Sketches from an Unquiet Country: Canadian Graphic Satire, 1840-1940 0773553401, 9780773553408

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sketches from an unquiet country

McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History Martha Langford and Sandra Paikowsky, series editors Recognizing the need for a better understanding of Canada’s artistic culture both at home and abroad, the Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation, through its generous support, makes possible the publication of innovative books that advance our understanding of Canadian art and Canada’s visual and material culture. This series supports and stimulates such scholarship through the publication of original and rigorous peer-reviewed books that make significant contributions to the subject. We welcome submissions from Canadian and international scholars for book-length projects on historical and contemporary Canadian art and visual and material culture, including Native and Inuit art, architecture, photography, craft, design, and museum studies. Studies by Canadian scholars on non-Canadian themes will also be considered. The Practice of Her Profession Florence Carlyle, Canadian Painter in the Age of Impressionism Susan Butlin Bringing Art to Life A Biography of Alan Jarvis Andrew Horrall Picturing the Land Narrating Territories in Canadian Landscape Art, 1500 to 1950 Marylin J. McKay The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada Edited by Carol Payne and Andrea Kunard Newfoundland Modern Architecture in the Smallwood Years, 1949–1972 Robert Mellin The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas The Natural History of the New World, Histoire Naturelle des Indes Occidentales Edited and with an Introduction by François-Marc Gagnon, Translation by Nancy Senior, Modernization by Réal Ouellet Museum Pieces Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums Ruth B. Phillips The Allied Arts Architecture and Craft in Postwar Canada Sandra Alfoldy

Rethinking Professionalism Essays on Women and Art in Canada, 1850–1970 Edited by Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson The Official Picture The National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division and the Image of Canada, 1941–1971 Carol Payne Paul-Émile Borduas A Critical Biography François-Marc Gagnon Translated by Peter Feldstein On Architecture Melvin Charney: A Critical Anthology Edited by Louis Martin Making Toronto Modern Architecture and Design, 1895–1975 Christopher Armstrong Negotiations in a Vacant Lot Studying the Visual in Canada Edited by Lynda Jessup, Erin Morton, and Kirsty Robertson Visibly Canadian Imaging Collective Identities in the Canadas, 1820–1910 Karen Stanworth Breaking and Entering The Contemporary House Cut, Spliced, and Haunted Edited by Bridget Elliott Family Ties Living History in Canadian House Museums Andrea Terry

Picturing Toronto Photography and the Making of a Modern City Sarah Bassnett Architecture on Ice A History of the Hockey Arena Howard Shubert For Folk’s Sake Art and Economy in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia Erin Morton Spaces and Places for Art Making Art Institutions in Western Canada, 1912–1990 Anne Whitelaw Narratives Unfolding National Art Histories in an Unfinished World Edited by Martha Langford Canadian Painters in a Modern World, 1925–1955 Writings and Reconsiderations Lora Senechal Carney Sketches from an Unquiet Country Canadian Graphic Satire, 1840–1940 Edited by Dominic Hardy, Annie Gérin, and Lora Senechal Carney

ske tches from an unquie t country Canadian Graphic Satire, 1840–1940 Edited by Dominic Hardy, Annie Gérin, and Lora Senechal Carney

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2018 ISBN 978-0-7735-5340-8 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-7735-5341-5 (paper) ISBN 978-0-7735-5426-9 (ePDF)

Legal deposit second quarter 2018 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Sketches from an unquiet country : Canadian graphic satire, 1840–1940 / edited by Dominic Hardy, Annie Gérin, and Lora Senechal Carney. (McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history) Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-7735-5340-8 (cloth). – ISBN 978-0-7735-5341-5 (paper). – ISBN 978-0-7735-5426-9 (ePDF) 1. Caricatures and cartoons – Canada – History – 19th century. 2. Caricatures and cartoons – Canada – History – 20th century. I. Carney, Lora, editor II. Gérin, Annie, 1969–, editor III. Hardy, Dominic, 1960–, editor IV. Series: McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history NC1445.S64 2018

741.5’6971

C2018-900315-4 C2018-900316-2

Contents vii Acknowledgments 3 Chapter One Introduction Dominic Hardy 39 Chapter Two Frankenstein’s Tory: Graphic Satire in 1840s Montreal, from Le Charivari canadien to Punch in Canada Dominic Hardy 75 Chapter Three Uncle Sam, a Not-So-Distant Cousin: Canadian Contributions to the Genesis of a US Allegorical Figure Christian Vachon 98 Chapter Four Reading Allegorical “Miss Canada” in Graphic Satire Robyn Fowler 136 Chapter Five Clubs, Axes, and Umbrellas: The Woman Suffrage Movement as Seen by Montreal Cartoonists (1910–1914) Pierre Chemartin and Louis Pelletier 170 Chapter Six Crossing the Line: Canadian Satire of the “Pretty Girl” North and South of the 49th Parallel Jaleen Grove

206 Chapter Seven Anti-Semitic Caricature in 1930s Montreal: Language and National Stereotypes in Adrien Arcand’s Le Goglu (1929–1933) Josée Desforges 232 Chapter Eight New Frontier (1936–1937) and the Antifascist Press in Canada Lora Senechal Carney 257 Chapter Nine Albéric Bourgeois … a.k.a. Baptiste Ladébauche Laurier Lacroix 285 Chapter Ten Epilogue: Humour, Wit, and Satire in Canada Annie Gérin 297 Contributors 299 Index

Acknowledgments As editors, we begin by expressing our gratitude to the scholars who came forward to answer the call for contributions to this volume, for they have helped us establish that studies in the history of Canadian graphic satire are more than worthy of attention. This scholarship has been, and continues to be sustained by an impressive range of agencies, research centres, institutions, and foundations. We wish to acknowledge the doctoral Connections and Insight programs of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council; the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et Culture; the Programme d’aide financière à la recherche et à la creation (pafarc) and the fare bursary program (Fonds à l’accessibilité et à la réussite) of the Université de Québec à Montréal (uqam); the Centre de recherche interuniversitaire sur la littérature et la culture québécoises (crilcq); and the Centre interuniversitaire d’études des arts, des lettres et des traditions (célat). The encounter with historical materials that are often difficult to access – and often rare and fragile – makes all the difference to an endeavour such as this. For their unstinting generosity and support in helping us to obtain and present high-resolution images for this book, we acknowledge with profound gratitude the help of our colleagues at the McCord Museum (Christian Vachon and Heather McNabb), at Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (Lisa Miniaci, Martin Couture, Ariane Bélanger, and Suzanne Grégoire), at the Special Collections of Queen’s University Library (Jillian Sparks), and at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library of the University of Toronto. We are also most grateful to the Cahén Archives in Toronto and to the Estate of Harry Mayerovitch for their generous support. For much of the groundbreaking scholarship that made possible the preparation of several of our chapters, we offer our lasting appreciation to the graduate student members of the Caricature et satire graphique à Montréal team (casgram) at uqam. Authors and editors are all particularly grateful to our editor, Jonathan Crago, and to the whole team at McGill-Queen’s University Press. We extend warm thanks to our colleague Ersy Contogouris of the Université de Montréal, who provided outstanding translations of three chapters. We are grateful to the

Institut du patrimoine, Éditions MultiMonde, and Éditions Fides for permission to translate the chapters by Christian Vachon and Laurier Lacroix. We also thank the anonymous readers, who provided constructive comments that were very helpful to us in the final stages of manuscript preparation. It takes many minds and shared moments to bring a project such as this one to the finishing point. We are truly obliged to our families, friends, colleagues, and students who participated in various stages of the project, if only by allowing us to share our collective passion for the history and practices of graphic satire in Canada. You are too many to name here, but your unfailing support and continuous encouragement throughout the years have made this book possible. Dominic Hardy, Annie Gérin, and Lora Senechal Carney

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sketches from an unquiet country

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Introduction DOMINIC HARDy

Prelude: Charting an Unquiet Country, 1899–1902 In the fall of 1899, as Canadians debated whether their country should support Great Britain in its armed conflict with the Dutch-language Boer communities in South Africa, the Montreal Daily Star took Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier to task for not having committed Canada to a policy of unequivocal support. On 7 October, as the culminating point in a carefully orchestrated campaign designed to show how Canadian public opinion could tolerate no other option, the Star presented its readers with a large two-panel political cartoon by Henri Julien (1852–1908) entitled Peace hath her victories no less than war (Fig. 1.1). The vaguely literary-sounding title, whose deceptive irony revolved around two episodes in Laurier’s career as premier, was meant to imply a bitter contrast. In the left panel Laurier is seen raising his hat in salute from the military procession that represented Canada in the Imperial celebrations organized in 1897 for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Laurier, Canada’s first francophone prime minister (and the first Liberal since Alexander Mackenzie), was knighted on that occasion. The honour elicited pride among Canadians, although it can only have discomfited the Star, whose owner and publisher, Hugh

1.1 Henri Julien, “Peace hath her victories no less than war” [Sir Wilfrid Laurier in 1897 and 1899]. Montreal Daily Star, 7 October 1899, 7. Album Henri Julien (Montreal, Librairie Beauchemin, 1916), 105–6

Graham, supported the Conservative Party as part of his broader ambition to sway Canadian politics toward the interests of the Montreal English business community. In the right panel, the year is 1899: Sir Wilfrid ducks down an alley, leaving the military procession, while in the middle distance, Australian troops dutifully march off to war. Unlike its cousins down under, Canada is not doing its part and its unsuitable leader is clearly at fault. The image has at its heart an encroaching shadow, drawn in Julien’s free brushstrokes across Laurier’s abdomen and chest. This shadow is only partly accounted for by reference to the play of light in the composition. It is tempting to read it as an emblem of the conflicts, personal and political, that marked this moment in Canadian politics in this era – and indeed, which rose to the surface throughout the stages of the country’s formation. Contact, conquest, colonial regimes, invasions, rebellions, riots, “union,” “Confederation,” the Indian Act, Riel, the Boer War, the World Wars, conscription – seen at a distance, the history of Canada takes on the character of an experiment that is repeatedly revisited, each interference a moment in its ever-unfolding instability: a land of First Nations and settlers that is hardly ever settled. The condition of Canadian graphic satire is fundamentally similar to that of other nations. Satire, which Northrop Frye called “militant irony,” here makes a humorous and polemical contribution to, and a record of, the conflicting ideologies that shaped Canadian lives. “Two things … are essential to satire,” wrote Frye in The Anatomy of Criticism: “one is wit or humor founded on fantasy or a sense of the grotesque, the other is an object of attack. Attack without humor, or pure denunciation, forms one of the boundaries of satire.”1 Our subject, graphic satire, helped structure Canadians’ understanding of and participation in the country’s conflicts on the terrain of the visual culture that became dominant in the Western public sphere by the end of the nineteenth century. When Carman Cumming studied the contributions of the magazine Grip (1873–94) to the tradition of graphic satire in Canada, he chose the title Sketches from a Young Country. But our book shows that it was an unquiet country, where discursive, physical, and symbolic violence was part of daily life; and it may have been neither innocent nor young. Rather, it could in many ways be seen as an ironic, perhaps satirical offspring of the European polities (with their centuriesold conflicts) that had imagined it into being. The years of the Boer War, 1899–1902, saw a sharpening of rhetoric around the identities that were thought to constitute this Canada. Its “two founding

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nations” (with a habitual disregard for its First Nations) – its francophone and anglophone communities, neither monolithic, were once again giving voice to their insecurities and anxieties over the very definitions of Canadian identity. Different communities were often at cross-purposes over Canada’s increasingly industrialized economy and the Liberal government’s policy of bringing in new waves of immigrants from Europe in order to “open up the land.” In the information journalism of the period, just as in the visual arts, in literature, in the performing arts, and, soon, in the new medium of film, we see how Canada’s settler society constantly renegotiated its relationships to its spaces and peoples. At the same time, through political and social graphic satire, Canadians fashioned a repertoire of people and places that represented their way of understanding what it meant to chart an existence in the spaces of urban and rural life – and in the Canadian “wilderness.” Graphic satire of the period offers us a constantly renewed amalgam of political and social types, men and women who conform to ideas of Aboriginal, American, African, European, and Asian identities and are deployed across settings that form a cartography of the Canadian spatial imaginary: city and village streets, boardrooms and ballrooms, living rooms, kitchens and bedrooms, ticket offices, theatres, backyard fences, parks, farms, cottage country, lakesides, mountains, forests, the arctic, railways, roads, laneways and rivers – and more. It is easy to rally all these sites of identity performance to the idea of a characteristically well-ordered modern nation-state. Dependent on the large-scale extraction of natural resources tied to a combined free-market capitalist and government-interventionist economic model that favoured the mobilization of peoples across vast distances, this rallying helps account for the plurality of identities that were brought together to carry out the work of “nation building.” But it is no longer possible to tell the Canadian story without referring to the cultural genocide endured by First Nations for over a century following the 1876 Indian Act, or without reminding ourselves of the restrictions placed on the movements of peoples from China and Japan who had been invited to Canada throughout the nineteenth century; or indeed, without remembering the role of the enslavement of peoples of the African diaspora in the shaping of the colonial and neocolonial Canadian economies, or (as just one example) how residency was prohibited for the families of African-American employees of the North American railways who stayed in Montreal and Toronto in the 1890s. Policies of corporate or government containment or proscription, racist in conception and execution, were also largely enacted through the harnessing

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of public opinion, in which the use of graphic satire was a key factor, especially in the years around 1900, when the percentage of newspaper surface given over to visual imagery was increasing so swiftly as to predominate over space accorded to text. In Barbaric Intercourse: Caricature and the Culture of Conduct, 1841–1936 (2002), Martha Banta charted Anglo-American responses to the history of population movements to and through the United States by considering the satiric staging of personal and community conduct in a highly class-conscious transatlantic society. To make this case, Banta undertook exhaustive research through comparisons between the British journal Punch; or, the London Charivari and a group of American periodicals (Judge, Puck, Vanity Fair, and Life). While a similar study for Canadian graphic satire is needed, the studies presented in this book and other research now underway allow us to confirm that Canadian satirical publications exhibited many of the same obsessions about the Other as their British and American counterparts (or indeed, as those of France, Mexico, and other European and American nations), although it must be borne in mind that in Canada, the category of the Other often included the British and the Americans as well. Quebec’s francophone satiric journals contain many examples of this satirical stock-taking, first of the anglophone communities with whom the spaces settled and carved out from Indigenous territories were shared – or not – and, after 1899, of the Jewish diaspora from Eastern Europe. Hector Berthelot, who introduced the wry everyman Baptiste Ladébauche in his journal Le Canard (1877–1936) in 1878, recovered the name (Baptiste) that had been emblematic of the Canadien settlers since the late eighteenth century. In acquiring the family name “Ladébauche,” this everyman became a carnivalesque self, “Baptiste The Debauchery.” Ladébauche went off around the world to meet its leaders and to report their doings to Canard readers. Berthelot, trained for a legal career, was a dedicated journalist and humourist who sought to give his fellow francophone citizens a way of thinking through the socio-political framework that conditioned Quebec’s development as a society and an economy within Confederation. In Berthelot’s view, the dominance of the ultramontane wing of the Catholic Church, notably with respect to its organization of francophone education, was as challenging as the tendencies toward corruption among Quebec politicians. By referring to other societies, Berthelot offered a means of distancing. One of Baptiste’s first stops was, intriguingly enough, Queen Victoria’s “house,”

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1.2 Unidentified artist (Henri Julien?), “L’affaire Luc en Angleterre.” Le Canard, 10 May 1879, 2. BAnQ Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie

where he gave the monarch advice about how to handle her parliamentarians (Fig. 1.2). Berthelot’s premature death in 1895 deprived Quebec of a dry antiultramontane voice, and we can only imagine how he might have reacted to the impact on Quebec of the outcomes of the Dreyfus affair in France (notably in the wake of Zola’s pro-Dreyfus text “J’accuse,” published in January 1898, and the subsequent virulent anti-Zola cartoons penned by some of France’s most accomplished graphic satirists, among whom Jules Forain and Caran d’Ache, who gave visual form to the powerful anti-Semitic movement in French political life). The consequences of this episode for Quebec became immediately evident in the pages of Le Monde illustré, which began publishing anti-Semitic cartoons in 1902, images that were possibly imported from French or American publications and would have an impact on the career of local artist Joseph Charlebois (Montréal Juif, 1912). These factors were no less present in Ontario. In his Sketches from a Young Country, Cumming explored the full meaning of what might almost be thought of as an English Canadian exceptionalism that could afford to see itself at a remove from all other nationalities. Cumming’s study focused on the writings and images of Grip’s publisher/editor/principal artist, John Wilson Bengough (1851–1923). Throughout Bengough’s virtuoso career-long depictions of Canada’s first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, his imagery of French Canadians, of Catholic clerics, of the Irish, of First Nations men and women, and of Jews is often highly stereotyped; the anxieties mapped out by Banta were just as present in Grip as they were in Puck or Life. Bengough left Grip in 1893 and the paper closed in 1894, but just such a perspective about the world was still in evidence during the adventure of The Moon (1902–03). With Bengough as an occasional contributor, The Moon’s graphic satire was dominated by the Montreal Daily Star’s Arthur George Racey (1870–1941), Toronto World cartoonist Sam Hunter (1858–1939), and the illustrator and art educator Charles William Jefferys (1869–1851). For example (and we see this in detail in Jaleen Grove’s chapter), fierce denigrating comedy was Racey’s preferred modus operandi when it came to depicting womanhood that was not English Canadian and Protestant (see Fig. 6.2). Racey’s perception was only the more extreme variant of a worldview that used national identity and social standing as inalienable organizing principles. In the issue of 9 August 1902, Racey and Jefferys joined forces to show what was at stake for Canadian identity in the drawing “Some of the Strange Gods Worshipped in Johnny Canuck’s Temple of Fame” (Fig. 1.3). Appropriate

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1.3 Charles W. Jefferys, “Some of the Strange Gods Worshipped in Johnny Canuck’s Temple of Fame.” The Moon, 9 August 1902, 156. Queen’s University, W.D. Jordan Rare Books and Special Collections

1.4 . Sam Hunter, Trolling for ’Lunge at Stony Lake. “Aboard the Wind-Lassie, Feeny the guide exclaims: ‘T’row yourself at ut as if’twas the preemeership, and yez wor extertin’ yer best political pull, Mister Stratton. ’Tis a good fish, sor.’” The Moon, 9 August 1902, 1. Queen’s University, W.D. Jordan Rare Books and Special Collections

prayers and offerings have been placed at the base of statues erected to the Side Line Politician, the American Capitalist, the British Snob, the Khaki Hero, Our Pastor and Our Priest, the American Visitor, the Society Hostess, William of Orange, the bedraggled and barefoot European Immigrant (“come over C.O.D. and help our census”), and the British Professor. Considering all these Strange Gods, we can imagine that Racey and his colleagues saw the typical Moon reader as a young Canadian man living in the city, easy-going and without much need for church, casting a wary eye on newcomers (although impatient with the depredations of Orange Order Protestantism and its sectarian rigidity in Ontario) and somewhat insecure about the Canadian economy and the opposite sex (although not necessarily in that order). Each week The Moon’s art nouveau cover framed a cartoon. In that same 9 August issue, Sam Hunter drew Peterborough West mp James Robert Stratton reeling a struggling fish into his rowboat, piloted by an oarsman whose speech is meant to suggest an Irish inflection, on Stony (or Stoney) Lake in an area that had been until recently inhabited principally by Mississauga Ojibwa people (living today at Curve Lake First Nation) (Fig. 1.4). Good-natured in tone, its subject in keeping with the summer spirit one might well imagine for an early August issue (Hunter was a summer resident of Stoney Lake), this comic image with its light satiric subtext is also a sign of the erasure and replacement that was prevalent throughout what was then becoming part of Toronto’s evolving “cottage country” in the Kawartha Lakes district. Here, as in Algonquin Park and the Haliburton Highlands, recreational development changed the habitation structures of central Ontario in the latter part of the nineteenth century. These displacements, all too common throughout the Dominion, could take on seriocomic overtones. In The Moon’s final issue (13 August 1903), James Fergus Kyle (1876–1941), another seasoned Toronto cartoonist, signed a desolate prairie landscape drawing in which “Lo, the Last Indian” stands opposite a graveyard of cpr trains nestled in the side of a hillock and reflects on the brand new flying machines overhead, and the fantasies of carrying grain and passengers back and forth across the sky (Fig. 1.5). As Banta’s work also shows us, settler imaginations were always ready to configure the fate of “alien” peoples in the light of anticipated scientific developments.2 Given that the “Last Spike” had only been driven into the ground some fifteen years earlier, historical irony is at work here. It might have an added resonance in the characterization of Lo as an elderly man: he is both last of his

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1.5. Fergus Kyle, Before He Expires. The Moon, 13 August 1903, 8–9. Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library

1.6. Albéric Bourgeois, “Chantiers d’autrefois.” La Presse, 15 February 1947, 48. Pencil, India ink, wash and erasures on Bristol board, 36.4 x 37.3 cm. Centre de conservation, BAnQ Vieux-Montréal, MSS346, 2006-10-001\6234

Nation, we must suppose (and this in keeping with the ambitions of Canadian national policy) and in his last years. The time of his witnessing gives the image its poignancy and draws the humour against itself, lending the image an important ambiguity, because it is a time that will soon end. Graphic satire helps to distance the artist/author and the reader from the implications of state actions. Tellingly, it was around this time that Baptiste Ladébauche, the Canadien ironic figure par excellence, made the transition from the reasonably healthy young farmer envisioned in 1878 by Hector Berthelot to that of a retired rural man, as taken up in 1905 by La Presse’s cartoonist, Albéric Bourgeois. Ladébauche, now exiled in a city walk-up apartment in east-end Montreal, is in the company of Catherine, the partner Bourgeois invented for him (Fig. 1.6). These elders, taken at face value, are rueful witnesses to the many transformations undergone by Canada since the colonial times in which they must have been “children.”

