was sworn in as police magistrate for the City of Edmonton, and the following year her territory was extended to cover the province of Alberta. The archives suggest that the accession to the demand for a Women's Court was a recuperative or at best an empty gesture. It was left to Murphy to convert this empty gesture into the precondition for a genuine transformation in the dispensation of justice. She was appointed, for instance, without being granted a site in which to carry out her work. The work of the Women's Court was an activity carried out in a basement, in unfurnished rooms, in Murphy's cramped office, in a borrowed courtroom, in the gaps of the Central Court's timetable. It does not seem to have been firmly settled whether the Women's Court was to hear only those cases in which women were being charged with the primary offence or all cases in which women were involved. While Murphy's view was that the Women's Court should have exclusive jurisdiction over all cases involving women, some police officers, city officials, and colleagues refused to recognize such a claim. In letters to the deputy attorney-general, they argued either for the confinement of Murphy's jurisdiction to females (so that in a case against a female brothel-owner, for example, male clients would be sent to the Central Court rather than the Women's Court), or for a policy of indiscriminate case distribution, which in practice allowed for the channelling of as many cases as possible to Murphy's male colleague.50 Indeed, for almost a decade Murphy conducted a backroom struggle against what she saw as the poaching of her clientele. In her first year of office, she suggested to the deputy attorney-general that the work of the Women's Court was being 'circumvented by [the] interested or hostile intervention' of parties inclined to dismiss women without trial.51 These interventions obstructed the work of 'reclamation and conservation' that she saw as the specialization of the Women's Court but that her opponents thought inappropriate for a police court.52 While the existence of this obstructionism demonstrates that the juridical incorporation of maternal authority was not a unified strategy, I want to suggest that such local disturbances and resistances served in a roundabout way to strengthen the connection between a specialized, gendered expertise and a modern, future-oriented course that found in the objections of the 'whispering circles' and 'backward' male prejudice the vindication of its moral necessity. Indeed, if certain police chiefs and magistrates resisted the very concept of a women's court, public support seems to have been firmly on the side of maternal authority. The work

198 Settler Feminism and Race Making

of the Women's Court was enthusiastically reported in the pages of the Edmonton Journal, and on several occasions in her correspondence with the attorney-general, Murphy points out that she is regularly receiving complaints from the public about women being summoned to appear in the Central Court. These jurisdictional battles were further complicated by the fact that a second designation, as a commissioner under the Children's Protection Act, was tagged onto Murphy's appointment as the first female magistrate in the British Empire. She acted as both the magistrate of a women's court and the judge of a juvenile court, amalgamated as a 'Women's and Children's Court' in which the only distinction between the two jurisdictions seems to have been the routing of reports to the attorney-general for the former and the superintendent of the Department of Neglected Children for the latter.53 If a subject managed to slip through one of these courts, her case could always be caught in the net of the other, as it was for the subject of the following Edmonton Journal story: Alleged to have been brought to the city by a procuress, according to a statement made by Detective P. Appleby before Magistrate Emily Murphy in the women's police court on Friday, Mildred O'Dier, 16, Calgary, told a sordid story when arraigned on a charge of vagrancy. She had been arrested at midnight while in a cafe with a taxi driver, an older woman and a lumberjack. 'I won't register a conviction against you on account of your tender years, so I'm going to discharge you in spite of your guilt,' said her worship. The girl faces another charge of being a neglected child. n4

Bringing the juvenile and the female together in the same space permitted the work of the female magistrate to be defined in relation to moral breaches affecting the future of the race. This race specialization aimed at the saving of human material, rather than the mere collecting of fines. Murphy thus opposed herself to the received view of the successful magistrate as 'one who produces the largest sum of money, in the shortest time, irrespective of any moral or social results he has achieved, or failed to achieve' ('Straight Talk' 10). His hurried fining or sentencing, his tendency to rush through the cases of females and 'foreigners' especially, was founded in 'ignorance, both of the crime and the criminals'; better equipped to broach the distance that was the cause of such ignorance was the feminist ethnographer appointed as 'magistrate-physician,' who would subordinate punishment to understanding.

Emily Murphy and Race Making in the West

199

The centrality of procedures of examination and diagnosis in Murphy's courtroom rendered prosecution irrelevant and drew defence into the work of parental advising, as Murphy shared confidential information, gleaned during 'private conversations' with the concerned parties, with a defence lawyer whom she addressed as a fellow social worker, primarily interested in 'keeping [a] home together.'55 At least one prosecutor stormed out of the courtroom in frustration, as Murphy suspended a criminal trial in favour of an attempt to 'better understand' through the testimony of a psychiatrist. The search for root causes led Murphy from the individual to the family and, even more widely, to questions of race that were rooted, in a return movement, in the inner recesses of the individual. If the search for root trouble in a truant or delinquent led to the problems of 'foreign' parenting, helping a vulnerable and dangerous female involved addressing the presocialized, 'foreign' part of her character. A charge against an adult woman often called for medical or psychiatric examination and investigation into the health and character of her children, regularly resulting in the woman's institutionalization and the transfer of her children to the Department of Neglected Children. With the superimposition of female and juvenile jurisdictions, then, the feminist concern to protect — the original source of the demand for a separate court - became fused with the concern for propriety that the Local Council of Women had originally assumed only as a rhetorical tactic. Protection was administered to the subject incapable of propriety. In one case, a girl whom Murphy found to be placeable neither 'in a lodging house nor at work, owing to her mental condition,' and whom Murphy regarded as unable 'to protect herself in other ways' was sent to the Provincial Training School for Mental Deficiency, where she was diagnosed as being without 'respect for those in authority' and incapable of 'appreciating her position here or the various differences in social relations.'56 More often than not, the reformable subject's induction into society consisted of a temporary enclosure within the walls of an institution or supervisory structure - a subjection to protective boundaries and divisions that mirrored the propriety of establishing separate courts for the sexes. Just as Murphy would argue for the 'civilization' of Alberta jails through the construction of additional walls and compartments to separate prostitutes and lesbians from other women, therefore, the model of the subject passing through her court was the vagrant in need of external restraint and internal organization: the 'loose, idle or disorderly person ... wandering in the fields, public streets or highways or places of

200 Settler Feminism and Race Making

public meeting or gathering of people' and failing to give a 'satisfactory account of herself when requested to do so.' An 'impulsive degenerate,' the 'vagrant' (or 'nightwalker' - the terms were interchangeable in the Women's Court) became a more general social figure in Murphy's courtroom, combining problems of heredity and indiscipline, what Donzelot calls the pathologies of race and will, the pathological effects of childhood (or racial) weakness 'not corrected or checked in time' (Donzelot 130).57 If all those subject to examination and diagnosis in the Women's Court were 'vagrants' in this expanded sense, the treatment prescribed for them entailed a corresponding generalization of the handling specified for juvenile delinquents - a 'care and custody and discipline ... approximating] as nearly as may be that which should be given by its parents, and ... treatment], not as a criminal, but as a misdirected and misguided child, ... one needing aid, encouragement, help and assistance. ts Murphy's Juvenile Court heard cases relating to adults who committed crimes against girls as well as those relating to offending girls,59 just as her Women's Court sentenced drunken, non-supporting, and abusive husbands, and the male procurers and 'foreigners' found in 'bawdy houses' almost as often as it sentenced female 'nightwalkers,' thieves, drunkards, fortune tellers, 'mental defectives,' and 'bawdy house' inmates. The space of the 'Women's and Children's Court,' in which, as Murphy wrote, 'society itself should be arraigned at the bar rather than the unfortunate girl,' blurred the distinction between female criminals and females victimized by crime, both of whom tended to be apprehended in the guise of the 'unfortunate woman [who] would be cared for in the future instead of being a victim of society, as she is at present.'60 The real division in this space was between the childlike, wandering female and the 'society' that failed her, but 'society' was held to account in the form of the unfortunate girl, whose treatment counted as a practical form of social criticism. This social criticism drew at least part of its legitimacy from a parallel struggle, also conducted on the grounds of women's moral capacities. Murphy's battle against the 'backward' opponents of the Women's Court was not only conducted behind the scenes, in correspondence with the deputy attorney-general, it also had a highly visible manifestation in her crusade for the recognition of Canadian women as 'persons.' The latter crusade was sparked by an objection to her authority raised by the defence lawyer on her very first day in court, on the grounds that she was not a 'person' within the terms of the British North America

Emily Murphy and Race Making in the West 201

Act. The ensuing debate focused on the received, non-inclusive interpretation of 'persons' in a section of the BNA Act regarding appointments to the Senate. The content of person hood in the debate amounted to the question of the 'capacity of a woman to hold public office,' a question that was settled in Alberta in a provincial Supreme Court ruling in 1917. In her copy of this provincial ruling that women were under no legal disqualification to hold public office, Murphy has underscored the judge's point that 'at a very early stage in the history of our law in the Territories it was recognized that women should be put in a new position.' The ruling continues: 'I am strongly of the opinion that we are returning to the more liberal and enlightened view of the middle ages of England, and passing over the narrower and more hardened view which possibly by the middle of the nineteenth century had gained ascendance in England.'61 The exhaustive review of precedents through which the Alberta decision is justified begins with the period of Henry III, in which, the ruling maintains, Anglo-Saxon women held public offices not as the result of anything as flimsy or arbitrary as a political right, but rather as the result of some 'exercise of judgement and discretion in regards to particular qualifications of the individual,'1 which provided the grounds for deciding, in the present, that 'a particular woman is a suitable and proper person to be appointed' (emphasis mine). With provincial recognition of the female capacity for public office secured on the grounds of individual character, Murphy's next move, in 1919, was to forward a resolution to the prime minister on behalf of the Federated Women's Institutes of which she was then president, demanding the appointment of female 'persons' to the Senate. Victory was achieved at the British Privy Council a full decade later and after a highly publicized defeat in the Supreme Court of Canada. This victory confirmed the earlier ruling of the Alberta judge who paired the Western girl of the new day, in the vanguard of a crusade against unenlightened 'barbarism,'62 with the Anglo-Saxon essence of a predegenerate, medieval England. The collaboration between the daughter of empire and the motherland had brought about a return to the essential features of the 'suitable and proper person' as the grounds for authority in the 'new Britain' of Canada.63 The victory of individual character was still the rubric available for understanding Murphy's career in 1945, by the time that Byrne Hope Sanders, editor of the Canadian women's magazine Chatelaine, undertook to write the biography of an inspiring woman, Emily Murphy: Crusader. On the second to last page of the chapter on Murphy's years as magistrate, Sanders's text offers the reader a

202 Settler Feminism and Race Making

visual representation of the trajectory of her career, in the condensed form of a photo collage (Fig. 1). The three-point narrative constructed by the three vertically aligned photographs proceeds from 'Emily, Reviewing Edmonton City Police Force, 1926' to 'Emily Conducting a Juvenile Court, with No Man Present, 1918,' to, finally, 'Lord Chancellor Sankey of His Majesty's Privy Council, at Temple Bar, 1929. On His Way to Deliver Judgment re the Status of Women as "Persons" Under the British North America Act' (Sanders 173). The reader's eye moves from a panoramic scene of feminist pioneering in which Murphy stands front-row centre in a sea of stiffly posed, uniformed men — 'Janey' clearing a space at the heart of uncivilized territory - to the middle photograph of an interior, women-only space in which a girl bows her head before maternal authority, to a scene in which Murphy is the stage manager, presiding in absentia over the procession of the bewigged lord chancellor in full, long-robed splendour, before awe-struck London crowds. The triumphant outside-inside-outside trajectory, from a space in which women are anomalous, to an interior in which only women are present, to the procession of Anglo-Protestant settler femininity conflated with English tradition in the parade of authority at the centre of empire, tells the story of a crusade in which a racial 'essence' is recaptured on the colonial front, through the assertion of character and more specifically of a particular woman's capacity for personhood. This heroic, liberal feminist view of the life of Emily Murphy, as the woman born to lead the crusade for 'person' status, is in line with the thinking of the Alberta decision in its twinning of progressive feminism (embodied in the exemplary character of a particular woman) with a racial 'essence' of self-government. In representing the life as the expression of a crusading personality, Sanders' photo-collage positions Murphy's appointment as police magistrate as a preliminary victory, in preparation for the real battle. But it is possible to read the collage otherwise, as a political-discursive diagram rather than an individual life trajectory, and a diagram in which the two outer scenes feed into the central one. Just as the figure of the feminist ethnographer charting the human resources of the Dominion was put to work in the Edmonton Women's Court, the crusade for 'person' status, rather than being a subsequent conquest in a career of'firsts,' fed back into the Women's Court, legitimating its activity of 'person' making with a feminist crusader's authority positioned at a distance from arbitrary power. When Murphy staged the campaign for women's legitimate claim to personhood, it was from the proving ground of the Women's Court and

EMILY, REVIEWING EDMONTON CITY POLICE FORCE, 1926. First row. Left to right: Chief Constable A. G. Shute, Emily, Mayor Ambrose Bury, Crown Prosecutor, Alan Harvey EMILY CONDUCTING A JUVENILE COURT, WITH No MAN PRESENT, 1918 LORD CHANCELLOR SANKEY OF His MAJESTY'S PRIVY COUNCIL, AT TEMPLE BAR, 1929. ON His WAY TO DELIVER JUDGMENT RE THE STATUS OF WOMEN AS "PERSONS" UNDER THE BRITISH NORTH AMERICA ACT Figure 1

204 Settler Feminism and Race Making

her position as the first female magistrate in the empire. It is thus important to ask how the crusade for 'person' status might have been recuperated for the legitimation of the 'kindly' power exercised initially in the Women's Court, and eventually in a much wider domain. How did the campaign against sex discrimination inflect the race-making work of the Women's Court magistrate as a challenge to patriarchal authority, a work conditional upon the exclusion of the big-P 'Padre'? The figure of the crusading feminist at such an apparent distance from the centre of political rule - such a distance as to be denied personhood by it - answers the liberal requirement for a type of authority that lays out the norms of individual conduct, but at a remove from political rule, in such a way as to detach 'truth' from 'power.' Of course it is possible to be subjected to authority in one field while exercising it in another. But here was an instance in which the exercise of authority was strengthened by and perhaps even contingent upon the fact of not having it, of being in the contestatory position of an individual demanding recognition as a 'person,' and demonstrating her qualification for such recognition by carrying out the work of race making. The struggle against arbitrary male privilege at the level of the 'person' crusade further provided the moral grounding, the guarantee of progressiveness, as Murphy moved in the 1920s towards the advocacy of enforced sterilization of the 'feeble-minded' and some of the racist conspiracy theories of The Black Candle. From the perspective of gender, she was at a maximal distance from the state; from the perspective of race, she was the very embodiment of its liberal 'essence.' The Women's Court and the 'person' campaign need to be grasped, then, neither as two progress-markers on the same path nor as contradictory moments, but rather as reciprocally constitutive positions. There is a serious situational irony to be noted in the fact that Janey Canuck loaned herself to an apparatus of 'person' making before Canadian women, led by her, had won recognition for themselves as 'persons.' As Murphy understood the Women's Court, its feminine incarnation of visible government had the responsibility to govern herself according to the principle that the magistrate was the very image of the Canadian government for those passing through the court. 'It might be said in passing,' Murphy wrote in a 1920 Maclean's magazine article, 'that it is from their experiences in Court that these foreign women usually deduct their ideas of the Canadian Government. They come into contact with officialdom at no other place, except the post office and the customs' ('Woman's Court' 27). Murphy was thus in the position of governing

Emily Murphy and Race Making in the West 205 herself as the embodiment of the Canadian government - that is, as Janey Canuck. This was a strategy of government that deployed the exemplary self-government of a Janey Canuck in the control of others. Janey Canuck was an effective instrument of government insofar as she could represent an expressive relation between a racial 'essence' and its structure and agents of political rule. As long as the moral authority of liberal government was grounded in this expressive status, political struggles could be made to appear as problems of moral inferiority, or differing levels of racial fitness. The 'person' making in the courtroom and the crusade for 'person' status outside of it are related through the peculiar functioning of the norm. The norm acts as both a stimulation and a constraint, operating through the intertwining of desires and controls. It sets in motion a longing for adequation, a desire to fit comfortably into (even a constraining) costume. The norm raises the question of what a woman has to do to herself in order to become the bearer of an identity or the subject of a given narrative. The stimulation to prove qualifications for 'person' status in the courtroom has the return effect of involving Murphy in defining the norms of the personhood to which she would lay claim. The norm thus becomes both the condition and the limit of the liberal feminist challenge to the established order, converting this challenge into a demand to belong. In order for a woman to be a 'person,' she must uphold the norms of personhood. The very fact that Murphy was a woman, without an automatic claim to public office, was what permitted that claim, and the office itself, to be cast as an expression of Anglo-Protestant character - a racialized character towards which her relation of striving was not only 'normal,' but exemplary. This dynamic was also played out in Murphy's presentation with a First Cross for Imperial Service in 1927, by the all-male Most Noble Order of Crusaders, an organization with branches in South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, India, and Canada. Once again, Murphy was in the position of receiving the first such decoration ever presented, and the only one ever presented by the Most Noble Order to a woman (Sanders 313). In the decoration of one who was forced to declare her interest as that of an 'outsider/ the 'adventurous enthusiasm and patient endurance' that united the Crusaders could be held up as a desirable characterological norm (Murphy qtd. Sanders 314). Murphy was an exemplary Crusader, paradoxically, precisely for her outsider's position of longing. In recognition of her work to promote the Most Noble Order in Alberta - where, Murphy argued, a 'polyglot population' threatened 'national

206 Settler Feminism and Race Making

unity' - she was granted the status of an honorary 'Brother.' 'Although no woman has been admitted to the Order,' the pro-grand master is reported to have said on the occasion of her decoration, 'we call Mrs. Murphy by the name of "Brother," and we love her as one loves those of his family to whom he is united by the tie of blood' (Sanders 317). It was seemingly of no consequence, in the eyes of the Most Noble Order, that Murphy's most famous crusade was against the exclusivity of another type of men's club. But while the 'barbarians' in her crusade against unenlightened prejudice had been 'backward' men, the 'persons' crusade was conducted in a costume and a language that could be identified with the aims of an organization like the Most Noble Order. The awkward decoration of 'Brother Mrs. Murphy' in 1927 might be understood as an emblem of the dynamic of subjectification that Judith Butler describes in terms of a 'fundamental dependency on a discourse we never chose but that, paradoxically, initiates and sustains our agency' (Psychic 2). When, in the latter part of her career, Murphy addressed audiences of women's organizations as an exceptional and exemplary woman and advised that '[i]t is a great day in a girl's life when she begins to discover herself. The latent capacity in each one of us, is greater than we realize, and we may find it if we search diligently,' she offered the 'little experiment' of Christopher Columbus as the model for that search: '[i]t was a good thing he had the nerve to try it' (qtd. Sanders 292). Just as the possibility of imagining female self-realization was predicated upon the figure of colonial exploration in these addresses, Murphy's own realization of a 'latent capacity' was performed through the assumption of a 'lineal heritage' of Anglo-Saxon character. The image reproduced on the cover of Settler Feminism and Race Making in Canada shows Murphy donning the costume of an early Saxon for the 1919 Edmonton horse show. This costume can be said to have provided an iconographic prefiguration of the grounds for the 1929 persons decision. Entering the stage of a history constructed as a heroic genealogy linking western Canadian Protestant feminism to a pre-Christian, Germanic tribe, Murphy insisted on having it both ways. Her drag laid claim to a double logic of sexual difference and racial superiority, signifying female difference in terms of the conquering might of the Saxons, and appropriating the biological heroism of the 'Men of the North,' by way of an 'ancestral' association with a virile tribe. It is more than ironic that a feminist vision inspired by a rejection of empty signs and dead rituals turned itself towards the future outfitted in the paraphernalia of'borrowed names, battlecries, and costumes' (Marx

Emily Murphy and Race Making in the West 207 300). More than ironic, because what grants agency in this picture is precisely what takes it away. Murphy's outfitting brings to fruition the feminist identity laid out for women by Caleb Saleeby, whose double-edged recognition of women's 'individuality' bestowed a form of agency lined with the responsibility to relate to the self as a racial resource. 'Borrowed names, battlecries, and costumes' is the phrase that Marx uses to describe revolutions in period costume in The Eighteenth Brumaire. In 1851, Marx was speaking to the slippage between an enabling costuming and a reactionary resurrection, but his hopeful anticipation of a revolution that might invent its own point of departure was shaken by the possibility that all revolutions might just be condemned to wear secondhand clothing. It is just this way of understanding Marx's phrase that '[mjen make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please,' as describing an unavoidable condition, that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak invokes when she proposes that the fundamental task of Western feminism should be 'negotiation with enabling violence' (Outside 283).

This page intentionally left blank

Epilogue

Here is another overdeterminalion, even perhaps a palimpsest. How can you judge those sweet and upright elderly U.S. spinsters [missionaries in the Simla Hills of India in the 1880s] except as they were remotely operated themselves by a texlualization that violated my Rani ? They had already accepted that recently worlded world as a 'sensuous /reality] ... given direct [unmittelbar — immediately, with no mediation or "uiorlding"] from all eternity.' The greatest personal goodwill of the unwitting benei>olent imperialist is inscribed in this error. Spivak, 'The Rani of Sirmur'

The image of Emily Murphy sporting the costume of a horse-mounted, spear-toting early Saxon warrior in 1919, a decade before her official recognition as a 'person,' usefully condenses the connections this book has mapped between liberal ideals of individual freedom and human agency, and the particular performance criteria that these ideals have presupposed. Indeed Murphy's early Saxon pose is imbued with a theatricality that runs through all the texts I have examined, from Anna Jameson's preoccupation with dramatic character and the figure of the actress, to Gowanlock and Delaney's respective performances of vulnerable femininity and foster motherhood, and to Murphy's own prefigurative dramatizations of maternal authority, in her self-representation as Janey Canuck. If nineteenth-century feminist liberal projects sought to prepare women for an ultimate accession to the unmarked universal - the category of the freely self-governing human 'person' - these projects could not fail to confront that category's entanglement with the term that

210 Settler Feminism and Race Making Hobbes proposed as its origin, persona. A 'person,' Hobbes suggested, 'is the same that an actor is, both on the stage and in common conversation; and to personate, is to act' (125). This book has attempted to reread the 'agency' of that would-be 'person,' the white settler woman, as an unwitting form of acting or 'personation.' The narratives of Jameson, Gowanlock, Delaney, and Murphy are written in the first person and frequently have recourse to the tropes and devices of spontaneity, intimacy, and sincerity. However, I have read these narratives as multi-faceted, 'interdisciplinary,' and interestingly unoriginal constructions. Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada plays with diary and epistolary forms, but I have argued that the text can be read as a political treatise in dramatic form. The transactions of recovery and investment that instigate the narration of Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear remind us that the 'voice' of the female captive is the effect of demands for a self-acquitting performance. The doubling of Emily Murphy as Janey Canuck, character-narrator and device of government, carries us back to the slippage between aesthetic and social registers that the language of 'character' enabled in Jameson's text. All of these writers use the nineteenth-century language of character to frame their concerns with the capacities and conducts that underwrite liberal personhood. Their texts expose the content of character as conduct conforming to the demands of a particular performance. 1 In their attempts to understand and operate its machinery, these writers also expose character's insistent articulation with the language of economy. Moral character, as it turns out, is an investment in the double sense of a garment 'into which one is installed by ritual or community fiat' and a commercial asset (Agnew 85). From the accountability that Jameson wishes to inculcate in the seduced woman, to the national virtues of thrift and investment that Delaney recommends to her Canadian sisters, to the 'saving' relation to the self and others as forms of racial capital that Murphy advocates, these writers also reinscribe character's connection to capitalist social relations. In analysing their texts I have not, however, reduced the first-wave feminist to a vehicle of class interests, complicit with patriarchal capitalism. Instead of explaining events with reference to 'interests' derived from some human essence of 'self-interest' or, tautologically, from the positions and politics actually adopted by these women, I have tried account for the formation and deployment of desiring subjects in strategies that (however compromising they may seem to our eyes) do not disqualify those subjects as feminist.