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1.7. Henri Julien, “Un Vieux de ’37.” n.d. [c. 1904]. Photomechanical reproduction. Album Henri Julien, Montreal, Librairie Beauchemin, 1916

Perhaps it is the same type of ambiguity that accounts for the puzzle of Henri Julien’s apparently non-satiric illustration, the “Vieux de ’37” (Fig. 1.7), drawn around 1904. The “Vieux” is an old man who either was active in the rebellions of 1837–38 or was caught, late in life, in the constant present of those rebellions, as if their failure might yet be forestalled. If this reading is at all credible, it lends even more irony to the adoption of the figure of Julien by the Front de Libération du Québec as an icon for the mimeographed communiqués issued by the group following their kidnapping and ransoming of James Cross and Pierre Laporte in October 1970, an adoption that was subsequently adapted, as it were, through the commercialized recovery of the image in recent Patriote commemorative iconography (flags, t-shirts, badges, et al.). Its potency as the basis for a plethora of recent newspaper cartoons (from Gilles Duceppe to Justin Trudeau) seems to have fulfilled its original ironic promise (Figs. 1.8, 1.9).

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1.8. Aislin [Terry Mosher, pseud.] Caricature of Gilles Duceppe. Montreal Gazette, 2000. Original work of the artist from the year 2000. Courtesy of Terry Mosher.

Studies in Canadian Graphic Satire: National and International Contexts Our book grew out of a project first presented at the annual conference of the Universities Art Association of Canada in Edmonton, Alberta, in November 2009. The call for papers for that conference proposed a discussion of visual satire practices from diverse Canadian regions, inscribed in different moments of national development, from periods in which visual satire was dominantly expressed through caricature and cartoon to more recent practices such as installation, performance, video, and public art. The promising results of that first effort led participants Lora Senechal Carney, Annie Gérin, and Dominic Hardy to launch a call for contributions to this volume in order to suggest ways forward for studies in Canadian visual satire.

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1.9 Garnotte (Michel Garneau, pseud.), Justin Trudeau, Le Patriote? www.ledevoir.com, 18 February 2012. Courtesy of Michel Garneau

While our original conference presented material from the beginning of the British colonial era to the present, we decided that this book should begin with the advent of satirical illustrated journals and close with the arrival of the Second World War, a historical moment that ushered in huge changes in the economic model of journalism in Canada, changes that would become particularly evident in the postwar era. We chart the evolution of the Canadian illustrated satirical press as it took form in Montreal and Toronto from the aftermath of the rebellions of 1837–38 to the eve of the Second World War by considering the circulation of some of the iconographic motifs, habits of language, and social characterization that made up sets of satirical imagery shared by the artists, publishers, and audiences who together made satirical meaning in this era. Until the end of the nineteenth century, English- and French-speaking Canadian readers encountered graphic

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satire above all through illustrated periodicals, which for the most part were weekly or monthly papers. These publications were often ephemeral endeavours, rising and falling within a matter of months, sometimes after a single issue. After Confederation, one or two of them had longer lives: as we have seen, Toronto’s Grip, almost single-handedly produced by John Wilson Bengough, ran for twenty-one years (1873–94); in Montréal, Hector Berthelot founded Le Canard in 1877 and although he died in 1895, his paper lived on until 1936. From the late 1890s onward, daily newspapers became the principal forum for political cartooning across the country, and the outbreak of war in September 1939 marked the end of the era of satirical weeklies. These shifts in the world of journalism can be described for Canada just as they can for many other nations: the replacement of an opinion-forming press often based on party-political ownership by a mass-distribution information model that dominated Western print media from the 1870s forward. But the Canadian context offers a unique perspective on these changes. The union of Lower and Upper Canada in 1840 and the ensuing (and contested) introduction of “responsible government” were followed two decades later by controversial preparations for Confederation, a constitutional settlement that, ironically, settled precious little. The first decades of the newly autonomous Dominion were marked by sectarian and ethnic strife. The great project of nation building, attendant on the building of the railway to British Columbia, was undertaken at a lasting cost to Canada’s First Nations and settler society acquired the habit of responding to its internal divisions, ethnic and national, through graphic satire. Northrop Frye’s “militant irony” was deployed across a visual culture that moved from the graphic to the photographic in the course of the hundred years covered here. The book’s primary emphasis, on visual culture, helps explain its second emphasis, on political and social history. As a visual art practice employed by artists, publishers, and their readers, the creation of satirical images (and of graphic satire more broadly) functions in close alignment with a process described by W.J.T. Mitchell, who sees all images as “active players in the game of establishing and changing values.” Furthermore, he writes: [Images] are capable of introducing new values into the world and thus of threatening old ones. For better or for worse, human beings establish their collective, historical identity by creating around them a second nature composed of images which do not merely reflect the values

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consciously intended by their makers, but radiate new forms of value formed in the collective, political unconscious of their beholders. As objects of surplus value, of simultaneous over- and underestimation, these stand at the interface of the most fundamental social conflicts.3 In the Canadian context, rife with unresolved questions of identity and belonging, it is important to think through what might be the nature of such threats between systems of “old” and “new” values. Indeed, what endgames are put in play by the formation of realms that articulate a “second nature of images” to a “collective, political unconscious”? What kind of answer might be found simply in studies in caricature and graphic satire? Martha Banta’s study, already mentioned, gives one kind of answer in that it breaks down a visual practice to see how it is maintained through the concentration of, and cooperation among, numerous distinct and even ideologically heterogeneous editorial, artistic, and publishing resources. This approach is in keeping with a research methodology evident since the 1990s in the field of British caricature and graphic satire studies. Mark Hallett, Diana Donald, and Brian Maidment, for instance, have encouraged us to consider graphic satire in the period 1700–1850 as a component of social, political, class, and gender relations and discourses. This recent work also requires us to pay close attention to the workings of these relations and discourses as they are revealed through the study of the infrastructures that supported the production, dissemination, and reception of graphic satire. Moreover, this scholarship foregrounds the mechanisms of production and consumption that allow producers and consumers to engage in the performance of a more-or-less extended personal and collective identity.4 One of the results of all this work has been the undoing of a rather Romantic paradigm according to which the graphic satirist is configured in heroic resistance to power.5 The record in Canadian scholarship on graphic satire can be seen as one of intensifying activity over the past forty years. In the 1970s cartoonist Terry Mosher and fellow journalist Peter Desbarats joined forces to publish The Hecklers (1979), a volume that remains the sole survey of Canadian caricature and cartoons for the period stretching from the cession of New France to Great Britain to the era of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Mosher’s extensive research in a wide range of archives and among the senior and junior cartoonists active in the 1970s remains unchallenged in its scope, and has left its historiographical mark

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on subsequent studies, notably Robert Aird’s and Mira Falardeau’s 2008 Histoire de la caricature au Québec. The Hecklers established a hybrid chronological/historical/monographic framework that remains useful for anyone wishing to gain a sense of the achievements of individual practitioners (George Townshend, Jean-Baptiste Côté, John Wilson Bengough, Henri Julien, Arch Dale, Len Norris, Duncan MacPherson) as they addressed key phases of Canadian history. The first of these artists, George Townshend (1724–1807), a general serving under James Wolfe at the Battle of Quebec, enjoys the usefully dubious status of being a “first” Canadian cartoonist by virtue of his authorship of anti-Wolfe satirical drawings; these were likely made at the Île d’Orléans during the siege of Quebec in the summer of 1759 before being spirited away to the Townshend family seat in England following Wolfe’s martyrdom and triumph.6 The rediscovery of this work through its surfacing to public view in the collection formed by David Ross McCord (now in Montreal’s McCord Museum) provides an emblem for the process at work in this collection. In bringing new scholarship to bear on long-overlooked satirical images to ask how they functioned in their time and what they allow us to understand today about the formation of Canadian society, we offer a showcase for a series of research activities that have shaped our field of enquiry for almost four decades. More specialized academic studies on Canadian caricature and graphic satire began to appear as post-structural and post-modern approaches became dominant in 1980s Canadian academia. The historiographical record can be roughly assessed according to a division between studies of pre-and post-1960 materials. The latter have perhaps been more evident in Canadian academic publishing. The sociologist Raymond Morris applied Mikhail Bakhtin’s model of the carnivalesque in two studies of post-1960 Canadian cartoons; he studied their visual and textual humour in relation to the social function of laughter that the cartoons engendered for Canadian society(ies) whose pluralism has been, since the 1960s, increasingly difficult to address or satisfactorily define (Behind the Jester’s Mask: Canadian Editorial Cartoons about Dominant and Minority Groups 1960–1979 [1989] and Carnivalization of Politics: Quebec Cartoons on Relations with Canada, England, and France, 1960–1979 [1995]). Since 1990 graduate research has been on the increase, with some completed master’s theses and doctoral dissertations finding their way to publication. Réal Brisson’s 1998 study of caricatural representations of the Oka Crisis of 1990 – and thus of a key moment of conflict in recent Canadian history – was published in 2000.

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Meanwhile, Canadian historians Ramsay Cook and Carman Cumming have made vital contributions to the study of Canadian graphic satire through their studies of John Wilson Bengough at work in the Toronto of the last quarter of the nineteenth century.7 Their approaches have reinforced the trend in graphic satire scholarship toward paying attention to relatively long careers and to the association of graphic artists and illustrators with specific journals or newspapers. If there is a fundamental model for this kind of association, it is doubtless that of the French satirical artist Honoré Daumier (1808–1879) in his relationship with Charles Philippon, the Maison Aubert, and the journals Le Charivari and La Caricature, all cornerstones of “Daumier studies” to this day. In the Canadian context, aside from Cook’s and Cumming’s studies of Bengough, Dominic Hardy has investigated Henri Julien’s relationship to the Montreal Daily Star as well as the satirical iconography against Maurice Duplessis that was developed by Robert LaPalme in the pages of Le Canada (1943–51) and especially at Le Devoir (1951–59). The result of these endeavours is an emerging emphasis on detailed and comprehensive inventorying and assessment of material published over the lifetimes of respective artists and of the journals they worked for (from the few months of Le Charivari canadien in 1844 to the twenty years of Grip in Toronto); several of the chapters presented in this volume (those of Hardy, Desforges, Senechal Carney, and Lacroix) reflect this recent shift. Other studies remain thematic in their approach and therefore rely on a broadly selective methodology that uses samples of productions spread over extended timeframes and geographical distances. G. Bruce Retallack’s 2006 doctoral dissertation, “Drawing the Lines: Gender, Class, Race and Nation in Canadian Editorial Cartoons, 1840–1926,” has had a demonstrable impact on, and participates in the field as it is reflected in several of the studies we present here (those of Fowler, Grove, Pelletier, and Chemartin, for instance). It is also significant that many of our Canadian colleagues are scholars at work on a nonCanadian corpus, or indeed in areas which, although they lie outside the field of caricature and graphic satire, are closely related to them by conceptual structure. It would be difficult to imagine our work without reference, for example, to Annie Gérin’s work on humour in the visual arts of the Soviet Union (and, as we shall see, on the conceptual relationship of humour to art history)8 or to Jean-Philippe Uzel’s enquiries into the aesthetics of humour and the function of humour in contemporary Canadian Indigenous artistic practices;9 or indeed to

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Linda Hutcheon and Mark Cheetham’s many studies of irony in contemporary Canadian visual arts.10 Their conceptual models speak across geographies and time periods – justifiably so since the arts of the twentieth century and of our contemporary era, in Canada as elsewhere, consistently address the nature and consequences of historical identity and of social and political structures. Indeed, the impact of all this activity makes it possible to envision a transhistorical field of visual satire that would allow for cross-readings of historical materials that are essentially bound up with print culture in articulation with more recent practices that typically depend on (and nourish) the infrastructures for the dissemination of visual arts (artist-run centres, museums and galleries, and civic public spaces, to name just a few). If this envisioning is possible, then this volume will also stand as a contribution to the constitution of such a transhistorical field. But with this role comes the responsibility for attending to the conceptual frameworks and definitions that allow us to name our objects and identify them as components of this field. The epilogue that we present here demonstrates Annie Gérin’s engagement with this aspect of our collective project, for the notions of humour, laughter, and irony, so central to any discussion of caricature and graphic satire (and to satire more broadly), have to be considered not only in themselves – in an ontological sense – but also in their specific applicability to the visual arts, and especially (for our purposes) to the visual arts in Canada. Gérin’s work shows us that our transhistorical field will also be a trans-territorial field. This type of work certainly remains to be done for satire itself as a mode or agent in the visual arts. The apparatus available to scholars of visual images from literary studies is vast and frequently both appropriate and highly useful for the textual structures that often frame the satirical image. Although this apparatus has yet to be dismantled, rebuilt, and above all retested for histories of visual practices, one of its most significant and concrete contributions lies in the conceptual survey developed by Sophie Duval and Marc Martinez (2000). Duval and Martinez provide a range of conceptual tools that allow us to consider, for example, the mode of satire and the specificities of satirical discourse, notably in their relation to the functions of mimesis, irony, allegory, and metaphor in (broadly speaking) the history of Western literary narrative (and in so doing they provide an overt updating of authors such as Frye and Hutcheon). Duval and Martinez also chart the literary symptoms of the processes of “construction and destruction” of satirical personae as part of

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what they term the “rhetoric of demolition” and the “aesthetic of devaluation,” paying close attention to strategies of fragmentation and dismemberment that align with the presentation of excessive visual information, as if visual satire belonged to a regime of the grotesque (that might regroup, across history, practitioners from William Hogarth to the Chapman Brothers). And yet, as many of the images in this volume demonstrate, caricature and graphic satire also have recourse to the flourishing virtuoso visual representation that depends on synthesis and compression for its aesthetic and rhetorical impact. If visual satire is militant irony too, then that militancy must be observable through an image that is often anti-excessive, closely aligned to the performance of a genial fusion of idea and penstroke.11 Regardless of the satirical image’s position in a scale that bridges excess and resolution, the chapters in this volume clearly show how, in a society such as Canada’s, that image is never fully autonomous, no matter how seductive. Throughout the period of Canada’s changing colonial structures and following the country’s reinvention as an autonomous political entity thanks to the ironically named British North America Act, Frye’s militant irony could just as easily be used by the powerful (notably on the scale of government, party-political, or large business interests represented in small- or large-scale press ownership) as a means of resistance to social and political change or indeed as a way of distancing the reader from the implications of the often-violent policies of the new democracy. A set of overwhelmingly masculinist and racist perspectives also emerges from the record constituted by these studies in Canadian graphic satire. As such, these studies, through the images and the journals (and thereby the discourses) that they bring together, are highly productive sources for understanding how politics and aesthetics have combined to produce and maintain social, political, and gender categories in our society. Studies in Canadian graphic satire form a cornerstone for Canadian studies in a broader sense, and for the overlapping fields of history, art history, cultural studies, and history of communications models. There is an even wider dimension to these studies. The networks put in place by artists, writers, publishers, and readers, combined with the endlessly renewed sourcing and redeployment of visual materials that takes place in graphic satire, make it a vibrant archive of a society’s understanding of its entire visual culture, and notably its art history (Canadian graphic artists, illustrators,

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and cartoonists were art historians long before there was art history in Canada). This is a field of study rich with implications for the sociology of art – art as in visual art, but also more widely as a set of practices that takes in theatre, the novel, poetry, the writing of history, film, radio, music, and indeed any form (one of the most recent being the internet meme) that channels the satirical impulse in society. By mapping the studies we have brought together, the next section of this introduction also provides a map for this approach to visual practices in the two metropolitan environments that were highly active in the 1840–1940 period.

Montreal and Toronto and the Emergence of Metropolitan Graphic Satire in Canada, 1840–1940 In the 1830s and 1840s, as Canadian economic and political structures were maturing, ideas about what Canada was and how it was to be represented were shaped by the construction of new transport networks and the intensifying dissemination of information. As we shall see, these ideas were made visible through personifications – playful and necessary embodiments built around social types that populate graphic satire – of emblematic figures (mostly female) and of the members of Canada’s political leadership, which was structured around the British governor general and the rising parliamentary administration. When the first illustrated satirical journals appeared in Lower Canada, at Quebec City and in Montreal, the high stakes of political sovereignty, capitalist investment, and resource and population development enjoyed a dialectical relationship with the province’s complex identity structures. In 1837 the Swissborn Napoléon Aubin launched Le Fantasque, the first (and one of the longerlasting) of these journals, at Quebec City, just as the rebellion of the patriotes was getting underway. By the end of its run in 1848, Le Fantasque offered its readers a smattering of visual materials, usually in the form of typographical fantasies that followed in a vein well exploited in the 1830s by the French journals La Caricature and Le Charivari. But most of the graphic satire that emerged in the territory that was Lower Canada, then Canada-East, and Quebec after 1867, came from ephemeral francophone and anglophone illustrated journals.12 Montreal saw the rise and fall of Le Diable bleu (1843), Le Charivari canadien and the Montreal Tattler (1844),

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The Satirist (1847), Punch in Canada (1849–50), Le Scorpion (1854), La Guêpe (1857–67) and Le Perroquet (1865). As the erstwhile capital city of Lower Canada and then United Canada, however, Quebec City dominated the period before Confederation through the energy of its journalism: aside from Le Fantasque (1837–49), we find Le Castor (1843–45), Le Carillon (c. 1849), Le Gascon (1858), Le Bourru (1859–60), L’Observateur (1858–60), Le Gridiron (1859), Le Grognard (1862), L’Écho des imbéciles (1863), La Lime (1863–64), La Mascarade (1863), The Saw (1863–65), La Scie (1863–65), The Dagger (1863–64), The Arrow (1864), Le Cyclope (1865), La Scie illustrée (1865–66), The Stadacona Punch (1865), Sprite (1865), L’Électeur (1866–67), and another version of Le Charivari canadien (1868). In the 1870s the focus of graphic satire in the new “Province of Quebec” would definitively shift to Montreal. Like much of the artistic production of this period, these early journals bear witness to the limits Canadians faced in the pre-Confederation era when it came to producing their own visual culture: what little artistic training existed took place typically on the master-and-apprentice model within the confines of a single artist’s studio. Formal academic training in visual representation required travel to Europe or the United States, and many of the trained artists working in Canada in this period were either immigrants or itinerant. Until mid-century the absence of qualified engravers skilled in the components of all contemporary illustration (the human body, nature, architecture, and perspective) combined with a relative paucity of specialized printing equipment in the colony posed serious challenges to the production of graphic satire. And yet, within these limits, the Canadian satirical journalists of the 1840s created a visual culture out of journalism itself, raiding its visual resources and fastening onto the codes of representation of largely imported illustrated magazines, often spoofing those codes in the process. Such is the context for the emergence of graphic satire in Montreal that is discussed by Dominic Hardy in “Frankenstein’s Tory.” Le Charivari canadien (1844) and its equally ephemeral successors were effectively adopting, adapting, and repurposing visual fragments culled from a wide range of sources, some of which have yet to be identified in detail. Early journals such as this one were using the same method as the painter Joseph Légaré (1795–1855), whose many religious and political works from the early 1820s were almost all constructed of components adapted from source paintings or engravings. This prevalence of the fragmentary in colonial visual culture is telling, since it provides a strategy not only for the

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construction of new meanings, but also for cross-readings – often ironic and inversed – of source materials. The specific process of adaptation that took place in 1840s Canada yielded an aesthetic that had everything to do with the power afforded by wood engraving, a relatively coarse but expressive medium. Lithography, which allowed for an autographic and often virtuoso drawing style, was first consistently used in Canadian graphic satire with the launch of Montreal’s Le Perroquet in Montreal in 1865, although it had been long been widely used in European, American, and Mexican satirical journals or single sheets of the period. A more sophisticated wood engraving technique did appear in Montreal by the end of the 1840s in the work of one long-term (and often embattled) local artist-engraver, John Henry Walker, and one itinerant portrait painter, Frederick Lock.13 Together, in Punch in Canada, these two artists created the first “cast of characters” of Canadian graphic satire: Governor-General Lord Elgin, and the joint premiers, Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine. In the journals produced in Quebec City through the early and mid-1860s (Le Bourru, La Scie, La Scie illustrée, L’Électeur and Le Charivari canadien), these characters would be joined by the leaders of the Confederation project. Jean-Baptiste Côté gave George Brown, Georges-Étienne Cartier, and John A. Macdonald a predominantly emblematic quality within a stern, radically simplified woodcut treatment.14 Presented as visually coarse and uncompromising, this stylistic approach corresponds to what Tom Gretton has shown is the type of proactive choice often made by publishers and artists of the time when they deployed the visual codes preferred by their audiences.15 By investigating the Canadian iconography of the American stalwart icon Uncle Sam, Christian Vachon’s chapter, “Uncle Sam, a Not-So-Distant Cousin: Canadian Contributions to the Genesis of a US Allegorical Figure,” touches on the early formation of these codes in the Canadian context. Vachon describes the evolving form of Uncle Sam as played out in pre- and post-Confederation Canada and alerts us to the potential for further research that lies in a close reading of the circulation (across borders, within communities) of the satirical image. By being very attentive to the chronologies involved on both sides of a border that was long disputed between the US and Great Britain, Vachon reminds us that we should not suppose that Canada was always merely the recipient of and adapter of exogenous cultural materials, even if just such a relationship seems to describe much of its cultural formation. Adaptation is

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itself a creative act anyway, and it is probably one of the clearest and most visible instances of a process that can be also described for just about any transnational and transcultural configuration. Beyond this, Canada’s troubled colonial and early postcolonial condition – seen here as a palimpsest – makes it a useful laboratory for working away at adopted symbols of the communities that buttress its own development. The immediate post-Confederation period of Canadian graphic satire was dominated by the work of John Wilson Bengough and Henri Julien. Working in Toronto, Bengough emulated the work of the German-born American cartoonist Thomas Nast (1840–1902) in the pages of his satirical journal Grip (1873–94). Nast was well known across North America for his contributions to Harper’s Weekly (1859–86), and his was a singular, much-respected (and in certain political quarters highly feared) editorial voice. With his admirer Bengough, he represented a return to the single-author model for the conception of graphic satire, along the lines of William Hogarth and James Gillray in eighteenth-century Britain. Using largely the same inventive visual and textual vocabularies as Nast, Bengough sought to have a similar impact from his base in Toronto. He hoped to shape and direct public perceptions of politicians in the new country, especially in the case of John A. Macdonald. Prominent of nose and bleary of eye, “John A.” held sway over Canadian politics from 1867 until his death in 1891. Bengough traced Macdonald’s political fortunes in an endlessly renewed series of stagings – in Parliament, in the classroom, in the desert, at sea, at shipside, in the general store – indeed across a repertoire of allegorical spaces from which the stock imagery of later-nineteenth-century illustrated political satire was drawn. Robyn Fowler’s chapter, Reading Allegorical Miss Canada in Graphic Satire, reminds us that Bengough’s impact was certainly not limited to his treatment of politicians. If Miss Canada could never be imbued with John A.’s rascally personality, she nonetheless had to deal with it, just as she had to confront Macdonald’s one-term successor, Alexander Mackenzie, as well as certain national symbols, some of whom were related to her (“mother” Britannia), others not (her suitor, Uncle Sam). As Fowler points out, Miss Canada was obliged to serve all the conflicting claims on national purpose, for example, by both exhorting Canada’s armed forces to crush the Second Northwest Resistance and honouring the Métis for standing up for their rights. In his 1985 study of social criticism in Victorian Canada, The Regenerators, Ramsay Cook (like Carman

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1.10. Henri Julien, Songs of the By-Town Coons, no. 3 [Joseph-Israel Tarte]. Montreal Daily Star, 18 January 1899, 12. BAnQ Grande Bibliothèque; reproduction from microfilm

Cumming) showed how important it was for Bengough’s particular vision of Canadian social justice that such oppositions be reconciled.16 Bengough’s Montreal counterpart was Henri Julien, son of a foreman in the printing firm of George Desbarats and William Leggo. Julien first worked in the offices of the company’s flagship publications, the Canadian Illustrated News and L’Opinion publique; his earliest published work dates from March 1873.17 But Julien was above all an illustrator and a cartoonist by virtue of his execution of the Desbarats publications’ “big cuts,” the large cartoons that adorned the front page of an issue or which occupied the two-page centre spread. Later, working at the Montreal Daily Star from 1888 until his death in 1908, Julien’s principal role would be as the paper’s artistic director and chief illustrator. While he contributed an accomplished series of portrayals of mps from the press gallery of the House of Commons in the 1897 and 1898 sessions of Parliament, his only political cartoons for the paper were made in 1899, beginning with the Songs of the By-Town Coons (Fig. 1.10), a series that Hardy has discussed at length elsewhere.18 In October of the same year, Julien drew the stinging attack on Laurier discussed above. Julien soon yielded the role of cartoonist to Arthur George Racey (1870–1941), who in November 1899 truly became Montreal’s first daily newspaper cartoonist. Racey’s career with the Star spanned the final four decades of his life. Although Racey still awaits a full-length study, Jaleen Grove gives us new insight into the early years of his career, notably at The Moon in Toronto. Racey was still working in a mode that we see in one of his first contributions to the post-Bengough Grip, where John Thompson, the Catholic successor to John A. Macdonald, is shown as a bishop who has just raped Miss Canada, in a composition that brings to mind a range of visual sources (notably Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare). At the Star, one of Racey’s first drawings presented a version of Laurier in blackface, in a manner that entirely matched the denigrating codes of standard representations of minstrelsy. But by and large Racey’s kind of visual anger was soon winnowed out of his work, being reserved in later years for figures such as the Bolshevik who represented Russia, the Soviet Union, and Communism in general throughout the 1920s and 1930s in the pages of the Star. We forget the extent to which the Miss Canadas and Johnny Canucks of this era were effectively competing for attention with symbols of the British way of life. But in turn-of-the-century Montreal, new representations of social feminine identity were also making it difficult, perhaps, for a more abstract Miss Canada

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to find purchase. Grove traces the “Pretty Girl” figure that was developed in Montreal by Russell Paterson and then ushered into the world of Charles Dana Gibson’s American Girls, showing both the contested social constructions of womanhood and the genealogy of this figure all the way through to the 1940s and the contributions of Oscar Cahén. Grove reminds us too how important the Montreal–Toronto axis was to the development of English-language graphic satire in Canada, as part of a larger North American and multi-centred anglophone metropolitan environment in which imagery and practitioners circulated freely. Lora Senechal Carney’s account of the Toronto-based New Frontier makes this clear, for the magazine was just as much a tribune for Montreal artists. Complementing Grove’s analysis, Louis Pelletier and Pierre Chemartin focus on Montreal as a bilingual (or more accurately dual-linguistic) city in order to account for the reception of exponents of the suffragette movement in the francophone and anglophone communities in the four years before the outbreak of the First World War. Their study adds to our understanding of Racey’s career by focusing on a finite segment of his work for the Star between 1910 and 1914, comparing it to the iconography developed by Le Canard in the same period. Moreover, Chemartin and Pelletier remind us just how fertile visual culture was at a time when illustrated journalism began to share the public’s attention with cinema. All in all, the chapters by Fowler, Grove, and Chemartin and Pelletier allow us to understand for the first time certain key continuities in the symbolic and social representations of women in the post-Confederation era. They are in some respects close to the blackface representations of Laurier’s liberal government insofar as they form a screen for the multifaceted projections of Canadian masculine anxieties. Graphic satire was used in strikingly different ways by Adrien Arcand's fascist weekly Le Goglu (1929–34) and Toronto’s leftist monthly New Frontier (1936–37). This difference is in part explained by simple historical circumstances. Le Goglu was launched just before the stock market crash of 1929, which ushered in the Great Depression. It was only a few months until the paper unveiled its virulent anti-Semitism through an approach that was highly unusual in Canadian satirical journalism: rather like the early MAD magazine that appeared two decades later, each component of every issue of Le Goglu was a thorough spoof of all the conventions of newspaper publishing (particularly those of La Presse, which had fired Adrien Arcand early in 1929 for organizing a Catholic journalists’ and pressmen’s union). Le Goglu’s comic approach

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extended right through its artists’ manipulation of photographs. Yet again, Canadian graphic satire framed its meanings through a reflection on and an immersion in the materials and properties of its medium. Le Goglu’s extreme political position was the price of enjoying what was easily (but uncomfortably) one of the most innovative of Canada’s magazines, reminding us that modernism and modernity, like graphic satire, can be all too compatible with a totalitarian viewpoint (as any study of the recourse to humour in interwar fascist and Communist propaganda and graphic satire will confirm). Although very precisely fixated on its anti-Semitic accounts of threats to francophone national identity in Canada, Arcand, Le Goglu’s owner (an old Oxford hand) was also a resolute supporter of the British monarchy. Desforges shows us how Arcand’s anti-Semitic graphic satire targeted above all the territory demarcated by language(s); the cartoons of his journals often did this by staging a community around a statue about to be destroyed – in a kind of dystopic fulfilment that fuses, avant la lettre, Anderson’s principle of imagined communities and the recurring analysis in W.J.T. Mitchell’s work on the Golden Calf and its twin lineage of idolatry and “iconogenesis.”19 Destruction and creation enjoy a dialectical relationship through the image. Insofar as Arcand’s recourse to this productively ambivalent iconography was in keeping with his subversive approach to the journalistic form, we can read his graphic satire as being designed to eventually foreclose on the public sphere as a forum for public discussion and exchange of ideas, a forum that satire, as a cultural institution and a visualliterary strategy, ordinarily helps into being. There is evidence that some of the visual material published in Le Goglu and in Arcand’s subsequent publications Le Miroir and Le Chameau was channelled to him by fascist organizations in Europe. If anything, this possibility serves to remind us of the extent to which Canadian graphic satire publications, like the satirical images themselves, depended for their strength and resilience on their ability to function within an international network of resources and references. As we have seen, this was the case from the outset in Canada. Its early colonial absorption and adaptation of its “metropolitan” resources corresponded to the paradigm in place for the local construction of visual culture (borrow, recombine, and republish existing images to new purposes). But it was also a process that could be documented in the “home” visual cultures that fed the colonial ones. Graphic satire, like all areas of visual culture, depends on a sequence of disruption, fragmentation, and reassembly; in graphic satire in

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particular, this visual logic follows a process of mimesis that operates within a range of more or less uncanny shifts between resemblance and cognitive dissonance. When this process becomes regulated by ideological frameworks, the militancy of satire’s irony gains strength. It gives a visual-textual identity to the “imagined community” that finds coherence in its worldview. The New Frontier project that Lora Senechal Carney has analyzed formed a site for its Toronto readership to find fellowship in a wider, “pluri-metropolitan” anglophone context that included Montreal and New York. Aligned with the Communist International, New Frontier set out to warn Canada (and Quebec) of the threats attendant on fascism. Key to its approach was the leavening of graphic satire (Harry Mayerovitch’s fiercely risible portrayals of Maurice Duplessis and Adolf Hitler, for example) with non-satirical illustration, notably in the conté crayon portraits by Louis Muhlstock of hungry and destitute urban men and women dispossessed by the Great Depression. In other contemporary circumstances, these approaches could be blended: this was the case at La Presse, where Albéric Bourgeois often depicted vagabond men by investing their bodies, clothing, and postures with charged brushwork. New Frontier was among the last of a line of journals that began with Le Fantasque. It may be that the possibilities offered by the structure of the weekly or monthly periodical – always a difficult proposition throughout the period covered in this volume, and a reality that mostly held for all small magazines in Canada’s history – were exhausted by 1939. On the other hand, and despite the huge changes in information industries, already affected by the advent of radio, by the total economy of wartime, and by the rise of television in the postwar era, cartoonists working for daily newspapers continued to enjoy the status of the authoritative columnist who helped define a paper’s identity (and, more prosaically, sell its copies). The question of the artist’s autonomy – although it always needs to be thought of in relative terms – is at the heart of our final chapter, Laurier Lacroix’s “Albéric Bourgeois, … aka Baptiste Ladébauche.” The long career of Albéric Bourgeois (1876–1962), who was trained at Montreal’s École des arts et manufactures, began in 1902 at the Boston Post, where he created a comic strip called The Education of Annie. Bourgeois was enticed back to Montreal in 1903 by the owner of La Patrie, the politician Joseph-Israël Tarte (the minstrel figure featured in Fig. 1.10). He joined La Presse in 1905, staying on until his retirement in 1957. Thanks to the inventorying of some 3,600 original items in the Fonds Albéric Bourgeois at Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, we

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now have a comprehensive if still incomplete measure of Bourgeois’s huge output over five decades. Fully one third of the archived material stars the character Baptiste Ladébauche, whom Bourgeois took over in 1905, giving him a long life in the paper and also on stage and musical revues, recorded monologues, and radio broadcasts.20 As a transfuge from Berthelot’s literary output to Bourgeois’s graphic satire (where he did not stay entirely put, being adopted by other artists along the way and later on), Ladébauche was one of Canada’s first intermedial satirical figures. In Lacroix’s analysis, we discover the meta-artistic relationship between the artist and his “creature,” a self-reflexive state that also announces a paradigm shift that takes the artist and her or his character beyond the confines of graphic satire to the wider field of visual satire. This shift is something that needs to be thought about in attempting to consider critical-humorous endeavours in Canadian visual arts after 1945.

A Call to Arms From Canada’s Victorian era right through to the eve of the Second World War, Canadian visual and political culture was greatly enriched by graphic satire. In years to come we will need to address some of the structural problems that become evident as we peruse the studies presented here. Women are largely configured to provoke idealism or anxiety in a masculine framework, and much work needs to be done to establish women’s roles as practitioners, producers, and consumers of graphic satire in Canada. We need sociological studies that can make visible women’s roles in the printing and editorial direction of cartoons and caricatures. We also need a comprehensive investigation into private and semi-private materials such as journals, diaries, and letters of the same period, where we are likely to find drawings and writings that reconstruct or innovate with respect to the models of printed graphic satire in circulation. As women gained access to professional training and began to participate in the structures of the visual arts in Canada, we should also look to satirical expression in the “Fine Arts” – manipulations of painting and print, for example, that reveal the combination of ethical critique and humour that signals the workings of satire. With respect to communities that have often been grouped under the terminologies of “multicultural” or “ethnocultural” approaches – the many continuous waves of immigration, forced and otherwise, that constitute the

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diasporic palimpsests of settler society, there is an enormous amount of work to be done on caricature and graphic satire in linguistic print communities that are neither English nor French. One way forward is to begin again with the aims that sustained our original conference of 2009. We need studies that will reach across the territories now gathered under the title “Canada” and that will consider other practitioners before and after the period we have been concerned with here. We could name Ethel Seath, Emily Carr, Pegi Nicol, Ghitta Caiserman, Avrom Yanovsky, and Oscar Cahén among many other examples of artists whose work raises questions about the relationships among caricature, graphic satire, and the adoption of modernist strategies in the visual arts. These are relationships that appear to change after the mid-century point, partly as a result of the now-enshrined ruptures such as Refus global in Montreal (1948), partly as a result of the changing political infrastructure for the visual arts in Canada – at each level of government jurisdiction – as political themes are taken up directly by artists engaged in theoretical examinations and reconfigurations of both the nature and the site of the art object. From the productions of the GRAFF artists in Montreal to Greg Curnoe, N.E. Thing Co., Joyce Wieland, and General Idea to Robert Houle, Kent Monkman, and the late Annie Pootoogook (again, to name only a few), many levels of ironic engagement with visual culture seem to take on the meta-representational possibilities of graphic satire. The way forward will then be toward any of the sides of this apparent chronological divide, in order to detail and deepen our understanding of the issues at stake for communities and instances of power that have been working through and at establishing their place(s) in Canada’s visual culture(s) by using the strategies afforded by satire.

NOTES 1 Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1990 [1957]), 223–4. 2 See Martha Banta, “The Fate of Fantasy in a High-Anxiety World,” Barbaric Intercourse: Caricature and the Culture of Conduct, 1841–1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 339–78. 3 W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 105–6.

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4 A process that Tom Gretton, for example, has ably described for caricature in Mexico City in the time of José Posada. See below, n. 15. 5 Nonetheless, as the reader will be all too aware, events such as the assassination of the artists Charb, Cabu, Honoré, Tignous, Wolinski, and seven colleagues in the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie-Hebdo on 7 January 2015 have forever shifted the perspective of anyone writing on the caricaturist’s work in our society. 6 See Dominic Hardy, “Caricature on the Edge of Empire: George Townshend in Quebec, 1759,” in Todd Porterfield (ed.), The Efflorescence of Caricature, 1715– 1838 (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2011): 1–29. 7 See Ramsay Cook’s chapter on John Wilson Bengough in The Regenerators: Social Criticism in Late Victorian English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985). 8 For Gérin’s work on Soviet Humour see Godless at the Workbench / Sans-dieu à l’atelier, exhibition and catalogue (Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina; Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax; and Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston), 2004–05; “On rit au NarKomPros: Anatoli Lounatcharski et la théorie du rire soviétique,” racar: Revue d’art canadienne / Canadian Art Review 37, 1 (spring 2012): 41–52; and her forthcoming Devastation and Laughter: Satire, Power and Culture in the Early Soviet State (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018). Gérin has published her work on the definitions of concepts related to humour in “A Second Look at Laughter,” Humor 26 (2013): 155–76. 9 Jean-Philippe Uzel, “L’humour comme combinaison des contradictions. Une approche esthétique,” racar: Revue d’art canadienne / Canadian Art Review 37, 1 (spring 2012): 87–97. For Uzel’s work on humour in contemporary Indigenous arts, see “Les objets trickster dans l’art contemporain autochtone au Canada,” Histoire de l’art et anthropologie, Musée du quai Branly / actes de colloque, 2009, https://actesbranly.revues.org/241 10 For example, see Mark Cheetham and Linda Hutcheon, eds., Essays in Canadian Irony (Toronto: York University, 1988); “Postmodernism in Recent Canadian Art: Ironies of Memory,” in Linda Hutcheon, ed., Double Talking: Essays on Verbal & Visual Ironies in Canadian Contemporary Art & Literature, ecw Press, 1992. 11 Sophie Duval and Marc Martinez, La satire (Littératures française et anglaise) (Paris: Armand Colin, 2000), 184–211. 12 See Josée Desforges, “Les débuts de la presse satirique à Montréal: Le Diable bleu

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13 14

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(1843), Le Charivari canadien (1844), Le Scorpion (1854) et Le Perroquet (1865),” Ridiculosa, special issue, La presse satirique dans le monde (Brest, Université de Bretagne occidentale, 2013): 345–77. For a discussion of Walker and Lock and of Punch in Canada, see below (Hardy, Frankenstein’s Tory). See Nicole Allard, “Un graveur et caricaturiste à l’aube de la confédération,” in Mario Béland, ed., Jean-Baptiste Côté caricaturiste et sculpteur (Quebec: Musée du Québec, 1996), 33–65. Tom Gretton, “Posada and the ‘Popular’: Commodities and Social Constructs in Mexico before the Revolution,” Oxford Art Journal 17, 2 (1994), 32–47. Online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1360573 In the same way, Marius Barbeau later had no trouble in claiming, in 1941, that Henri Julien’s image of the Patriote (the “Vieux de ’37”) foreshadows the fight for the enshrinement of French-Canadian liberties within Confederation. Marius Barbeau, “Le vieux patriote d’Henri Julien,” Les Nouvelles de l’Épargne de guerre, 25 July 1941: 4. “The Wary Old Fisherman, and the Loose Fish.” Canadian Illustrated News, 18 March 1873. Dominic Hardy, “Une grande noirceur: splendeurs et mystères de la caricature au Québec, 1899–1960,” in Ségolène Le Men, ed., L’art de la caricature (Paris: Presses universitaires de Paris Ouest, coll. Les arts en correspondance, 2011), 151–70. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London and New York: Verso, 1983, [2006]; W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 97. See Dominic Hardy and Micheline Cambron, eds., Quand la caricature sort du journal. Baptiste Ladébauche 1878–1957 (Montreal: Fides, 2015).