Epilogue 211

This enfolding of economy within character meant that the settler woman writer who took up the question of female moral character stepped onto a densely inscribed terrain. I have thus attempted to sketch out instances of'implication,' rather than 'complicity.' As Spivak suggests in my epigraph, perhaps the only way for us to judge the benevolently imperialist feminist of the past, without assuming our own access to a transcendental truth and removing ourselves from the kind of fraught and contingent ground occupied by the nineteenth-century feminist, is to locate the source of her agency in a reading error. Following Spivak, we could say that although the settler woman was herself 'remotely operated' by discourses of poverty management, social discipline, and race making, she mistook her terrain for 'uninscribed earth,' 'given direct from all eternity.' Instead of endeavouring to repair this error, I have tried to expose some of the processes of 'worlding' that formed the preconditions of these narratives, 'worldings' to which their writers also contributed through constructions of an empty colonial 'arctic zone,' individualizing representations of political dissidence, and 'expert'judgments of character. I contend that, after noting that first-wave Canadian feminism denied the personhood of racial 'inferiors' while it claimed that status for Anglo-Protestant women, there remains the work of analysing how feminism actually participated in the elaboration of technologies of personhood. This analysis cannot take place within the terms of liberalism itself that would presume a fundamental antinomy of freedom and subjection, only going so far as to point out that the freedom of some women was pure hased at the expense of others. Insofar as that perspective fails to address liberal freedom itself as a subjectification, it is no different from the kind of liberal feminist hagiography that celebrates firstwave women as self-determining, courageous heroes. Neither of these approaches can explain how the authority of Anglo-Protestant settler women was constituted and came to be articulated into an apparatus of rule, how their freedom had to be exercised appropriately if it was to be smoothly integrated with the control of others, how this exercise of freedom did not necessarily aim at the dehumanization of others but, 'wellmeaningly/ at fostering a self-governing citizenry and a national and racial well-being. Addressing these questions requires that we reframe first-wave feminist demands for statutory rights - to property, to selfownership, to a claim on the status of 'person' - within the context of government, in which women were valorized as a biopolitical resource. It is precisely by involving human beings in practices of the self regu-

212 Settler Feminism and Race Making

lated by particular norms of freedom that liberal government makes subjectivities and social relations calculable.2 The freedom/subjection antinomy cannot address this fundamental paradox. Neither can it grasp what was original in feminist participation in nineteenth-century 'social' projects, the important mutations in the mechanisms of power and the creation of an arena for the appearance of new kinds of problems and solutions. Running through these narratives is the tension between two kinds of politics that Bonnie Honig describes as a politics of virtue and politics of virtu: whereas the former yearns for a political closure rooted in the production of well-conducted selves, the latter underlines the ruses of liberal political discourse, and holds open the permanent need to disrupt political closures. Virtue politics understand freedom as a protection from outside incursions achieved through the rational subject's obedience of universal laws. Virtu politics, however, conceive of freedom as a practice of questioning the truths according to which the self is governed; freedom, for this politics, is found not in the unfettered realization of a human nature (the achievement of personhood) but rather in the ability to critique the discourses and the practices that determine human nature in its historically variable forms. In the narrative from Jameson to Murphy that this book constructs, there is a movement towards an uncritical acceptance of the former freedom, as a social legitimacy won in exchange for self-government according to norms of 'civilized' personhood. Acceptance of freedom in this form, I have tried to show, required unexamined 'figurations at the ground.' I have suggested that women's literary production is an effective force in political history. That is the 'broad strokes' version of the argument, but perhaps more important is the kind of historical detail that it has marshalled. This detail has had to do with the questions of how women's first-person narratives do political work. These first-person narratives were produced and circulated as the result of particular pressures and incitements, and within historically specific economies of truth in which truths produced from apparently marginal positions were central to the exercise of power, contributing effects of veridiction and jurisdiction concerning the 'what' and 'how' of government. Critiquing ways of reading women's history and writing that presuppose women's exclusion from the exercise of power, I have demonstrated how women have been positioned at the centre of a line of liberal governmental policy and practice. This perspective dislodges the question of women's agency from the sounding of a repressed voice and renders legible more compli-

Epilogue 213 cated entanglements of agency and power, freedom and subjection. The narratives of Jameson, Gowanlock, Delaney, and Murphy contributed to the definition of white femininity as a fundamental vulnerability or weakness of barriers, a deficient or precarious individual sovereignty. They constructed the unprotected daughter or captured woman as concentrated sites of repair and/or supplementation of the capacity for freedom, starting points for the elaboration and diffusion of a more general self-regulating normalcy. But they also assigned that work of elaborating and diffusing normalcy to the daughter of empire, that exemplary liberal self or 'diva citizen' whose striving relation to freedom served as a guarantee of freedom's desirability and meritoriousness.3 I have thus tried to account for the paradoxical combination of the Anglo-Protestant woman's functions as a emblem of vulnerability and a governmental exemplar. In the texts I have discussed, the female template for problems of government has a strange way of involuting into a position of moral expertise. Jameson insists on the connections between the prostitute and the actress; Delaney attempts to build the authority of a 'social' foster mother out of the position of the female captive; in the white slavery narrative, The Girl Who Disappeared, the recovery of a white slave culminates in her promotion to a position of maternal authority. If Canadian women's writing is to be adequately historicized, I have suggested, 'history' must be something other than a narrative of origins. Instead of hearkening back to the time immemorial of the nation in an originary settler woman's encounter with the wilderness, then, I have made my point of departure the invention of a specific project of rule and its simultaneous transposition to a colonial testing-ground. The difference between a history that seeks to establish the 'slow exposure of the meaning hidden in an origin' and one that tracks the entry and interplay of systems of subjection and domination is implied in Foucault's statement that 'knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting' ('Nietzsche' 151, 154). 'Cutting' here means breaking the stability of that which is taken for granted in the present; the historian who endeavours to cut therefore situates herself in a particular time and place and attempts to study 'what is closest, but in an abrupt dispossession, so as to seize it at a distance' (156). My desire to study historical first-person women's narratives as things of this world, involved in a politics of truth that determines the discourses accepted as true and the subject positions associated with their 'voicing' thus stems from worries about the way women's 'I'-narratives circulate and function in the present.4 There is not room here to treat the present paradoxes of the

214 Settler Feminism and Race Making white middle-class woman's 'voice' and 'agency' adequately. Thus, I will just gesture in that direction with an anecdote, followed by a brief comparative discussion of two contemporary women's narratives in the Canadian literature canon. That discussion will suggest what the nineteenth-century history that I have sketched out might mean for our current reading practices. That the construction of an essential female vulnerability still participates in the displacement of political struggle, and that women's assumption of this vulnerability still implicates them in the control of others, was evident in the unfolding of a local event in Toronto in September 1999. At the same time that women were advised to stay indoors and lock their doors against a 'bedroom rapist,' the Toronto Police Department implemented a campaign to clear the city of a symptom of neo-liberal governmental policy, the impoverished and disenfranchised individual who follows the entrepreneurial imperative to the letter, selling his services as a car window cleaner - the 'squeegee kid.' The mutual productivity of the figures of the 'squeegee kid' and the endangered bourgeois woman was evident in a CBC radio call-in show that addressed the appearance of this new version of the morally different pauper by posing the question, 'What is to be done with the squeegees?' - thereby framing for public discussion the administrative problem of a behavioural anomaly.5 The offensive visibility of the 'squeegee kid' was the persistent theme of replies to this question, but it was left to suburban women callers to support such pronouncements with the evidence of a personal sense of endangerment whenever their cars were approached by these 'aggressive' moral others. Testimonies to such a sense of threat functioned as the final, incontrovertible word in the debate about the social problem of the homeless entrepreneur. The point of view of the endangered woman legitimated the conversion of political symptoms into antecedent problems of moral otherness, reawakening the nineteenth-century figure of the antisocial, ungovernable pauper for more service. In order for women's testimonies to function in this way, they had to ignore their own 'remote operation' by the discourses that produced the objects of their fear. Settler Feminism and Race Making in Canada began with the declaration, by the writer of one of the earliest monographs on Canadian literature, that 'Canadians figure their country to themselves' through the 'image of a woman, young and fair, with the flush of sunrise on her face ... They say to the world in effect: "We are a people ... because we have a voice"' (Mac-

Epilogue 215 Mechan 17). MacMechan's 1924 statement could as easily apply to latetwentieth-century feminist and nationalist literary criticism that was informed by the dialectic of the masculine self and his others. This criticism endeavoured to effect the postcolonial credentialization of Canadian literature by drawing on a popular international strand of postcolonialism concerned with the psychological origins and effects of colonization. It turned to the fiction of Canadian women writers of the 1970s for objects of analysis and constructed an analogy between the positions of 'woman' and 'colony' that became something of a critical reflex. At the heart of this analogy was an idealist conception of culture as an expression of authentic identity, that permitted comparisons between woman's problems of identity and self-expression under patriarchy, on the one hand, and the cultural dislocation experienced by British settlers transplanted to an alien environment on the other.6 Reinventing nineteenth-century attempts to indigenize settler culture, this postcolonial criticism could thus establish as a critical a priori the existence of a 'continuing yet subterranean tradition of refusal towards the conceptual and cultural apparatuses of the European imperium' in the national literature (Slemon 6).' But while the woman/colony analogy permitted Canada to win a place in the postcolonial field through its feminization, this required the reduction of complex colonial processes to the structure of a generic patriarchy and the misconstrual of the 'white' settler woman who had, historically, occupied the site of the norm - as a privileged signifier of otherness. In an exemplary strain of this criticism, the figure of Prospero embodied the source and centre of an undifferendated colonial power, as The Tempest's allegory of the totalizing powers of the masculine, Western self was substituted for analysis of the colonial archive. Miranda, the daughter 'under Prospero's despotic tutelage and the victim of his capricious will,' was constructed as an emblem of Anglo-Canadian national identity (Zabus 42). Read in this context, Margaret Laurence's novel The Diviners, (1974) became one of the touchstones of Canadian postcolonial criticism in the 1980s. A kunstlerroman with a Miranda figure at its centre, the novel was interpreted as an allegory of Canada's emergence from colonialism, representing the predicament of Canadian national culture (a struggle for self-expression against the pressures of silencing) in the figure of Morag Gunn, a woman writer in the process of finding her voice. This allegorical interpretation of The Diviners was shaped by a reliance upon a repressive model of power but when a different analysis of power is employed, and the focus is shifted from questions of identity to

216 Settler Feminism and Race Making those of normativity, another reading becomes possible. This alternate reading of The Diviners transforms a touchstone of Canadian postcolonial criticism into the very symptom of this criticism's failure to come to terms with Canada's history of racist differentiation and exclusion.8 Because The Diviners is as much an allegory of critical practices as it is an allegory of national awakening, it is worth sketching out how such an alternate reading might proceed. This sketch will demonstrate what is at stake in the distinction between the inherited or transcendental mythic significance explicitly thematized by The Diviners and its critics, and the kind of discursive sedimentation exposed by a more archaeological approach to Canadian women's writing. The narrative task of Laurence's protagonist, as Chantal Zabus has noted, is to 'abandon the sterility of British letters' represented by her paternalistic husband, a professor of English literature, and to 'embrace the fertility of the native land' represented by her Metis lover, Jules (Zabus 45). The opposition of sterility/fertility is central to The Diviners' articulation of norms of tolerant multicultural Canadianness through the figure of the progressive woman. Morag Gunn's sexual maturation will coincide with her insertion within a scheme of nationalist affect by means of a transgressive desire to 'love across racial lines' that is nonconjugal but, significantly, not non-reproductive.9 The language of the scene in which Morag conceives a daughter with her Metis lover insists on the identity of transgressive heterosexual female desire and the healing of historical wounds. In this scene Morag 'doesn't expect to be aroused, and does not even care if she isn't, as though this joining is being done for other reasons, some debt or answer to the past, some severing of inner chains which have kept her bound and separated from some part of herself (Laurence 292). Morag's desire for a reparatory coupling can be read as the novel's means of figuring the 'will to unity' of the good Canadian citizen, the disposition for which diversity is a problem calling for policy solutions (Day 49). Published just five years before The Diviners, the Report of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism promoted a policy of 'integration' as the means of engendering a 'healthy diversity within a harmonious and dynamic whole' (qtd. Day 57). But the diverse and harmonious whole envisioned by The Diviners involves a diversity of cultural memories within what must be called a single Canadian race, given the text's insistence on the 'will to unity' as a specifically reproductive impulse. In Laurence's text, national identity is ultimately a matter of genealogy in the biological sense, and the white woman does not cease to be the bearer of

Epilogue 217

sexual norms just because these are now associated with the project of building up a multicultural Canadian race. The inter-racial relationship between Morag and Jules simply expands the boundaries of the multicultural whiteness envisioned in the Report of the Royal Commission, folding Metis 'blood' within its homogenizing embrace.10 One needs to look elsewhere in The Diviners for the unassimilable racial difference that remains beyond the pale of this harmonious whole, as the guarantee of that whole's indigenous purity and its historical impunity. The fertilization of multicultural policy achieved by The Diviners rests on the construction of a normative desire for unity that is constitutively opposed to a sexual dysfunction, a failure of the 'will to unity' located in the text's Prospero-figure, Morag's Anglo-Indian husband. Brooke Skelton's name already speaks his truth as the sterile carcass of imperialism, and, indeed, The Diviners connects his defective will to the psycho-sexual 'pathology' of imperialism. Raised in India, Brooke is a racialized figure who carries the traces of intolerable otherness in this tolerantly multicultural text. He is equipped with these traces just before Morag decides to leave him. At this point the narrative displaces onto him the infantilized and hystericized position that Morag has occupied as his wife, in a passage that assigns him a sexual dysfunction with an aetiology reaching back to the aberrant practices of a native nursemaid in his childhood India. In this scene, Morag is positioned as an analyst seeking to decipher the traces of Brooke's unconscious, in his sleep-talking utterance of a Hindi name in a 'weird low anguished voice' (Laurence 237). She discovers that it is by the hand of 'Minoo,' the Indian nursemaid who performed a 'common practise there ... [n]ot, however, among Europeans' (247), that her husband acquired his skeletal aspect, his reluctance to reproduce, or what might be called his multicultural sterility. Minoo, Brooke confesses, 'would get into bed beside me, and hold me in her arms and stroke me. I mean all over. I used to have an orgasm or whatever is the equivalent in a child' (247). The Diviners situates Brooke's psycho-sexual 'illness' as his deep inner truth, but as critics we are not bound to adopt the same therapeutic gaze as Morag. It is also possible to read Brooke's 'illness' symptomatically, as the sign of the continuing resonance of nineteenth-century colonial discourses in a feminist novel of the 1970s.11 In order to ensure Brooke's abjection from healthy Canadian multiculturalism, the text resurrects a late-nineteenth-century discourse on the degeneration of Europeans in the tropics and the susceptibilities of white colonial children to moral contamination by native domestic servants. The construe-

218 Settler Feminism and Race Making tion of the danger of tropical degeneration, as Nancy Stepan has shown, 'gave scientific weight to the importance of maintaining the correct psychological and social distance from the very places into which the white race, by its putatively natural vigor, ambition, restlessness and dominance was moving' - a distance, more specifically from the dangerous habits of the peoples it gave itself the right to govern (102). Two texts from 1898 exemplify this argument for proper distances. Eugene Talbot's Degeneracy: Its Causes, Signs, and Results (1898) identifies a relative of those 'tramps, errabund lunatics, and paupers' located in the metropolitan centre, in the white person who picks up the habits of natives in the colonies, becomes 'incurable' and abandons white society to 'live in the woods or in Indian villages' (117). The trajectory traced by Talbot's account of degeneracy runs from an ancestor's acquisition of a degenerate habit, to his descendants' inheritance of an acquired neurosis, and finally to a generalized mental and moral family degeneracy. Ann Laura Stoler discusses the discourse that pointed to native servants' alien habits as the source of this trajectory of white degeneracy, citing an 1898 handbook for colonial mothers that warned of the 'unbelievable practices' of native nursemaids who risk 'damaging these children for their entire adult lives' (qtd. Stoler 155-6). This alternate reading of The Diviners allows us to consider how the staging of the problematic of national identity through the woman/colony analogy only reinscribes normalizing violence. Brooke's confession of his childhood orgasms clinches his function as the point of concentration for anxieties about racial contamination and loss of character in The Diviners. The text prepares Brooke's inability to accede to 'normal' desiring in the breakdown of natural bonds between parents and children and their replacement by the distances, militarist disciplining, and tropical contaminations that it constructs as the other of a healthy multicultural hybridity. Morag's normative 'will to unity' is thus constitutively opposed to the defective desire to breed that originates in her husband's contamination by an Indian nursemaid who does not (as does Morag's Metis lover) provide rhetorical access to a Canadian indigeneity. Ella Shohat's reminder that hybridity must always be examined in a 'non-universalizing, differential manner,' attentive to the way in which inverted racist tropes can become 'figure[s] for the consecration of hegemony' is pertinent here (110). Morag's sexual desire is purified as the desire for a reparatory hybridization of Canadian identity only through the text's projection of the historical role of racist discursive practices in the constitution of Canadian identity onto the distant scene

Epilogue 219 of colonial India. The point that needs to be stressed is that this displacement of the thematics of racial purity and contamination onto another scene is symptomatic of a much wider problem in the discourse of Canadian postcolonial criticism. The mythic approach to history that characterizes The Diviners' narration of Canadian identity along the lines of The Tempest also runs through the thematic criticism of Canadian literature in the 1970s, and carries over into postcolonial criticism of the 1980s that continues to work with transhistorical phenomenologies, not the historically contingent, practical thresholds of discourse. 12 Just as The Diviners' narrativization of cultural authenticity is ill equipped to address the historical cultivation of a racialized Canadian body, the same is true of the criticism that took its inspiration from The Diviners. Naive conceptions of culture as the expression of a temperament and of colonial space as a wilderness or negative space outside of culture and history do not allow us to hear the echoes of more practical, 'scientific' discourses about the social body that circulate in texts like The Diviners (where they determine a character's inadmissibility to the Canadian race). In order to broach the kind of discursive threshold from which a theme like that of the contaminating native nursemaid is derived, it is necessary to adopt a more archaeological approach to Canadian women's writing. The approach modelled in Settler Feminism and Race Making has thus been predicated on two key moves: first, the settler woman's text is considered in the dimension of its exteriority - its conditions of existence, its historically specific 'author-functions,' its practical deployments; second, the ground occupied by the woman writer is grasped as a discursively mapped and inscribed space, thick with prior statements. 13 The inspiration for such a historical epistemology14 might come from another late-twentieth-century Canadian novel, Sky Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe (1990), part of which is set in 1924, the year of Archibald MacMechan's declaration about the Canadian 'image of a woman, young and fair, with the flush of surnise on her face' (17). In Lee's novel, an archivist's 'pursuit of still life' in a 'microfilm viewing machine' (65-6) effectively breaks open this 'image of a woman,' for as he discovers, 1924 was the year in which the circulation of a particular white woman's image 'made criminal suspects of all Chinese men' in Canada (224). This was the year in which a twenty-two-year-old Scottish nursemaid (whom Canadian newspapers named the 'Singing Nursemaid' and the 'Scottish Nightingale') was murdered in the laundry room of a Vancouver mansion. The only evidence summoned against the Asian houseboy accused

220 Settler Feminism and Race Making

of her murder was the testimony by her friends that she had been 'real scared of the Chinese' (Starkins 82-3). The discursive production of this fear in early-twentieth-century Canadian legislation to protect white women - legislation supported by feminist organizations - is also part of the history exposed by the research of Lee's archivist character, who recollects the historically contingent self-evidence of a 'god-given duty to protect our poor, white working-class maidenhood from those filthy minded, slant-eyed vermin' (Lee 67).15 Disappearing Moon Cafe thus insists on the discursive practices that rendered 'chineseness' visible and knowable as an unwanted presence and threat to the security of the nation in early-twentieth-century Canada. Refusing the possibility of a coherent family saga, its narrative dissipates the roots of identity, by excavating the determination of'chineseness' in a historical stratum teeming with statements about white women's vulnerability. In this novel, the figure of the Anglo-Protestant settler woman is a discontinuity cutting across the history of Asian Canadians, whose contemporary world is full of the '[ujbiquitous irony' of historical sedimentations: the present-day archivist lives in the basement of the very house in which the Scottish nursemaid was murdered (70). The narrator of Lee's kunstlerroman is a writer, not an archivist, but this writer's orientation to her own project of writing an autobiography is symbolized by the archivist's approach to history as an accumulation of sedimentary beds of discourse. Their mingled projects of excavation pay homage, in turn, to an earlier 'bone-searching expedition.' In this 1892 expedition, an ancestor recovers the traces of labour erased in the fetishization of the transcontinental railway as a symbol of the Canadian nation - the 'bones of dead chinamen strewn along the Canadian Pacific Railway, their ghosts sitting on the ties' (5-6). Unearthing the bones of ancestors, Disappearing Moon Cafe suggests, requires excavating the discursive relations within which they took their shape. That is why Lee's novel inscribes the historicity of another national symbol, the figure of the Canadian songstress, 'young and fair, with the flush of sunrise on her face,' whose fetishization in literary-critical discourse has erased the traces of its work as a mechanism of race making.

Notes

Introduction 1 See, for example, Daniel Coleman, 'Immigration, Nation, and the Allegory of'Manly Maturation,' Essays in Canadian Writing 61 (1997): 84—103, and Lorraine Weir, 'The Discourse of "Civility": Strategies of Containment in Literary Histories of English Canadian Literature,' Problems of Literary Reception/Probiemes de reception lilteraire, ed. E.D. Blodgett and A.G. Purdy (Edmonton: Research Institute for Comparative Literature, 1988) 24—39. Although his focus is on heteronormativity in Canadian nationalist criticism, Peter Dickinson also finds that Canadian nationalism has been 'gendered as patriarchal' (5). For an examination of the legacy of romantic historicism in Canadian literary histories, see Jonathan Kertzer, Worrying the Nation: Imagining a National Literature in English Canada (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1998). 2 Lome Pierce, a contemporary of MacMechan's, praises 'Janey Canuck' as a 'virile' and 'forceful' writer, and credits Laura Goodman Salverson - a 'descendant of the Vikings, and a Canadian by birth' - with having 'married the spirit of the romantic past to the romantic present.' An Outline of Canadian Literature: French and English (Toronto: Ryerson, 1927) 39, 40. Lorraine Weir's essav, 'The Discourse of "Civility"' drew my attention to these references. 3 In 'Anthologies and the Canon of Early Canadian Women Writers,' Re(dis) covering Our Eoremothers: Nineteenth-Century Canadian Women Writers, ed. Lorraine McMullen (Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1990) 55-76, Carole Gerson critiques this received account from another perspective, pointing out that, in

222

4

5

6

7 8

9

10

11

Notes to pages 5-9

spite of the cultural myth of English-Canadian women writers' prominence, national literary canons have consistently marginalized early women writers of popular fiction, tending to privilege the poetry of male modernists. On 'articulation' as a tool for describing historically specific 'complex structures' (as opposed to transhistorical unities) composed of parts hinged together through their differences, see Stuart Hall, 'Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,' Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (Paris: UNESCO, 1980) 305-45. Ian McKay's essay 'The Liberal Order Framework' provides a concise summation of the hierarchical arrangement of these ideological principles in liberal orders. 'It is an awkward fact,' McKay adds, that the consolidation of the Canadian project required the 'massive extension of a relatively autonomous state ... a dramatic new unleashing of institution building, a newly intense drive to master the chaos of life and liberalize social relations, often before the development of the "fundamental classes" classical Marxists view as pivotal to capitalism' (629). See Stoler; also Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). It was specifically in reference to Ireland that MacDonagh, borrowing the term 'social laboratory' from W.L. Burn, made this point. But Ireland was not the only social laboratory: a significant number of Canadian colonial governors played pivotal roles in Britain's 'revolution in government.' Later on, during the period in the late nineteenth century in which Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney wrote their narratives, the new culturally heterogeneous population in the Canadian West served as the target of Protestant missionary 'Home Work.' When Emily Murphy took up her pen as Janey Canuck in the early twentieth century, moral reformers were reframing political conflict in 'overlapping discourses about rampant immorality, family breakdown, and race suicide,' and proposing social control as the guarantee of order and security (Chunn 28, 12-13). The earlier moment included the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789, the publication of Olympe de Gouges's Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen and Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, and the wide circulation of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (1791). Radical societies proliferated in Britain in the 1790s, some of them advocating an unrestricted franchise. On the different platforms of these radical societies, see H.T. Dickinson, British Radicalism and the French Revolution, 1789-1815 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985). See Brouwer, 25-30. The 'reflex influence' of foreign missionary work, wrote

Notes to pages 9-14 223

12 13

14

15

16

17

one commentator in an 1887 issue of Knox College Monthly, saved Canadian women from being 'empty, selfish, shallow things' (J.A. MacDonald qtd. Brouwer 32-3). Blake, House of Commons debate, 30 April 1885. As Denise Riley has argued, the emergence of the territory of the 'social' stemmed from the linking of demands for an education that would fit women for the rights and duties of an independent civil existence with the goal of training future generations in bourgeois morality. As the project of women's advancement was hitched to early sociological discourses on the moral forces at work in society, the 'social' came to represent a topography of moral problems calling for the intervention of the well-regulated bourgeois woman. In Canada, women who acceded to this 'social' arena often worked under the supervision or official sanction of male religious figures. See Valverde, Age, and Morgan, Public. William Kilbourn identifies the Laurentian thesis governing the work of such historians as Harold Innis and Donald Creighton, for whom the Canadian nation is a product of trade routes running from east to west. See 'The Writing of Canadian History,' Literary History oj Canada, vol. 1, Canadian Literature in English, ed. Carl F. Klinck (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1965) 501-2. Anna Jameson's access to London publishers had already been established by her demonstrated ability to produce non-fiction appealing to a relatively wide, educated readership. The narratives of Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney were published in Canada (in a period when Canadian authors were still forced to seek publishers in England and the United States) through the newspaper and printing office in Parkdale, Ontario, owned by Gowanlock's brother-in-law. Emily Murphy's Janey Canuck series was written during the period of the initial blossoming of a Canadian publishing industry. Her first collection of sketches, The Impressions ofjaney Canuck At/road (1901), was published in Toronto but found reviewers in England as well as Canada because of its interest as an imperial daughter's view of the mother country. While this approach is still somewhat new in Canadian literary criticism, it is not so new in Canadian social history. See for example Joy Parr's The Gender of Breadwinners: Women, Men, and Change in Two Industrial Towns, 1880—1950 (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1990). Parr's essay 'Gender History and Historical Practice,' Canadian Historical Review 76.3 (1995): 354-76, provides an outline of some of the disruptions that the work of cultural and gender historians has produced in the field of Canadian history. Emily Murphy cites a 1919 text by Caleb Saleeby in her 1922 anti-narcotics text, The Black Candle.