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Frankenstein’s Tory: Graphic Satire in 1840s Montreal, from Le Charivari canadien to Punch in Canada DOMINIC HARDy

In the 1840s, as Montreal underwent tremendous political, economic, and social change, becoming capital of the recently minted “United Canada,” graphic satire was established for the first time as an active agent in the city’s public sphere. The struggle for political dominance was so intense that the battling parties, the Tories and the Reformers, often committed violence leading to injury and death. In this chapter I focus on the effect that graphic satire had when it was harnessed to the purposes of violence in Canadian politics in the formative years of the new Union.1 I consider two springtime events, occurring almost exactly five years apart, which shared grievous commonalities. The first was a by-election, held over two days in April 1844, in which both sides intimidated voters at the hustings. The outbreak of a riot at one polling station, which led to the death of a Tory supporter, was the starting point for a three-part satirical détournement of history and current events in the first two issues of Le Charivari canadien on 10 and 14 May (Fig. 2.1). The second moment came with the burning of Montreal’s House of Parliament by a Tory mob on 25 April 1849,

2.1 Le Charivari canadien, vol. 1, no. 1 (10 May 1844), 1. Early Canadiana Online

and the subsequent “coverage” of this arsonous (indeed, treasonous) attack by Punch in Canada in a special “extra” number published on 12 May (Fig. 2.2). These events bookend Montreal’s brief time as capital of Canada, and more significantly, they show that in this environment graphic satire could be used as a defensive strategy by the party responsible for violence. As we shall see, this use went hand in hand with an equally strategic manipulation of history – or rather, of the public’s sense of those historical continuities in which local and national current events took their meaning in the 1840s. The textual and visual satirical interventions of Le Charivari canadien and Punch in Canada were at the heart of that manipulation. The preceding years had been marked by rupture and crisis: the failed 1837– 38 rebellions were followed by Lord Durham’s report (1839), which recommended the fusion of Lower and Upper Canada in an effort to definitively assimilate the Canadiens, described as a “people without culture, without history,” to the language and customs of a British majority in the new United Canada.2 In response to the onset of the rebellions, the Swiss émigré author, journalist, and publisher Napoléon Aubin (1812–1890), based in Quebec City, had launched the first satirical journal to be conceived and produced in Canada, Le Fantasque (1837–48).3 Aubin may also have been the force behind the establishment of a series of ephemeral satirical journals (appearing weekly and illustrated with woodcuts, lasting barely a few months or at most, a year) that began to appear in Montreal starting in 1843. More closely evocative of French and British metropolitan models than Le Fantasque, these earliest Montreal satirical journals bore titles such as Le Diable bleu (1843) and Le Charivari canadien (1844). The anglophone community countered with the Montreal Tattler (1844), The Satirist (1847), and Punch in Canada (1849–50).4 These journals appealed to (and were organized by) supporters of the main political camps struggling for control of Canadian politics. On the one hand was the class of Tory merchants whose interests lay both in their close relationships with the governor general, the representative of the British Crown, and in his discretionary exercise of power and patronage. On the other hand were the supporters of the Reform movement led by Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin, who believed in Responsible Government; that is, in the principle according to which electors, and not the Crown, should choose their government and the said government should be accountable above all to the electorate – an electorate made up of two linguistic communities tasked with

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2.2 Punch in Canada, vol. 1, no. 8 [Extra] (12 May 1849), cover page. Early Canadiana Online

working together to form a sense of nation. This Reform movement gave history’s reply to Lord Durham’s assumptions and actions.

Le Charivari canadien and the April 1844 By-election: Of Extras and the Physiognomic Representation of Tories The April 16 and 17 by-election was a dress rehearsal for an anticipated general election eventually held in the fall of 1844.5 Lewis Thomas Drummond stood for LaFontaine and Baldwin’s Reformers against the Montreal Merchant Tories’ man, William Molson (of brewery family fame). “In the violent election which ensued,” we are succinctly reminded by the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, “Drummond and his organizer, Francis Hincks, united two groups of archrivals, the French Canadian and the Irish workers on the Lachine Canal and on the docks, and used the latter to rule the polling stations physically; Drummond was declared the winner by a large majority.”6 The Montreal Gazette revisited the story in 2007: On the second day of the voting [that is, on April 17] Julien Champeau was among the crowd milling about the poll in what is now Victoria Square [near the site of the American Presbyterian Church].7 He had arrived with his friend Guillaume Mallet in Mallet’s wagon. Perhaps Champeau’s barge was tied up and he temporarily had no work; the Irish navvies had sabotaged the canal works a couple of days before. They watched as one John Dyer tried to vote. A Molson man, he was attacked and thrown to the ground. His shirt was torn from his back, his trousers pulled down past his knees. Mallet and Champeau leapt from the wagon, apparently to help Dyer, but then got into a fight with his tormentors. Soldiers with their muskets held across their chests pushed them back. Champeau grabbed at two bayonets, and then was stabbed – apparently by accident, yet apparently several times – by a third … Early in the morning of April 21 he died.8 The newly created Liberal satirical journal Le Charivari canadien took up this episode in its very first issue, which appeared on 10 May 1844. In that inaugural number it declared that it would publish on Tuesday and Friday mornings,

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2.3 Portrait of Daniel O’Connell. Le Charivari canadien, vol. 1, no. 1 (10 May 1844), 4. Early Canadiana Online

for two pennies an issue (or 15 pence a month for the city and 2s 6d for the country), but it was short-lived like most papers of its kind, lasting a mere twenty-nine issues; appearing at first twice a week, then erratically, and then not at all, it emerged briefly with a final issue on 3 October. It listed its printer and publisher as the establishment of A. Fortier at 33 rue des Commissaires (today, rue de la Commune, which stretches along the quaysides of Vieux Montréal), near the “new market.”9 Le Charivari canadien also advertised itself as a jobbing printer. One of its ”correspondents” – a “Jean-Baptiste De Barasse,” perhaps the forerunner of Hector Berthelot’s avatar “Baptiste Ladébauche” (who first appeared in Berthelot’s satirical journal Le Canard in 1878) – gave as the city of origin of his “letters” a place called “Montréal, France, Département du Canada.” The first issue also presented a rather more serious textual and engraved portrait of Daniel O’Connell (Fig. 2.3), the famous (or notorious, depending on the reader’s political stripe) Irish leader.10 The journal’s position was clear: “The Illustrious subject of this short biographical notice, the champion of Irish liberties assailed by an execrable power, the defender of Catholicism,” is an “intrepid patriot” whom only “death will silence.” This inaugural number also featured a series of “Extras” that were presented as having been written some eight hundred years previously in Montreal. Entitled “Extras Antiques. Élection de la Cité de Montréal / Le 16 et 17 avril 1044” (Fig. 2.4), these “extras” were supposedly culled from the Montreal Herald of April 1044, the style of which was said to be “updated” in order to render them more intelligible to the reader. In the space of two pages, four “extras” were presented: one from 11 April, at two in the afternoon; two in a row from 16 April, the first at ten in the morning, the second at noon; and the last from 17 April, stamped at “noon and one second.” Each of the first three extras is laden with the textual markings of breathless battle. The first two extras end with tables that recount losses in the camps of Lewis Drummond and William Molson. As the 10:00 a.m. report of 16 April recounts: a 150-man detachment of “Molsonites” has been seen heading through the Champ de Mars to the market at Viger Square, corner of rue St Denis, where a polling station has been set up; hoping to take command of the square unopposed, the “Molsonites” are ambushed by the “Drummondites.” The assailants use sticks, pistols, and rocks; the battle lasts “two minutes and one hundredth of a second”; the Molsonites are repelled, losing two hats, one cap, 149 sticks, seven and a half sideburns, thirty clumps of hair, half a vest,

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2.4 “Extras Antiques. Élection de la Cité de Montréal. Le 16 et 17 avril, 1044.” Le Charivari canadien, vol. 1, no. 1 (10 May 1844), 3. Early Canadiana Online

twelve and a half neckerchiefs, one red pocket handkerchief (held to be Molson’s standard), and six mooring ropes, amounting to two hundred and a half items against Drummond’s losses, which total three in all: two cuts to the forehead, one hood collar (Fig. 2.5). This numerical extravaganza is followed by Extra number 3, the occasion of a small festival of exclamation marks as the riot act is read in response to the return of the Molsonites, who are once again defeated. Extra 4 – timed at noon plus one second – brings news “from the Wheat Market” of the skirmish that leads to the death of Julien Champeau, adding that the threat to this single “Tory” life will doubtless be countered with the sacrifice of a hundred “Liberal” lives. In a moment “that will forever be glorious for the arms of Albion,” the “English warriors” charge and hold the field of battle. One bayonet is bent into a curve because it has been used as a stick rather than a bayonet. The temporality embedded in the text takes a similar twist, playing on recent past, present, and close future: “The enemy had several wounded. One of them died, as we hope. His name is Julien Champeau, and a jury of our peers will find, at the inquest: death by accident.” The compiler adds in a final note the hope that his work will be of use to future generations; and he (inevitably) signs his chronicle “X. Tra.” The voice of Le Charivari then comes forward: “You will find as I do that the Herald of 1044 resembles little the Herald of 1844. The ancient version told the truth with a good heart; the present-day one would consider it a crime to do as much.” “X Tra” adds a postscript: “I was rolling up the extras when a caricature appeared in a dog-eared corner of the parchment. This happy accident gives me the means to give you a copy of this antique piece, at the foot of which are the words that I faithfully reproduce (Fig. 2.6): ‘A resemblance of a Molsonite, at the elections of the city of Mont-Royal, in the year 1044.’” The letter U in the French text that makes up the caption has become a V in keeping with the use of V for U in Latin inscriptions. As we can tell through this substitution, through the language play in the Extras, and above all in the preposterous recourse to the medieval, Le Charivari canadien’s purpose is, to put it into proper art historical terms, to mess around and mess with the codes and conventions of historical time that were contemporary to readers in 1844. Within this metahistorical intervention, Le Charivari canadien then engaged with what we might call a metacognitive structure: physiognomy, the study of individual (and, by extension, collective) personality through a study of the body’s “topography,” which was a hallmark of nineteenth-century culture.

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2.5 “Extras Antiques. Élection de la Cité de Montréal. Le 16 et 17 avril, 1044 (suite et fin). ” Le Charivari canadien, vol. 1, no. 1 (14 May 1844), 1. Early Canadiana Online

2.6 “Extras Antiques. Élection de la Cité de Montréal. Le 16 et 17 avril, 1044 (suite et fin).” Le Charivari canadien, vol. 1, no. 1 (14 May 1844), 2. Early Canadiana Online

ll the the ze

2.7 “Extras Antiques. Élection de la Cité de Montréal. Le 16 et 17 avril, 1044 (suite et fin).” Le Charivari canadien, vol. 1, no. 1 (14 May 1844), 3. Early Canadiana Online

In its “Study of the Physiognomy of Man,” the journal presented three illustrations (Fig. 2.7) that made fun of its political adversary while at the same time satirizing current belief in physiognomic understanding. The first showed “the physiognomy of a Tory on the morning of the first day of the election held the 16th and 17th of last month. Behold this personification of egotism.” Type number 2, however, is a composition of types one and three: All Torys are naturally and constitutionally soft. Their physionomy is thus of the kind that you will allow me to characterize as being a softgalosh physionomy; I’d give you an idea but one meets enough of them in the street without needing to parade them on paper … Number two is a a faithful representation of the state of a bureaucratic face, the evening of the first day of the election … Notice how this expression slides naturally into that of number 3; how it follows on from number one. Is it not the very marriage contract that joins two extremes! Never has an artist better caught the whole of a figure expressing pain! It’s a Tory the evening of April 17, last day of the election. He is morally and physically stricken! Perhaps he has lost a garment in the mêlée, poor fellow! Go on, console yourself, accursed Molsonite; if you lost a garment, present a bill to your candidate; if you took a harder knock, present your doctor’s bill to your candidate. Go on, go drink some whiskey! Many readers will already have recognized this “physiognomy of a Tory.” It is a citation from a British original: Punch; or, the London Charivari, the satirical journal founded in 1841 (Fig. 2.8). “The Irish Frankenstein” was drawn by J. Kenney Meadows (1790–1874) for the Punch issue of 4 November 1843.11 Le Charivari canadien was at work in a visual regime of transposition, borrowing, recirculation, and adaptation of source material. The unlikely archive that it dated to the year 1044 underlined the spirit of this citation: this was a society that knowingly enjoyed playing with its sense of historicity, with anachronism, with the fragmentary, and with detail. When it came to making a contemporary representation that allowed it to think through its current events – ones that were traumatic for individual and community alike – it did so in relation to the continuities (and the discontinuities or ruptures) that shaped its context.

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2.8 J. Kenny Meadows, “The Irish Frankenstein.” Punch; or, the London Charivari, 4 November 1843.

Guildhall Library, London (uk). Photo: Dominic Hardy

Walking with Frankenstein in Montreal, 1844 Just what was being circulated in Montreal through this image? In London, Kenney Meadows represented the Irish movement for political autonomy as it was manifested in England, through the dual figure of Frankenstein and his creature. The international notoriety of the eponymous novel recently published by Mary Shelley certainly extended to Montreal in the 1830s and 1840s.12 The motif of suture invested in Shelley’s novel and in the figure of Frankenstein’s creature is key for our context. For Punch, Meadows sought to personify the Irish nationalist movement, whose aim was to repeal the 1800 Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland, an act that gave its name to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The drawing in Le Charivari canadien is emblematic of another ill-gotten union, that of the Two Canadas. The Irish movement for repeal – or, as one can read on the monster’s vest, “repale,” or rather, since we are meant to sound out the syllables in a mock-Irish voice, repail – is symbolized by the monster that its creator, the leader Daniel O’Connell, celebrated in the first issue of Le Charivari canadien, can no longer control. Indeed, throughout the year 1843 O’Connell had led great popular outdoor gatherings that had come to be known in the British press as “monster meetings.”13 So it is this monstrous mass, which seeks the end of the political union of two realms, that is taken up just seven months later as the ironic emblem of the erstwhile ruling class of Canada, the Tory Merchants, who are held to have imposed the same type of fusion on the Canadien polity, and who become here the agents of monstrosity. Aside from the old-fashioned art-historical-detective-work pleasure we might be having here, this transfer also shows us that the London Punch is well and truly being read in Montreal – by the francophone community as much as by the Tory merchants who are presumably its intended audience. It is safe to say, then, that the discourse that ranges through Montreal’s political environment in 1844 is at least in part being structured by the ironic use of historical and contemporary textual and visual material. Just as there is a wilful and playful anachronism at work, and just as there is a sort of atopia being imaged in the pages of Le Charivari canadien – “Montreal, France, Department of Canada” – there is also an unabashed plundering of free-range, semantically loose or flexible visual sources. But it is a plundering of satirical material that, as such, helps form a new, discrete political position. Le Charivari canadien was already an ally of the Irish community in Montreal; in its first issue it presented its readers with a visual and textual portrait of Daniel O’Connell. In its second

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issue, it presented a fragment of the figure of Irish Nationalism as raised up by what one might call “Daniel O’Frankenstein,” the fragment transformed into the Montreal Merchant Tory. The very accessibility and usefulness, the ubiquity of the fragment seems to be symptomatic. But of what? The engagement with the symptom and the symptomatic in some recent art-historical writing may be of use. When Georges Didi-Huberman performatively rehearses the workings of Nachleben (survivals) in his studies of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne, he gives us a renewed framework for thinking about the recurrence of images beyond the limits of causal relationships, and perhaps he helps us to think about what is transferred with the image.14 The illustrative moment is that of a complex transfer and reconfiguration of visual, textual, and mental imageries that imports, adapts, discards parts of, and then enriches what is sent forward in the illustration. I maintain that what is sent forward in this case must be understood as an adapted practice that does not reconfigure itself in isomorphic relationship to its metropolitan “origins.” Origins, adaptations, discardings … In 2006 Johanne Lamoureux offered a reading of Frankenstein’s monster in a very different context, that of an afterword to fellow art historian Donald Preziosi’s book of essays, In the Aftermath of Art. In her essay “Showing Scars of Legibility,” Lamoureux devoted a section to “A Creature for Art History: Monster on a Raft,” in which she envisioned Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa in the perspective opened up by Mary Shelley’s novel. Ultimately Lamoureux was keen to establish a resonance between what she saw as the acts of dismembering and remembering, remembering and forgetting in Shelley’s work and the diagnostic that she teased out of Preziosi’s analyses of museography, that “art of art history” that is established through and with the museum. The museum too “dismembers and remembers”; and in evincing this process, said Lamoureux: Preziosi does what Mary Shelley did: he injects the gothic into the phantasmagoric story of the neoclassical origins of art history: he dismembers and recognizes the fragmentary morbidity of the material at his disposal, and he proposes a model much like the subjectivity of the monstrous creature, like the consciousness of the subject re-membered … This manner of instancing the dis-member/re-member allows one to forget the history of art, which is to say, to reject its regime of dissolving sutures and occult grafts.15

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In considering what gets opened up by an instanced/distanced reading of source image and citation, there are a few small material points to be made. Someone has taken the trouble to design a new block based on Meadows’s “Irish Frankenstein” for Le Charivari canadien by reversing the original, ensuring that the new printed-out fragment would rekindle the reader’s memory of the original, if only in that the position of the head and upper body face roughly the same way in the citation. Here too, there has been a dismembering in the remembering made by Le Charivari canadien of the Punch original: the monster’s flaying arms are indeed gone, so that the semantic replacement of Tory by Irish brute fuses them, empties out the original, and deprives it of its menace, its destructive arms and hands. What those hands can do is also at hand in Lamoureux’s analysis. She takes pains to remind us of the creature’s path to self-knowledge and its consequences: The series of textual encounters, through which the monster reconstructs, little by little, the history of human institutions, then his own, and finally the mythological resonances that tie the two together, is strongly eloquent. He miraculously masters language (the lingua franca) in listening to a reading of Les Ruines (1791) by Volney [a forgotten meditation] on the fragility of empires and on the vanity of human power, a meditation emblematized by the scattered remains of civilizations. The Monster next discovers Frankenstein’s laboratory notebook which unlocks for him the secret of his own disgusting genesis. Finally, by chance, he picks up some classics of literature that introduce him to contemporary sensibility (The Sorrows of the Young Werther) and awaken him to the mythological resonances of his history: after reading Paradise Lost by Milton, he perceives himself as a new Adam. Throughout his confessions, the monster is torn between the desire to reconstitute his history and the desire to forget the past as soon as he remembers it, as he discovers in his past the insupportable fragments that push him to carry out the destruction around him. However, just as the history of humanity appears to him written under the aegis of remains and debris, his actions also seem fatally determined by an instinct of dismemberment and, in the perspective of an exemplary revenge, by the desire to be “the author of the ruin” that will befall Victor Frankenstein. (147)

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Now, this long citation, like the previous one, allows me to frame the cross-reading we can undertake from here on in considering the relationship between the “original” caricature and its “citation” – from creature to caricature and back again. There is, first of all, a fundamental act of translation to be recognized, across territories – let’s confine these to London and Montreal for the time being. We go from an anglophone universe in which Punch is finding its way – in the early 1840s it still fairly critical of the government but already prepared to confirm and draw its strength from the widely shared prejudices of its readership – to what I would like to call a dually lingual or heterolingual, as well as bilingual Montreal, in which polemical discourse is weighted differently according to different cultural and educational frames of reference, across the social structures of the British and the canadien communities of the day.16 Within the latter community, the split between forces that are favourable to conformity with the British colonial government’s imperatives and those that seek reform in the name of supporting the full direct enjoyment of British liberties and institutions could be said to establish (at least) two parallel vectors of mimetic desire. Let’s consider for a moment that Meadows’s “Irish Frankenstein,” Daniel O’Connell, has raised a monster; and then let’s return that monster to Shelley’s purpose, which is to say something meaningful about learning, knowledge, and its sometimes destructive power – the Promethean problem. Let’s confer on this Irish “monster” the status of a creature perhaps built out of a sense of a tragic understanding of his identity, of what Lamoureux called his “desire to reconstitute his history and the desire to forget the past as soon as he remembers it, as he discovers in his past the insupportable fragments that push him to carry out the destruction around him.” Let’s think about that fragmentation as the effect of waves of colonial violence that reduce Irish identities, complex and plural and certainly rich with history, to Irish identity, one that seems to be constantly erased and cancelled out under the force of sterotypical and colonial representations that, predictably perhaps, cancel out Irish self-representation. Reading across to the canadien recasting of a truncated ”Irish Frankenstein,” the monstrosity is transferred onto the figure of the British Tory, who most articulates and feels the threat of the progressive project of Victor Frankenstein and of the destructive force of awakened historical consciousness and nationalist affirmation that is fused together in the “life” of his creature. I think that the transferral allows for the projection of the Canadien into the tragic dimension

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of Shelley’s educated, self-aware creature, whose very knowledge brings creative and destructive possibilities. Crucially, for my argument to have any hope of standing up, I would have to depend on there being a satirical reversal operated on Meadows’s drawing by Le Charivari canadien. Insofar as it is a humorous reversal made in a criticalsatirical context that is itself a response to the eruption of violence in Montreal, I may be right. But if I admit even further that the moral position occupied by Le Charivari canadien defends to a large extent the violence perpetrated by the forces loyal to LaFontaine and Drummond – even if Julien Champeau, one of Molson’s men, appears to have died because of a mêlée with a British soldier’s bayonet – then I am forced to conclude that this satire stands in relationship to a trauma not so much suffered as induced by a section of the canadien community and that satire serves, as does the recourse to playing with historical time, to blur the moral edges of the reality on the ground.