224

Notes to pages 15-22

18 Jean-Christophe Agnew points out that the word 'agent' was connected to 'actor' in the latter's pre-Shakespearean, pre-theatrical reference to the rep resentative who acted on behalf of another - 'actor' in this sense meant a steward, attorney, or factor (98). It is helpful to remember that agency is bound up in the double sense of 'actor' as one who performs and one who serves on behalf of another. 19 My anti-expressivist approach substitutes for the transhistorical subject of phenomenological philosophy the self that is the product of a specific form of labour involving the infolding of social norms, or what Gilles Deleuze calls exterior 'lines of force.' Deleuze's suggestion that there is no better answer to the ontological question What are we? than the 'habit of saying "I" speaks to the very practical approach to subjectivity entailed in this shift from the subject to the self (Empiricismx; emphasis added). In contrast to theorization about the subject, a history of forms of selfhood, Deleuze suggests, must work 'on the ground,' mapping contingent lines of knowledge, power, and subjectification. 20 On veridical discourse, see Georges Canguihelm, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett (New York: Zone, 1978). 21 For a study of white women's complicity, see Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (London: Verso, 1992), a text that emphasizes the cultivation of a racist consensus about black men in nineteenthcentury Anglo-American feminism. 22 The 'conduct of conduct' is the epigrammatic definition of the work of government (or 'governmentality,' Foucault's neologism for governmental rationality) that Foucault offered in his 1978 and 1979 courses at the College de France. See Foucault's essay, 'Governmentality,' and Colin Gordon's 'Governmental Rationality: An Introduction' in Burchell, Gordon, and Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect. Nikolas Rose's Powers of Freedom is an attempt to synthesize 'analytics of government,' which he defines as studies of a stratum of knowing and acting that involves ways of speaking the truth about conduct, in order to achieve specified ends. 23 For more on the fragmentation and hierarchization of nineteenth-century Canadian femininity along moral-racial lines, see Lykke De La Cour, Cecilia Morgan, and Mariana Valverde, 'Gender Regulation and State Formation,' Colonial Leviathan: State Formation in Nineteenth-Century Canada, ed. Allan Greer and Ian Radforth (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992) 163-91. 24 Racism, as Stoler points out, is the 'complex, if elusive' subtext of Foucault's work on liberal government, which, in the trajectory of his thought, followed several years devoted to a genealogy of 'state racism' (26). Stoler resituates biopolitical technologies centred on sexuality as an element of'state racism'

Notes to pages 22-8

25

26

27 28 29

30

225

by collating The History of Sexuality with Foucault's later 1976 College de France lectures, two of which are published in Power/Knowledge as 'Two Lectures.' This 'grid of intelligibility' was first deployed as an instrument of opposition to sovereign rule in late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century counternarratives of the conquest of Saxon England, which tied the rights of the English people to the expulsion of Norman 'foreigners' (Stoler 73—4). What was new about this analysis of social relations at the time was the way that it called upon a type of power that was incompatible with the will of the sovereign. This other form of power, Foucault argues, eventually crystallized into modern practices of discipline and normalization that are dependent upon the invocation of norms rather than sovereign rights. The name for future meetings was changed to 'Imperial Conference' at the 1907 meeting. After 1937, 'Prime Ministers' Conferences' or 'Commonwealth Conferences' met until 1953. The proceedings of the conferences between 1887 and 1937 are edited and condensed in Maurice Ollivier's three-volume. Colonial and Imperial Conferences. Metalepsis is the figure through which a 'present effect [is] attributed to a remote cause' (Lanham 5). E.C. Murphy papers, City of Edmonton Archives (CEA), MS 2, Scrapbook 23, 227. As Sylvana Tomaselli observes, the association of female agency with the progress of civil society runs through eighteenth-century histories of the progressive stages of civil society, constructed from descriptions of'primitive' cultures by travellers who understand the condition of women as the barometer of progress in morals, laws, and government. In these texts, the history of civil society is the history of improvements in women's condition, and women themselves are the protagonists of the narrative, the 'agents of the process by which their condition [is] improved' (107). Tomaselli draws chiefly upon The History of Women from the Earliest Antiquity, to the Present Time (1779) by the Scottish physician William Alexander, Denis Diderot's 'Sur les femmes' (1772), and John Millar's The Origins of the Distinction of Ranks (1779). The need to account for this additional manoeuvre becomes more clear when we consider the limits of the critique of liberalism's universalist pretensions. The critique of women's and subaltern people's historical inadmissibility to the constituency of natural rights can ultimately only charge liberalism with self-limitation; furthermore, it keeps the white woman and the colonized subject side by side. In order to be able to critique liberalism in a manner capable of grasping the historical inequivalence of these subject positions, it is necessary to look to the discursive practices that make up liberalism's unacknowledged regime of discipline and normalization.

226

Notes to pages 29-40

31 On Thomas Chalmers's Scottish home-visiting scheme designed to 'work a transformation of taste and character' in the poor, see Poovey, Making, 35. On the 'zenana visit,' see Brouwer. 32 Thus for Adam Smith, the 'scheme of actions' that promotes the 'common interest' is that which locates individuals within systems of dependence and productivity of which they are unaware, but which nevertheless constitute the rationality of their actions (Burchell, 'Peculiar' 133). 33 In Gilles Deleuze's reading, Hume's Treatise on Human Nature offers a practical theory of the self as the product of subjectifications tied to specific discourses and institutions. Hume theorizes society as a design for the realization of human nature in a system of'models of actions ... invented system [s] of positive means' (Deleuze, Empiricism 45-6). As such, the Treatise forms part of the history of liberal governmental know-how addressing the self that is the target and partner of positive techniques of power, of norms, practices, and institutions. 34 Happiness, defined by Malthus in terms that studiously ignore the question of distribution, is the condition in which the yearly increase of food approximates the yearly increase of population. 35 Martineau's narrative elucidations of the 'grand principles' proceed by means of plots always resolved by 'natural laws' and frequently interrupted by extended dialogues modelling the assimilation of these laws to everyday conversation. The use of dramatic dialogue to normalize the vocabulary of political economy as the material of everyday conversation takes up Hume's promotion of rational and civil conversation as a means of restraining political 'enthusiasms' in liberal society (Poovey, Making32). 36 See Riley; Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987), Ware, Beyond the Pale, and Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1994). 37 See Carol Smart, 'Disruptive Bodies and Unruly Sex: The Regulation of Reproduction and Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century,' Regulating Womanhood: Historical Essays on Marriage, Motherhood, and Sexuality, ed. Carol Smart (London: Routledge, 1992) 7-32. 38 White women first came to western Canada in significant numbers as the wives of fur trade company officials. See Sylvia Van Kirk, 'Many Tender Ties': Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670-1870 (Winnipeg: Watson and Dwyer, 1980). Another influx of white women in families to British North America occurred as Loyalist refugees settled in the Maritimes and Upper Canada. But late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century immigration schemes drew

Notes to pages 42-8

227

single British women to Canada as servants and as the potential wives of British Columbia settlers. 39 Murphy papers, CEA MS 2, Scrapbook 87, 'Canada's First Woman Magistrate Points to Vast Saving in Human Material,' Christian Science Monitor, 1926, n.p. 40 Ibid., Scrapbook 10, 'Formation of Canadian Clubs among Foreign Women Is Suggested by Mrs. Murphy,' Edmonton Bulletin, 31 October 1929, n.p. 1. 'A Magnificient and an Enviable Power' 1 On Jameson's participation in the campaign for married women's property rights in England and her efforts to improve conditions and widen opportunities for working women, see Johnston as well as Ernstrom. 2 For a reading that focuses on the gender specificity of the text's epistolary mode of address, see Bina Friewald, '"Femininely Speaking": Anna Jameson's Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada,' A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing, ed. Shirley Neuman and Smaro Kamboureli (Edmonton: Longspoon/NeWest, 1986) 61-73. 3 Robert and A n n a Jameson had lived separately since 1829. Anna Jameson came to Toronto to begin making arrangements for a divorce; by the time she embarked on her return trip to England, she had secured an arrangement that would permit her to continue living apart from her husband, on an allowance of £300 a vear. In 1849, when Robert Jameson retired, she lost this income See Clara Thomas, Love 125, 190. 4 This preference for the lively example over abstract reasoning is connected to the project of inculcating an art of living through an education at the level of the passions. As Thomas Malthus observes in the 1826 edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population, the passions are the materials 'of all our virtues, as well as of all our vices. It must therefore be regulation and direction that are wanted, not d i m i n u t i o n or extinction' (470). Jameson applies this pedagogical orientation to her critique of a Sunday sermon as being 'not well adapted to the sort of congregation assembled. The situation of those who had here met together to seek a new existence in the new world, might have afforded topics of instruction, praise, and gratitude, far more practical, more congenial, more intelligible, than a mere controversial essay on a disputed text, which elicited no remark or sympathy that I could perceive' (Winter Studies 244). Harriet Martineau, whom Jameson will recognize in her text as an expert in the 'social,' was another early-nineteenth-century woman of letters with a penchant for the concrete demonstration. But whereas Martineau uses dramatic dialogue to normali/.e the vocabulary of political economy as the material of evervdav conversation in her Illustrations oj Political Economy

228 Notes to pages 49-52

5 6

7

8

9

(1834), Jameson uses dialogue to normalize a particular kind of feminist discourse. In Characteristics of Women, she uses the form of the debate between a feminist narrator and a suspicious male interlocutor to demonstrate the rhetorical means of countering objections to arguments for women's education without, as she once advised younger feminists in another context, 'riskfing] all that lies before you by running on the wrong side of the post' (qtd. Johnston 233). Jean-Christophe Agnew's discussion of the incorporation of theatricality in eighteenth-century prose conventions has been helpful here. The preposition in 'making up' makes all the difference between depth psychology's a priori theory of the constitution of the subject and the 'dynamic nominalism' proposed by Ian Hacking. Hacking's much-cited essay 'Making Up People' argues along Foucauldian lines that new kinds of persons emerge hand in hand with new modes of description and classificatory practices. '[O]ur spheres of possibility, and hence our selves, are to some extent made up by our naming,' he suggests (236). An ethics that has been entirely colonized by religious, pedagogical, medical, or psychiatric knowledges and institutions is no longer autonomous (Foucault, Care 282). The Care of the Self is an attempt to recover the sense of a pre-Christian ethics that was not so tightly bound to the procedures of confession and the more general injunction to know the self. By linking Wollstonecraft's pre-depth-psychology feminism to Foucault's nominalist approach to the person and his sense of ethics as a practice of freedom, I wish to underline the potential usefulness of some of Foucault's later work on the 'care of the self for feminist thought. For the narrative of Robert Jameson's brief career as a Tory member of the Legislative Assembly and his collusion with Ogle Robert Gowan, founder of the Orange Order in Canada (and Emily Murphy's maternal grandfather) in the intimidation of Reformers in 1836, see Charles Anderson, Bluebloods and Rednecks: Discord and Rebellion in the 1830s (Burnstown, ON: General Store, 1996). It is important to note that the Upper Canadian Reformers' talk of making the appointed Executive Council responsible to the elected Assembly in the 1820s and 1830s went further than the constitutional arrangements practised at the time in Britain. The Crown's representative acted on the advice of a ministry composed of men of the aristocracy, a ministry that was not dependent upon public opinion for its authority. Because there was no aristocracy in Upper Canada, public opinion tended to be more consequential at the polls. See Gerald Craig, Upper Canada: The Formative Years, 1784-1841 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1963) 202-3.

Notes to pages 54-8 229 10 It is worth noting that 'person,' for Thomas Hobbes, defender of the new contractualism of seventeenth-century social and political relations, was derived from the word persona, which had originally referred to the mask of a player. See Agnew 98-9. On the character-strengthening effects of 'struggles of passion,' see Wollstonecraft 150-4 and 216-18. 'By fits and starts,' she argues, women 'are warm in many pursuits; yet this warmth, never concentrated into perserverance, soon exhausts itself (153). Catriona Mackenzie makes a very convincing argument that Wollstonecraft's ideal of female selfgovernance does not 'pit women's reason in opposition either to their bodies or to affectivity'; on the contrary, '... the denial to women of the right to express or act in accordance with their affections all conspire to make love and friendship founded on respect just about impossible between men and women' (37, 46). See her 'Reason and Sensibility: The Ideal of Women's Self-Governance in the Writings of Mary Wollstonecraft,' HypatiaS. 4 (Fall 1993): 35-53. 11 Helen Buss reads Jameson as an autobiographer who merges her identity with the land. See her essay, 'Women and the Garrison Mentality: Pioneer Women Autobiographers and Their Relation to the Land,' Re(Dis) covering Our Foremothers: Nineteenth-Century Canadian Women Writers, ed. Lorraine McMullen (Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1990) 123-36. In Wayne Eraser's reading, Jameson 'projects her marital tensions onto her portrait of the political situation in Upper Ganada'; 'colonized as she was by the dominant power of her husband, she astutely analyze [s] the colonial tensions of Upper Canada' (10, 11). 12 I borrow the term 'pre-sociological observation' from Bruce Curtis, whose essay 'Pre-Sociological Observation? Maria Edgeworth, Elizabeth Hamilton and A.A. de Saussure Necker' in Society/Sociele (Newsletter of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association) 16.1 (1992): 10-19, proposes a reevaluation of sociology's beginnings that would include the work of nineteenth-century female authors of educational guidebooks, moral fictions, and popular ethnographies, in order to return a more critical, self-reflexive sense of the 'political character of social scientific activity' to the discipline (11). 13 For a recent investigation of Martineau's writing career, see Shelagh Hunter. 14 The lack of such a boundary also explains how it was that Jameson could choose the peculiar title Social Life in Germany for her 1840 translation of a collection of German dramas. 15 Fanny Kemble was the niece of the celebrated Shakespearean actress Sarah Siddons and the actor John Philip Kemble. She was the daughter of Charles Kemble, who took over the ownership and management of Covent Garden

230 Notes to pages 63-8

16

17

18

19 20

21

in 1820. See Margaret Armstrong, Fanny Kemble: A Passionate Victorian (New York: Macmillan, 1938). Jameson was a friend and mentor of Fanny Kemble's, who made recommendations for her stage costumes and visited her in Branchtown, Pennsylvannia, on her way back to England. On Jameson's friendship with the Kemble family and with Fanny in particular, see Thomas, Lovech. 5. The 1832 Reform Bill was a compromise between landed privilege and money. As E.P. Thompson suggests in The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin, 1963), this compromise was ensured when middle-class Radicals assumed the organization and direction of demands for change in 1831-2, subordinating the call for universal male suffrage to calls for property, security, and free trade. Wollstonecraft argues that 'one reason why men have superior judgement, and more fortitude than women, is undoubtedly this, that they give a freer scope to the grand passions, and by more frequently going astray enlarge their minds' (216). The neoclassical style of studied gestures and exaggerated statuesque poses was characteristic of both the Kemble-Siddons school of acting in England and the style developed in Weimar by Goethe and Schiller. Goethe recommended that his actors study and then emulate the static poses of Greek statues, but the style was popularized (and gendered) by a book of sketches of the model Emma Hamilton in classical 'attitudes,' published in 1794. As Gail Marshall points out, Goethe's 1809 novel, Die Wahlverwandtschaflen (Elective Afjininties), in which the statue pose serves to expose a female character's moral sensitivity, also contributed to the popularization of'tableaux vivants' in early-nineteenth-century England (39-47). On the Kemble-Siddons school of acting, see Alan S. Downer, 'Nature to Advantage Dressed: Eighteenth-Century Acting,' PMLA 58, 4.1 (1943): 1002-37. On the style of acting developed by Goethe and Schiller, see F.J. Lamport, German Classical Drama: Theatre, Humanity, and Nation, 1750-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990). See the reviews collected in Matthews and Hutton. The very idea of an individual inner core, authentic to the extent that it is hidden, is the product of these historically contingent techniques of 'moral invigilation and self-correction' (Lynch 133). While these techniques were first elaborated as a more sensitive way of reading literature, with the emergence of 'English' as a school subject the practice of 'character appreciation' would be seized upon as a means of building up a cohesive liberal society of self-monitoring and -correcting individuals. See Ian Hunter. This process recalls the interplay between social conventions and individual

Notes to pages 73-83 231

22

23

24

25

impulses that David Hume describes in the empiricist theory of subjectivity outlined in his Treatise on Human Nature. Here, the passions provide the crucial individuali/.ing element without which social conventions - or the 'principles of association' - could not be realized at the level of individuals. See Constantin V. Boundas, 'Translator's Introduction,' Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Human '.v Theory of Human Naure, by Gilles Deluize (New York: Columbia UP, 1991, 1-19). Wollstonecraft, too, assigns a key role to the passions in her outline of the conditions necessary to the realization of human potential. As Mitzi Myers has argued, she proposes a 'complex union of the feelings and the understanding,' refusing to pit reason against affectivity (125-6). Wollstonecraft's Vindication follows Olympe de Gouges's Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen (1791), which countered Rousseau's pronouncements on the dangers of excessive desire and unregulated imagination in women, with a claim to an active citizenship predicated on the powers of the female imagination. See Joan Scott, ch. 2. The conclusion to which the anecdote leads Jameson is virtually identical to that arrived at by Wollstonecraft: a woman trained to exercise her understanding 'would turn in disgust from a rake' (Vindication 227-8). Public education was a highly contentious issue in the 1830s, as members of the elected Assemblv of Upper Canada criticized Church of England influence in the grammar schools, demanded elected school trustees, and insisted that the proceeds of the Clergy Reserves be invested in education. See Gerald Craig, Upper Canada: The Formative Years, 1784-1841 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1963), ch. 9. Bruce Curtis argues that educational reform in Canada in the 1840s was spearheaded by liberal reformers who endeavoured to educate 'the people' as the most effective way of maintaining 'their version of Christian morality, paternal authority, and private property' ('Class' 110). He notes that Leonard Horner, the translator of Cousin's report on education in Holland, was a member of the Political Economy Club in London in the 1820s, together with Charles Poulett Thomson (Lord Sydenham), who was to become governor general of British North America in 1839(108). Malthus's agricultural colony can be read as the imaginary setting for what Mary Jacobus calls his 'fantasy of exact equivalency ordering] relations between signs and things, labour and subsistence, sexuality and reproduction' (96). This fantasy of exact equivalence without remainders involves the capture of female sexuality within a system of visibility in which it is accurately represented by the evidence of pregnancy. In an 1843 review for the London Athenaeum, Jameson makes a somewhat similar argument about the need to intervene in the relation between the

232 Notes to pages 84-95 sexes, painting an alarming picture of labouring-class men continuing to marry in the hope that wives will keep them clean, but having only 'hardened and demoralized' girls to choose from. '[T]here has existed in the lower, that is, the labouring classes, a necessity for marrying, such as the Malthusians have not dreamt of in their philosophy,' she observes, arguing that something must therefore be done to improve the 'future mothers of our labourers and operatives' ('Condition' 257). 26 The 1837 Act to Make the Remedy in Cases of Seduction More Effectual was without parallel either in England or the United States. Backhouse cites a mid-nineteenth-century English lament regarding the poor father who was without redress for the seduction of a daughter 'sent unprotected to earn her bread among strangers' but notes that, despite the concern, there were no legislative consequences in England ('Tort' 51n21). In the United States, existing common law was routinely stretched to cover the sort of situation targetted by the Upper Canadian act, but the practice was never legally codified. 27 Daughters in service far away from home and vulnerable to seduction by their employers were, according to Justice John Wilson of the Upper Canada Court of Common Pleas, 'under their condition a class, where the [existing] common law was no remedy for them' (Backhouse, 'Tort' 52). 28 In theory, the father's empowerment as a family man allowed him a measure of authority over the somewhat wealthier employer of his daughter. However, as Backhouse points out, very few of the defendants in seduction cases came from the upper classes. They represented a 'relatively prosperous cross-section of the working classes,' the majority being farmers or farmers' sons (ibid. 74—5). 29 It is no accident that, for Jameson, the most compelling figure in the drama of Adam Oehlenschlager is the the model of the woman strengthened by suffering, the figure of the Magdalen, who falls and then redeems herself. Johnston notes that, in Jameson's Poetry of Sacred and Legendary Art (1848), the Magdalen embodies the 'self-motivated, strong woman of action' whose story provides a popular and 'authentic' history of suffering and redemption (184, 189). In 'Summer Rambles,'Jameson contends that heroic women are 'not rare among the Indians, women who can bravely suffer - bravely die' (399). 30 Ernstrom cites a letter written byjameson in June 1837, before she embarked on her summer travels, announcing her itinerary and explaining that 'I wish to see, with my own eyes, the condition of women in savage life' (287). 31 On the emergence of a modern form of racism predicated on a universal

Notes to pages 95-102

32 33

34

35

233

equality that was defined in terms of a capacity to be Christianized, see David Theo Goldberg, Racist (Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993). See, for example, Ernstrom 290. George Johnston is the brother of the sisters Jane Schoolcraft and Charlotte MacMurray, whom the narrator befriends on her travels, and the son of Susan Johnston (O,shah,gush,ko,da,na,qua), the Anishinaube woman who adopts the narrator into the family under the name Wah,sah,ge,wah,no,qua (the bright foam) after her descent of falls at Sault Ste Marie (462). An acknowledgment of the possibility that this rejection and this withdrawal might entail a form of social death seems to be encoded in the intertext of the chapter 'Descent of the Falls' in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, a poem by a contemporary of Jameson's, Felicia Hemans. 'Indian Woman's Death Song' connects the figure of the First Nations woman with the contempt of danger and pain that Jameson learns to associate with First Nations warfare. The speaker of Hemans's poem, forsaken by her husband, 'Proudly, and dauntlessly, and all alone' plummets down a cataract to certain death, in a canoe with a female child 'born, like me, for / woman's weary lot.' The poem employs the topos of the native 'drudge,' but it reinscribes it in the mode of tragic, defiant grandeur that would have appealed to Jameson. Indeed, one of the poem's epigraphs is drawn from the speech of the heroine of Schiller's tragedy Braut Von Messina, a drama that Jameson discusses briefly in the 'German Actresses' chapter in Winter Studies. While the speaker of Hemans's poem descends to her death, Jameson's descent of the falls secures her an honorary place in a First Nations family. I am indebted to Susan Brown of the University of Guelph for pointing me to Hemans's poem. A policy firmly established by 1869 fostered practices of representative government on reserves while placing all practical control over lands and reserve income in the hands of the superintendent of Indian affairs. As Adrian Tanner argues, legislation that demanded 'civilization' and responsibility from First Nations people while denying them control over the forces affecting their lives resulted in a disproportionate binding to the 'postpolitical' sphere of administration, in which potentially critical and contestatory energies are expended in self-regulation according to requirements for particular programs. See Tanner's 'Canadian Indians and the Politics of Dependency,' The Politics of Indianness: Case Studies of Native Ethnopolitics in Canada, ed. Adrian Tanner (St John's: Institute of Social and Economic Research, 1983) 1-35.

234 Notes to pages 106-11 2. Female Freedom as an Artefact of Government 1 An Act for Consolidating and Amending the Statutes in this Province Relative to Offences Against the Person, 4 & 5 Viet. (1841) c. 27 s. 19, Statutes of the Province of Canada. The law continued to distinguish between heiresses, who were protected from abduction until the age of twenty-one, and all other women, who were covered only until they were sixteen (Parker 212). 2 See McLean; Tobias, 'Canada's'; Sprague. 3 'Contractual implication' is used by Donzelot to name procedures for drawing individuals into governing activity through invitations to 'active involvement,' which saddle them with the requirement that they conduct themselves 'in accordance with the appropriate (or approved) model of action.' Donzelot is cited in Burchell, 'Liberal' 276. Honig's argument that the figure of contract works performatively, as a ritual for ordering selves into 'fitting' forms, is pertinent here (135). 4 On the history of post-Confederation Indian Acts designed to 'civilize' First Nations people through special 'protections' aiming at eradicating their cultural differences, see Tobias, 'Protection.' Efforts to assimilate First Nations people in Eastern Canada operated through incitements to claim the rights and privileges of the European Canadian. In Western Canada, a more repressive policy of assimilation was applied, through the prohibition of traditional ceremonies, the removal of children to industrial and residential schools, and special Indian Act provisions regarding marriage, illegitimate children, and vagrancy (Tobias, 'Protection' 133, 135). 5 In nineteenth-century Canada, 'half-breed' designated the mixed-race population of British (mostly Scottish) and First Nations descent, while 'Metis' referred to those of French and First Nations descent. Metis men worked as bison hunters and subsistence farmers, while 'half-breed' men were more apt to be directly employed by the Hudson's Bay Company and, later, more fully involved in commercial agriculture. See Boisvert and Turnbull, 109—17. On the governmental strategy deployed to ensure the divided political allegiances of these two populations, see McLean, 83—4. 6 See McLean, 83-4. 7 See Sarah Carter, Lost Harvests: Prairie Indian Reserve Farmers and Government Policy (Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1990); Dyck; and Tobias, 'Canada's.' 8 Tobias notes that the Indian agent Thomas Quinn 'had physically abused some of the Indian men, while [the farm instructor John] Delaney had cuckolded others before he brought a "white" bride to Frog Lake in late 1884' ('Canada's' 544). 9 See Silver 39; Sprague 180.

Notes to pages 111-13 235 10 See Valverde, Agtr, Dubinsky. 11 In the mid-nineteenth century, the term 'white slavery' was used to refer to the plight of industrial workers, implying a parallel with African slaves and an association with the abolitionist cause. The English feminist Josephine Butler first applied the term to prostitution. Stead's 'Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon' series consolidated the term's more specific application to the plight of girls abducted by deception or force to brothels, and pioneered the genre of the white slavery narrative. The genre shifted the focus of the racial analog) from the slave to the sex-crazed male 'beast.' Lucy Bland reads this raciali/.ation of the abductor in terms of growing anxieties about immigration and the movement of rural girls to cities and suggests that Britain's 1912 Criminal Law Amendment Act offered women circulating outside of domestic space protection from racially marked men in lieu of the vote. See xiv-xvi, 297-302. 12 John McLaren, for instance, argues that it was '[o]nly when a concern with prostitution was allied with irrational and racist fears about Oriental immigration and settlement [that] widespread alarm among the public' arose with regard to white slavery, which 'ranked only behind temperance and Sunday observance as the "social and moral cause of the era"' (57, 54). 13 One such conjugation was the series of white women's labour laws, passed in Ontario and across the western provinces in the first two decades of the twentieth century, that prohibited the employment of'white' women in such racial 'danger /ones' as the 'Chinese cafe' or 'Chinese laundry.' See Constance Backhouse. 'White Female Help and Chinese-Canadian Employers: Race, Class, Gender and Law in the Case of Yee Chin, 1924,' (Canadian Ethnic Studies 26.3 (1994): 34-52. 14 In (faring in the West (1935), Nellie McClung recalls that the news of the capture of'Mrs. Delaney and Mrs. Gavanlock' [sic] forced a 'vague and abstract' threat "out into the open': 'the evil had assumed shape and image; painted savages, brandishing tomahawks and uttering blood-curdling cries' (183). 15 As Daniel Defert has shown, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, European states sei/ed upon the collectivization of security as a means of governing conduct. Appropriating the concern of autonomous working-class associations with risks of mortality and reassigning this concern to the bureaucratic management of the banker and the medical adviser, states created a new medico-economic interest in the value of human life that marginali/ed political issues and prescribed financial solidarity as a sociable solution to the risks associated with wage labour (218, 230-1). 16 This was the case even when the issue of white slavery was taken up by an

236 Notes to pages 114-21

17 18 19

20

21

22

23

organization such as the Ontario branch of the Knights of Labor. Karen Dubinsky argues that the support of the Ontario Knights for the bill that criminalized seduction in Canada in 1886 stemmed from an isolationist class perspective on the sexual dangers of the workplace (69-71). But I would suggest that the thematic of race also needs to be read in the Knights' emphasis on the 'sensuality [of the rich] naturally begotten by luxury, overfeeding and laziness' (qtd. Dubinsky 70). See Backhouse, 'Nineteenth-Century' 229. Ibid., 205. The high rate of success in seduction trials was in no small part related to the fact that such trials pitted the father- and not, as in rape trials, the woman herself- against the alleged seducer (Backhouse, 'Tort' 77). The 1886 act made it an 'offence against chastity' to seduce a girl above twelve and under sixteen years if she was of 'previously chaste character,' or to seduce under promise of marriage any unmarried woman under eighteen 'of previously chaste character.' See Parker. The migration of the seduction offence into the Criminal Code did not replace the 'tort of seduction,' which continued to exist under common law. However, it did mean that the Crown attorney carried the proceedings and acted as the main decision maker in the prosecution of the case, and the Crown attorney would have called the 'seduced woman' (rather than her father) as his witness. I am grateful to Constance Backhouse for her reply to my query on this point. In Michelle Burnham's tracking of changing captivity narrative forms, the sentimental version serving to produce the affective model of the imperialist audience coincides, in the United States, with the early- to mid-nineteenthcentury emergence of an aggressive policy of Indian removal. Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear was published, as Lalage Grauer points out, when conditions in the Canadian Northwest were closest to those on the American frontier (Grauer 130). It was published fifteen years after the former Hudson's Bay Company territory was annexed, and just as the Canadian government was actively encouraging settlement and moving in to partition and regulate a diverse population. Grauer connects the constraints of 'freedom' with the 'prescribed behaviour of the proper lady' (132). In general, however, she is interested in the two narrators' successful self-representations as 'victim-heroines' (132). She locates the source of their discourse in the generic conventions of the captivity narrative and the stock descriptions of sensationalist journalism. Sarah Carter, whose reading focuses on the discrepancies between the women's reported statements and the written accounts of their experiences, is also

Notes to pages 122-9

24

25

26

27 28

29

30

237

inclined to argue that Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear turns Gowanlock and Delaney into the 'classic victims of the classic captivity narrative' (103). Dumm's critique of Isaiah Berlin has helped in my understanding of the disciplinary character of negative freedom as an 'inviolability' achieved through conformity with the norm. The bookends can reasonably be supposed to have been assembled by Theresa Gowanlock's brothers-in-law, Andrew and James Gowanlock, the publishers of Two Months in the Camp oj'Big Bear and the owners of the Parkdale Times Newspaper, Book and Publishing Office. It is also possible that the two journalists who were with the party that accompanied Gowanlock and Delaney on their return east-William Baillie of the Toronto Globe and William Fox of the Mail- had a hand in the composition. The gallery of martyrs includes the mill owner,John Gowanlock; his clerk, William Gilchrist; the Reverend Adelard Fafard; and the trader George Dill. John Delaney is conspicuously absent, although the two biographical sketches that follow his widow's narrative are succeeded by his poem The Saskatchewan Stream.' Pritchard was the grandson of a First Nations woman and an Englishman prominent in the Red River Settlement. He married a Metis woman, Rose Delorme (Mrs Pritchard in Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear), and moved with his family to Frog Lake in 1884. The Pritchards were among the ambiguous captives of the Plains Cree, captives who were not all vulnerable white women, but also Wood Cree and Metis men including Louis Goulet, Adolphus Nolin, Andre Nault, and Pierre Blondin - all of whom make appearances in Two Months in the Camp oj Big Bear. Gowanlock thereby draws on the long tradition of European commentary on the degraded condition of the 'savage' woman that I discuss in chapter 1. This is a pervasive topos in the captivity narrative genre, beginning with Mary Rowlandson's obsessive record of her (literal) consumption of the 'sorrowfull meat' dealt to Job as providential suffering, in The Sovereignty and Goodness oj God, together wilh the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed; Being a Narrative oj the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682). Police reports from the Northwest in the summer of 1884 warned the dominion government that delay in processing the land claims would 'almost certainly result in some "illegal combination" (Spragtie 170; emphasis added). See Chambers 14. Blackstone's Commentaries (1803) glosses the common law doctrine of coverture or marital unity as follows: 'by marriage the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection and cover she performs everything'; 'the wife is regarded as distinct from her

238 Notes to pages 129-35

31

32

33

34

35

husband, but so entirely under his power and control that she can do nothing of herself, but everything by his licence and authority' (2: 242, 433, qtd. Chambers 14). The 1884 Married Women's Property Act gave Ontario wives formal legal equality with respect to ownership of their own wages and inherited property at a time when women in the Canadian West were being deprived of property rights. The 1886 Territories Property Act eliminated the common law dower right that had given widows a life interest in onethird of their deceased husband's freehold estates. See Catherine Cavanaugh, 'The Limitations of the Pioneering Partnership: The Alberta Campaign for Homestead Dower, 1909-1925,' Making Western Canada: Essays on European Colonization and Settlement, ed. Catherine Cavanaugh and Jeremy Mowat (Toronto: Garamond, 1996) 186-214. In their earliest statements to the press, Gowanlock and Delaney credited Pierre Blondin with having purchased their safety. Less than a month later, however, newspapers were reconstructing Blondin as a duplicitous, would-be violator (Carter 84, 90). I use catachresis (G. misuse, misapplication, abuse; a word wrenched from common usage — see Lanham 31) to name the verbal 'outrage' that Gowanlock identifies in Blondin's speech; this rhetorical figures carries connotations of inappropriateness and use offeree that underline the threat of racial 'impropriety' and the sexual insinuation contained in Blondin's claiming of Gowanlock's husband's property. An Act to Further Amend the Criminal Law, 53 Viet. (1890) c. 37 s. 14. The amendments proposed in this bill reflect a prophylactic concern with racial purity. Other sections, for example, propose criminalizing the seduction of female employees, polygamy, and sodomy. Sir John Thompson, the member moving the bill, declared that while he was not yet aware that polygamy existed in Canada, the nation was sure to be threatened with it. It would be 'much more prudent that legislation should be adopted at once in anticipation of the offence, if there is any probability of its introduction, rather than we should wait until it has become established in Canada' (House of Commons Debates, 10 April 1890, 3163-9; emphasis added). The codification of a woman's 'marital duty' was sharpened just as the law's recognition of any ability to consent to sexual relations outside of marriage was eroded. Spousal immunity from rape charges, and thus the requirement that women submit to this 'duty,' was enshrined in the 1892 Criminal Code. See Backhouse, 'Nineteenth-Century' 234-5. On the tangled histories of Indian enfranchisement and the right to vote, see Richard Bartlett. Because legislation in 1830 and 1850 had vested Indian lands in Upper and Lower Canada in the trust of commissioners, First

Notes to pages 137-50 239

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

Nations men on reserves were unable to pass even the lowest property tests. These terms ignored the treaties in relation to which First Nations people had been parties to a contract, and reconstituted them instead as recipients of government charity. Jean-Christophe Agnew points out that with Hobbes, the 'representative' comes to encompass both the traditional sense of a person chosen to stand for another, and a newer sense of the person chosen to act for another. It is this new sense of a 'surrogate agency' that leads Hobbes to choose the theatre as a metaphor for the new world of capitalist exchange relations (102). The instruction of First Nations women on reserve in the early 1880s was often conducted by the wives of government-employed farm instructors; these women taught the arts of housekeeping that were also the central subjects for First Nations girls in industrial schools. See Carter, Lost Harvests. Carter observes that, while inadequate housing conditions and shortages of materials made it impossible for women to apply these lessons on reserve, Indian Department officials invariably interpreted this failure of domesticity as the sign of an essential moral backwardness. An explicit identification with Lot's wife can be found in Mary Rowlandson's admission that she 'understood something of Lot's wife's temptation, when she looked back' (23). Unlike Rowlandson, however, Delaney emphasizes the in advisability of the backward glance. For the concept of the instance of discourse, see Emile Benveniste, Problems in General linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FL: U of Miami P, 1971). In narrative film, Silverman argues, female voice-overs are necessarily autobiographical and even symptomatic, presented as 'tool[s] of diagnosis, and ... devicefs] for inserting [their speakers] into a more orthodox subject-position' (312). 'There is a caustic, sardonic quality in many of the lyrics of [the 1786-8] period that is generally not found elsewhere in [Freneau's] non-political poetry,' Vitzthum notes (87). The Indian Burying Ground' marks a shift from 'open hostility' to 'ironic acceptance' in his mode of relating to the problem of'fancy' or self-delusion (107). Cecilia Morgan makes a similar argument about Laura Secord's attempts to justify her access to the material benefits distributed in the patronage system of Upper Canada (see '"Of Slender"'). Secord's request for a pension 'used the language of female dependency,' but also 'featured her service to her country in 1813 and her new position as the head of a household' (201). Her formal request for a pension preceded the publication of her narrative account by eleven years. It is interesting to note that it was in the late 1880s -

240 Notes to pages 151-62 the period in which Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear was published - that newly formed organizations such as the Women's Canadian Historical Society took up the project of inscribing Secord in a history of women's contributions to nation building (202). 43 See 'The Sexual Contract as Narrative Paradigm' in Armstrong, Desire. 44 The same norm of prudent saving takes shape in the following description of the primary deficiency in Indian character, in an 1875 report of the Department of the Interior: 'Even under the most favorable circumstances time must be given [to the Indian] to understand the motives and acquire the habits of the white man; who labors to accumulate wealth in order that he may have the means of support in sickness or old age, or of giving his offspring a start in life. But when these motives come to be understood and acted upon by the Indian, the evidence of which is the possession of considerable property acquired by his own industry and thrift, it shows that he may safely be entrusted with the rights of full citizenship' (qtd. Bartlett 167). 45 This description of Canadian home missions, which I borrow from the March 1896 issue of the Presbyterian Record, is placed under the headline, 'A Good Investment.' It reads: 'Is there any investment of mission money that can show more gratifying results than that spent for home work? Is there any investment that promises larger, surer or speedier returns for the future? Does not patriotism demand that we Canadianize the foreigner, and help to make and keep our land Christian, from ocean to ocean? ... If souls are lost shall our skirts be spotless if we hold back?' (62). 3. Inducted Feminism, Inducing 'Personhood' 1 Murphy's clippings of these articles and reports on her public addresses can be found in the E.G. Murphy papers, City of Edmonton Archives (CEA). 2 These 'mottos' (attributed to Thomas Allen, Marshall Saunders, and Ralph Connor, respectively) are a small selection of the 73 'Day's Motto[es] by Janey Canuck' pasted into one of Emily Murphy's personal scrapbooks (Murphy papers, CEA MS 2, Scrapbook 3). They were published in the Edmonton Bulletin. 3 Murphy papers, CEA MS 2, Scrapbook, 323, Edmonton Journal 1926, n.p. 4 See Mander; Saunders. 5 For more on authority in this sense, see Rose, 'Authority' and 'Government.' 6 Justice of the Peace papers, Provincial Archives of Alberta (PAA), 69.210 2159/J.P. vol. 1, Murphy to A.G. Browning, 5 May 1917. 7 Murphy papers, CEA MS 2, Scrapbook, 65, Canadian Child Welfare News, 1925, n.p.

Notes to pages 162-4 241 8 The early-twentieth-century creation of separate courts combining protection and control for women and children was the first instance of specialized justice being prescribed for a particular group of Canadians, with the notable exception of the 1876 Indian Act, which prescribed a distinct style of justice for First Nations people. See Carolyn Strange and Tina Loo, Making (Mod: Law and Moral llegulation in Canada, 1867-1939 (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1997). 9 In Murphy's narcotics trade expose, The Black Candle (1922), the description of a distinctly 'Saxon' style of justice includes a critique of the standard representation of Chinese bachelor immigrants as 'the eternal scapegoats for ourselves and our children,' and a call for preventative supervision of the vulnerable and dangerous white woman (239). In the 'marital relations between white women and men of color,' Murphy contends, 'the glove is always thrown by the woman, or, at least deliberately dropped' (238). She classifies a white woman who leaves her husband and searches for work in a 'Chinese laundry,' where she falls victim to a seduction trap, as an example of the criminal who is 'nearly [always] unbalanced, or at least afflicted with some queer mental slant' (235). 10 See also the critique of Bacchi by Ernest Forbes, in his Challenging the Regional Stereotype: Essays on the Twentieth-Century Maritimes (Fredericton: Acadiensis P, 1989). The essays collected in A Not Unreasonable Claim: Women and fieform in Canada, 1880s-1920s, ed. Linda Kealey (Toronto: Women's P, 1979) offer other approaches to studying the involvement of first-wave Canadian feminists in projects of social supervision. 11 Dorothy Chunn identifies the three elements of what she calls 'socialized justice' - an 'emphasis on individualized treatment,' a 'reliance on non-lawyer "experts" and individualizing devices such as juvenile and domestic-relations courts to design and implement treatment,' and the resort to 'administrative methods' (4) - in her examination of early family court development in Ontario between 1880 and 1940. The objectives of socialized justice were to 'maintain the general security through prevention and [to] maintain the individual life through rehabilitation' (R. Pound [1943] qtd. Chunn 4). 12 See the appendix to the biography by Byrne Hope Sanders, 345-8. Emily Murphy was first president of the Zenana Bible and Medical Society in 1903; president of the Women's Press Club of Canada, 1913-20; vice-president of the National Council of Women of Canada, 1918-26; president of the Federated Women's Institutes of Canada, 1919-21; and a member of the board of directors of the Big Sisters' Association, 1928-31. She was vice-president of the Social Service Council of Canada, 1920-31, and of the Canadian Social Hygiene Council, 1921-31, and director of the Canadian Council of Child

242

13

14

15

16

17

Notes to pages 165-8 Welfare, 1923-7. From 1926 to 1931 she was appointed by the lieutenant-governor-in-council of Alberta to report on public institutions. She was responsible for inaugurating a movement for the medical inspection of Alberta schools, and for organizing the Alberta and Saskatchewan branches of the Canadian Committee on Mental Hygiene. I refer to some of her more wellknown accomplishments in the course of this chapter. Some of the sketches in The Impressions ofjaney Canuck Abroad first appeared in the National Monthly, to which Murphy was shortly thereafter appointed literary editor (1902-4). The Impressions ofjaney Canuck Abroad does not bear the name of a publisher and appears to have been privately published by Murphy's husband at the same time as he published a collection of his sermons. Sanders (63) and Mander (56) note that the text was reviewed in England and the United States as well as Canada. See D.J. Hall, 'Clifford Sifton: Immigration and Settlement Policy, 18961905,' The Settlement of the West, ed. Howard Palmer (Calgary: U of Calgary P / Comprint, 1977) 60-85. On the norms of masculinity inscribed in and by Canadian expansionist fiction in this period, see Daniel Coleman, 'Immigration, Nation, and the Allegory of Manly Maturation,' Essays in Canadian Writing Gl (1997): 84-103. Dr John Watson (Ian MacLaren), 1850-1907, a novelist and writer of 'practical' studies of moral life; Dean (Frederic William) Farrar, 1831-1903, a prolific Protestant cleric; W.T. Stead, the Pall Mall Gazette editor who orchestrated England's 1885 white slavery panic with 'The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon' series. Janey and her husband, 'The Padre,' also attend a demonstration at Royal Albert Hall by ten thousand Protestants demanding that Queen Victoria direct the prime minister to 'take the necessary steps ... to suppress the Romish practices now in vogue in thousands of churches' (Impressions 81). The metaphor of the dangerous 'worm' of degeneration hidden within civilized societies was that of B.A. Morel, whose Traite des Degenerescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de I'espece humainewas translated into English in 1857 in The Medical Circular (see Stepan). By the end of the nineteenth century, the theory of degeneracy had developed an 'extraordinary inclusiveness,' taking hold outside of the field of racial biology (in medical pathology, psychiatry, and criminality), as a general theory of 'morbid anthropology' and a 'racial style of biological analysis' (Stepan 112). Carolyn Strange describes Jack Canuck as the 'most obnoxious exponent of anti-Asian racism' in Canada in the early 1900s (155). On a series of articles published \njack Canuck in 1911, entitled 'The Yellow Peril in Toronto,' see Pon.

Notes to pages 168-77 243 18 In a 1903 text entitled Practical Suggestions on the Conduct of a Rescue Home, one of the recommendations for the furnishing of spaces for girl saving is the substitution of neat, crisp muslin curtains for heavy draperies (Barrett 12). 19 Later on, Emily Murphy will propose the minister's wife as the 'outstanding example of the unpaid worker,' the Visual aid' to men who cannot see the 'injustices under which [their own] women have to labor,' and the 'multitudes of women in Canada who are rearing children and working on farms' (Murphy papers, CEA MS 2, Scrapbook 1, 65, 'Child Welfare Interests' (1925); 'Why Do Wives Leave Home' (1926) 8. Murphy campaigned successfully in 1911 tor the introduction and passage of the Dower Act in Alberta, which provided married women with one-third of their husband's property, long after women in the rest of Canada had won this right. See Catherine Cavanaugh, The Limitations of the Pioneering Partnership: The Alberta Campaign for Homestead Dower, 1909-1925,' Making Western Canada: Essays on European Colonization and Settlement, ed. Catherine Cavanaugh and Jeremy Mowat (Toronto: Garamond, 1996) 186-214. 20 'Westward Ho' was also the name of the first chapter of the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire (established in Alberta), of which Murphy was a member 21 Saleeby is the author of a number of tracts on race regeneration, but Woman and Womanhood (1911) is the only one addressed exclusively to the theme of woman as instrument of the future. The text occasionally breaks into a direct address to women. 22 Anna Jameson replies to Coleridge's pronouncement by insisting that 'women need in these times character beyond everything else' (Winter-11^). 23 The mixed-race relationships and forms of household that the society-building 'girl of the new day' was to assist in clearing away are described in Sylvia Van Kirk, 'Many Tender lies': Womenin Fur-Trade Society, 1670-1870 (Winnipeg: Watson and Dwvei, 1980) and Jennifer Brown, Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Companies in Indian (Country (Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1980). 24 Murphy papers, CEA, MS 2, Scrapbook, 43, May Armitage, 'Canada's Responsibility to Her Writers,' (Calgary Herald, November 1925, n.p. 25 Ibid., File 60, T.I1. \ Weekly, n.d., qtd. in Cassell &: Co.'s publicity forjaney Canuck in the West. 26 Ibid., Scrapbook, 227, Marjory MacMurchy, 'Wholesome Writings,' Toronto Star Weekly, 1924, n.p. 27 Ibid., Scrapbook, 241, E.B. Robertson, 'Women Writers More Loyal to Canada Than Men?' Toronto Star Weekly, 1927, n.p. 28 Ibid., File 60, Church 'Times, n.d.; CEA MS 2, File 60, Manitoba Tree Press, n.d., qtd. in Cassell publicity.