Punch in Canada, 12 May 1849 As one might imagine, the Montreal Tories would exercise revenge. This came with the foundation of Punch in Canada on 1 January 1849. From the very first issue we know that its “Montreal office” was at 10 St François Xavier Street. The first “big cut,” the central and main caricature of every satirical weekly modelled on the British and French satirical journals, was unsigned; captioned “Mr Punch turneth woodman, and layeth his axe to the root of a rotten old tree,” it showed Mr Punch coiffed with a canadien tuque (or Liberty Cap, or Phrygian Bonnet) in the act of chopping away at the tree of “Responsible Government,” a tree whose bark has already peeled away to reveal a core of “Humbug.” In the distance, two kneeling figures – Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin – entreat Mr Punch, “Woodman, spare the tree” (Fig. 2.9). In the second issue (which in fact did not appear for another month, on 3 February), the big cut is rather more fluid in organization of space and line. At Monklands, the vice-regal residence on the west slope of Mount Royal near present-day Notre-Dame de Grâce, a portrait of the late governor general, Charles Metcalfe, looks askance at the Nanny [LaFontaine] showing a drawstring puppet, the new governor general, Lord Elgin, to a delighted Young Canada sitting in a high chair. Behind LaFontaine is a toy house, Monklands, its

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2.9 John Henry Walker, “Mr. Punch turneth woodman, and layeth his axe to the root of a rotten old tree.” Punch in Canada, vol. 1, no. 1 (1 January 1849), 5. McCord Museum, Montreal, M930.51.1.46

entablature bearing the inscription “Ici on parle français.” The image is signed F. Lock Inv.; tucked away in the shadow lines below the high chair are letters spelling out “Walker Sc” (Fig. 2.10). Over the lifetime of the journal, these two signatures dominated Punch in Canada’s big cuts. “F.W. Lock” was very likely the portraitist Frederick W. Lock (active in Montreal 1847–62). Each of the first issues of Punch in Canada presents on the inside cover an advertisement for his services as a portrait painter “in crayons” with a studio that is also on “Saint François Xavier Street.”17 “Walker” was the engraver and illustrator John Henry Walker (1831–1899) who, in 1849 at about eighteen years of age, was at the outset of a long but, alas, not always brilliant career.18 The publisher of Punch in Canada was Thomas Blades de Walden (1811–1873). He would go on to have a career as the author of musical comedies on Broadway in 1850s New York.19 That’s where we’ll also eventually find Charles Dawson Shanly (1811–1875), son of a Protestant family from Dublin that had settled in Upper Canada in the 1840s; several members of the family were involved in the building of railroads, in the land transactions and speculation that necessarily went along with railroad building, in civil engineering, and in the real estate business.20 In 1849 Charles Shanly was an employee of the colonial government in Montreal and, it would seem, the main writer of Punch in Canada. He may also have played a role as illustrator: the collection of Punch in Canada available through Early Canadiana Online is consistently annotated by “W.S.,” most likely Shanly’s brother Walter. The annotations serve to show Charles Shanly’s role as author and illustrator. Indeed, the frontispiece adopted with the second issue (headlined in gothic type, “February the 3rd, 1849!”) (Fig. 2.11) is held by “W.S.” to be the joint work of Lock and Shanly. In joining forces as publisher and editor, Blades de Walden and Shanly launched a publication with the purpose, as we have just seen, of illustrating and defending the interests and expounding the worldview of the merchant Tories of the city. Responsible Government – the idea that was anathema or “Humbug” at the very least – the speaking of French, and the idea that Canada might be governed on a bilingual basis were lampooned as notions that belonged to prattling of the nursery. It would be hard to overestimate the impact on the Tory worldview of the revolutions that had swept Europe in 1848, and especially of the reversals of fortune that brought authoritarian rule back to the fore. Shanly’s satirical poetry and the polemical articles published in Punch in Canada read now like the chronicle of a revolt foretold, balancing between mockery of the previous

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2.10 Frederick W. Lock, “young Canada delighted with responsible government.”

Punch in Canada, vol. 1, no. 2 (3 February 1849), 13. McCord Museum, Montreal, M930.50.7.629

2.11 Charles D. Shanly and John Henry Walker, Punch in Canada.

Proof before printing for journal cover page, 1849. 22.1 x 20.5 cm. McCord Museum, Montreal, M911.1.5

year’s European revolutions and disgust at the implementation of Responsible Government. From the outset, Punch in Canada warned Lord Elgin not to “reward the rebels”; that is, not to sign into law a bill for the payment of indemnities against losses to property incurred by citizens of Lower Canada during the 1837–38 Patriotes rebellions against British colonial rule. The bill made no distinction between British subjects and Canadiens, nor indeed between supporters of the Crown and supporters of the rebellion, in assessing eligibility for indemnity payments. In full accordance with this principle and through respect for the elected leadership of the Reform government of Canada, Lord Elgin did precisely what Punch in Canada warned him not to do; he signed the bill into law on the afternoon of 25 April 1849. Reaction from the Tories was swift – and catastrophic: by mid-evening of the same day, an English-speaking mob incited by the editor of the Montreal Gazette had set fire to the Parliament building, which was utterly destroyed within a few hours. Among the ashes of the benches of the Reform majority and the Tory opposition lay great swaths of the colony’s memory, as John Ralston Saul has recently reminded us in his 2010 study of the political and personal friendship between LaFontaine and Baldwin: By 2 a.m. the Parliament of Canada was a smouldering shell. Twentythree thousand books had been lost, all of our archives, historic portraits, all three a treasure trove stretching back to New France. None of this seemed to bother the Orangemen or merchants from the St. Andrew’s Society. But the theme of lost books and lost archives would be endlessly lamented in speech after speech over the weeks to come, both by those defending the government and those attacking it. With this destruction of knowledge Canada had demeaned itself.21 Some three weeks later, Punch in Canada presented a special issue (another Extra) commemorating the whole affair. The centre page spread was given over to visual and textual reportage (Figs. 2.12 and 2.13). On the left hand page, a pair of images planned and engraved by John Henry Walker, one above the other, showed the destruction of the Parliament. The codes of visual representation that he used are not in themselves humorous in any way: their matter-of-fact appearance invokes the model of illustrated weeklies such as the London Illustrated News. The captions, however, both play on and undermine the authority invested in these reportorial codes:

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“The House of Parliament, Montreal / Taken while burning on the night of the 25th of April, 1849; it having been fired by an outraged and Loyal British populace, three hours after the Governor General, the Earl of Elgin, gave his assent, in the Queen’s name, to the Bill for rewarding the rebels.” –“the ruins, now known as the modern elgin marbles.” Walker’s portrayal of the burning House of Parliament of course calls to mind the celebrated paintings devised by J.M.W. Turner in late 1834 and early 1835, The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, October 16 1834, images that brought out the sublime in the event through a form of terrifying picturesque that seemed to transform the paint itself.22 Montreal added a topos to the emergent trope of Parliament buildings ablaze, for Walker’s was certainly not the only representation of the 25 April fire. Montreal’s McCord Museum owns a lithograph by E. Hides showing the Destruction of the Parliament House, Montreal, April 25th, 1849, along with a painting sometimes attributed to Joseph Légaré (The Burning of the Parliament at Montreal) which, regardless of its attribution, echoes the narrative approach taken by Légaré in his scenes of fires that devastated the boroughs of St Roch and St Jean in 1845. “Légaré” adds the wry twist of a backlit figure, striding before the blazing Parliament, who bears a disconnected hose while the impassive citizenry look on.23 Perhaps a modicum of ambiguity was required for offerings to a divided local audience, one that the merchant Tories could eschew. Just as the London Illustrated News would present a visual interpreptation in its issue of 21 May, which showed a triumphant group of bystanders hailing the Parliament’s destruction,24 Punch in Canada could afford to be trenchant in its satirical approach to the event. Like Hide and “Légaré,” Walker established a group of onlookers in the foreground; but instead of being gathered as if for a conversazione, Walker’s denizens race toward or past the building in agitation, shaking their walking sticks as if to alert one another to the disaster taking place, or to the celebration that will soon be required. The characteristics of Walker’s wood-engraving practice are used to great advantage: the night sky, a mass of variegated black resulting directly from the woodblock’s grain, is sinuously carved out by the tendrils of smoke escaping from the centre and the south end of the Parliament building. Its windows are brighly cast slots within a deeply backlit façade. The point of view, looking northeast from the corner of McGill and (present-day) d’Youville, is that of the “frontier” of the city centre as it was then defined. The stick-shaking men in the foreground

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2.12 John Henry Walker, “The House of Parliament, Montreal” ; “The Ruins, popularly known as the Modern Elgin Marbles.” Punch in Canada, vol. 1, no. 8 [Extra] (12 May 1849), 6. Early Canadiana Online

2.13 Frederick W. Lock, “Portraits of Five Gentlemen (…) .” Punch in Canada, vol. 1, no. 8 [Extra]

(12 May 1849), 7 (Proof before printing). McCord Museum, Montreal, m911.1.7.1–5

are perhaps readers of the Gazette, who were called to convene in protest by an Extra that the Gazette had rushed onto the streets that very afternoon. The call to arms was composed by the papers’s editor, James Moir Ferres.25 The End has begun. / Anglo-Saxons! you must live for the future. Your blood and race will now be supreme, if true to yourselves. You will be English “at the expense of not being British.” To whom and what, is your allegiance now? Answer each man for himself. / The puppet in the pageant must be recalled, or driven away by the universal contempt of the people. / A Mass Meeting will be held on the Place d’Armes this evening at 8 o’clock. Anglo-Saxons to the struggle, now is your time.26 Time, night and day, before (or during) and after: a fundamentally Hogarthian approach to establishing ironic contrast is at the heart of the Modern Elgin Marbles conceit. The droll wit deployed in the captions speaks once again to the historical culture of the period. The captions’ author and Punch in Canada’s readers were well aware of the role played by Governor General Lord Elgin’s father in the removal to England between 1801 and 1805 of the Parthenon sculptures that were presented to the British Museum in 1816. Moreover, there is every reason to believe that the reading public in 1849 Montreal was equally aware of the controversies attendant on the sculptures’ acquisition and transfer. As the Parliament building lay in ruins, this former covered market, “repurposed” for the needs of a legislature, was now reduced to its (degraded) neoclassical form, its legitimacy, like that of Lord Elgin and perhaps like that of his father and his famous (or notorious) acquisitions, in ruins too. Not for the first time in early Canadian caricature and graphic satire, an attack on the institution of government and its representatives was also an attack on the whole stylistic regime with which they were associated.27 Punch in Canada enjoyed the singular liberty of being able to satirize Lord Elgin and the burning of the house of Parliament without being arrested for sedition, which might have been a not unreasonable charge. Indeed, the right-hand page of the 12 May centre spread presented a garland of portraits signed “F.W. Lock, April 1849.” Portraits of Five Gentlemen / Who were unjustly imprisoned by an arbitrary administration in consequence of presuming, at a Public Meeting, to express their disapprobation of that Administration’s “Indemnity Act,” for rewarding Traitors, and putting a premium on Rebellion.

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These keepsake medallion portraits, beribboned by winding stems, speak to a relationship of affection for (and perhaps among) these “five gentlemen.” They were “J.M. Ferres, editor” (as we have seen, of the Gazette); H.E. Montgomerie, merchant; W.G. Mack, barrister; Augustus Heward, broker; and Alfred Perry, tradesman. Punch in Canada explained: Our portraits have no allusion to the faint resemblances of our characteritic nose and hunch which decorate alike the walls of the streets and those of the Emperor of China, with whom Punch is a great favorite. Our portraits are those of Messrs. Mack, Montgomerie, Heward, Ferres and Perry, men whose names will be handed down to posterity, by the Canadian Babington Macauley whenever he makes his first appearance and by Punch as the five men who first suffered in the work of socially and politically regenerating the inhabitants of the the benighted and lazy province of Canada. On the previous page, we read, in a chronicle entitled “The late illumination,” an account of the fire at the house of Parliament. The gallant Fire Companies played a little on the surrounding buildings for the amusement of the bye-standers, the troops stood at ease on the various avenues leading to the scene of vengeance, the fire steadily burned its fury out amongst the records of centuries, until it dwindled to a red and ominous glare from the ghastly eyes of the dead Parliament House – and Punch went to bed in a conflict of emotion, and dreamt of Lafontaine dressed up as Nero, performing melodies on a bewitched violin, over the burning Capitol of an imaginary city. In the next column, we read of “Fortifications at Monklands. – Revival of the Feudal Ages.” Imagining that “plates of Iron – egg proof – have already been ordered for the windows,” Punch makes fun of – and makes fun with – a penchant for the imitation of the signs of the “medieval” in written (and spoken) dialogue, in an era in thrall to the literary works of Sir Walter Scott and William Shakespeare. Five years after Le Charivari canadien had reflected on electoral violence and the death of one young man, Punch in Canada too enveloped the impact of terrifying recent events in the cotton of a droll virtuoso manipulation of

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history that served to set the city of Montreal adrift. Down the St Lawrence River perhaps; certainly into the realms of a distancing fantasy that desensitized the reader who may or may not have believed in Responsible Government and yet for whom the sense of civic responsibility for violence was clearly at stake. The humour of both papers was placed at the service of the construction of a an atopic Canada, at once a real project and an imagined reality. The stuff of Punch’s dreams clearly echoed Lord Durham’s vision of the fate that must await the Canadiens and his verdict on their society (benighted and lazy); Punch’s insistence was in reverse proportion to Le Charivari canadien’s refusal of that same vision. Both approaches were fundamentally metahistorical, in the sense that what satire does in society, for society, and about society is here inextricably tied to an understanding of what history can and must do as well. Faithful to its origins as satura, an array of apparently unrelated items in an unidentifiable cornucopia, satire allows for both the fragmenting and the subsequent strategic selection and rearrangement of the things we know about our past and our present, allowing us to choose not only what we must see but also what we must hide, often in the very process of revealing some other hidden reality, through mechanisms attached to humour and irony. Both episodes presented in this essay allow us to think about 1840s Canadian society – both canadien and Tory – at work in making sense of a world that was, then as now, always in construction.

Epilogue In 1840s Montreal, there was a distinct form of graphic satire that worked directly in and across the burgeoning field of information transmission through the publication of illustrations to a wide audience by industrially organized means of reproduction. This was also graphic satire functioning as a key institution in the colonial transfers of British culture, revealing here the unstable position of collecting and display practices within a colonial community “imagined” by a European power. In particular, Punch in Canada established an unusual metanarrative in the colonial record as an English-language satire projecting into the public realm of English Montreal a comment on the well-known controversies associated with the Elgin name, and the collection of “ruined” ideal forms that represented some reaching toward a legitimacy founded in an appeal to a Greek past. It was perhaps no less a self-consciously ironic reading than Le Charivari

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canadien’s projection, for its francophone audience, of the by-election violence of April 1844 onto an absurd date some eight hundred years earlier. Very precise, traumatic incidents – the death of Julien Champeau in 1844, the seditious attack on government in 1849 – were soon absorbed by Le Charivari canadien and Punch in Canada, respectively, as each paper called on its readers’ historical imaginations in order to defuse (and reactivate) the recourse to bayonet and torch as means of ordering public space. This is what is at stake in the recovery of and paying of attention to satire’s negotiation of its complicity with violence: this is how we “follow the money,” as the saying goes, tracing its circulation through the institution of the illustrated press in order to watch how it participates in the history of Canadian society – quite possibly one city, or even one public space, at a time. What we have described for Montreal may need to be reimagined for each Canadian urban centre in turn. By paying attention, too, to what satire does as it envisions society in its historical dimension, through a close reading of its textual and visual components, we begin to understand a little bit more about how a given society – let’s imagine it as limited to the extent of a city, for now – is structured by its participation in what might be thought of as a wider satiric field. Finally, we might say that our re-reading of these events through the lens of Lamoureux’s reading of Preziosi’s work on art history re-performs these authors’ endeavours in helping to situate and clarify some mechanisms of antagonistic mutual resistances within a colonial power structure. In the end, Lamoureux drew our attention to the latent and inevitable ruin-making of Frankenstein’s creature, a figure of the destruction of learning that was all too thoroughly accomplished by the Tory mob’s razing of the House of Parliament of Montreal.

NOTES 1 Early versions of this chapter were presented in Glasgow in 2013 (International Bande Dessinée Society conference) and 2016 (Stirling Maxwell Fellowship at the University of Glasgow), and at the University of Guelph in 2015. Warm thanks to Laurence Grove and Christina Smylitopoulos for the opportunity to share this material with their communities of young and established scholars, and to students and colleagues at uqam, who have provided a rewarding environment in which to think out loud about the history of graphic satire in Québec. 2 Armed rebellions were launched against the British colonial government in both Lower and Upper Canada by citizens and members of the legislative assemblies in

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the winter of 1837–38. In Lower Canada, the rebellion was almost entirely led by the leaders of the francophone community who were known as the Canadiens – by contrast to the British (the term “Canadian” would not come into general usage as a sign of anglophone citizenship until Confederation). After a few initial victories the Canadien rebels were overpowered by the British militia in early 1838. Many of their leaders, known to this day in Quebec history as the Patriotes, were exiled to Australia; others escaped to the United States; twelve of them were sentenced to death and hung on the gallows at Montreal in February 1839. The illustrated material of Le Fantasque was largely limited to a masthead showing Pierrot and Punchinello dancing, and to the playful use of typographical elements in a way that was reminiscent of eighteenth-century antecedents such as Tristram Shandy. Le Fantasque also provided comment on caricature and, in some cases, ekphratic accounts of graphic satires that may or may not have actually existed. The satirical journals published between 1837 and 1939 are the subject of an exhaustive digitization and analysis carried out by the Caricature et satire graphique à Montréal research team (casgram) founded at uqam in 2009. The materials are largely available for consultation online through the web portal of Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (banq) and through Early Canadiana Online/Notre mémoire en ligne. The election was called on 23 September with the results announced on 12 November 1844. See for example the National Assembly of Quebec, Chronologie parlementaire depuis 1791, http://www.assnat.qc.ca/fr/patrimoine/chronologie/ chrono24.html. J.I. Little, “drummond, lewis thomas,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 11, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed 16 May, 2015, http:// www.biographi.ca/en/bio/drummond_lewis_thomas_11E.html. See Jacalyn M. Duffin, “The Great Canadian Peritonitis Debate – 1844–47,” Histoire sociale / Social History 19, 38 (November 1986): 407–24, 408. Dr Wolfred Nelson (1791–1863) was well known as one of the Patriote leaders in the Lower Canada rebellion of 1837–38. For an account of the electoral riot, see Montreal Gazette, online edition, “Rough Politics in Montreal,” http://www.canada. com/story.html?id=16eaa249-9533-43d3-9a0e-f4ea4fcb8a4c Lovell’s Montreal Directory for the years 1843–44 and 1844–45 lists “August Fortier,” printer, at the intersection of Bonaventure and Inspector streets. The Lovell directories for 1842 through 1977 can be consulted online at Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, http://bibnum2.banq.qc.ca/bna/lovell/.

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10 The paper affirmed that it had taken the image from the London Illustrated News, which meant that “the likeness is therefore to be trusted.” Le Charivari canadien (10 May 1844), 3. 11 “The Irish Frankenstein” was reproduced in Curtis Perry’s classic 1971 study of the representation of the Irish figure in Ango-American caricature, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1971). Martha Banta revisited the representations of the Irish figure at length in her 2002 study Barbaric Intercourse: Caricature and the Culture of Conduct, 1841–1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 12 Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus was first published anonymously by Mary Shelley in 1818. A revised edition appeared under her own name in 1823; she published the definitive edition in 1831. A discussion of the importance of place in Shelley’s conception is given by Fred V. Randel, “The Political Geography of Horror in Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’,” elh 70, 2 (summer 2003), 465–91. In 1833 Ludger Duvernay’s The Montreal Museum: or, Journal of Literature and Arts reprinted a commentary on the “Recollections of the late Mrs Piozzi,” in which Shelley’s novel is discussed. On 19 May 1844, J.B. Dupuy’s Mélanges religieux, scientifiques, politiques et littéraires presented the transcript of a speech offered by Daniel O’Connell to his supporters at a banquet held in London’s Covent Garden Theatre at which he was the guest of honour the previous 12 March. In speaking of the accusations of conspiracy brought against him, he is quoted as saying, “Une dame anglaise, d’un grand renom littéraire, a fait le portrait d’un être imaginaire d’un volume extraordinaire et du caractère le plus féroce, et elle l’a baptisé du nom de Frankenstein; eh bien! La conspiration qui vient d’être jugée en Irlande est le Frankenstein de la loi. (Hilarité générale).” Mélanges religieux, scientifiques, politiques et littéraires 7, 51 (19 May 1844), 293. 13 The image is discussed at length in L. Curtis Perry, Apes and Angels, 37–9. See also W. Caleb McDaniel, “Repealing Unions: American Abolitionists, Irish Repeal, and the Origins of Garrisonian Disunionism,” Journal of the Early Republic 28, 2 (summer 2008): 243–69. 14 Georges Didi-Huberman, L’image survivante. Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2002). 15 Johanne Lamoureux, “Seeing through Art History: Showing Scars of Legibility,” in Donald Preziosi, In the Aftermath of Art: Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006): 131–54, 150. 16 The notion of the heterolingual has notably been explored by Rainer Grutman,

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Des langues qui résonnent: Hétérolinguisme au XIXe siècle québécois (Montreal: Fides, 1997) and more recently by Myriam Suchet, L’Imaginaire hétérolingue. Ce que nous apprennent les textes à la croisée des langues (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014). 17 The advertisement reads in full: “portrait painter in Crayons! W.F. Lock [sic], Studio, Saint François Xavier Street, between Notre Dame and Great Saint James Streets.” Of the five works by Frederick William Lock in the collection of Montreal’s McCord Museum, all donated by David Ross McCord, three are pastel portraits of John Samuel and Anne Ross McCord, dating from the years 1847–51; a landscape of Niagara (1856) and a portrait of Robert Phillip “Dolly” Isaacsen complete the set, showing Lock to have been active in Montreal between 1847 and 1862. The National Portrait Gallery in London also lists on its website a Frederick William Lock, active 1845–71. http://www.mccord-museum.qc.ca/scripts/search_results. php?Lang=2&artist=00165. 18 Montreal’s McCord Museum has a strong collection of Walker’s drawings and wood engravings (including original blocks) along with a memoir that was the subject of what remains a foundational study of mid-nineteenth-century engraving in Canada by Yves Chèvrefils, published in the Journal of Canadian Art History in 1985 (Yves Chèvrefils, “John Henry Walker [1831–1899], artisan-graveur,” Journal of Canadian Art History (Montreal) 8 (1985): 178–223). The bulk of Walker’s memoir is taken up by his anger and sorrow at the misfortunes that have befallen him despite his attempt to become the finest wood engraver in Canada. His work ranges from the comic images discussed here to engravings for Canada’s Geological Survey, which at mid-century was preparing the economic rationale for the viability of an autonomous Canadian state. Walker especially deplores the low quality of printing in Montreal, in comparison to Toronto, and avers that this deficiency is partly responsible for his inability to enjoy the levels of success for which he had hoped. Of course, also responsible is the development of photomechanical engraving, a time- and labour-saving process that was absolutely essential for a marketplace that craved a wide variety of quality illustrated material but that was not extensive enough to support the necessary workforce. Thus the Canadian Illustrated News in 1869, but also, thus the immediate popularity and dominance of the American illustrated press that expanded in the wake of the success of Harper’s Weekly, from 1850 on. Indeed, Walker, who returned to Montreal in 1850 to take on the illustrations for a new weekly, The Literary Garland, sees this, as so many other short-lived Canadian periodicals – Punch in Canada among them – fall by the wayside as Harper’s comes to establish the norm for excellence in illustration and is readily

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available, closely following its publication in the United States. See the entry for Thomas Blades de Walden (1811–1873), presented as actor and playwright on Lehigh University’s web resource, “The Vault at Pfaffs: An Archive of Art and Literature by the Bohemians of Antebellum New York,” http://pfaffs.web. lehigh.edu/node/54219. In the final issue of Punch in Canada, an advertisement records: “At a meeting of the Gentlemen Amateurs and supporters of the Drama in Toronto, it was unanimously resolved that a Testimonial should be presented to Mr De Walden, in consideration of the gratuitous services in assisting the Amateur Theatricals during the season.” The advertisement informs us that three new plays, apparently by De Walden, were to be performed at the association’s theatre on 19 April 1850. Punch in Canada 2, 13 (17 April 1850), 72. As to Thomas Blades de Walden’s aristocratic credentials, a Howard De Walden family is listed in G.W. Colleen, ed., Debrett’s Peerage of England, Scotland and Ireland, 1840, https://books. google.ca/books?id=DuwDAAAAQAAJ&dq=Debrett+Blades+de+Walden&hl=fr& source=gbs_navlinks_s. The entry for Charles Shanly in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography positions him for us: “He joined the Board of Public Works of Lower Canada as a clerk in 1840, serving under its chairman, [Hamilton Hartley] Killaly, and remained with the board after the union of Upper and Lower Canada. However, Shanly continued writing and became editor, in 1849, of a comic magazine, Punch in Canada, to which he contributed poetry, satirical articles, and cartoons, all unsigned. This periodical followed the government when it was transferred from Montreal to Toronto and was published weekly until its end in 1850.” Shanly enjoyed a reasonably well documented life in the annals of American theatre and journalism, notably as the author of patriotic verses published in Harper’s Weekly during the American Civil War; his best-known poem was Walker in the Snow. See Frank Norman Walker, “shanly, charles dawson,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 10 (University of Toronto / Université Laval, 2003–), accessed 16 May 2015, http:// www.biographi.ca/en/bio/shanly_charles_dawson_10E.html. John Ralston Saul, Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2010), 188. The first painting, dating probably from late 1834, was exhibited at the British Institution early in 1835 and is now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. See http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/103831.html. The second version, exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1835, was eventually acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art (http://www.clevelandart.

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org/art/1942.647). Turner’s preparatory watercolours can be consulted at London’s Tate Gallery (http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-burning-of-the-huses-ofparliament-d27881). The sketches have been recently discussed by Edward Eigen in “On the Record: J.M.W. Turner’s Studies for the Burning of the Houses of Parliament and Other Uncertain Bequests to History, Grey Room 31 (spring 2008): 68–89. http://www.mccord-museum.qc.ca/en/collection/artifacts/M10963. The London Illustrated News image entitled “The Burning of the House of Assembly at Montreal, 25 April 1849” can be consulted on the website of Library and Archives Canada, at http://collectionscanada.gc.ca/ pam_archives/index.php?fuseaction=genitem.displayEcopies&lang=eng&rec_ nbr=2952697&title=Burning+of+the+Houses+of+Assembly%2C+at+Montreal.+&e copy=e011080201-v8. For a biography of J.M. Ferres, see Lorne Ste Croix, “ferres, james moir,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 9 (University of Toronto / Université Laval, 2003–), accessed 23 May, 2015, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/ferres_james_ moir_9E.html. The transcript of the Montreal Gazette’s incendiary editorial, composed by its editor, can be read online at http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/ The_Disgrace_of_Great_Britain_accomplished! See the discussion of the 1811 caricature of Pierre-Amable de Bonne in Dominic Hardy, “‘En voilà encore de bonnes!’: Caricature and Graphic Satire in Quebec, 1792–1811,” Yale French Studies 131 (June 2017): 21–45.

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Uncle Sam, a Not-So-Distant Cousin: Canadian Contributions to the Genesis of a US Allegorical Figure CHRISTIAN VACHON Translated from the French by Ersy Contogouris

Historians often credit Thomas Nast (1840–1902) with the development, during the 1870s, of the figure of “Uncle Sam.” This is what Ruth Miller and Donald Dewey, for instance, have argued in their essays on the national personification of the United States and on US political caricature respectively.1 However, certain caricatures at the McCord Museum in Montreal reveal a significant Canadian input into the genesis of this figure. Uncle Sam was created two hundred years ago and remains to this day the quintessential caricatural symbol of the United States. In this chapter I trace the significant contribution of Canadian caricaturists to the collective circulation of iconographic signs that relate to this emblematic figure. I examine the graphic evolution of Uncle Sam from birth to maturity, using images published between 1834 and 1877. These were chosen from among the key caricatures that American scholars such as Winifred Morgan, Stephen Hess, and Sandy Northrop identified in their studies of the character’s historiography,2 and from among the illustrations I found that were produced during this period in which the term “Uncle Sam” appeared in the title or caption, or in the text within the

image.3 I discuss here the origins of the figure, contextualize its evolution, define its archetypal representation, and identify the contribution of two Canadian artists to the development of the international graphic conventions that characterized Uncle Sam in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Identity Formation Caricature entered the mainstream with the development of an affordable independent press at the time of the French Revolution.4 Since its inception, the language of caricature has relied on graphic symbols, for these can more easily reach readers whose literacy is limited. If the viewer is to rapidly grasp the meaning of a drawing, the caricaturist needs to use elements that are immediately identifiable: symbols, codes, facial features, and, if necessary, some text. Since caricature renders visible a thought or concept, it can be considered close to allegory. A national allegorical figure anthropomorphizes a nation in order to represent it in the guise of a person. This is a technique that caricature and propaganda in particular have favoured. The first known Western allegorical figures, such as Britannia, were modelled on representations of warrior goddesses. In the eighteenth century, America was represented by British artists first as a Native woman (Fig. 3.1), and then as a classical figure, which would eventually become Columbia. This image, which American artists subsequently adopted, associates the young US republic with Athena and with the beginnings of Roman civilization.5 As Todd Porterfield has argued in “James Gillray, le mariage et le fonctionnement de la caricature,” caricature contributes, just as history painting does, to the wider process of identity formation.6 The United States developed different characters, each of which represented a different aspect of their search for identity – a plurality that can be explained by Americans’ difficulty in defining themselves as a nation over the course of their tumultuous history. In the case of Uncle Sam, the principal precursors were Yankee Doodle and Brother Jonathan. “Yankee Doodle” was originally sung by British troops to mock the colonial “Yankees” during the Seven Years’ War, “doodle” meaning “idiot” or “buffoon.” The Americans then adapted the song, and it became patriotic.7 The term “Yankee” can mean both an inhabitant of New England and an American

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3.1 [N.s.], “America in Flames,” Town and Country Magazine, 1 December 1774, 659. McCord Museum, Montreal, m7108

3.2 Frank Bellew, “Brother Jonathan Suited Exactly.” Diogenes, Hys Lantern, 23 October 1852, vol. 2, no. 42, p. 173. Caption: Star Dealer: “Allow me to recommend this Vest, Sir; it will suit your figure exactly.” Jonathan: “Wall, I guess I’ll try it on, for the present, but tother’s the garment, I calc’late, would fit me best of all!” Private collection

citizen in general. The character Yankee Doodle remained essentially a figure of comedy, and the stage and did not develop a distinct personality or imagery in the way that Brother Jonathan did. In fact, in the few images I was able to find of Yankee Doodle, he is sometimes represented with the attributes of Brother Jonathan. As part of this on-going search for patriotic and national imagery, the character of Brother Jonathan built upon the colonial figure of Yankee Doodle. Jonathan represented Everyman, and, like Yankee Doodle, was created by British loyalists to mock those who supported the American cause. Initially, he symbolized both the egalitarian spirit and American pride in success. He then came to represent an oppositional stance to some of the government’s economic and social policies.8 In a lithograph published in the 1830s by James Akin,9 Jonathan wears the characteristic striped trousers of the sans-culottes, the lower-class supporters of the French Revolution, thus visually affirming the United States’ revolutionary origins. This iconographic sign would be retained for representations of Uncle Sam. Brother Jonathan’s outfit evolved, and by the 1850s, he was dressed almost entirely in the costume that later came to characterize Uncle Sam (Fig. 3.2).10 By the following decade, however, Brother Jonathan had become old-fashioned; he had lost his casual humour and, most of all, his relevance. He was an individualist, and thus became obsolete in the context of the Civil War, when national necessities held sway over entrepreneurship.11 Brother Jonathan progressively disappeared, but not without handing over his physical and sartorial attributes to his successor.

Chronology of Uncle Sam One explanation for the origin of the name “Uncle Sam”12 is linked to a meat packer from Troy, New York, named Samuel Wilson. During the War of 1812, Wilson received a contract to supply the army with beef. He dispatched the salted meat in barrels, and as these were government property, they were marked with the letters “US.” Soldiers would joke that these referred to Wilson, whom they affectionately called “Uncle Sam.” It is purportedly from there that widespread use of this nickname to designate the United States originated.13 In 1961 Congress adopted a resolution that officially recognized this story as the origin of this American national symbol,14 and in 1989 President George Bush declared 13 September (Wilson’s birthday) as “Uncle Sam Day.”15

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3.3. Thomas Nast, “‘Nay, patience, or we break the sinews’ – Shakspeare [sic]. U.S. “Our Artist must keep cool, and sit down, and see how it works.’” Harper’s Weekly, vol. 21, no. 1062 (5 May 1877) , front page. Private collection

Uncle Sam began to appear in caricature as a personification of the United States at the beginning of the 1830s. His features were not modelled on Samuel Wilson’s. He underwent a number of metamorphoses, and by the 1860s the illustrated press seemed to have reached a consensus as to his appearance: he wore the visibly out-of-fashion hat, frock coat, and striped trousers with which we associate him today. He had inherited the outfit from previous male allegorical figures; and in fact, Uncle Sam and Brother Jonathan had been represented interchangeably in the United States until the Civil War, and in England and Canada this practice persisted until approximately the end of the nineteenth century. Thomas Nast, one of the most eminent political cartoonists in the United States in the nineteenth century, is credited with truly crystallizing, in the 1870s, the figure of Uncle Sam.16 Nast, who was born in Germany, had such a hold on this character that he even represented himself

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3.4 James Montgomery Flagg, “I want you for U.S. Army – Nearest recruiting station.” 1917. Library of Congress, POS–US.F63, no. 9

in his company (Fig. 3.3). Nast published with Harper’s Weekly, a New York political journal, from 1859 to 1860 and again from 1862 to 1886.17 The journal’s print run reached 160,000 at the beginning of the 1870s,18 and Nast’s caricatures of Uncle Sam, which occasionally appeared on the front page, thus gained a wide viewership.19 It was James Montgomery Flagg (1877–1960) who in the twentieth century produced the most famous and iconic representation of Uncle Sam. “I Want You” was initially published on the cover of Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly Newspaper in 1917,20 and then reused for a military recruitment poster (Fig. 3.4), of which more than four million copies were printed and distributed during the First World War.21 This image is generally considered the definitive, archetypal modern representation of Uncle Sam, whose golden age can be placed between 1875 and 1925. Although Uncle Sam remained very present in the international

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illustrated press, as the century advanced he came to represent a more burlesque facet of American folklore.

Physical and Sartorial Attributes Two caricatures in particular bring together the main physical and sartorial attributes that constitute the archetype of Uncle Sam. The first, by Henri Julien (1852–1908), was published in the Canadian Illustrated News in December 1877, and the second, by Thomas Nast, in Harper’s Weekly one week after Julien’s (Figs. 3.5 and 3.6). These two illustrations mark the end of our period of study: they show the finished version of Uncle Sam, the one these two artists would retain in their drawings. The caricatures of Julien and Nast depict Uncle Sam in very similar ways. A white man, aged and tall, with long white hair and a goatee, he wears a curved top hat, a tailcoat, a traditional waistcoat, stirrup pants, and pointy boots. Apart from the striped trousers, the outfit is characteristic of 1830s men’s fashion. The tie, though, is from a different era. Nast’s Uncle Sam wears the very popular horizontal, starched, and asymmetrical tie worn by Brother Jonathan in the 1850s; and Julien’s, the four-in-hand knotted tie that was in fashion at the time the caricature was produced. By the turn of the century, Uncle Sam would most often be shown wearing a bow tie. The development of the figure of Uncle Sam cannot be attributed to a single caricaturist and seems rather to have happened collectively. Many artists began to share these graphic conventions during the 1870s, among them, Joseph Ferdinand Keppler (1838–1894) and Frank Leslie (1821–1880) in the United States, James G. Mackay (1847–1885) in Canada, and John Tenniel (1820–1914) in Britain. Draughtsmen working at the British satirical journal Punch contributed to the evolution of the modern representation of Uncle Sam by popularizing the image of a thin gentleman sporting a goatee, top hat, and striped trousers.22 But it was also during those years that satirical drawing took root in Canada as a common artistic, social, and political practice,23 and a study of Canadian caricatures in the McCord Museum reveals a significant Canadian contribution to the development of the figure of Uncle Sam through the introduction of six visual markers, specifically in the works of two Montreal caricaturists.

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3.5 Detail from Henri Julien, “The Fisheries Award” (see Fig. 3.11, [below]). McCord Museum, Montreal, m982.530.5359 3.6 Detail from Thomas Nast, “C.O.D.” (see Fig. 3.12 [below]) Private collection

John Henry Walker (1831–1899) was an illustrator, wood engraver, and caricaturist, and the first Canadian artist to regularly publish caricatures that commented on political events.24 In 1849 he published the first known drawing in the history of the illustrated press worldwide to use the term “Uncle Sam” in the drawing itself to designate the personification of the United States (first marker; see Fig. 3.7). To my knowledge, this caricature is also the first time that Uncle Sam sports a goatee (second marker) and wears a top hat (third marker). About twenty years later, Walker showed Uncle Sam wearing a starry jacket, another innovation for which I could find no precedent elsewhere (fourth marker; see Fig. 3.8).

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Henri Julien, who published drawings in two Montreal weeklies,25 invariably drew stars on Uncle Sam’s jacket or waistcoat after 1875 (fifth marker; see Fig. 3.9). Then in 1876, he added a fob pocket ornament (sixth marker; see Fig. 3.10), a graphic sign that Nast adopted the very next year, and which became standard in representations of Uncle Sam until the twentieth century.

A Brief History of the Iconographic Origins of Uncle Sam In the United States, before illustrated journals appeared in the 1840s, lithographs were used to distribute images on a large scale. The very first caricature that represented Uncle Sam and named him as such was published as a lithograph in 1834.26 In the centre of the image, Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States, is shown bloodletting an allegorical figure that symbolizes the Federal Reserve, the country’s central banking institution of the moment. Unlike his alter egos Yankee Doodle and Brother Jonathan, Uncle Sam personifies the US government, or more specifically, its manifestation. Here, Uncle Sam wears a bonnet and does not at all resemble his modern incarnation. The only thing they have in common is the American flag on his outfit.27 Three years later the lithograph “Uncle Sam Sick with la Grippe” was published in response to Jackson’s veto of the creation of a central bank.28 Uncle Sam looks similar to the way he did in the previous caricature, except that he has long hair and his cap is inscribed Liberty. Brother Jonathan is also represented in this print; we see him through the window, wearing the characteristic outfit that would become Uncle Sam’s: top hat, tailcoat, and striped pants. The lithograph “Uncle Sam and His Servants,” published in 1844,29 also depicts a barely recognizable Uncle Sam, this time as an old man with long hair, wearing short trousers and a wide-brimmed straw hat. This caricature, which ridicules President John Tyler’s attempt to secure a second term in office, was borrowed by overseas satirical journals. The British caricaturist John Leech gave these features to his Uncle Sam, whom he infantilized by naming Yankee-Noodle, in a caricature published in Punch in 1846.30 The following year Leech’s colleague Richard Doyle published a caricature featuring a similar character with a long face and long hair, and named him Brother Jonathan.31 Jonathan smokes a cigar and bears a striking resemblance to the Uncle Sam in Leech’s lithograph with his elongated face and

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slightly Roman nose. This similarity in their physiognomies suggests an agreement between the caricaturists regarding the development of international graphic conventions.