244 Notes to pages 178-88 29 Ibid., File 50, Hearth and Home, n.d., qtd. in Hodder and Stoughton's publicity for Seeds of Pine. 30 Ibid., File 60, qtd. in Hodder and Stoughton publicity. 31 Ibid., Toronto Globe, n.d., qtd. in Cassell publicity; Deacon qtd. Sanders (1945) 324. 32 Ibid., Vancouver Saturday Sunset, n.d., qtd. in Hodder and Stoughton publicity. 33 Murphy cites Robert Service here. 34 'They say that a thankless child is like a serpent's tooth, you are not returning your mother anything, but are bringing disgrace and shame upon her' proceeds a typical closing statement by 'Her Worship' (Murphy papers, CEA, MS 2, File 15). The Black Candlewas marketed with promises to strike 'the most casual reader' with its 'literary value,' 'strangely whimsical and humorous expressions,' and 'classical allusions' (dust-jacket notes). The literary and philosophical citation in this text is designed as a protective sheathing for author and reader alike, who need to be able to delve into the details of the 'dread valley of the Shadow of the Drug' and spaces full of 'opium debaucheries' under a protective covering. In this sense, literary quotation is the location of'civilization' in The Black Candle, the 'thin crust beneath which the savage nature of man burns with an infernal fire' (151). 35 I borrow the phrase 'taxidermic time' from Fatimah Tobin Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1996). 36 Emily Murphy Fonds, Doris Lewis Rare Book Room, U of Waterloo Library (DLB), File 2, Quebec Chronicle, n.d. 37 Murphy papers, CEA, MS 2, Scrapbook, 347, 'Goodness a By-Product of Efficiency,' While Ribbon Bulletin, December 1916, n.p. 38 Ibid., Scrapbook, 153, 'Canada's First Woman Police Magistrate,' Christian Science Monitor, 1926, n.p. 39 Justice of the Peace papers, PAA, 2159/JP 1. 40 Murphy Fonds, DLB, Box 2, File 2, Magistrate's Note Book IV [1917]. 41 For more on Patterson's synthesis of medicine and evangelism, see Valverde, Age 47-50. 'Even before becoming a magistrate,' Valverde notes, Patterson 'heartily advocated long reformatory sentences (rather than fines) for women convicted of prostitution.' In a 1914 address, she called for the establishment of'moral hospitals' to which morally deficient individuals might be 'sent on indeterminate sentence [s]' (qtd. Valverde 48). 42 Murphy papers, CEA, MS 2, Scrapbook, 163. 43 See Ian Hunter for a theorization of the technique of exemplarity in the context of mid- to late-nineteenth-century educational reforms in Britain. 44 Murphy papers, CEA, MS 62, File 10, 5 June 1921.

Notes to pages 188-97 245 45 Ibid., MS 62, 13 R. 46 While it uses narrative discourse in order to demonstrate, The Girl Who Disappeared often becomes impatient for the more direct didacticism of the sermon. The narrative of Jane's ascendancy as a moral exemplar is regularly interrupted with 'practice' public lectures by Jane and her associates in the anti-white slavery crusade. Testimonies and affidavits are dropped into chapters as 'real life' evidence of the destructive operation of a double standard of morals; appendices provide more speeches, outlines for study, sex education bibliographies, and a list of agencies and resources with which moral reform workers might work. 47 The transfer of the right of correction away from the ignorant mother also occurs through the women's court. The extent to which this substitution was recognized by parents is clear in a letter written to the attorney-general of Alberta in 1918, two years after Murphy was appointed magistrate. The letter writer complains that Murphy has usurped her authority and made a daughter hostile towards her mother. She insists that the provincial government must be prepared to assume the financial responsibilities attendant upon Murphy's appropriation of a mother's moral responsibilities (Justice of the Peace papers, PAA 69.210 2159/JP vol. 2). 48 The Girl Who Disappeared appropriates a contemporaneous critique of the department store, by early twentieth-century women's reform organizations as a space in which young women were subjected to moral endangerment and physiological deterioration. The text reconstructs this space of selling and consuming as one of preventative supervision. As Susan Porter Benson has observed, the early department store was staffed by a largely female and working-class population. While managers sought to enlist this population's gendered capacities for 'empathy and responsiveness' as the 'irreducible core of selling skill,' they also came under pressure to correct the classed aspects of their conduct that offended more 'refined' clientele (130, 141). The reformist critique of the department store thus became the basis for a project to 'shape a whole new breed of clerks' through the transformation of stores into spaces designed to compensate for the 'unfortunate home and ... misguided school' (141-2). 49 See Sanders 131-2 and Murphy's 'A Woman on the Bench.' It was Murphy's suggestion that the Local Council of Women members should use the purported dangers of a 'mixed audience' as the basis for proposing the establishment of a women's court 'in which women offenders may be tried by a woman in the presence of women' (Sanders 132). 'To [Murphy's] amazement,' Sanders writes, 'no argument was required' when she approached the attorney-general of Alberta, C.W. Cross, who 'agreed immediately that such

246 Notes to pages 197-201

50

51 52 53

54 55

56 57

58 59

60

61 62

a court was urgently needed' and asked Murphy when she was ready to be sworn in (133). Murphy was without legal training but, asjaney Canuck, she had already proven her qualifications for such a position, as I have suggested. In addition, she would have demonstrated an expertise in the 'social' through her work in collaboration with the superintendent of the provincial Department of Neglected Children on the Children's Protection Act, one of the two statutes governing procedures in Alberta's juvenile courts. See Murphy's 'Woman on the Bench' 27. The male magistrate appointed at the same time as Murphy seems to have assumed a gendered privilege, insisting, with the compliance of court clerks, on a right to first pick in the distribution of case dockets. See correspondence injustice of the Peace papers, PAA, 69.210 2159/JP. Ibid., vol. 1, Murphy to A.G. Browning, 21 September 1916. Ibid., Murphy to A.G. Browning, 5 May 1917. The name 'Women's and Children's Court' seldom appears in the archives, but it is the shorthand subject line of a letter from Murphy to the attorneygeneral, in which the sender's address is given as the 'Women's Police Court,' while the signature line reads 'Police Magistrate, City of Edmonton and Judge of the Juvenile Court' (ibid., vol. 4, 1 April 1921). Murphy papers, CEA, MS 2, Scrapbook 3, 321, Edmonton Journal, 1927, n.p. Justice of the Peace papers, PAA, 90.365/16, Police Court transcripts, Rex v. Mary White, 22 October 1926; Murphy papers, CEA, MS 2, File 3, Murphy to WJ. Loggie, 7 December 1917. Murphy papers, CEA, MS 2, File 6, Murphy to Laidlaw, 6July 1923; W.J.M. Alister to Murphy, 20 July 1923. Donzelot is discussing the figure of the 'vagabond' in the turn-of the-century extension of the domain of French psychiatry, from the asylum to the whole social body. The vagabond was the adult counterpart of the child who displayed a 'presynthesis' of all adult abnormalities. An Act Respecting Juvenile Delinquents, 8 Edw. VII [1908] c. 40. In a letter to the deputy attorney-general, Murphy protests against interference by the superintendent of the Department of Neglected Children and insists that her 'Girl's Court' is supposed to deal with crimes against girls (Justice of the Peace papers, PAA, 69.210 2159/JP 3, 18 September 1922). Murphy papers, CEA, MS 2, Scrapbook 1, 45, 'Urges Appointment of Psychopathic Experts,' Edmonton Journal, 1918, n.p.; Justice of the Peace papers, PAA, 69.210 2159/JP vol. 2, Murphy to Sup. Bryant, 21 November 1918. Murphy fonds, DLB, Box 1, File 7, n.p. One of Murphy's personal scrapbooks includes a clipping from a Scottish newspaper that similarly stressed the relatively advanced state of institutions

Notes to pages 201-15 247 in the Canadian West in its observation that '[i]t is indicative of the great tendency of the Far West to initiate new customs that the former ranching province of Alberta should not only have established the first two of the three Women's Courts in Canada, but that it should also have appointed the first woman magistrate in the Empire' (Murphy papers, CEA, Scrapbook 1, 43, 'Canada's Three Women Magistrates,' Glasgow Herald, 9 December 1925). 63 The other four appelants in the 'Persons Case' led by Murphy were Nellie McClung, Irene Parlby, Louise McKinney, and Henrietta Muir Edwards, all from the western provinces. Epilogue 1 Mitchell Dean argues that technologies of government are designed to lock conduct into regular, calculable performances ('Putting the Technological into Government,' History of the Human Sciences 9.3 (1996): 47-68). 2 See Nikolas Rose, Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996). 3 On 'diva citizenship,' see Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1996). 4 See my essays 'How to Manage Yourself: "Feminism" and Recovery in the New Managerial Discourse,' Tessera^, (special issue on Work) (1997): 14-24, and Introduction, Tessera IS (special issue on Feminism and Self-Help) (1997): 6-15. 5 'Talk-Back,' Ontario Today, CBC Radio, 22 September 1999. See also Toronto Squeegees under Police Crackdown,' CBC News Online (www.cbcnews.cbc.ca), 26 July 1999, and 'Ontario Ready to Ban Squeegee Kids, Beggars,' ibid., 1 September 1999. 6 The figure of the settler woman provided the axis for a strategic hesitation between literal and figurative, or geographical and psychological, senses of 'displacement' in this context. This hesitation allowed the theme of the settler's troubled identificatory relation to a new place to subsume the sense of psychological dislocation experienced by the 'forcibly colonized.' (Analysis of the settler woman's own historical position in this framework could take the form only of accounting, as critics tallied her receipt of a 'double dose' of power.) See Ash croft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, which posits an 'alienation in vision and ... crisis in self-image' as the predominant features of postcolonial literature (9). This psychological approach was disseminated in Canadian literary criticism by students of Bill Ashcroft and Helen Tiffin. See the early work of Diana Brydon: 'Re-Writing The Tempest,'

248 Notes to pages 215-16 World Literature in English 23.1 (1984): 75-88; "The Thematic Ancestor: Joseph Conrad, Patrick White, and Margaret Atwood,"' World Literature Written in English 24.2 (1984): 386-97; and The Myths That Write Us: Decolonizing the Mind,' Commonwealth 10.1 (autumn 1987): 1-14. See also Stephen Slemon's 'Modernism's Last Post' and 'Unsettling the Empire: Resistance Theory for the Second World,' World Literature Written in English 30.2 (1990): 30-41. Ella Shohat provides a trenchant critique of the constitution of a homogeneous field of postcolonial culture that is oblivious to the 'pre- and post-independence racist policies of the settler colonies' (107). For other critiques, see Ann McClintock, The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term "Post-Colonialism",' and Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, 'What Is Post(-)colonialism?,' both in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia UP, 1994) 291-304 and 276-90. 7 A variant of the insistence on a 'tradition of refusal' was the argument that literatures of the 'Second World' (the former settler colonies) embodied in an especially acute form the complicitous resistance or 'radical ambivalence' that was being celebrated in theories of postmodern culture emanating from a 'First World.' The cultural production of the 'Second World' thus deserved to be accorded a paradigmatic status in the field of postcolonialism. See Stephen Slemon's 'Unsettling the Empire: Resistance Theory for the Second World,' World Literature Written in English 30.2 (1990): 30-41. Both lines of argument focused on textual strategies of subversion, the transfer point between the signification of gender and colonial differences, as well as a basis for staking claims to a postmodernism with a greater political purchase. Bouncing between postmodern and feminist validations, settler postcolonialism thus alternately acquired value as a particularly sophisticated inscription of postcolonialism that avoided the pitfalls of essentialism, or a political enterprise unburdened of'those radical postmodern challenges' -including that of auto-critique -which 'are in many ways the luxury of the dominant order' (Hutcheon 151). 8 Jill Vickers makes a related point about the analysis of power in the interdisciplinary field of Canadian studies, which has long recognized American cultural domination as the single power relation relevant to the study of a homogeneous, beleaguered Canadian nation. See her 'Liberating Theory in Canadian Studies,' Canada: Theoretical Discourse / Discours theorique, ed. Terry Goldie, Carmen Lambert, and Rowland Lorimer (Montreal: Association for Canadian Studies, 1994) 351-71. 9 I borrow the phrase 'love across racial lines' from Ross Chambers, The Women of Margaret Laurence,' Journal of Canadian Studies 18.2 (1983): 21.

Notes to pages 217-20

249

10 See Neil ten Kortenaar, 'The Trick of Divining a Postcolonial Canadian Identity: Margaret Laurence between Race and Nation,' Canadian Literature 149 (summer 1996): 11-33, for another argument that The Diviners is about national descent. \ 1 A similar point has been made by Katie Trumpener, who discusses The Diviners in relation to the nineteenth-century colonial nurse's tale. Trumpener identifies two variants of this tale, an optimistic one (often set in the settler colonies of North America) that tends to emphasize the possibility of transcending differences, and a more pessimistic one (set in British India or the penal and slave colonies) that stresses colonial malaise and irresolvable divisions between colonial and indigenous cultures. In Trumpener's reading, the optimistic nurse's tale in The Diviners situates Christie, Morag's foster father, as a 'male national nurse' (240); the pessimistic version is condensed in another fostering relationship - Brooke's with his Indian ayah - that is coloured by the incest taboo and the spectre of traumatic loss. Thanks to Daniel Coleman for bringing this convergence to my attention. 12 Pamela McCallum is right to assert that myths of identity in The Diviners are not inert, transparent truths protected from the 'structures that twist and distort both speech and writing' (7). However, The Diviners concedes only that myth is mediated by 'mentalities' or interior sources of the 'folk.' Mythic significance in The Diviners is a rigorously interior kernel, a part of the self that transcends the contingencies of social communication. Morag Gunn's rediscovered 'Black Celt' within is ultimately a genetic inheritance, not so very different in its form and its implications from Emily Murphy's appeal to early Saxon ancestors, 13 On the analysis of discourses 'in the dimension of their exteriority,' see Michel Foucault, 'Politics and the Study of Discourse,' Burchell, Gordon, and Miller 53-72. On 'author-function,' see 'What Is an Author?' Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977) 113-38. 14 On 'historical epistemology,' see Poovey, Making. 15 The Act to Prevent the Employment of Female Labour in Certain Capacities (Saskatchewan, 1912) prohibited a white woman's employment, residence, or even frequenting ('save as a bona fide customer in a public apartment thereof) businesses owned by 'any Japanese, Chinaman or other Oriental person' (s. 1). Subsequent legislation, in 1918-19 and 1925-6, required Asian employers of white women to obtain special licences. In Manitoba in 1913 and Ontario in 1914, laws stipulating that 'No Chinese person shall employ in any capacity or have under his direction or control any female white person in any factory, restaurant or laundry' were passed ([Ontario] 4 Geo. V, c. 40,

250 Notes to page 220 s. 2). See Constance Backhouse, 'White Female Help and Chinese-Canadian Employers: Race, Class, Gender and Law in the Case of Yee Chin, 1924,' Canadian Ethnic Studies 26.3 (1994): 34-52, for discussion of a challenge to the legislation by a Regina man who was opposed by a coalition of white women's organizations.

Works Cited

Statutes An Act Respecting Juvenile Delinquents, 8 Edw. VII (1908), c. 40 (Province of Alberta). An Act to Amend the Factory, Shop and Office Building Act, 4 Geo. V (1914), c. 40 (Province of Ontario). An Act to Further Amend the Criminal Law, 53 Viet. (1890), c. 37. An Act to Make the Remedy in Cases of Seduction More Effectual, and to Render the Fathers of Illegitimate Children Liable for Their Support, 7 William IV ( 1 8 3 7 ) . c . 8 (U.C.). An Act to Prevent the Employment of Female Labour in Certain Capacities, 2 Ceo. V (1912), c. 17 (Province of Saskatchewan). An Act to Punish Seduction, and Like Offences, and to Make Further Provision for the Protection of Women and Girls, 49 Viet. (1886), c. 52. Criminal Code of Canada, 55 and 56 Viet. (1892), c. 29. Dominion Franchise Act, 48 Viet. (1885), c. 40. Archival Sources E.G. Murphy Papers, City of Edmonton Archives Emily Murphy Fonds, Doris Lewis Rare Book Room, U of Waterloo Library Justice of the Peace Papers, Provincial Archives of Alberta Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library, U of Toronto

252 Works Cited Primary and Secondary Sources Agnew,Jean-Christophe. Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theatre in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. Amaron, Rev. Calvin E. 'The French Protestant Movement.' Presbyterian Record Jan 1899: 6-8. Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. - 'Why Daughters Die: The Racial Logic of American Sentimentalism.' Yalejournal of Criticism 7.2 (1994): 1-24. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989. Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. London: Harvard UP, 1982. Bacchi, Carol Lee. Liberation Deferred? The Ideas of the English-Canadian Suffragists, 1877-1918. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1983. Backhouse, Constance. 'Nineteenth-Century Canadian Rape Law, 1800-92.' Essays in the History of Canadian Law. Vol. 2. Ed. David H. Flaherty. Toronto: Osgoode Society, 1983. 200-47. - 'The Tort of Seduction: Fathers and Daughters in Nineteenth-Century Canada.' Dalhousie Law Journal 10 (1986): 45-80. Barrett, Kate Waller. Some Practical Suggestions on the Conduct of a Rescue Home. 1903. New York: Arno Press, 1974. Bartlett, Richard H. 'Citizens Minus: Indians and the Right to Vote.' Saskatchewan Law Review 14 (1979-80): 163-94. Benson, Susan Porter. Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1880-1940. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1988. Berland, Jody. 'Marginal Notes on Cultural Studies in Canada.' University of Toronto Quarterly 64.4 (1995): 514-25. Bland, Lucy. Banishing the Beast: Sexuality and the Early Feminists. New York: New Press, 1995. 'Books and Magazines.' Canada Presbyterian 25 Nov. 1885: 777 Boisvert, David, and Keith Turnbull. 'Who Are the Metis?' Studies in Political Economy 18 (autumn 1985): 107-47. Brody, Miriam. Introduction. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, by Mary Wollstonecraft. London: Penguin, 1992. 1-73. Brouwer, Ruth Compton. New Women for God: Canadian Presbyterian Women and India Missions, 1876-1914. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1990. Burchell, Graham. 'Liberal Government and Techniques of the Self.' Economy and Society 22.3 (1993): 267-82.

Works Cited

253

- 'Peculiar Interests: Civil Society and Governing "The System of Natural Liberty."' Burchell et al. 119-50. Burchell, Graham, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., TheFoucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991. Burnham, Michelle. Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1682-1861. Hanover: UP of New England, 1997. Butler, Judith. 'Passing, Queering: Nella Larsen's Psychoanalytic Challenge.' Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Ed. Elizabeth Abel et al. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. 266-84. - The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Cadigan, Sean T. 'Paternalism and Politics: Sir Francis Bond Head, the Orange Order, and the Election of 1836.' Canadian Historical Review 72.3 (1991): 319-47. Carby, Ha/el V. '"On the Threshold of Woman's Era": Lynching, Empire, and Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory.' 'Race,' Writing and Difference. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. 301-16. Carter, Sarah. Capturing Women: The Manipulation of Cultural Imagery in Canada's Prairie West. Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1997. Chambers, Lori. Married Women and the Law of Property in Nineteenth-Century Ontario. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1997. Chrisman, Laura. 'The Imperial Unconscious?' Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory. Ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. 498-516. Chunn, Dorothy. From Punishment to Doing Good: Family Courts and Socialized Justice in Ontario, 1880-1940. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992. Collini, Stefan. 'The Idea of "Character" in Victorian Political Thought.' Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5.35 (1985): 29-50. Cran, Marion. A Woman in Canada. London: W.J. Ham-Smith, 1911. Curtis, Bruce. 'The Canada "Blue Books" and the Administrative Capacity of the Canadian State, 1822-67.' Canadian Historical Review 74.4 (1993): 535-65. - 'Class Culture and Administration: Educational Inspection in Canada West.' Colonial Leviathan: Stale Formation in Mid-Nineteenth-Cenlury Canada. Ed. Allan Greer and Ian Radforth. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992. 103-33. - 'Representation and State Formation in the Canadas, 1790-1850.' Studies in Political Economy 28 (spring 1989) 59-87. Davin, Anna. 'Imperialism and Motherhood.' History Workshop^ (1978): 9-57. Day, Richard. 'Constructing the Official Canadian: A Genealogy of the Mosaic Metaphor in State Policy Discourse.' Topial (spring 1998): 42-66. Dean, Hartley. Social Security and Social Control. London: Routledge, 1991.

254 Works Cited Dean, Mitchell. The Constitution of Poverty: Towards a Genealogy of Liberal Governance. London: Routledge, 1991. Defert, Daniel. '"Popular Life" and Insurance Technology.' Burchell, Gordon, and Miller. 211-33. Deleuze, Gilles. Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of Human Nature. Trans. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. - Foucault. Trans. Sean Hand. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. - 'The Rise of the Social.' Foreword to The Policing of Families, by Jacques Donzelot. New York: Pantheon, 1979. ix-xviii. - 'What Is a Dispositif?' Michel Foucault, Philosopher: Essays Translated from the French and German. Trans. Timothy Armstrong. New York: Routledge, 1992. 159-68. Dickinson, Peter. Here Is Queer: Nationalism, Sexualities, and the Literatures of Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1999. Donzelot, Jacques. The Policing of Families. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1979. Dubinsky, Karen. Improper Advances: Rape and Heterosexual Conflict in Ontario, 1880-1929. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Dumm, Thomas. Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996. Dyck, Noel. 'An Opportunity Lost: The Initiative of the Reserve-Agricultural Programme in the Prairie West.' 1885 and After: Native Society in Transition. Ed. F. Laurie Barren and James B. Waldram. Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 1986. 121-38. Ernstrom, Adele M. 'The Afterlife of Mary Wollstonecraft and Anna Jameson's Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada.' Women's Writing 4.2 (1997): 277-96. Ewald, Francois. 'Norms, Discipline, and the Law.' Representations SO (spring 1990): 138-61. Foucault, Michel. The Care of the Self. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1988. - Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1979. - Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Vol. 1 of Essential Works of Foucault, 1954—1984. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: New Press, 1997. - 'Governmentality.' Burchell, Gordon, and Miller. 87-104. - The History of Sexuality. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. - Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault. Ed. Donald Bouchard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977. - 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.' Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected

Works Cited

255

Essays and Interviews by MichelFoucault. Ed. Donald Bouchard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977. 139-64. - 'Of Other Spaces.' Diacritics (spring 1986): 22-7. - Omnes et Singulatum: Towards a Criticism of "Political Reason."' The Tanner Lectures on Human Value. Vol. 2. Ed. S.M. McMurrin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980-1.223-54. - Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972—1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. Trans. Colin Gordon et al. Brighton: Harvester, 1980. - 'Truth and Power.' Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 7972-7977. Ed. Colin Gordon. Trans. Colin Gordon et al. Brighton: Harvester, 1980. - 'Two Lectures.' Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972— 1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. Trans. Colin Gordon et al. Brighton: Harvester, 1980. Eraser, Wayne. The Dominion of Women: The Personal and the Political in Canadian Women's Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1991. Gallagher, Catherine. 'The Body versus the Social Body in the Works of Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew.' The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur. Berkeley: U California P, 1987. 83-106. George, Rosemary Marangoly. 'Homes in the Empire, Empires in the Home.' Cultural Critique 26 (winter 1993-4): 95-127. Gerson, Carole. 'The Presenting Face: Prefaces to English-Language Poetry and Fiction Written by Women in Canada, 1850-1940.' Prefaces and Literary Manifestoes / Prefaces et manifestes litteraires: Towards a History of the Literary Institution in Canada. Vol. 3. Ed. E.D. Blodgett and A.G. Purdy. Edmonton: Research Institute for Comparative Literature, 1990. 56-71. Gowanlock, Theresa, and Theresa Delaney. Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear: The Life and Adventures of Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney. Parkdale, ON: Times Office, 1885. Grauer, Lalage. ' Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear: The Life and Adventures of Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney.' Women Writing and the Literary Institution. Ed. Claudine Potvin and Janice Williamson. Edmonton: Research Institute for Comparative Literature, 1992: 127-37. Hacking, Ian. 'Making Up People.' Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought. Ed. T.C. Heller et al. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1986. 222-36. Haliburton, Robert Grant. The Men of the North and Their Place in History. Montreal: J. Lovell, 1869. Hall, Catherine. 'Private Persons versus Public Someones: Class, Gender and

256 Works Cited Politics in England, 1780-1850.' British Feminist Thought: A Reader. Ed. Terry Lovel. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990. 49-67. Hemans, Felicia. The Poems of Felicia Hemans. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1862. Hennesy, Rosemary. Feminist Materialism and the Politics of Discourse. New York: Routledge, 1993. Hobbes, Thomas. 'Of Persons, Authors, and Things Personated.' Leviathan, Or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil. 1651. Ed. Michael Oakeshott. New York: Collier Macmillan, 1962. Highfill Jr., Philip H. 'Performers and Performing.' The London Theatre World, 1660-1880. Ed. Robert D. Hume. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1980. 143-80. Honig, Bonnie. Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. 1738-40. Ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978. Hunter, Ian. Culture and Government: The Emergence of Literary Education. Houndmills, UK: Macmillan, 1988. Hunter, Shelagh. Harriet Martineau: The Poetics ofMoralism. Aldershot, UK: Scolar, 1995. Hutcheon, Linda. 'Circling the Downspout of Empire: Post-Colonialism and Postmodernism.' ^nV/20.4 (1989): 149-75. Jacobus, Mary. 'Malthus, Matricide, and the Marquis de Sade.' First Things: The Maternal Imaginary in Literature, Art, and Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1995. 83-104. Jameson, Anna Brownell. Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical. 1832. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1857. - 'Condition of the Women and the Female Children.' Athenaeum 18 March 1843: 257-59. — 'Fanny Kemble in Juliet.' Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad. New York: Harper, 1834. 288-304. - Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada. 1838. New Canadian Library Series. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990. Johnston, Judith. Anna Jameson: Victorian, Feminist, Woman of Letters. Aldershot, UK: Scolar, 1997. Kemble, Fanny. Fanny Kemble'sJournals, 1809-1893. Ed. Catherine Clinton. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000. Knox, Ellen M. The Girl of the New Day. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1919. Lanham, Richard. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991. Laurence, Margaret. The Diviners. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974.

Works Cited

257

Lee, Sky. Disappearing Moon Cafe. Vancouver: Douglas and Mclntyre, 1990. Levy, Anita. Other Women: The Writing of Class, Race, And Gender, 1832-1898. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991. Lynch, Deidre Shauna. The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. MacDonagh, Oliver. 'The Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Government: A Reappraisal.' Historical Journal 1 (1958): 52—67. MacKirdy, Olive Christian Malvery. The White Slave Market. London: Stanley Paul, 1912. MacMechan, Archibald. Headwaters of Canadian Literature. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1924. Malthus, Thomas Robert. An Essay on the Principle ojPopulation. 1798. Ed. Geoffrey Gilbert. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. - A n Essay on the Principle of Population. 6th ed. 1826. The Works of Thomas Robert Mallhus. Vol. 3. Ed. E.A. Wrigley and David Souden. London: William Pickering, 1986. - Principles oj Political Economy. 6th ed. 1836. The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus. Vol. 6. Ed. E.A. Wrigley and David Souden. London: William Pickering, 1986. Mander, Christine. Emily Murphy: Rebel. Toronto: Simon and Pierre, 1985. Marshall, Gail. Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Martineau, Harriet. 'Cousin Marshall .' 2nd ed. 1833. In Illustrations of Political Economy. Vol. 3. London: Charles Fox, 1834. - 'On Female Education.' Harriet Martineau on Women. Ed. Gayle Graham Yates. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1985. 88-93. - 'Preface.' Illustrations of Political Economy. Vol. 1. London: Charles Fox, 1834. i-xviii. - Society in America. London: Saunders and Otley, 1837. Marx, Karl. 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.' Selected Writings. Ed. David McLellan. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. 300-25. Marx, Karl. Selected Wntings. Ed. David McLellan. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. Matthews, Brander, and Laurence Hutton, eds. Actors and Actresses of Great Britain and the United States. New York: Cassell, 1886. McCallum, Pamela. 'Communication and History: Themes in Innis and Laurence.' Studies in Canadian Literature3.1 (1978): 5-16. McClung, Nellie. Clearing in the West: My Own Story. Toronto: Thomas Allen, 1935. McKay, Ian. 'The Liberal Order Framework: A Prospectus for a Reconnaissance of Canadian History.' Canadian Historical Review 81.4 (2000): 617-45.

258 Works Cited McLaren, John. 'White Slavers: The Reform of Canada's Prostitution Laws and Patterns of Enforcement, 1900-1920.' Criminal Justice History 8 (1987): 53119. McLean, Donald. '1885: Metis Rebellion or Government Conspiracy?' 1885 and After: Native Society in Transition. Ed. F. Laurie Barren and James B. Waldram. Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 1986. 79-104. Mehta, Uday. 'Liberal Strategies of Exclusion.' Politics and Society 18.4 (1990): 427-54. Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Government. 1859, 1861. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946. Miller, J.R., ed. Sweet Promises: A Reader on Indian—White Relations in Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1991. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Ed. Scott Elledge. New York: Norton, 1993. Morgan, Cecilia. '"Of Slender Frame and Delicate Appearance": The Placing of Laura Secord in the Narratives of Canadian Loyalist History.' Journal of the Canadian Historical Association b (1994): 195-212. — Public Men and Virtuous Women: The Gendered Languages of Religion and Politics in Upper Canada, 1791-1850. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1996. Morton, Desmond. Introduction. The Queen vs. Louis Riel. Ed. Michael Bliss. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1974. vii-xxxiv. Murphy, Emily. 'Are Parents What They Used to Be?' Maclean's Magazine 15 Aug. 1927: 13,52. - The Black Candle. Toronto: Thomas Allen, 1922. - 'Fighting the Drug Menace.' Maclean's Magazine April 1920: 11, 12. - [Emily Ferguson] The Impressions ofjaney Canuck Abroad. Toronto: n.p., 1902. - Janey Canuck in the West. 1910. Ed. Clara Thomas. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973. - The School Library in Alberta.' Canada MonthlyNov. 1916: 17-20. - Seeds of Pine. Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1914. - 'Sterilization of the Insane.' Vancouver Sun 24 Sept. 1932: n.p. - 'Straight Talk on Courts.' Maclean's Magazine Oct. 1920: 9-10, 55-7. - 'Why Do Wives Leave Home?' Canadian HomeJournalDec. 1926, 8, 82. - 'A Woman on the Bench.' Maclean's Magazine Nov. 1919: 34-6, 81. - The Woman's Court.' Maclean's Magazine]an. 1920: 27-8, 73-5. Myers, Mitzi. 'Politics from the Outside: Mary Wollstonecraft's First Vindication.' Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 6 (1982): 113-32. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Ed. and Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1967. Nightingale, Florence. Florence Nightingale's 'Cassandra. '1853. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1979.

Works Cited

259

Ollivier, Maurice. The Colonial and Imperial Conferences from 1887 to 1937. Vol. 1. Ottawa: Queen's Printer, 1954. Owram, Douglas. Promise of Eden: The Canadian Expansionist Movement and the Idea oj the West, 1856-1900. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1980. Parker, Graham. 'The Legal Regulation of Sexual Activity and the Protection of Females.' Osgoode Hall Law Journal 21.2 (1983): 187-244. Patterson, Margaret. 'Zenana Work.' Canada Presbyterian 18 Nov. 1885: 761, 777. Pennefather. R.S. The Orange and the Black: Documents in the History of the Orange Order oj Ontario and the West, 1890-1940. n.p.: Orange and Black Publications, 1984. Polkinghorn, Bette, and Dorothy Lampen Thomson. Adam Smith's Daughters. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 1998. Pon, Madge. 'Like a Chinese Puzzle: The Construction of Chinese Masculinity in Jack Canuck.* (lender and History in Canada. Ed. Joy Parr and Mark Rosenfeld. Toronto: Copp Clark, 1996. 88-100. Poovey, Mary. Making a Social Body: British Cultural formation, 1830-1864. Chicago: U of Chicago P. 1995. - Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work oj Gender in Mid-Victorian England. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. Porritt, Edward. Evolution of'The Dominion of Canada: Its Government and Its Politics. Yonkers-on-Hudson, NY: World Book Co., 1918. Powell, Kerry. Women and Victorian Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Procacci, Giovanna. 'Social Economy and the Government of Poverty.' Burchell, Gordon, and Miller. 151-68. - 'Sociology and Its Pool/ Politics and Society 17.2 (1989): 163-86. Radforth, Ian. 'Sydenham and Utilitarian Reform.' Colonial Leviathan: State Formation in Mid-Nineteenth-Cenlury Canada. Ed. Allan Greer and Ian Radforth. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992. 64-102. Riley, Denise. 'Am I Thai Name"?'Feminism and the Category of 'Women' in History. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. Roberston, Rev. Dr. 'Samples from My Note-Book.' Presbyterian Record March 1886: 62. Roe, Clifford G. The Girl Who Disappeared: A White Slave. Chicago: American Bureau of Moral Education, 1914. Rose, Nikolas. 'Authority and the Genealogy of Subjectivity.' Detraditionalization: Critical Reflections on Authority and Identity. Ed. Paul Heelas et al. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996. 294-327. - 'Government, Authority, and Expertise in Advanced Liberalism.' Economy and Society 22.3 (1993): 283-99. - Powers of Freedom: Refra mi ng Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.

260 Works Cited Rowlandson, Mary. The Captive: The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, together with the faithfulness of his promises displayed; being a narrative of the captivity and restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. 1682. Show Low, AZ: American Eagle, 1996. St-Onge, Nicole J.M. 'The Dissolution of a Metis Community: Pointe a Grouette, 1860-1885.' Studies in Political Economy (autumn 1985): 149-72. Saleeby, Caleb. Methods of Race Regeneration. London: Cassell, 1911. - Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles. New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1911. Sanchez-Eppler, Karen. 'Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and Abolition.' The Culture of Sentiment. Ed. Shirley Samuels. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. 92-114. Sanders, Byrne Hope. Emily Murphy: Crusader. Toronto: Macmillan, 1945. Scott, David. 'Colonial Governmentality.' Social Text 43 (fall 1995): 191-220. Scott, Joan. Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996. Sharpe, Jenny. Allegories of Empire: TheFigure of Woman in the Colonial Text. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1993. Shohat, Ella. 'Notes on the Post-Colonial.' Social 7>x* 31/32 (1992): 99-113. Silver, A.I. 'The Impact on Eastern Canada of Events in Saskatchewan in 1885.' 1885 and After: Native Society in Transition. Ed. F. Laurie Barren and James B. Waldram. Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 1986. 39-51. Silverman, Kaja. 'Dis-Embodying the Female Voice.' Issues in Feminist Film Criticism. Ed. Patricia Erens. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1990. 309—27. Slemon, Stephen. 'Modernism's Last Post.' ArielZOA (1989): 3-17. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York: Routledge, 1993. - 'The Rani of Sirmur.' Europe and Its Others. Vol. 1. Ed. Francis Barker et al. Colchester: U of Essex P, 1985. 128-51. Sprague, D.N. Canada and the Metis, 1869-1885. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 1988. Starkins, Edward. Who Killed Janet Smith? Tor onto: Macmillan, 1984. Stepan, Nancy. 'Biological Degeneration: Race and Proper Places.' Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress. Ed. J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman. New York: Columbia UP, 1985. 97-120. Stoler, Ann Laura. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995. Strange, Carolyn. Toronto's Girl Problem: The Perils and Pleasures of the City, 18801930. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1995. Talbot, Eugene. Degeneracy: Its Causes, Signs, and Results. 1898. New York: Garland, 1984.

Works Cited

261

Thomas, Clara. Afterword. Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, by Anna Jameson. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990. 543-9. - Love and Work Enough: The Life of Anna Jameson. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1967. Titley, Brian E. A Narrow Vision: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Administration of Indian Affairs in Canada. Vancouver: UBC P, 1986. Tobias, John L. 'Canada's Subjugation of the Plains Cree, 1879-1885.' Canadian Historical Review 64.4 (1983): 519-47. - 'Protection, Civilization, Assimilation: An Outline History of Canada's Indian Policy.' Miller. 127-44. Tomaselli, Sylvana. 'The Enlightenment Debate on Women.' History Workshop Journal^ (autumn 1985): 101-24. Trumpener, Katie. Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1997. Valverde, Mariana. The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada, 1885-1925. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1991. - '"Despotism" and Ethical Liberal Governance.' Economy and Society 25.3 (1996): 357-72. - '"When the Mother of the Race Is Free": Race, Reproduction, and Sexuality in First-Wave Feminism.' Gender Conflicts: New Essays in Women's History. Ed. Franca lacovetta and Mariana Valverde. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992. 4—26. Vitzthum, Richard C. Land and Sea: The Lyric Poetry of Philip Freneau. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1978. Warkentin, Germaine. Introduction. Canadian Exploration Literature. Ed. Germaine Warkentin. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1993. ix-xxi. Watt, James. 'Anti-Catholic Nativism in Canada: The Protestant Protective Association.' Canadian Historical Review 48.1 (1967): 45-58. Weit/er, Ronald. Transforming Settler States: Communal Conflict and Internal Security in Northern Ireland and Zimbabwe. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990. Wexler, Laura. Tender Violence: Literary Eavesdropping, Domestic Fiction, and Educational Reform.' The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America. Ed. Shirley Samuels. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. 9-38. Winks, Robin. The Relevance of Canadian History: U.S. and Imperial Perspectives. Toronto: Macmillan, 1979. Wollstonecraft, Mar)'. Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 1792. Ed. Miriam Brody. London: Penguin, 1992. 'Women Are "Persons": Privy Council Holds They Can Sit in Senate.' Edmonton Bulletin 18 Oct. 1929: I. Zabus, Chantal. 'A Calibanic Tempest in Anglophone and Francophone New World Writing.' Canadian Literature 104 (spring 1985) 35-50.

This page intentionally left blank

Index

Aboriginal Protective Association, 92 acclimation and racial decline, 170. See also climate Act for the Protection of Women and Girls (1886): seduction criminalized, 116, 236n2(); women's capacity to speak for self, 131-2 Act of Union (1841): events preceding, 6 actress: character-strengthening duty, 72; ethical work of, 71; feminist counter discourse, 58; governess and the, 57; as ideal of female character, 66, 70; prostitute and the, 71-2; self-government of, 67-8; as a solitary reader, 67-8; transformations of self, 46 Act to Further Amend the Criminal Law,238n33 Act to Make Further Provision for the Protection of Women and Girls, the Suppression of Brothels, and Other Purposes, 112 Act to Make the Remedy in Cases of Seduction More Effectual (1837), 232n26

Act to Prevent the Employment of Female Labour in Certain Capacities, 249n 15 Act to Punish Seduction, and Like Offences, and to Make Further Provision for the Protection of Women and Girls, 114 administrative knowledge: dissemination of, 77 Africa: colonial incorporation of race, 23 agency: double meaning of, 224nl8; institutionalized power and, 15; as its opposite, 123; of would be 'person,' 210 agency (female): captivity narratives, 104, 123; essential vulnerability, 214; folded back on self (paradox), 58; government through, 173; narratives of sexual violence, 103; progress of civil society, 27, 225n29. See also person hood Agnew,Jean-Christophe: actor/ agent, 224nl8; agency, 239n36; theatre and social relations, 56-7 Alberta: jails, 199; library, 174-5; mar-

264 Index ried women's property rights, 243nl9. See also Edmonton; Women's Court Alberta Provincial Legislature school library, 174-5 American Bureau of Moral Education, 189 Anglo-Protestant settler culture: conflated with English tradition, 202; national political dominance, 109; publication of women's narratives, I I . See also settler women, AngloProtestant Annual Report of the Alberta Department of Dependent and Delinquent Children (1927), 185-6 anthropological humour, 184 anti-colonial: counter-identification with First Nations peoples, 98; rebellions, 104 Arabia: colonial incorporation of race, 23 archaeological approach to literary criticism, 219 archivist's approach to history, 220 'arctic zone': correction of moral deficiency, 8, 62; description of, 59; education of women, 99; female nature, 61; female self-governance, 40, 90 aristocratic: authority, 6-7; manners, 36 Armstrong, Nancy: bourgeois woman's authority, 36; Desire and Domestic Fiction, 29-30; 'Why Daughters Die,' 105 Arneth, Madame: heroic character, 69; leaves theatre, 72; moral evaluation, 70-1 Asian. See Chinese people; Japanese people

assimilation of racial others, 43; authority of women and, 151; First Nations peoples, 91-3; francophone population, 21; Metis, 130; moral, 91 Athenaeum: Anna Jameson review, 231n25 Austin, Jane, 174 Australia: imperial context of, 23; racially defined, 25 authentic speech and chaste character, 115 authentic writing voice, 144-8, 239n40 Bacchi, Carol Lee: first-wave feminism, 163 Backhouse, Constance: patriarchal authority, 85; seduction of daughter, 231nn26, 28 Baillie, William, 237n25 bannock, 133, 141. See also food and racial boundaries Barbados: racial limits of self-government, 24-5 barbarism: despotism and, 93; stages of human society, 90; Western civilization and Eastern, 103 'bedroom rapist,' 214 Benson, Susan Porter: department stores, 245n48 Berkeley, Bishop George: status of Canadian West, 170 Bevan, Sophie: shortage of white women, 173 Big Bear's band: captured Gowanlock and Delaney, 110; 'half-breed' interpreter, 125. See also Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear Black Candle, The, 223nl7, 241n9,

Index 244n34. See also Murphy, Emily Ferguson Blake, Edward: franchise extension, 9 Bland, Lucy: feminist theories of heredity, 171; white slavery, 235nll Blondin, Pierre: protector of Gowanlock and Delaney, 125-6; suspect offer of help, 129-30, 133, 155, 238n31 Boer population: British education, 25 bourgeois woman: authority of, 17— 18, 36; civilizing agent, 27; education of, 53-4, 222n 11; history of, 27; internali/ation of unwritten law of society, 87-8; moral and racial superiority, 39; public domesticity of, 29; redomesticated, 30; trading in capitalist society, 57 British imperial government: experiments in 'civilizing' natives, 91 British Indian Department: changes to, 91; strategy of criminalization, 111 British North America Act, 160 British Privy Council, 201 British reformers: colonies as testing ground for, 6-7 Brody, Miriam: feminist agenda, 53 Bronfman Foundation, 160 Brouwer, Ruth Compton: the zenana, 183-4 Burchell, Graham: history of the present, 163-4; processes of population, 32 Burn, W.L.: social laboratory, 222n8 Burnham, Michelle: captivity and freedom, 121: captivity narrative forms, 236n22; debt anxiety, 125; sentimental captivitv narrative, 119

265

Buss, Helen, 229n 11 Butler, Josephine: white slavery, 235nll Butler, Judith: subjectification, 117 Calgary Herald: Canadian authors, 175 Canada: emigration to, 112; feminized nation, 3, 13, 221n3; geometric mapping of, 20; golden age of literary publishing, 164; public library system, 174-5; representations of the West, 170-4; scarcity of white women, 173-4; self-governing status, 13. See also Dominion of Canada Canada as a project of rule: new reading of history, 5 Canada First movement: gendered form of social labour, 16 Canada Monthly: 'The School Library in Alberta,' 174—5 Canada Post, 160 Canada Presbyterian: announcement of Gowanlock and Delaney volume, 107, 109; zenana work, 184 Canada Savings Bonds, 14 Canadian: foreigner becoming, 156, 240n45; home missions, 156, 240n45; identity and The Diviners, 215-19; studies, 248n8 Canadian Council for the Immigration of Women: undesirable women, 40 Canadian Reformers, 52, 228n9 canoe adventure, 100—1 capitalism: education of women, 100; feminist materialism, 164 capitalist exchange: colonial daughter's moral standing, 84; social relations, 89

266 Index capital punishment: newspaper support of, 111 captivity narratives: absolution of colonial guilt, 119; discourse of rape and, 104, 118; forms of, 236n22; freedom and captivity represented, 121-2; as insurance, 150; Lot's wife, 143, 239n38; publication timing of, 9; right to government pension, 149-50; territorialization of liberal norms, 20-1; topos used in, 123, 237n28; white slavery context, 112; the writers as the martyrs, 124. See also Delaney, Theresa; first-person women's narratives; Gowanlock, Theresa; settler women narratives; Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear Carby, Hazel V.: feminist movement constraints, 19 Carter, Sarah: anti-colonial insurgency, 103-4; victims, 236n23 catachresis, 131; use of word, 238n32 Central Court (Edmonton), 197

Chambers, Ross: love across racial lines, 248n9 character: chastity, 138, 150; deficiency of Indian, 153, 220n44; feminine knowledge of, 181; feminist possibilities, 68; language of, 84—5, 210; literary example in pedagogy, 68; manufacture of, 160; as moral disposition, 63; Native insurgency as bad, 111; norms of conduct and chaste, 121-2, 153, 155-6; poverty and, 38; punitive approach to, 87; reading and formation of, 67-8, 188, 190-1, 194-5; in reformed rape laws, 114, 117; rescue home and formation of, 190; science of society, 75; strengthening through

hardship, 54; victory of individual, 201 Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical: character, 63, 65-6; moral evaluation, 70; moral exercise book, 68 charity work: reformulation of, 37-8 chastity: debt repayment to society, 138; fathers legally responsible for daughter's, 85-6; hygiene and, 150; norms of conduct, 121-2, 153, 1556; offence against, 236n20; race making, 153; theft of daughter's, 84 Chicago Vice Commission, 189 children: born out of wedlock, 83; Canadianized, 176; infanticide, 87. See also vulnerable and dangerous girl Children's Protection Act, 198 child support: for unmarried mother, 86 Chinese people: and Anglo-Protestant settler women, 220; exclusion from franchise, 136; national security and, 168; portrayed as threat to white working girls, 162, 219-20, 235nl3, 241n9, 249nl5; racial anxieties of West, 189, 242nl7 Chrisman, Laura: economy centred on the body, 17 Chunn, Dorothy: marginal category, 42; socialized justice, 241nll Church of England: authority of clergymen, 183; ritualism of, 167 citation: in place of memory, 145-8; use of injaney Canuck texts, 178-9, 244n33 citizenship: education of women, 49; self-government and government of others, 51

Index civilization: of Alberta jails, 199; of Canada's West, 171; coercive demands of, 41-2, 136; cultivation of women, 59; Eastern barbarism and Western, 103; marriage, 60-1; racially defined, 25; stages of human society, 90; women as main beneficiary of, 90-1 'civilizing' culture: of Protestant and English-speaking, 3 class: First Nations women, 95—6; insurance classifications, 154; mobility, 52; priority of gender over, 106; of wage-earning colonial daughters, 84; in women's education, 50-1, 99-100. See also middle class; working class climate: acclimation and racial decline, 170; Toronto's winter, 49, 64; writing and, 94 clothing: costume of an early Saxon, 206-7, 209; decoration of 'Brother Mrs. Murphy,' 203/ 206; of women, 184-5 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 174, 243n22 Collini, Stefan: economics and morality, 35; liberal political theorists, 63; 'Muscular Liberalism,' 87 Colonial Conference (London, 1907): Canada as test-case, 23; definition of dominion, 27; racial essence, 25—6. See also Imperial Conference colonialism: colonies as testing rounds, 6-7, 222n8; figure of exploration, 206; household management guides, 29-30; political innocence of a violated, 113; vulnerability of white woman, 103

267

'colony' and 'woman writer': homologous categories, 5 Columbus, Christopher, 206 Commissioners' Report on the Condition of Women and Female Children in Mines and Factories (1843), 99 common sense rules, 195-6 Comte, Auguste: Martineau translator of, 76 conduct books: history of the bourgeois woman, 27; regulating desire, 49 'conduct of conduct': female specialization in pedagogy of, 75-6; liberal political order, 19; work of government, 224n22 Congregational Union of Quebec and Ontario, 116 coquetry: corrupting effects of, 50 counterinsurgency, 103-4 Cousin, Victor: On the State of Education in Holland, as Regards Schools for the Working Classes and for the Poor, 77, 23In23 Cree: differentiations of, 126; refused to sign treaties, 110 Criminal Code, 182; rape definition, 132; seduction offence, 236n21 criminality: construction of, 111; the criminal 'Eve,' 162, 181; or victimized by crime, 200; preventative and reformative work, 162; seduction and, 117, 235nl6. See also legislation Cross, C.W.: establishment of Women's Court, 245n49 Crown colonies: presence of white femininity, 104 cultural difference as moral inferiority, 95

268 Index Curtis, Bruce: colonies as testing grounds, 6-7; 'pre-sociological observation,' 229nl2; techniques of governance, 55 Daily Patriot: readers expectations, 146 'dark continent': 'aboriginal' relation to, 4 data collecting: occular penetration, 20 daughters: as culture-bearers, 105; foster mothers from, 138; indebtedness to society, 118, 155; infantilization of women, 183; marginal subject of violated, 123; rape law price of speaking for selves, 114-16; theft of chastity, 84; voiceless in Seduction Act, 84-5; wage earners, 84. See also family Davin, Anna: fitness of sons, 172 Dean, Hartley: social insurance, 150 Dean, Mitchell: domestic arrangements, 89; laws of industrial capitalism, 27; technologies of government, 247nl; The Constitution of Poverty, 32 debt repayment to society: absolution of colonial guilt, 119; advance payment of, 156; anxiety of accountability, 125; chastity and, 138; constrained freedom, 120-1; daughters, 118; extorted speech, 139; lack of sentiment, 41-2; martyrdom of, 124-5; protest against cost, 122-3, 138. See also insurance Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789), 223nl2; qualifications of, 9 Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen. Seede Gouges, Olympe