John Henry Walker and the Canadian Affiliation The Canadian contribution to this development began in Montreal in 1849 with the launch of Punch in Canada (1849–50), the Canadian version of the British Punch (1841–2000). Like Punch, it was a weekly illustrated satirical publication that mocked politicians.32 Our three first markers can be found in a caricature that appeared in the 20 October 1849 issue (Fig. 3.7). It is an attack on the political leanings of Benjamin Holmes, one of the representatives of Montreal in the parliament of the Province of Canada, who had declared himself in favour of annexation to the United States. John Henry Walker represents Holmes trying to pawn the British flag to Uncle Sam. This entirely innovative personification of the American government foreshadows the “Lincolnian” Uncle Sam that was developed during the Civil War.33 While Walker’s Uncle Sam sports the hair, facial features, and cigarillo that the Punch caricaturists had popularized, this was the first time in the history of press cartooning that the US government itself was identified as “uncle sam” in the image and personified by a bearded man wearing a top hat. The hat is undoubtedly an attribute borrowed from Brother Jonathan. The American caricaturist Frank Bellew would use the same top hat at the beginning of the 1850s. The goatee was characteristic of men’s fashion at the time. Nevertheless, it would take about twelve years for it to appear in the drawings of American caricaturists, and about twenty to become generalized in the illustrated press. Visual satire underwent a great surge of artistic maturation in the United States during the Civil War (1861–65). Political caricature became increasingly sophisticated and gained popularity, as it portrayed this harrowing episode of US history in a light that was at once humorous, tragic, and disquieting. In 1861 an anonymous caricature published in The Phunny Phellow34 showed Uncle Sam caging the rats that had tried to destabilize the union at Fort Lafayette. It depicts Uncle Sam wearing Brother Jonathan’s out-of-date clothes, and it is the first time that we see Uncle Sam with a goatee in the American press.35 Shortly after the Confederation of Canada in 1867, two satirical journals

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3.7 John Henry Walker, “Little Ben Holmes and some naughty children attempt to pawn their mother’s pocket-handkerchief, but are arrested by policeman Punch, who was stationed ‘round the corner.’” 1849, wood engraving. McCord Museum, Montreal, M930.51.1.30. Artist’s proof of a caricature published in Punch in Canada, vol. 1, no. 20 (20 October 1849), 155

3.8 John Henry Walker, [“Uncle Sam Kicked Out!”]. 1849, wood engraving. McCord Museum, Montreal, M930.50.6.7. Artist’s proof of a caricature published in Grinchuckle, vol. 1, no. 1 (23 September 1869), 5

illustrated with wood engravings began to appear in Montreal, Diogenes and Grinchuckle. Diogenes, a literary journal, was fundamentally Canadian, and its humour was tinged with patriotism.36 In 1869 it published a caricature signed by “E.N.” featuring three particularly successful national personifications: Britannia, Miss Canada, and Cousin Jonathan.37 The way in which Jonathan is depicted in this instance is markedly close to the Uncle Sam archetype: he does not wear stirrup pants, but his waistcoat is decorated with stars. In fact, between 1860 and 1870, the star motif was much more frequently seen in Canadian representations of Brother Jonathan and Uncle Sam than in American caricatures. As a graphic sign representing the United States, the Stars and Stripes seems to have been used to a greater extent for a foreign viewership at that time in order to mark the American identity of the figure. Grinchuckle was a short-lived weekly journal founded in 1869 to compete with Diogenes.38 It also called on John Henry Walker for illustrations. In its first issue, it published a caricature by Walker that features our fourth marker, the starry jacket (Fig. 3.8). “Uncle Sam Kicked Out” depicts three national personifications: John Bull, Young Canada, and Uncle Sam. On the Canadian side of the border, Uncle Sam was generally drawn to look elderly and unpleasant. Walker here shows that the United States is not welcome in the young Dominion of Canada. In order to ensure that viewers correctly identify this latter symbol, he has inscribed the words “young canada” on the younger man’s arrowed sash. Uncle Sam wears a starry coat and striped trousers that explicitly bring to mind the Star-Spangled Banner. This is the first time that the starry pattern appears on Uncle Sam’s frock coat.

Thomas Nast and Henri Julien Thomas Nast’s first illustration of Uncle Sam was published two months later, on 20 November 1869, in Harper’s Weekly.39 We see Uncle Sam carving the Thanksgiving turkey at a table around which sit his guests, US citizens from different ethnic backgrounds. The caricature is in support of the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which guaranteed every citizen the irrevocable right to vote, regardless of race. Uncle Sam, hatless and not really different from the model previously popularized by American caricaturists, is barely visible in the background. Nast represented Uncle Sam again three

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3.9 Henri Julien, “On the Strike.” Canadian Illustrated News, 3 April 1875. McCord Museum, Montreal, M992x.5.74. Caption: “Yankee Pedlar: Strike away, boys! Guess I’ll take the opportunity to sell Canada all she wants for a year to come and when you go back to work, I reckon there’ll be nothing for you to do!”

years later in a caricature relating to the 1872 presidential campaign.40 This time, Sam displays the self-confidence that would become characteristic in Nast’s representations of him. He holds a cigarillo, in imitation of Republican candidate Ulysses S. Grant, which brings to mind Walker’s smoking Uncle Sam, drawn twenty-three years earlier. Nast would later remain generally faithful to this virile and inflexible attitude in his figure. Henri Julien first represented Uncle Sam in 1875 in the Canadian Illustrated News (Fig. 3.9). For this caricature he named him Yankee Pedlar, but we can easily recognize him in spite of his slightly grotesque demeanour. He is represented as a hawker who is looking to profit from the strikes in Canadian factories by selling objects made in the United States. The only thing missing from the characteristic outfit is a tie, which Julien added the second time he depicted the character. Julien kept modifying his Uncle Sam until 1877, when he settled on his final version. The waistcoat is decorated with white stars and is similar to the

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3.10 Henri Julien, “Line 45; or our Wall of China.” Canadian Illustrated News, 12 February, 1876. McCord Museum, Montreal, M982.530.5307

one that Cousin Jonathan wore in the caricature published in Diogenes and described above. This reference to the American flag recurs also in Julien’s works. Julien used the star motif (our fifth marker) systematically in the seven representations of Uncle Sam that he published in the Canadian Illustrated News between 1875 and 1877, first on the waistcoat and then on the frock coat, as Walker had done in 1869. During the second half of the nineteenth century, this motif can be found on different areas of the character’s outfit, whereas in British and American caricatures during the Civil War it had only been represented on Uncle Sam’s waistcoat. In Canada, the coat was starry from the first post-Confederation moment. At the turn of the century, a consensus appeared and the pattern appeared on Uncle Sam’s hat. After Julien, the illustrators J.S. Mackay from the Canadian Illustrated News, and J.F. Keppler and John S. Pughe from the magazine Puck41 also adopted the starry coat. It was only in 1877 that Nast first drew Uncle Sam with a starry frock coat, and this was to be the last time.42 Julien’s depiction of Uncle Sam changed rapidly. In a caricature published in February 1876 (Fig. 3.10) we see a more credible face and the presence of a

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3.11 Henri Julien, “The Fisheries Award,” Canadian Illustrated News, 8 December 1877. McCord Museum, Montreal, M982.530.5359. Caption: “Johnny Canuck comes up smiling with receipt drawn up, and held behind his back. Brother Jonathan looks rather awry, but makes up his mind to pay, considering that, after all, it’s only so much British money left over the Geneva Award.”

fob, the last of our significant markers. Between 1740 and 1840, the fob ribbon had a pocket watch attached to it. By extension, the term “fob” then came to mean any ornament, such as a seal or keys, attached to the ribbon that was worn only with trousers. It is possible that Julien, wanting Uncle Sam to look more authentic, decided to complete his outfit by adding a detail from his period. The fob started to appear in Nast’s representations of Uncle Sam at the beginning of the following year (see Fig. 3.3) and became a conventional attribute that we find in the works of many other illustrators. Is it possible that there was a link between Nast’s work and Julien’s? After all, the initial print run of the Canadian Illustrated News was about ten thousand, and six thousand copies were sent to potential subscribers free of charge.43 What’s more, after the launch, the publisher was sending free sample editions to American newspapers.44 Another analogy between the two caricatures discussed here supports this hypothesis. In the context of national policy and of the adoption of protective trade measures, the Fisheries Commission met in Halifax on 23 November 1877, and decided to grant Canada a compensation of 5.5 million dollars.45 This

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3.12 Thomas Nast, “C.O.D.,” Harper’s Weekly, 15 December 1877, vol. 21, no. 1094, front page. Private collection. Caption: U.S. “This is hard, after being so Economical of late.” The Fishery Commission gave their decision against the United States for $5,500,000.

diplomatic victory over the United States led to a caricature by Julien in which Uncle Sam met Johnny Canuck, another personification of Canada (Fig. 3.11), who wears a strange woolly hat that I have been unable to identify. One week later, Nast also commented on the Fisheries Commission’s decision in a caricature featuring Uncle Sam, John Bull, and a Canadian fisherman wearing a hat that is almost identical to Johnny Canuck’s in the Julien illustration (Fig. 3.12). National self-representation is paradoxically a process that occurs not in isolation, but rather with full knowledge of, against, and through cultural exchange and iconographical transfer on a wider scale. This case study exemplifies the way in which images cross borders. The journals for which Walker and Julien worked did not go unnoticed in the United States, as can be ascertained by the many favourable reviews that were published at the time.46 A more extensive analysis of the international circulation of nineteenth-century illustrated and satirical journals would further our understanding of the networks of artistic influences and conventions. If Nast’s caricatures in New York and those of the Punch illustrators in London contributed, through their circulation, to the satirical imaginary of Canadian caricaturists such as John Wilson Bengough (1851–1923),47 could the same not be said of Walker’s and Julien’s caricatures abroad? The present state of research does not yet allow us to go much beyond conjecture, but the issue warrants further study, particularly since it reconsiders the foundations of the most important symbol of American national identity.

NOTES 1 Ruth Miller, “Stuck or Star-Struck with Uncle Sam? Reevaluating Relations Between the U.S. and Its National Personification,” Americana 8 (2010), 19; Donald Dewey, The Art of Ill Will: The Story of American Political Cartoons (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 16. 2 Winifred Morgan, An American Icon: Brother Jonathan and American Identity (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988); Stephen Hess and Sandy Northrop, Drawn and Quartered: The History of American Political Cartoons (Montgomery, al: Elliot & Clark Publishing, 1996). 3 I identified these images using several online resources, among which: American Periodicals, Artefacts Canada, Canadian Illustrated News: 1869–1883 (Library and Archives Canada), the Digital Collection of the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Harpweek, Library of Congress, Notre mémoire en ligne (Canadiana),

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Punch magazine volumes online (Google), and the Smithsonian Collections. See the exhibition catalogue French Caricature and the French Revolution, 1789–1799 (Los Angeles: Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, University of California, 1988). Morgan, American Icon, 28. Todd Porterfield, “James Gillray, le mariage et le fonctionnement de la caricature,” in Ségolène Le Men, ed., L’art de la caricature (Paris: Presses universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2011), 191. Library of Congress, Yankee Doodle, Historical Period: The American Revolution, 1763–1783, http://www.loc.gov/teachers/lyrical/songs/yankee_doodle.html (accessed 22 October 2013). Morgan, American Icon, 21. James Akin, A Kean* Shave between “John Bull and Brother Jonathan,” Philadelphia, c. 1835–36. Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Bb 612 K193. I am referring to the caricatures by Frank Henry Temple Bellew (1828–1888), who was an American artist, illustrator, and caricaturist. He is considered the creator of the first personification of Uncle Sam – although he called his character Brother Jonathan – in a caricature published in 1852 in the New York Lantern. See Frank Bellew, “Collins and Cunard. Raising the wind; or both sides of the story,” The Lantern 1, 97 (13 March 1852). Library of Congress, Illus. in AP101.L28 [Rare Book RR]. Morgan, American Icon, 36. The name “Uncle Sam” can be found in a 1775 patriotic version of the song “Yankee Doodle,” at the thirteenth stanza. However, it is unclear whether it refers to a metaphor for the United States or to a person named Sam. See Mark Aldrich, A Catalog of Folk Song Settings for Wind Band (Galesville: Meredith Music Publications, 2004), 33, 59. Dewey, Art of Ill Will, 18. Senate joint resolution number 14: Uncle Sam. 87th Congress, 15 September 1961. Proclamation 6016: Uncle Sam Day. 5 September 1989. This statement is repeated in general publications such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/614065/Uncle-Sam (accessed 20 October 2013). Another encyclopaedia describes Nast as one the most famous illustrators to employ the image and credits him with adding the characteristic goatee. Nicholas John Cull et al., Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500 to the Present (Santa Barbara: abc-clio, 2003), 403.

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17 Two biographies of Thomas Nast are particularly interesting. Written by A.B. Paine upon Nast’s request, the first recounts principally Nast’s youth from a series of interviews that took place between the two men at the turn of the century. Albert Bigelow Paine, Th. Nast His Period and His Pictures (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1904). The second examines Nast’s work in the context of the Gilded Age, which corresponds to the years of prosperity that followed the end of the Civil War, between 1865 and 1901. This period was marked by intense competition between the Republican Party, which Nast and Harper’s Weekly supported, and the Democratic Party. Fiona Deans Halloran, Thomas Nast: The Father of Modern Political Cartoons (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 18 Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1850–1865 (Cambridge, ma: Belknap Press, 1967), 476. 19 I have identified 804 caricatures by Nast published between 1869 and 1877, the last year of the present study. Thirty of them – seven of which are on covers – feature Uncle Sam. 20 Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly Newspaper 124 (15 February 1917), 3206, cover page. Founded in 1855 under the name Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Leslie’s Weekly was a literary and information magazine that offered illustrated reportages. 21 Susan E. Meyer, James Montgomery Flagg (New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1974), 37. 22 Library of Congress, John Bull and Uncle Sam: Four Centuries of British-American Relations, http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/british/britintr.html (accessed 25 October 2013). 23 See the first three chapters of the only history of Canadian modern caricature published to date, Terry Mosher and Peter Desbarats, The Hecklers: A History of Canadian Political Cartooning and a Cartoonists’ History of Canada (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1979). 24 See Yves Chèvrefils, “John Henry Walker (1831–1899), artisan-graveur montréalais: la montée et la chute du premier médium moderne d’illustration: la gravure sur bois de reproduction,” Master’s thesis, Université du Québec à Montréal, 1985. 25 See Dominic L. Hardy, “Drawn to Order: Henri Julien’s Political Cartoons of 1899 and His Career with Hugh Graham’s Montreal Daily Star, 1888–1908,” Master’s thesis, Trent University, 1998. 26 Thomas W. Whitley, Uncle Sam in Danger, New York, 1834, National Museum of American History, DL*60.3429. 27 The design of the American flag, or the Star-Spangled Banner, goes back to the 1777

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Flag Act, modified in 1794, and then again in 1818, according to which the thirteen foundational colonies were to be represented by alternating horizontal red and white stripes, and the members of the Union as stars on a blue background. See Boleslaw Mastai and Marie-Louise d’Otrange Mastai, The Stars and the Stripes: The American Flag as Art and as History from the Birth of the Republic to the Present (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973). Edward Williams Clay, “Uncle Sam Sick with la Grippe,” New York, printed and published by H.R. Robinson, 1837. Library of Congress, PC/US-1837.C619, no. 7. H. Bucholzer, “Uncle Sam and His Servants,” New York, published by James Baillie, 1844. Library of Congress, PC/US-1844.B157, no. 19. John Leech, “What! You young Yankee-Noodle, strike your own Father!” Punch, or the London Charivari 10 (19 March 1846), 119. Richard Doyle, “The Land of Liberty. Recommended to the Consideration of Brother Jonathan,” Punch, or the London Charivari 13 (4 December 1847), 215. André Beaulieu and Jean Hamelin, La presse québécoise des origines à nos jours, vol. 1: 1764–1859 (Sainte-Foy: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1973), 163–4. Stephen Ness and Sandy Northrop have noted a correlation between Abraham Lincoln’s facial hair and the goatee that appears on Uncle Sam’s face at the beginning of the 1860s. See Hess and Northrop, Drawn and Quartered, 30. Monthly satirical publication sympathizing with the Republicans, published in New York from 1859 to 1876. Anonymous, “Uncle Sam caging the rats who would undermine the Union,” Phunny Phellow 3 (November 1861), 1 (front page). Beaulieu and Hamelin, La presse québécoise, vol. 2, 120. E.N., “A Pertinent Question,” Diogenes (18 June 1869), 2, 6, 45. This caricature was reprinted by the publisher J.W. Bengough in his history of Canadian caricature and politics. John Wilson Bengough, A Caricature History of Canadian Politics: Events from the Union of 1841, as Illustrated by Cartoons from “Grip” and Various Other Sources, vol. 1 (Toronto: The Grip Printing and Publishing Co., 1886), 101. McCord Museum, Montreal, M994X.5.273.42. Beaulieu and Hamelin, La presse québécoise 2, 133. Thomas Nast, “Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner,” Harper’s Weekly 13 (20 November 1869), 745. Thomas Nast, “Carl Is Disgusted with American Politics,” Harper’s Weekly 16 (24 August 1872), 817 (front page). Puck was a satirical weekly founded by J.F. Keppler in St Louis and published between 1871 and 1918.

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42 Thomas Nast, “Extra Session of Congress Soon,” Harper’s Weekly 21, 1062 (5 May 1877), 356. 43 Peter Desbarats, ed., Canadian Illustrated News: A Commemorative Portfolio (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1970), 4. 44 The Daily Picayune (22 December 1872), 1: “We have received from the publisher, George E. Desbarats, Montreal, Canada, a copy of the Canadian Illustrated News, now in its sixth volume.” 45 British and Foreign State Papers. 1877–1878, vol. 69 (London: William Ridgway, 1885), 1218–26. 46 Regarding the second issue of the Canadian Punch, for instance, a correspondent for the New York weekly The Albion wrote, “I assure you that Punch in Canada does no discredit to the honoured name which it has somewhat boldly assumed.” The Albion, A Journal of News, Politics and Literature (17 February 1849), 80. 47 Bengough was the editor of the weekly satirical journal Grip (1873–94), based on the Punch model, and to which he also contributed editorial cartoons.

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Reading Allegorical “Miss Canada” in Graphic Satire ROByN FOWLER

“The future of Canada, I believe, depends very largely upon the cultivation of a national spirit.” Edward Blake (October 1874)1

Following Canada’s Confederation in 1867, a new figure, “Miss Canada,” began to appear in newspapers, magazines, and other print media. Seen mainly as graphic satire in political cartoons, Miss Canada also appears in illustrations where satire is not in play; but regardless of the context or treatment, Miss Canada is always recognizable in her dual role as the daughter of Britannia2 (who often appears with her) and the paragon of the new nation. Her accoutrements included such symbolic objects as a crown of maple leaves, a maple leaf on her belt or hemline or shield, and a beaver at her feet (the maple leaf and beaver were associated with Canada from early post-Confederation days). She might also be found with such figures as “Liberty” or “Miss Columbia,” which denoted the United States. Miss Canada could appear in classical attire, reminiscent of allegorical figures such as Athena and Nike, or abstract ideals such as Justice or Truth. However, one could just as readily see Miss Canada in contemporary dress. As she came to stand for the ideals and values of the dominion,

she became identifiable to viewers of cartoons and illustrations through her various costumes and attributes. To address the ideological work that Miss Canada performed, I target critical historical moments figured in graphic satire, specifically the Washington Treaty of 1871, the Pacific Scandal of 1873, and the Northwest Rebellion of 1885. At these moments, Miss Canada stands in straightforwardly for the nation, masking flash points of crisis, naturalizing historical functions of the nationstate, and dodging the very constructedness of her own allegorical identity. Before I embark on this reading, however, we need to contextualize Miss Canada as a national image and to ask why graphic satire is a propitious site for her political use. Post-confederation Canada was decidedly a dominion in the British Empire, with no control over international affairs. However, the word “nation” begins to appear early in the post-Confederation period, not to supplant the term “dominion” and the treasured ties to Britain – ties largely unquestioned among anglophone Canadians – but to represent a concept of autonomy that was beginning to form in the public consciousness.3 In patriotic poems and in prose extolling Canada’s potential, the word “nation” captures the sense of a growing imagined community, to use Benedict Anderson’s familiar expression.4 According to Anderson, the periodical press was in large part responsible for building imagined community: that simultaneous, shared consumption drawing people together in an entity called nation.5 Along the same lines, Jonathan Kertzer argues that “the state usually came first and a nationalist ideology had to be fostered by educated elites who instructed the ‘folk’ from whom they allegedly drew inspiration.”6 Although nations are “supposed to grow organically, without contrivance,”7 Kertzer continues, they are highly constructed conceptual frameworks. One of the reasons why an allegorical image is so important to national imagining is that it, too, is a contrivance, proclaiming at once its nature and its artifice. In masquerading as nature, allegory performs its important work: imbuing a figure with mythic power. While “nation” is an ideal that can be represented in myths and allegories, working with the state, it often perpetuates a concept of homogenous, hegemonic culture. Miss Canada was constructed to represent the nation as a material, historical, geographically and linguistically bounded, and ethnic entity – an ideal that was blind to linguistic and cultural differences present most obviously in Quebec and among the First Nations. In Canada, the nation was being

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imagined long before it could be officially recognized as such. It is generally understood that, in a de facto sense, this happened after the First World War, and in a de jure sense, it followed the Balfour Declaration of 1926 and, most especially, the Statute of Westminster in 1931, which conferred to Canada control over international affairs. However, the state infrastructure began developing long before any official recognition of autonomy. Images of Miss Canada enter the contested ground where Canada was a dominion, but with trappings of domestic statehood and dreams of national identity. This ground was contested because, to many, national identity meant relinquishing dominion status within the British Empire.8 For others, nation and dominion were compatible conditions, which is why we often see the terms used simultaneously. Cartoon images and illustrations used in advertisements have at best a dubious hold on “culture” as the nineteenth-century audience might have understood the term. Calling Miss Canada a “cultural” image may indeed be a retrospective effort to come to grips with her influence and charm. However, she evidently had a wide and popular appeal, since a number of artists relied on her image, and generations of cartoonists, from the late 1860s until well into the twentieth century, represented her. J.W. Bengough (whose work is considered here), his brother, William Bengough, A.G. Racey, Henri Julien, F.J. Willson, Alonzo Ryan, J.M. Groner, and J.G. Mackay constitute a short list of these cartoon artists. Newspapers and magazines where Miss Canada appeared were largely urban, Liberal or Conservative, anglophone,9 middle class, and mainly (though not exclusively) located in Ontario and Quebec. Toronto’s Grip (1873–94), The Globe (1844–1936, later the Globe and Mail), and Saturday Night (1887–2005), and Montreal’s Star (1869–1979), Canadian Illustrated News (1869–83), Gazette (1778–) and Herald (1811–1957) all at various times published images of Miss Canada in graphic satire. These publications were intent upon edifying the reading and viewing public, as Paul Rutherford in his work on early Canadian newspapers10 and Ramsay Cook in his book The Regenerators: Social Criticism in Late-Victorian English Canada,11 both make clear. Whether in the context of graphic satire or of straightforward illustration, Miss Canada reproduces middle-class values of honesty, moral and sexual purity, and domestic stability within these publications. She projects a tone of moral didacticism befitting her calling as the nation’s ideal. Given her popularity, familiarity, and broad middle-class appeal, Miss Canada may be described as hegemonic.12

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4.1 John Wilson Bengough, “Whither Are We Drifting?” Grip, 16 August 1873. A Caricature History of Canadian Politics, 71.