Defert, Daniel: insurance, 154, 235nl5 degeneracy: by acclimation, 170-1, 218; among settlers, 52-3; of Europeans, 166, 217-18, 242nl6 de Gouges, Olympe: execution of, 9; Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen, 223nl2, 230n21 Delaney, Theresa: authenticity of narrative, 144—8; connections to power, 11; deficiencies of First Nations, 21; evidence at trials, 106; life before marriage, 149; Lot's wife, 143, 239n38; mother and a teacher, 139; mother of 'squaws,' 154-5; motivation of rebellion, 149; protection of the state, 113; right to government pension, 149-50; spokeswoman for civilizing project, 153. See also Gowanlock, Theresa; Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear Deleuze, Gilles: disposilif, 23; 'lines of force,' 224nl9; theory of the self, 226n33; transformations in the machinery of government, 160 Delorme, Rose, 237n26. See also Pritchard,John democracy: repression of, 9. See also liberal political order Department of Indian Affairs. See British Indian Department Department of Neglected Children, 198, 246n59; Children's Court, 246n53 department stores, 194-5, 245n48 desire: deployment of, 33; reformation of women's, 60-1 despotism: legitimate when dealing with barbarians, 93 determinism, 64

Index de Tocqueville, Alexis: De la democracie en Amerique, 79

deviant mode of life: non-interference and, 97; punishment of, 98 discourse of rape: captivity narratives, 104; counterinsurgency, 103. See also rape disgrace as discipline, 34, 87-9; government of poor, 88 displacement: rape synonymous with, 106 disposiiif: reading women's narratives and a, 23-4 Diviners, The: colonial discourses, 217, 249nll; myths of identity, 249nll; narration of Canadian identity, 215-19; publication context, 21617 domestic: fiction, 27; service, 83—4; woman, 29, 36 domestic sphere: authority over questions of assimilation, 151; 'foster mother,' 108, 138; institutional reformation of character, 194—5 dominion: definition of, 24—5, 27; fitness of women for, 172; penalties for rape, 1 16; presence of white femininity, 104 Dominion Franchise Act: exclusion of women and Indians, 136 Dominion of Canada: first in British Empire, 162; imperial context of, 23-5; mixed genetic inheritance of, 16; well-managed immigration, 25. See also Canada Donaire, Gregory: desire, 132; protector of Gowanlock and Delaney, 126 Don/elot, Jacques: contractual implication, 234n3; family deficiencies, 175-6; mother as collaborator, 31;

269

pathologies of race and will, 200; vagrant, 246n57 Doukhobors: perfect Canadians, 180; technique of zenana-missionary, 184-5; a transplanted 'lump,' 26 Dower Act (Alberta), 243nl9 Dubinsky, Karen: seduction, 235nl6 Dumm, Thomas: captivity and freedom, 121; freedom, 101; Isaiah Berlin, 237n24 Durham Report, The: events preceding, 6; internal racism, 22-3; selfgoverning status, 21; widely read, 22 duty: feminism not bound to, 101; narrative on behalf of nation, 144; prostitution and characterstrengthening, 72-3; public woman's performance of, 156 East Africa: colonial incorporation of race, 23 economy: of bodies, 35; definition of, 14; shift from sphere of household, 32. See also language of economics; political economy Edgeworth, Maria: feminine expertise, 55 Edmonton: horse show, 206. See also Alberta; Women's Court Edmonton Bulletin: Murphy's daily mottoes, 179 Edmonton Journal: Women's Court reporting, 198 education of First Nations peoples: cultural difference as moral inferiority, 95; infantilization of, 139-40; instruction to, 239n37. See also First Nations peoples education of women: bourgeois morality, 222nll; citizenship and,

270 Index 49; class distinctions in the, 99-100; dangers of not doing well, 51; good reading material, 194-5; mechanisms of fear in, 97; potential in colony for, 61-2, 82-3; punitive pedagogy, 53-4; re-creation of female nature, 47, 227n4; social cohesion, 37 Edwards, Henrietta Muir, 247n63 Electoral Franchise Bill, 135-6 Emily Murphy: Crusader, 201-4. See also Murphy, Emily Ferguson English theatre: as heterotopic space, 7-8 Enlightenment: brutality of, 100; essential human nature, 49 epistolary mode of address, 47-8, 55 Ernstrom, Adele M.: 'children of the forest,' 90; Wollstonecraft's influence on Jameson, 47 Essay on the Principle of Population (1798): changes with second edition, 34, 81—2; female reproductive body, 34; moral reformers, 26; natural checks of misery and vice, 801; passions, 33-4, 227n4; power of population, 32; prostitution and population increase, 75; woman as agent of government, 35-6; women's role in social order, 1314. See also Mai thus, Thomas ethics: of actress, 71; colonized, 228n7; freedom and, 50; social utility or, 62 ethnography: First Nations peoples and, 179 'eugenic feminism,' 171-2 Ewald, Francois: society norms, 98 experimental counter-site: colonial testing-ground, 213; Jameson's dis-

appointment in, 78-9, 82; settler woman's ambivalent position, 39. See also laboratory of the settler colony exploitation: absence of liberal government, 42 family: deficiencies in children, 176; effect of legislative changes on, 856; liberal government cultivation of, 89; metaphors of economy, 17; racially inferior, 194; reasonable beings within, 51; status shift, 31-2; wounded in rape, 117. See also daughters; father; mother Farrar, Dean, 166, 242nl5 father: compensation for daughter's loss of wages, 83-4; compensation for grief, 115, 236nl9; infantilization of daughter, 183; in seduction cases, 231n28. See also family fear: embrace of, 101 Federated Women's Institutes, 201 feminine: colonial rule and the figure of, 104; essences, 4; historicization of, 19; sympathetic understanding, 37, 192-4; voicing model, 5. See also zenana feminism: benevolently imperialist, 211; colonial discourses and, 21718; contradictions of agency, 163; ethical code, 74; ethnographer, 202; 'eugenic,' 171-2; feminine delicacy, 88; government and, 74; historicize white femininity, 19; history not inevitable, 51; history of paradoxes, 27; materialism, 13,164; maternal, 16-17, 161; of Murphy, 202; project of Jameson, 8; for selfsupporting middle-class women,

Index 46; support of racist legislation, 220; takes itself back from Malthus, 36; theories of heredity, 171-2; virtue and, 102. See also first-wave feminism; personhood; second-wave feminist readers; virtu feminism feminized nation: expressive voicing, 3 Ferguson, Adam: economy, 32 First Cross for Imperial Service: Emily Murphy presented with, 205 First Nations peoples: anti-colonial counter-identification with, 98; assimilation, 91-3; control of government, 233n35; convictions from Frog Lake, 106; designations of mixed race, 234n5; effects of Indian policy, 91; franchise legislation, 135—6; French Canadian, 130; Indian agent's Cree wife's pension, 150; infantili/ation of, 139-40; international context of resistance, 111; Jameson's analysis of women of, 95-7; naive conception of, 90; norm of domestication, 126; pauperization of women, 100; racial anxieties of West and, 189; reconciling protection and violation, 135; second uprising of, 9; wards of the government, 135; woman as emblem of female civil subject, 91; women's contempt of pain, 101, 232n34. Sec also British Indian Department; education of First Nations peoples; Metis first-person women's narratives: antiexpressivist approach, 224nl9; generic or authentic, 144—8; interdisciplinary and unoriginal, 210; political work of, 212-14; privileged

271

signifier of Otherness, 106; target of protective form of punishment, 108; things of this world, 15. See also captivity narratives; settler women narratives first-wave feminism: contradictions of, 163, 210-12; legal 'persons,' 9, 161. See also feminism First World War: participation in, 9 folds of words: economy within character, 211; unwitting involvement, 18 food and racial boundaries, 126-8, 133-4, 141 'foster mother': from daughter to, 138; domestic sphere, 108; professions of, 171 Foucault, Michel: analysis of social relations, 225n25; 'care of self,' 228n7; 'conduct of conduct,' 224n22; discipline and normalization, 28-9; freedom is ethical, 50; 'general polities' of truth, 15; heterotopic spaces, 7, 47; internal purification, 22; knowledge cutting, 213; liberal government, 1920, 33; political economy, 30; racism, 17, 224n24; strategy of penal reform, 108; History of Sexuality, 17, 224n24 Fox, William, 237n25 franchise: extended, 9, 63 francophone population of Lower Canada: assimilable minority, 21 freedom: condition of protection, 106; constraints of, 236n23; constraints of debt repayment to society, 120-1; ethics and, 50; at expense of others, 211; licence to speak, 105; negative, 121-2,

272 Index 237n24; norms of conduct, 41; and racial security, 113, 155; transgression of limits of, 101, 233n34 French-Canadian population: British education, 25 Freneau, Philip: 'Lines Occasioned by a Visit to an Old Indian Burying Ground,' 148, 239n41 Frog Lake Indian agency, 139 'Frog Lake Martyrs,' 108, 124 Frog Lake settlement: institutionalized power, 11; trials of First Nations men, 106 Gallagher, Catherine: biological exchange, 81 gendered: class category, 106; expertise, 197-8; privilege, 246n50; social labour, 16 gender-specific form of disgrace, 87-8 generic representations, 147 George, Rosemary Marangoly: household-management guides, 29—30, 139-40 Gerson, Carole: literary canons, 221n3; prefatory apologetics, 119 'girl problem': contradictions for feminism, 162—3. See also vulnerable and dangerous girl Girl Who Disappeared: A White Slave, The: direct didacticism, 245n46; discourse of social science, 189; plot, 190-2 Goethe, Ottilie von: addressee of Jameson, 47 golden age of literary publishing, 164 governess: middle-class working woman, 57 government: 'conduct of conduct,' 19, 76; constitution of space, 21;

power of population, 34; women as agent of, 35-6 government pension, 149-50, 239n42 Gowanlock, Theresa: bannock, 133, 141; connections to power, 11; evidence at trials, 106; husband's coat, 131-3; racial contamination and life in captivity, 126-9; treachery of protection, 136. See also debt repayment to society; Delaney, Theresa; Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear Grauer, Lalage: freedom and captivity, 121, 236n23; publication of captivity narratives, 236n22 Gregory, Dr: Legacy to His Daughters, 49 'grid of intelligibility,' 225n25 grief: father's compensation for, 115; replaced by violation, 123; staging of widow's, 108 Hacking, Ian: 'Making Up People,' 227n6 Haliburton, Robert Grant: The Men of the North and Their Place in History, 16-17 Hamilton Spectator: capital punishment, 111 handbook for colonial mothers, 218 Havergal College (Toronto): 'girl of the new day,' 173-4 Hayter, Sir George: drawings of actress, 66 Hemans, Felicia, 233n34 Hennesy, Rosemary: feminist materialism, 164 'Heritage Minute,' 160 heterogeneous mechanisms, 32 heterosexuality: threatened by transient population, 112

Index 273 heterotopic spaces: the colonies, 58; definition of, 7; residential schools, 99; theatre as, 47-8, 72 Highland settler family, 79, 82; cultivation of family feelings, 89; patriarchal authority, 85 historical construction of women, 14 historical epistemology, 219 History of the Missions of the United Brethren among the Indians of North America, 92 Hobbes, Thomas: agency, 239n36; 'person,' 210, 229nlO; theatre and social relations, 56; Leviathan, 1367 Hodder and Stoughton publicist, 178 Honig, Bonnie: classifications, 21; construction of criminality, 111; norms of character, 121; virtue, 102, 212 household-management guides: colonialism, 29-30; infantilization of adults, 139-40 How to Observe: Morals and Manners'. Jameson's relation to, 76; political administration, 56. See also Martineau, Harriet Hudson's Bay Company: exploitation by, 42, 139, 150; 'liberalization' of West, 9; in opposition to Dominion government, 152; Rupert's Land, 170 Hume, David: economy, 32; Treatise on Human Nature, 33, 226n33, 230n21 Hunter, Shelagh: women's education, 37 husband impersonation, 145; Gowanlock's experience of, 129-31; race impersonation, 133-5, 137—8;

reforms to rape laws, 116, 131-2; woman's capacity to determine, 133, 136 hybridity, 218 hygiene: chaste character and political, 150; controlling bodies and, 109; 'health officer among band of braves,' 126; unhygienic environment of captivity with Metis, 41-2 identity: bearer of, 205; Canadian, 218-19; counter-identification with First Nations peoples, 98; The Diviners and Canadian, 215-19; racialized, 153; woman/colony and national, 218 Illustrations of Political Economy: social cohesion as goal, 37-8. See also Martineau, Harriet Imperial Conference, 225n26. See also Colonial Conference (London, 1907) Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire, 195, 243n20 Impressions ofjaney Canuck Abroad: degenerate material of England, 166; introduction ofjaney Canuck, 165; Orange Order, 189; political context of writing of, 9; to revitalize white Canada, 170; 'Romish practices,' 166-8. See also Murphy, Emily Ferguson India: anti-colonial insurgencies, 103-4 Indian Act (1876), 241n8 infantilization: of adult First Nations peoples, 139-40; daughterly disobedience and laughter, 183; of Doukhobor women, 184; younger on a scale of moral evolution, 186-8, 193

274 Index infanticide among unmarried mothers, 87 inpsychation, 142 institutional life: confusion of public/ private, 196; reformation, 199 insurance: captivity narrative as, 150, 155-6; governmental rationality of, 113, 235nl5. See also debt repayment to society internal purification: liberal societies defining feature, 22 Irish peasant, 81-2 Jack Canuck, 168-9, 242nl7 Jacobus, Mary: exact equivalency, 231n24; power of population, 34-5 Jamaica: anti-colonial insurgencies, 103 Jameson, Anna Brownell: British-born liberal activist, 6; colonial administration problems, 76-7; connections to power, 11; critique of Jesuit missionaries, 92—3; critique of male hypocrisy, 71-2, 231n22; cultural difference as moral inferiority, 95; disidentification from truths of own culture, 40; on female education, 47; feminist project of, 8, 46, 98-9; figure of the actress, 46; first European female, 90; First Nations women, 91, 95-7; heroic women, 232n29; literary reputation, 54, 223nl4; Malthus, 75, 80; Martineau's influence, 38, 56, 76; newspapers as arena of public opinion, 77; personhood, 54; romantic conception of subjectivity, 68; separation from Robert Jameson, 227n3; supported self, 48; theatre as place of transformative work, 53-4; thea-

tre writing, 7-8, 54; view of representative government, 52; virtue, 88; Wollstonecraft's influence on, 47-8; women as part of state machinery, 9; women in savage life, 232n30; Poetry of Sacred and Legendary Art, 232n29; Social Life in Germany, 229nl4. See also actress; 'arctic zone'; Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical; Shakespeare's heroines; Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada Jameson, Robert: institutionalized power connections, 11; separation from Anna Jameson, 48, 227n3; Tory establishment, 52 Janey Canuck in the West golden age of literary publishing, 164; intimacy of text, 182-6; political context of writing of, 9; reading and character formation, 186-8; reviews of, 177-8; Swedish-Canadian servant, 186-8; utility of feminine qualities, 26. See also Murphy, Emily Ferguson Janey Canuck texts: Canadian publishing industry, 223nl4; characterization in, 179; conduct, 42-3; documentary quality of early Canadian writing, 177; dominion's human resources, 170; Doukhobor as perfect Canadian, 180; essay topics, 159; human appeal of, 176-7; literary figure, 164; political context of, 10; recipe for moral and efficient living, 159; 'Are Parents What They Used to Be?', 159; 'Fighting the Drug Menace,' 159; 'The Day's Motto, by Janey Canuck,' 159; 'Why Do Wives Leave

Index Home?', 159. See also Murphy, Emily Ferguson Japanese people: racial anxieties of West, 189; threat to white working girls, 249nl5 Jesuit missionaries: criticism of, 93. See also missionaries Johnston, George, 232n33; dialogue with Jameson, !()()—1 Johnston, Judith: structure of Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, 45—6 Johnston, Susan, 232n33 Kemble, Fanny: acting and womanhood, 58; Jameson's study of, 54, 58, 229nl5; leaves theatre, 72; naturalist acting style, 66-7; neoclassical acting style, 230n 18; public life, 69; supporting family, 68 Kilbourn, William, 223nl5 Knights of Labor (Ontario), 235nl6 Knox, Ellen: common sense rules, 195-6; 'girl of the new day,' 173-4 Kruger, Anna, 70 kunstlerroman, 215, 220 laboratory of the settler colony: historical function of, 13, 223nl6; problem of pauperism, 40. See also experimental counter-site laissez-faire arrangements: muscular Magdalens produced by, 88 Lamarck,Jean Baptiste: heredity, 171 language of economics: the body and, 17; in captivity narratives, 120, 122-3; in rape laws, 115-16; of texts settler narratives, 210 language of nursery rules: in household-management guides, 139-40 language of rights: synecdoche, 28

275

language of science: 'eugenic feminism,' 171-3; norms of conduct, 164 language of the courtroom: in captivity narratives, 119-20, 122-3 Laurence, Margaret, 215. See also Diviners, The Laurentian thesis, 223nl5 Laurier, Wilfrid: definition of dominion, 24 Lee, Sky: Disappearing Moon Cafe, 21920 legislation: amalgamation of women and children, 198; assimilation, 21; compromise between privilege and money, 230nl6; demands of Canadian Reformers, 52; enlightenment of the mind, 37; familial and sexual norms, 39-40; father's redress for seduction, 232n26; feminist support of racist, 220; franchise qualifications, 135-6; influence of the mother, 32; married women property rights, 237n30, 243nl9; Metis rights in Manitoba, 110; political turbulence surrounding, 63; protection of women and girls, 112, 114, 249nl5; rape law, 114-18; recognition of women as persons, 160-1, 191, 200-6, 209, 247n63; relations between sexes, 83; seduction, 84-9, 116, 236n20, 238n33; sexual, 116; specialized justice, 241 n8; white slavery, 235nl6; women's capacity to speak for self, 131-2 leisure clubs, 195 lesbians, 199 liberal political order: British-born activists, 6; colonies as testing

276 Ibndex ground for, 6-7; 'conduct of conduct,' 19, 75-6, 224n22; contradictions of, 27; critique of, 27-8, 225n30; despotism and, 93; differentiation and hierarchy, 25-6; domestic arrangements, 89; expenditure offeree, 19, 31; exploitation as absence of, 42; family privileged element of, 31; freedom/subjection antimony, 212; history of, 226n33; individual strength of will, 87; industrial capitalism and, 27; language of rights, 28; moral-racial classification, 21; need for feminine expertise, 173-4, 197-8; norms of individual conduct, 204; not inevitable, 51-2; public/private confused, 196; rethinking of history of, 5; space of negative freedom, 100; theorists, 63; uprising against, 20; usefulness of First Nations peoples, 152; Vindication's critique of, 49. See also power in liberal societies; various self-government entries library. See public library system literary criticism: archaeological approach, 219; colonial women as voiceless, 43; feminine voicing model, 5; feminist materialism, 164; figure of the settler woman, 247n6; postcolonialism, 215-20; readings of Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, 54—5, 76; subjectification and, 15. See also reading literature: documentary quality of early Canadian writing, 177; false defence of 'savage,' 98-9; golden age of publishing, 164; power of in nation-making, 4, 212; privileged

support of authority, 176; replacement of evangelical church meeting, 188; women who write, 60. See also national literature; reading; sentimental fiction Local Council of Women (Edmonton), 196, 199 Locke, John: Second Treatise, 136 Lot's wife, 143, 239n38 love across racial lines, 216, 248n9 Lynch, Deidre: ethical reading, 67 MacDonagh, Oliver: colonies as testing rounds, 6, 222n8 Macdonald,John A., 109 machinery of government: transformations in the, 160 Mackenzie, Catriona: self-government, 229n 10 Maclean's: Women's Court introduction to Canadian government, 204; work of the Women's Court, 180 MacMechan, Archibald: Headwaters of Canadian Literature, 3; 'image of a woman,' 3-4, 12-13, 219; people because we have a voice, 214-15 MacMurray, Charlotte, 232n33 'making up,' 49, 227n6 male settler: demand for ornamental women, 82-3, 231n25 male subalterns: colonial authority, 103 Malthus, Thomas, 13; check on the power of population, 90; economy, 32; exact equivalency, 231 n24; gender-specific form of disgrace, 87-8; happiness, 34, 226n34; Irish peasant, 81-2; Jameson engages, 75, 80; social malaise, 171. See also Essay on the Principle of Population (1798)

Index Manitoba Act, 110 marriage: custom and prohibitory laws, 97; disappearance of, 60-1; in New World, 74; pleasure principle, 195; privileges of rank, 79; and prostitution, 71-2 Married Women's Property Act (Ontario, 1884), 237n30 Marshall, Gail: acting and female character, 65-6 Martineau, Harriet: feminine expertise, 55; narrative elucidations of principles, 37, 226n35; translator of Comte, 76; 'Cousin Marshall,' 37-8; 'On Female Education,' 36-7; 'Summary of Principles,' 37. See also How to Observe: Morals and Manner's; Illustrations of Political Economy; Society in America martyrs of rebellion: the narrating women, 124 Marx, Karl: The Eighteenth Erumaire, 207 materialism, 13, 164 maternal authority. 42. 140, 161, 163, 189-90, 197 maternal feminism: experts in norms of conduct, 161; race making of the dominion, 16-17. See also first wave feminism maternal role in family: improvement of inferiors, 16 'matriarchy of letters': as the 'voice' of the colony, 4 McCallum, Pamela, 249nll McClung, Nellie, 247n63; Clearing in the Wert, 235nl4 McKay, Ian: Canada as a project, 5; postt olonial studies and, 6; violent reorgani/.ing of living spaces, 20

277

McKinney, Louise, 247n63 Mehta, Uday: differentiation and hierarchy, 25-6; moral-racial classification, 21; protected wards, 136 melodrama, 189 memorials: lack of in colonies, 92 memory as painful, 125, 142-3 memsahib, 139-40; colonial household management guides, 29-30; in feminist literary criticism, 43; functions of, 30 metalepsis: definition, 225n27; differentiation and hierarchy in liberal order, 26-7 metaphor: of family, 17; of house fire, 72-3 Methodist Church: unification of sects of, 111 Metis: contractual implication, 110, 234n3; international context of resistance, 111; Red River provisional government, 109—10; second uprising of, 9; as unassimilable, 130 metonym: John Gowanlock's coat, 131 middle class: feminist campaigns for the, 46; moral attributes of, 16; public domesticity, 39; in relation to the poor, 34; theatre reconstructed to attract, 71; woman's domain outside politics, 78; women's education and, 99-100; working women figures, 57. See also class Mill, John Stuart: character, 63; voluntarism and determinism, 64; On Liberty, 93—4; System of Logic, 63 Millar, John: economy, 32; Origin of the Distinction of the Ranks, 90

278 Index Milton, John: Paradise Lost, 147-8 miscegenation: fate worse than death, 105, 130, 145, 155; girl as vulnerable and dangerous, 162; right to vote and, 137 missionaries: Canadian home missions, 240n45; critique of Jesuits, 92-3; linking Women's Court to foreign, 160; Protestant and English-speaking, 222n9; white woman's foreign work, 29-30; white woman zenana, 184—5; women's organizations, 9 mixed-race: carriers of a 'virus,' 126; designations of, 234n5 modernity: the market self, 56-7 morality: affecting future of the race, 198; assimilation of First Nation's women, 91; authority of woman and, 13, 29, 189; backwardness of North American, 79; character, 63; character of rape victim, 116; charity work's project, 38; duty of welldisciplined woman, 9; economic role and, 58; education of women, 222nll; maternal authority and, 189; problem of poverty and, 34; racist discourse of sexual, 19; reading and, 49, 187-8; reform self to reform world, 52-3; use of female character and, 8; women's responsibility for own honour, 83; of working girls, 194—5; younger on a scale of, 186-8, 193 moral pedagogy: fiction built for, 174, 176-8, 181-2 moral reformers: controlling bodies, 109; political conflict, 222n9; women's subject position, 26 Morel, B.A., 242n 16

Morgan, Cecilia: Laura Secord, 239n42; sex specific public arenas, 77-8 Most Noble Order of Crusaders: Murphy as a, 205-6 mother: as collaborator, 31; as defective parent, 194-6, 245n47. See also family Muller, Sophie, 70 Mullner, Adolf: The Schuld, 69 multiculturalism, 216-17 Murphy, Arthur: sermon writing, 178 Murphy, Emily Ferguson: address to Women's Canadian Club, 43; biography of, 201-4; connections to power, 11; embodiment of Canadian government, 204—5; historical context of work, 9; literary editor, 242nl3; maternal authority, 42; opinion sought by news media, 26; sermon writing, 178, 243nl9; 'The School Library in Alberta,' 174—5; well known in Canada, 159; Open Trails, 164; Seeds of Pine, 164, 178, 181; The Black Candle, 223nl7, 241 n9, 244n34. See also Impressions of Janey Canuck Abroad;Janey Canuck in the West;Janey Canuck texts; Women's Court 'Muscular Liberalism,' 87 muscular Magdalen s, 88 Myers, Mitzi: reason, 230n21 narrative: mechanisms of, 191. See also captivity narratives; first-person women's narratives; settler women narratives; white slavery narrative narratives of Canadian history: essential pattern of, 5 narratives of sexual violence: colo-

Index nialism and, 103; in a rape trial, 117-18 National Council of Women of Canada, 162 national development: alternate view of, 10 national essences: or ideology, 4 national literature: canons of, 221n3; and maturation of the nation, 3; and racial and political security, 175. See also literature National Monthly: janey Canuck texts, 242nl3 nation building: evolutionary narrative of, 19 Nelligan, Kate, 160 newspapers: arena of public opinion, 77; 'Janey Canuck,' 159; Martineau's book in local, 38, 56; readers expectations, 146; support of capital punishment, 111; women's (white) franchise, 136 New Zealand: imperial context of, 23 Niet/sche, Friedrich: internalization of terror, 124—5; self-mastery, 155 Nightingale, Florence: 'Cassandra,' 45—6; feminist project of, 46 noble savage, 91. See also Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Nolin, Adolphus: protector of Gowanlock and Delaney, 125-6 normalization, function of captivity narratives, 105; mother as a collaborator, 31; prohibitory laws and, 98; of recreational reading, 187-8; as solution to white slavery, 189 norms of conduct: authority of women and, 13; bearer of identity, 205; chaste character, 121-2, 153, 155-6; colonial laws, 39; controlled

279

by non-interference, 97-8; female authority, 75,161; freedom, 41, 212; internalized through fiction, 187-8, 190-1; politically innocent common sense, 16; prudent saving, 220n44; and racial defensiveness, 10; scientific expert, 164; sexual and racial purity, 104; socially useful human nature, 59; tolerant multiculturalism, 216; women as bearers, 107 North-West Rebellion (Canada, 1885): military commanders of the, 104; provoked by dominion government policies, 109 Oehlenschlager, Adam: Corregio, 69, 71,88, 232n29 Ojibway woman anecdote, 97 On the State of Education in Holland, as Regards Schools for the Working Classes and for the Poor, 77, 231 n23 Open Trails, 164. See also Murphy, Emily Ferguson Orange Order: colonial responsibility, 189; election riots, 52; institutionalized power, 11; prominent Canadian family of the, 164; racial purity, 130, 137 Orange Sentinel: warnings against Roman Catholic Church, 169 'Oriental quarters': and Protestantism, 168-9 other: cultural difference, 95; signifierof, 215 Padre, the: generalized paternalism,

182-8 Paine, Thomas: Rights of Man, 223nl2 Pall Mall Gazette: white slavery articles, 111-12

280 Index Paradise Lost:]ohn Milton, 147-8

Parkdale Times Publishing Company, 138, 154, 237n25 Parker, Graham: rape law, 117 Parlby, Irene, 247n63 passions: science of political economy, 33 paternalistic powers: constraint of, 19; representation of by the Padre, 182-3; of surveillance, 118 pathologies of race and will, 200 patriarchal authority: arbitrariness of, 31; challenge to, 204; race making, 204; reforms of rape laws, 116, 118; replaced by reason, 30; representation in figure of the Padre, 182; and Seduction Act, 85; Women's Court challenge to, 204 Patterson, Dr Margaret: magistrate of Women's Court, 184, 244n41 pedagogy: controlling bodies, 109; humanizing, 176. See also various education entries pension. See government pension personhood: agency of would be 'person,' 210; content of, 201; first wave feminism, 9; necessity of, 54; norms of, 205; paradox of women's quest for, 202-7; 'person,' 229nlO; recognition of women as persons, 160-1, 191, 200-6, 209, 247n63 Pierce, Lome, 221nl pleasure principle for the working girl, 195 political economy: conduct of individuals, 81-2; individual catastrophe, 75; Jameson's critique of, 54, 74—5; new governmental problems, 30-1; passions as basis of, 33-4; sacrifice of women to, 73-4; women's

charity work, 37. See also economy; self-government political implications of settler women's writing: anti-expressivist approach, 224nl9; second-wave feminist readers, 8; technologies in aid of liberal political order, 11; as things of this world, 212-13; tropes of violation and recovery, 12 political philosophy: conduct of individuals, 19-20, 75 political power: women's exercise of, 39; women outside of, 78 polygamy, 238n33 Pon, Madge: 'Oriental quarters,' 168 Poor Law Reform Act (1834, Britain), 32; enlightenment of the mind, 37 Poovey, Mary: situation of the governess, 57; violence of implementation of abstraction, 20 postcolonialism: Canadian feminist literary criticism, 215-20, 247n6; tradition of refusal, 248n7 postcolonial studies: colonies as testing grounds, 6 poverty: character and, 38; colonial government's priorities and, 86; disgrace and, 88; misery of, 34; morality, 32-4 Powell, Kerry: governess and actress, 57 power in liberal societies: detached from truth, 204; expenditure of force, 19; norms and sovereign powers, 98. See also liberal political order power of population, 33-4 power to punish: shift of target and scale, 108

Index 281 prefatory apologetics: conventions of, 119; denial of, 123 Presbyterian Record: Canadian home missions, 240n45 Principles of Political Economy: demand and capital, 81 Pritchard, John: captive of Plains Cree, 237n26; Gowanlock in wife's kitchen, 126-7; protector of Gowanlock and Delaney, 125-6, 145 professional female reformer: social science, 76 proper distances, 218 prostitution: banned from theatre, 71; character-strengthening duty, 72; definition of, 106; laws of population increase, 80-1; mobility of women, 162; occasional, 162; racial anxieties of West, 189; sacrifice of virtue by social system, 73; in white slavery narratives, 190; women's special knowledge of, 75 Protestant and English-speaking: 'civilizing' culture, 3; criticism of Jesuits, 93; Janey Canuck's criticism of ritualism, 166-9; missionaries, 92, 222n9 Provincial Training School for Mental Deficiency, 199 psychiatric evidence in court, 199 psycho-sexual pathology' of imperialism, 217 public and private: confusion of divisions, 196; household production, 30; life on the stage, 57; linking of, 160; public man and virtuous woman, 77-8; shift in, 31-2 public domesticity: as a political space, 29; women's place of power, 39 public education, 77, 231n23

public library system, 174-5, 177 public women: female character, 75 punitive pedagogy: for bourgeois women, 53-4; lack of in Women's Court, 181; pleasure of inflicting pain, 125; seduced woman and, 89 race: degeneracy of Europeans, 166, 217-18, 242nl6; degeneration by acclimation, 170-1, 218; discourse of rape and, 105-6, 115; inflected feminization of woman, 116; nineteenth-century sense of, 16; pathologies of will and, 200; racially inferior family, 194; self-government and, 23-5; specialization of court system, 198 race making: challenge to patriarchal authority, 204; chaste character and, 153; dominion's industry, 1617; fictional daughters as culture bearers, 105; origins of term, 17; protections of 'civilized' society, 105; racialized identity, 153; raw materials of, 26; settler women implicated in, 18-19; white women at centre of, 39, 188; women as organ of the future, 172-3; women's clubs and, 43 race regeneration: colonial responsibility of, 189 racial boundaries: and interests of women, 106; 'Oriental quarters,' 168 racial contamination, 104; assimilable and unassimilable difference, 130; captivity and resistance to, 126-9; race impersonation and, 133—5, 137-8; resolute conduct to resist, 129

282

Index

racial distinctions: as a marker, 16; production of, 10 racial essence, 202 racial 'inferiors': women as experts in the enculturation of, 161, 197-8 racialized identity: basis for governing, 153 racial superiority and sexual difference, 206 racism: of expansion, 17; internal purification, 22; modern form of, 232n31 racist differentiation: Canada's history of, 216 Radforth, Ian: administrative knowledge, 77 radical societies, 223nl2 rape: in Delaney's narrative, 145-7; economic savoir, 113; legal definitions of, 106, 131-2, 238n34; law and female (white) voice, 104; moral nature of victim, 116; reforms in law about, 114—16; stridency of law, 117; synonymous with displacement, 106; trial success, 236nl9; trial transformed, 117-18. See also discourse of rape; husband impersonation reading: actress as solitary reader, 678; expectations of newspapers, 146; intimate space created in text, 183; political implications of settler women's writing, 8; reformation of character, 190-1, 194-5, 230n20; self-scrutiny and recreational, 1878. See also literary criticism; literature 'real economy': women's central function in, 14 reason: paradigm for political authority, 30

rebellions (1837-8): assimilation of francophones, 22; democratic openings, 9; and publication of Jameson's narrative, 6 Red River rebellion (1870), 110-11 Red River settlement, 109-10, 170 Reform Act (1832, Britain), 21, 230nl6; con text for Characteristics, 63; demands of Canadian Reformers, 52 regulation of women's speech: context of first-person narratives, 14 Report of the Chicago Vice Commission: The Social Evil in Chicago, 189 Report of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, 216-17 rescue homes: non-coercive relationships in, 186-7; restrooms modelled on, 195; techniques of character reformation, 190, 192 residential schools: heterotopic spaces, 99 resistance: essential difference, 21; infantilization of adults and, 13940; to testimony of captivity narrative, 144-5 rhetorical tropes: catachresis, 131; citation in place of memory, 145-8; metalepsis, 26-7; metaphor, 72-3; metonymy, 72; narrative discourse, 245n46. See also citation Riel, Louis: 'settlers union,' 110 Riley, Denise: authority of women's voices, 114; education of women, 222nl 1; mother as collaborator, 31; political work of women, 29; regulation of women's speech, 14; social science's early practices, 20; women and social science, 76;

Index women's government of others, 51; women's political power, 39 Robinson, Sir John Beverley: seduction legislation, 84 Roe, Clifford: The Girl Who Disappeared: A White Slave, 189 Romanism: Janey Canuck's criticism of, 166-70 Rony, Fatimah Tobin: taxidermic time, 244n35 Rose, Nikolas: 'conduct of conduct,' 76; setting norms of conduct, 161, 164; Powers of Freedom, 224n22 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: 'children of the forest,' 90; excessive desire, 230n21; female nature, 49; least governed, 175; passion femini/ed, 30 Rowlandson, Mary: Lot's wife, 239n38; The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed, 237n28 Rupert's Land, 170 sacrificial social system: Toronto fire as metaphor for, 72-3, 75 Saleeby, Caleb: fitness of women, 171-3, 243n21; Murphy familiar with, 14, 223nl7; race regeneration, 243n21; self-control, 180; women as racial resource, 207; women's role in racial fitness, 14; Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles, 171, 243n21 Sanders, Byrne Hope, 201-4; Emily Murphy: Crusader, 201 Sanitarian, The, 107 Saskatchewan: geometry of, 20; 'settlers union,' 110 savagery: stages of human society, 90

283

Schoolcraftjane, 232n33 science of society: Jameson's relation to, 76 Scott, David: racial classifications, 18 Scott, Joan: Only Paradoxes to Offer, 27 'scrip,' 110 second-wave feminist readers: political implications of settler women's writing, 8 Secord, Laura, 239n42 Seduction Act (1837), 84-9; Jameson's reading of, 86 Seeds of Pine: golden age of literary publishing, 164; use of epigrams, 178; utility of aliens, 181. See also Murphy, Emily Ferguson self-government: moral degeneration among settlers, 52-3; problems of, 39 self-government status: internal purification, 22; racial essence, 26; racially exclusive determination, 23-5 self-government (women): of actress, 67; dangers of uneducated underclass, 50—1; economic rationality in, 15; embodiment of Canadian government, 205; eradication of moral difference in others, 80; failures of, 188; feminist liberal projects and, 209, 212-13; government of others, 9, 51, 204; interests of virtuous society, 74-5,195-6; poverty over moral deficiency, 86; of rescue-home model, 186-7; right to comment on others, 94; women's sexual, 34 selfhood (female): 'aboriginal' relation to 'dark continent,' 4; colonized by objectives of political rule, 75; in the interests of virtuous soci-

284 Index ety, 74; Jameson's approach to, 46; law of supply and demand, 82; moral assimilation, 91 Senate (Canada), 201 sentiment: debt repayment to society and lack of, 41-2,119, 154 sentimental fiction: changes in North America, 105; fictional daughters as culture-bearers, 105 Sepoy Rebellion (1857), 103-4 Service, Robert, 244n33 settler colony rule: figure of defenceless white woman, 104 settler women: daughters are happy, 61-2; in experimental counter-site, 39 settler women, Anglo-Protestant: authority of, 211; history of Asian women, 220; institutionalized power connections, 11; self-governing capacity of, 11, 13. See also Anglo-Protestant settler culture settler women as site of the norm: event in women's history, 31—2; exercise of power, 28; privileged signifier of otherness, 215; traditional criticism and, 4 setder women narratives: connections among, 12; evaluation of conduct, 42-3; moral and racial inferiority backdrop, 13; morality distribution, 14-16; political context of, 11; race making and, 18-19. See also captivity narratives; first-person women's narratives settler women writers: 'colony' and 'woman writer,' 5; literary backgrounds of, 11 sexual aggression, 103 sexual and political consent, 136

sexual norms: chanelling deviant impulses, 195; feminine passionlessness, 132; threatened by transient population, 112; transgressive female desire, 216; women's marital duty, 238n34 sexual self-restraint: actress's ethical work identified with, 71; authorization of women's, 116; disgrace and, 88 Shakespeare's heroines: character, 63; ideals of female character, 65-6; natural state, 95 Sharpe, Jenny: 'discourse of rape,' 103-4 Shearer, Rev. John G.: racial anxieties of West, 189 Shohat, Ella: hybridity, 218 Siddons, Sarah: acting and womanhood, 58; style of acting, 67 Simla Hills (India), 209 'slushing in an Indian teepee,' 128 Smith, Adam: economy, 32; 'scheme of actions,' 226n32; theatre and social relations, 56—7. See also Theory of Moral Sentiments social criticism of sentences, 200 Social Evil in Chicago, The: Report of the Chicago Vice Commission, 189 socialized justice, 241nll 'social laboratory' of settler colony, 67, 222n8 social science: analysis of social relations, 22, 225n25; in fiction to educate, 189; professional female reformer, 76; reformation of girls, 192; violence of implementation of abstraction, 20 social terrain: female observation of, 76

Index Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 169 Society in America: marriage in New World, 74; observation of morals and manners, 38; prosperity and corruption, 80; reproduced in Canadian newspapers, 38, 56; 'white slaves of the north,' 129. See also Martineau, Harriet sociology's beginnings, 229nl2 Some Practical Suggestions on the Conduct of a Rescue Home, 186 South Africa: imperial context of, 23 Spencer, Herbert: character, 63 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty: agency, 15; benevolent feminist, 211; enabling violence, 207; 'worlding of a world,' 95; 'The Rani of Sirrnur,' 209 'squeegee kids,' 214 stages of human society, 90-1 state racism: language of liberal politics, 28; vulnerable and dangerous woman, 40. See also internal purification states influence in the female parent, 37 statistical data, 77 Stead, W.T.: reformers speeches, 166; 'The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,' 242nl5; white slavery, 111-14, 235n11 Stepan, Nancy: proper distances, 218 sterility/fertility in The Diviners, 216 sterilization of the insane, 159 Stoler, Ann Laura: racism, 224n24; state racism, 40; white degeneracy, 218 Stow, David: The Training System, the

285

Moral Training School, and the Normal Seminary, 185 Strange, Carolyn: girl as vulnerable and dangerous, 162,188; governing women, 173; Jack Canuck, 242nl7; pleasure principle, 195; progress cast in Christian tones, 189 subjectification: definition of, 117 subjectivity: romantic conception of, 68 suffrage: suffragists, 183; universal as male, 9 supply and demand: women suited to colonial life, 82-3, 231n25 surveillance: as rape substitution, 145-7; as self-regulation, 118 synecdoche: language of rights and, 28 systems of race and morality. See economy Talbot, Eugene: Degeneracy: Its Causes, Signs, and Results, 218 Tanner, Adrian, 233n35 taxidermic time, 179, 244n35 technologies: insurance, 154, 156; political implications of settler women's writing, 11 Tempest, The: postcolonial literary criticism, 215, 219 Territories Property Act (1886), 237n30 theatre: the colony as the space of, 53; heterotopic space of, 48; reconstructed to attract middle class, 71; space of freedom, 46-7; texts connected through, 209; world as, 56. See also actress Theory of Moral Sentiments: theatre and social relations, 56-7. See also Smith, Adam

286 Index Thomas, Clara: construction of Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, 48 Thompson, Sir John, 238n33 Times (London): scarcity of white women, 173-4 Tobias, John: usefulness of First Nations peoples, 152 tolerance: feminine terms of, 185; of multiculturalism, 216 Tomaselli, Sylvana: female agency, 225n29; woman as agent of liberal coercion, 27 Toronto: books alleviating winter of, 49; reports of criminal convictions in, 76-7; writing alleviating winter of, 64, 69 Toronto Police Department, 214 Toronto public libraries, 177 tort of seduction, 84, 117-18, 231n26, 236n21 transgression of limits of freedom, 101, 120-1 travel literature: history of the bourgeois woman, 27 Treasure-Trove, 107 Treatise on Human Nature. See Hume, David Trinidad: racial limits of self-government, 24-5 Trumpener, Katie, 249nll truth and power, 15 Two Months in the Camp of Big Bear. appended sections of, 124, 237n25; context of reception, 108; debt repayment to civilized society, 41— 2, 118; differing descriptions of rescue, 140-1; female freedom and racial insecurity, 113; political context of, 10-11; publication timing of, 9, 107, 236n22; published in

England, 223nl4; speak 'for themselves,' 104; territorilization of liberal norms, 20-1; unsentimental narratives, 108; white slavery narratives and, 41. See also captivity narratives; Delaney, Theresa; Gowanlock, Theresa unmarried mothers: child support from seducer, 86; infanticide rate among, 87 unruly reproductive woman, 34-5, 88 Upper Canada: Jameson's appropriation of, 49 uprising (1885): against liberal rule, 20; viewed through a moral filter, 21 Utopia: as distinguished from heterotopia, 7 vagrant, 200, 246n57 Valverde, Mariana: dangerous women, 40; despotism and liberalism, 93; Patterson, 244n41; race, 16 venereal diseases, 162 Vickers, Jill: Canadian studies, 248n8 Victoria, Queen, 242nl5; accession to throne, 9 Victorian theatre: acting and womanhood, 58 Viking heritage: masculinist limitations of, 16 Vindication of the Rights of Woman: feminist project, 36; Jameson's text and, 48; liberal feminist discourse since, 13; liberal political order critique, 49; passions, 65, 230nl7; radical societies, 223nl2; reason, 230n21; women's self-government, 86, 231 n22

Index 287 violence: of literature in false defence of'savage,' 99; narratives of sexual, 103; negotiation with enabling, 207; normalizing, 218 virtue: campaign against contamination of, 113-14; feminism not bound to, 101-2; politics of, 212. See also morality virtu feminism, 102, 212, See also feminism Vitzthum, Richard: self-delusion, 148 voluntarism, 64 Vosnesenia, 184 vulnerable and dangerous girl, 162, 181, 188, 190; essential female vulnerability, 214 wage earners: daughters as, 83-4, 88 war dance representations, 147 warfare practices, 100-1, 233n34 Warkentin, Germaine: documentary quality of early Canadian writing, 177 Watson, John, 166, 242nl5 Watts, D.A.: sexual legislation, 116; white slavery pamphlets, 112-14 Weimar tragic drama, 46 West Indies: colonial incorporation of race, 23 Westminster Review: review of Jameson, 54 Wexler, Laura: false defence of'savage,' 98-9 'white brides': institutional power connections, 11 white slavery: feminist approach to, 188-9; foreign threat to civilized nations, 111-12; legislation, 235nl6; use of term, 235nll white slavery narrative: brothel and

'Oriental quarter,' 168-9; reworking of, 190-1, 194; and settler women narratives, 41,129, 146. See also Girl Who Disappeared: A White Slave, The white women's labour laws, 235nl3 widow's grieving: not staged, 108 wilderness: colonial space as, 219; readings of in settler women's writings, 4 Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada: Canada as a testing ground, 6; character as moral disposition, 63; colonial laws, 39; colony as heterotopic space, 7-8; dialogue with First Nations man, 100-1; dramatic form, 210; duty, 69, 71; female social utility, 62; 'Fire at Toronto,' 72-3, 75; role of German drama in, 46; interdisciplinary study, 56, 229nl4; intertexts, 80; marriage in New World, 74; moral backwardness of North Americans, 79; move to punitive pedagogy, 54; paradox of, 64; pauperism, 40; political context of, 10-11; privileges of rank, 79-80; publication timing of, 6, 45; 'social' aspirations of text, 55; structure of, 45-6, 48-9, 55; theatre and social relations, 567; Wollstonecraft's influence on, 47-8; women's poetic ability, 59; writing women, 59-60. See also Jameson, Anna Brownell; Kemble, Fanny Wollstonecraft, Mary: 'care of self,' 228n7; education of women, 51; ethics and freedom, 50; Jameson's exposure to, 47; male judgement, 230nl7; necessity of personhood,

288 Index 54; privileges of rank, 79; vilification of, 9; women's self-government, 86, 229nlO. See also Vindication of the Rights of Woman woman (white): as agent of liberal coercion, 27, 31-2,136; into Canada, 226n38; civilization, 90-1; colonialism and vulnerability of, 103; criminals or victims, 200; dangerous, 40; empowered as experts, 161,172-4, 192-3,197-8; fit for, 61—2; foreign missionary work, 2930; instructors of First Nations women, 239n37; intimate space of instruction, 182-6,192-3,195; as legal property, 71; mobility of, 105, 112,114,162; moral capacities recognized, 85; power in politics, 39; proper concerns of, 78; proto-critique of exploitation of, 128; punishment of, 88; reconciling protection and violation, 135; reproduction of, 32; scarcity in western Canada, 173-4; social scourge, 74; stages of human society, 90. See also personhood women commissioners, 186 Women's Canadian Club (Edmonton): Murphy addresses, 43 Woman's Christian Temperance Union, 111, 195 Women's Court: armchair for prisoner's dock, 161-2,181; Children's Court, 198, 246n53; confusion of public/private, 196, 245n47; establishment of, 196, 245n49; first female magistrate, 42, 159-60,198, 204, 246n62; foreign women, 204; magistrates note-

books, 182; magistrates role, 180-1; male magisterial privilege, 246n50; moral crimes and therapeutic cures, 42; 'Mother Murphy,' 177; Murphy's procedures in court, 179, 199, 244n34; no man present, 1856, 241n8; opposition to, 197-8; Dr Margaret Patterson as magistrate, 184; personhood achieved, 202, 203/ 204-6; personhood sought, 160-1,191, 200-1, 247n63; social criticism of sentences, 200; timing of creation, 189. See also Murphy, Emily Ferguson; personhood Women's Foreign Missionary Society, 183 working class: colonies as testing ground for constitution, 7; militancy and, 41; moral inferiority of, 29; public education, 77, 231n23; women's education and, 99-100. See also class working girl: reformation of, 192-5; risk of occasional prostitute, 162; threatened by Asian community, 162, 219-20, 235nl3, 241n9, 249nl5. See also Girl Who Disappeared: A White Slave, The Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), 189,195 Zabus, Chantal: sterility/fertility in The Diviners, 216 zenana: linking Women's Court to foreign missions,' 160; and space of intimacy with reader, 183-4; spaces of female seclusion, 165; work described, 184