She is endowed with authority and cachet. The mildly to moderately satirical political cartoons in which she appears are not deeply subversive.13 They regale, cajole, and grumble but do not attempt to derail political stability.14 So Miss Canada evolves in graphic satire in very particular ways. The scenes in which she has a role are unabashedly partisan. For example, in the magazine Grip, editor and chief artist J.W. Bengough made no secret of his Liberal Reformist position, and his derision of the Conservative government under Sir John A. Macdonald was legendary. His satire is most pointed when Macdonald is the target. However, even highly satirical cartoons such as Bengough’s “Whither Are We Drifting” (Fig. 4.1)15 fail to unseat the moral exemplarity and stability that typically characterize Miss Canada. The political message of the image of Miss Canada is aligned and inflected to suit a hegemonic ideology of nation, requiring a particularly safe, congenial rendering.16 She is an allegorical figure rather than a symbolic one, in part because she exists in temporal relation to historical antecedents such as Britannia in England, Marianne, Liberté, and La République in France, and her cousin Liberty or Columbia in the United States.17 Meaning can be ascribed to an allegorical figure, but it is neither a fixed nor a transcendent meaning; nor is it inherent: allegory needs to be “filled up” with each citation. Allegory can assign meaning according to the allegorist, the context, and the viewer.18 While Miss Canada assumes a historical connection to other allegories and belongs to a certain period of Canada’s development, she is at the same time acutely ahistorical in that her image often elides or disregards the struggles and growing pains associated with the many events that she purports to represent. As Susan Hayward points out: “Nationalist discourses around culture work to forge the link – the hyphen – between nation and state. Nationalist discourses act then to make the practice of the state as ‘natural’ as the concept of nation.”19 Rather than forge that link in obvious ways, however, Miss Canada, like other nationalist images, hides all evidence of this linking process so that she may appear to viewers as a “natural” image of the nation’s ideals, even as her image occludes messy, unpleasant facts about the growing state. It is admittedly paradoxical that an allegorical sign, the most arbitrary and inorganic mode of signification, may parade as “natural,” but because of the way that myth permits history to recede into the background, the allegorical sign may be the sort of representation that, to use Graeme Turner’s phrase, is “legitimated by nature

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rather than problematized by history.”20 Because allegory is an “empty” sign,21 it can refer to historical antecedents (like Britannia, for example), but unlike a symbol, for example, does not secure a one-to-one correspondence with a referent. So, Miss Canada stands in for the nation even though she contains no transcendent meaning of nation, even in an imaginary sense. As myth, she does not need to provide that transcendence accorded to symbol because she is above historical reality and the often unsavoury means by which the nation has taken shape in a material sense. Her mythic aspect, in concert with her allegorical shape, makes Miss Canada seem “natural.” The mythic and the natural are thus co-dependent features of this allegorical sign and make possible the particular political reading I advance. Miss Canada can deliver the viewing audience from unseemly political history. She makes her appearance in cartoon versions of political scenarios, yet she is unsullied by them because of her moral integrity and inviolability. Her sexual inviolability may be tested at times, especially in scenes which I call courtship narratives, in which she is actively pursued by suitors such as Uncle Sam, or handled indelicately by a drunken Sir John A. Macdonald, but Miss Canada is above all a boundary marker. The frisson evoked by France’s Liberté with the slipped chiton and bared breast would be far too sexualized for our Miss Canada.22 Her role is to galvanize an ideal of nation while the real work of nation building – from political intrigues and aggrandizements to increased state and bureaucratic functions – proceeds apace. Miss Canada’s function is pedagogical; she instructs the national subject to desire an ideal of a middle-class, moral steadfastness with which to imagine the future of the nation. While she is always recognizable as Canada, Miss Canada may actually signify a variety of political positions because competing influences from the dominant culture make up this national image. Some visual cues and signifiers present her as a minion of the British Empire; others emphasize her independence, moral exemplarity, and suitability as a mother of the nation. These different incarnations are representative of conflicted impulses in Canada’s movement from dominion to nationhood. A popular cultural image, as well as a gauge of political history, Miss Canada can be read as a barometer of deep divisions as well as the profound dreams of the dominant culture in its striving for national definition during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

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Miss Canada and the Washington Treaty Cartoons chronicling the Washington Treaty signed between Britain and the United States on 8 May 1871 mythically foreclosed upon deep anxieties about Canada’s colonial status in international affairs. Since the abrogation in 1866 of the then-existing reciprocity treaty (which today we would call a free trade agreement) signed on 6 June 1854, Americans had been shut out of the Canadian maritime fishery, and they wanted back in. They had a few trump cards left over from the Civil War: Canada’s inability or unwillingness to either extradite or prosecute Confederate soldiers who raided St. Alban’s, Vermont, accessing their target through Canada; the building of the Confederate ship Alabama in a British shipyard; and Canada’s indifference to union draft dodgers whom the United States wished returned to face trial for desertion.23 Hoping to normalize relations and even avoid a war with the United States, Britain offered concessions, one of which was unfettered access to Canada’s maritime fishery. Sir John A. Macdonald, as Canada’s first prime minister, was the only Canadian of five signatories (the rest were British and American), so his powers in this negotiation were limited and symbolic. Macdonald had hoped to receive compensation for the Fenian border raids (attacks on Canadian soil by American Irish Catholic rebels intent on Ireland’s independence) and a restoration of the reciprocity treaty, but he got neither, and was reputed to have said, “There go the fisheries!” as he applied his signature to the document.24 He had no choice but to sign, and the tone of Lord Elgin’s letter entreating him to do so reflects Britain’s Imperial interests, not those of the Dominion. Elgin wrote: I believe [the treaty] to be one, which taken as a whole, and regarded as it ought to be, as a broad settlement of the many differences which have lately sprung up between Britain and the United States, is fair and honourable to all parties and calculated to confer many important advantages upon our respective countries.25 Elgin’s use of the terms “ought” and “respective countries” betrays a prescriptive tone and an acknowledgment that the parties that mattered were decidedly Britain and the United States. Present-day historical commentators such as John Thompson and Stephen Randall have argued that the Treaty of Washington “was a preliminary phase

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in confirming U.S. acceptance of Canadian borders” and, while “legally, emotionally, and especially in U.S. eyes, Canada remained a colony for generations to come … by 1871, it was clear that Canada had joined the United States and Mexico as the nation-states of North America.”26 The conflicted nature of Canada’s status is reflected in Thompson and Randall’s assertion that Canada was both “a colony for generations to come” and one of three “nations” in North America. The Washington Treaty may have solved the problem of strained relations between Britain and the United States, but it also revealed the fundamental difficulty of Canada’s colonial limitations. A cartoon entitled “The Right Kind of Valentine” (Fig. 4.2),27 published in the Canadian Illustrated News during the treaty negotiations, depicts the gift of fisheries rights from Miss Canada to Miss Columbia. The figures are more or less equal in stature, with Miss Canada appearing slightly younger and less buxom, and lacking Miss Columbia’s hauteur. Otherwise, the two figures are evenly placed within the cartoon frame; their gestures are minimal and the transaction appears calm and amiable. The caption, “The Right Kind of Valentine,” suggests that Canada’s gift is morally and strategically sound; it is the “right” thing to do. From this artist’s perspective, then, this scene is not treated satirically. Recalling Stuart Hall’s notion that representation is made meaningful through both presence and absence, I note that Britannia is conspicuously absent from this cartoon.28 Miss Canada proffers her “gift” unaccompanied by her “mother,” as if she operates as a sovereign nation. Perhaps independence and equal footing visa-vis the United States are desired in this instance because the stakes – fisheries, trade reciprocity, and restitution for the Fenian raids – were high, but a study of discourse surrounding the historical event reveals the cartoon’s ideological purpose. While the cartoon refers to an objective truth – Macdonald did sign the Washington Treaty as a member of the Joint Imperial High Commission – the attribution of full nation-state status to Canada was a compensatory fantasy. Macdonald had delayed the signing of the treaty in a bid to alleviate the humiliation,29 and with an election looming, he needed to take something substantial back to parliament. What he got for Canada was minor compensation in the form of cash and some access to American fisheries markets, as well as Britain’s promise to endorse loans for railways.30 Canada’s loss of exclusive rights over maritime fisheries, the consequence of a British-American achievement that offered Canada only minor fiscal and trade reciprocity concessions in return, remained a politically charged issue, so much so that Macdonald

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4.2 “The Right Kind of Valentine,” Canadian Illustrated News, 18 February 1871. McCord Museum, Montreal, M984.306.152

did not speak publicly about it until a year later in a four and a quarter hour speech to the House of Commons on 3 May 1872. This ponderous speech, laced with rhetorical flourish and laden with immense detail, underscores how the Washington Treaty signalled a deep division in national identity. It may have been difficult during the negotiations for Macdonald to occupy dual roles as his country’s representative and as a British subject; he certainly had to rely upon his keen rhetorical skill in order to secure acceptance of the Treaty in the House of Commons. Early in the speech Macdonald outlined the potential for equivocation forced upon him: I had continually before me, not only the Imperial question, but the interests of the Dominion of Canada which I was there specially to represent and the difficulty of my position was that if I gave undue prominence to the interests of Canada I might justly be held in England to be taking a purely Colonial and selfish view, regardless of the interests of the Empire as a whole … and on the other hand, if I kept my eye solely on Imperial considerations I might be held as neglecting my especial duty towards this my country, Canada.31 Macdonald leaned toward his duty as a Canadian statesman, saying, “upon this, as well as upon every other point, I did all I could to protect the rights and claims of the Dominion.”32 In his closing comments, however, it is clear that the Imperial card needed playing in order to convince Parliament to accept the treaty and exonerate him: I went to Washington as Her Majesty’s servant, and was bound by Her Majesty’s instructions, and I would have been guilty of dereliction of duty if I had not carried out those instructions. And, sir, when I readily joined under the circumstances in every word of that treaty with the exception of the Fisheries Articles, and when I succeeded in having inserted in the Treaty a reservation to the Government and the people of Canada of the full right to accept or refuse that portion of it, I had no difficulty as to my course.33 Despite Macdonald’s clever movement from one position to another, the unsettling and unresolvable fact of a liminal national subjectivity is clear. Canada was

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a dominion in the British Empire, yet its international interests might best have been served in these negotiations had it been a nation in its own right. Note that Macdonald, in this speech to the House of Commons, used the terms “this my country, Canada,” while in the same breath he genuflected to the Empire. The “Valentine” cartoon obviates these conflicted aims, as if national status and authority had been achieved. In handing over the fisheries card to Miss Columbia, Miss Canada appears to act as an independent nation. From an American point of view, Canada was no more than a meddling upstart. Macdonald’s own words were used to characterize him as meddlesome and self-aggrandizing in an article published in the New York Times following the posthumous release of his memoirs.34 That Macdonald had called the US Commissioners “ridiculous” and “annoying”35 may account for this opinion. The article closes with an ominous, theatrical flavour: Such is the hitherto secret chapter of the story of the treaty of Washington, which appears to convey a new warning that if ever Britain and Uncle Sam get at loggerheads, Canada may be found to be at the bottom of it.36 Interestingly, Macdonald is only once referred to as Canada’s premier37 in reference to the treaty signing; he is called the late premier only at the beginning of the article and thereafter referred to as a commissioner or Sir John. The article is representative of the way that this period in Canadian history was characterized in the American media and shows how far Canada still had to go in order to be regarded as a viable state in the international arena. The record in law and diplomacy is one thing; documentation in popular media, quite another. Lack of legal sovereignty notwithstanding, the nation was being imagined in cultural forms with Miss Canada as a leading example. The sincere and forthright manner in which Miss Canada hands over the fisheries card to Miss Columbia denies any of the diplomatic wrangling evident from the historical record. Miss Canada is performing as an independent nation in the scene, and her image in graphic satire elides both the limited stature and influence felt by Macdonald and the losses experienced by the Dominion. Cultural representations of Canada as a nation are especially slippery in this period, and other evidence from graphic satire speaks to the complex and divisive nature of national identity politics. In an unsigned Dominion Day cartoon entitled “Dominion Day: Canada’s Debut at the Council of Nations,” published 1 July 1871 (Fig. 4.3),38 a mere two months after the signing of the Treaty of

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4.3 “Dominion Day: Canada’s Debut at the Council of Nations,” Canadian Illustrated News, 1 July 1871. McCord Museum, Montreal, M993X.5.899

4.4 “Uncle Sam – ‘Waal marm, I guess we’ll trade,’” Canadian Illustrated News, 24 June 1871. McCord Museum, Montreal, M994.104.3.25.400

4.5 [Mother Britannia, Uncle Sam, and Infant Canada], Canadian Illustrated News, 23 July 1870. McCord Museum, Montreal, M988.182.145

Washington, the same Miss Canada, held in the firm grasp of Britannia, offers the fisheries card to Columbia from a safe distance. The cartoon’s formal arrangement of figures, including those intended to represent European statesmen in royal, ministerial, or martial regalia, indicates a straightforward, sincere stance on the part of the artist: he did not caricature any of the figures in the illustration. In this example, Miss Canada is a daughter of Empire and not an independent actor, as in the “Valentine” cartoon. Two other cartoons – again from the Canadian Illustrated News – depict her as a wailing infant, sorry for losing the “golden goose” of fisheries for Uncle Sam’s “old gander” (Fig. 4.4),39 and as a faltering toddler, leaving mother Britannia’s arms only to be caught by a waiting Uncle Sam should she fall (Fig. 4.5).40 The presence of Uncle Sam as a self-satisfied, sly, and threatening figure tells the viewer that Canada should be wary of American designs on her freedoms. The artists who drew these cartoons were much more satirically engaged than in the previous examples, and they held the view that the gift of fisheries was not at all the “right kind of Valentine.” By emphasizing vulnerability in the representation of Canada as an infant and toddler, the artists invoke the vulnerability of Canada as a colony facing abandonment by Britain and threats from the United States.

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The range of representations from innocent, vulnerable infant, to chaperoned daughter, to remarkably composed young figure of a sovereign nation speaks to the scope of anxieties around Canada’s status in the wider political field. As a mythic allegory, Miss Canada encourages selective forgetting of history – and, remarkably, within the same publication. Even allegory’s artifice can be hidden by this ostensibly natural display of rightness and reason.

Miss Canada and the Pacific Scandal The next significant crisis to attract attention from graphic satirists was the Pacific Scandal of 1873, in the course of which Macdonald lost his control of Parliament to Liberal Reformers under Alexander Mackenzie. The scandal grew out of Macdonald’s having solicited campaign funds from railway magnate Sir Hugh Allan in exchange for railway contracts. Because of J.W. Bengough’s staunch Liberal bias and dislike of Macdonald’s Conservative policies (and, needless to say, scandals), he represented Miss Canada as tainted by association with Macdonald, only to be transformed into an unimpeachable moral allegory, suggesting that Canada the nation was an innocent sufferer forced to endure unseemly political crises. The cartoons I focus on here – one concerning the Pacific Scandal and three concerning the reform policies of Mackenzie’s government – are drawn by Bengough, a confirmed Grit (Liberal) supporter and unfailing critic of Macdonald’s methods and policies. This partisanship is integral to the satire and, in the case of the first, “Whither Are We Drifting?” (Fig. 4.1), Bengough took a strong vituperative tone.41 The scene shows Macdonald (drunk and desultory as usual in a Bengough cartoon) with his foot on the neck of a prostrate Miss Canada. Macdonald says his outstretched hand is “clean,” yet the same hand is labelled with the words “send me another 410,000” in ironic reference to his dirty dealings with Sir Hugh Allan over the railway bribes. Miss Canada’s position depicts her as potentially sullied under Macdonald’s rule: she can’t quite touch the Bible, which lies just out of reach. Bengough’s anti-Macdonald stance is more than clear, but reading the cartoon simply as partisan invective does not do justice to its rich blend of allegory, satire, and myth and the ways they work together to support ideologies of nationhood. The deep satire of “Whither Are We Drifting?” suggests that the spectator make associations between Macdonald’s morally reprehensible

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behaviour and the nation as embodied by Miss Canada. This association could be costly; under Macdonald’s power, how can Miss Canada maintain her moral purity and her sexual inviolability? What might her transgression mean for the viewer? However, audiences had already seen in other cartoons and illustrations evidence of how her image supported mythic deliverance from sordid situations. There were plenty of classically inspired and morally upright images of Miss Canada to identify as hegemonic, regulative models42 so that the impact of a few tawdry images was easily absorbed. Mythic deliverance occurs through recognition that the allegory lives up to high standards, in spite of the occasional deeply satirical lapse. The viewer was likely more inclined to see her as needing rescue and succour: after all, she represented the nation as a powerful cultural ideal. Her presence in the cartoon ensures that insupportable political foibles such as those perpetrated by Macdonald are seen as a function of the troubled state and not of the beleaguered nation. While the audience must consider Miss Canada’s vulnerability to moral taint as she lies prostrate under Macdonald’s foot, four cartoons drawn later by Bengough depict the same Miss Canada as a moral exemplar who approves of the election promises of Alexander Mackenzie, a Liberal Reformer who campaigned successfully against Macdonald in 1874 on the basis of his reform policies of “electoral purity” and “independence of Parliament” (which aligned with Bengough’s own politics). She is all the while the same recognizable figure: young, classically or stylishly attired (perforce middle-class), fine-featured, and consistently labelled as “Canada.” But, her character as conceived by Bengough, her role in the cartoons’ narratives, and her relationship to other characters – whether subservient, superior, amused, or disdainful – determines how the image of the nation will be defined. These four composed and modest images of Miss Canada distance her from the disagreeable operations of the growing state, causing the viewing subject to perform an ideological leap from unpleasant and disorderly politics and unrestrained state functions to an allegory of nation that occludes such activities. As a female figure, Miss Canada is ideational at best and may embody the nation but, like many women of her day, she has no knowledge of or associations with the internal workings of the state. The implied male viewer is then lulled into this ideological schema involving, paradoxically from our vantage point, evocation of a feminine figure and simultaneous rejection of women’s involvement in the political life of the state.43 Miss Canada recovered from the contamination of Macdonald’s Pacific

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4.6 John Wilson Bengough, “The Premier’s Model. Or, Implements to Those Who Can Use Them,” Grip, 29 November 1873. A Caricature History of Canadian Politics, 91

Scandal through Mackenzie’s accession and watches approvingly as Mackenzie carves maxims in stone in a cartoon entitled “The Premier’s Model; or, Implements to Those Who Can Use Them” (Fig. 4.6).44 Miss Canada appears in full-figured Greco-Roman style here with helmet, shield, and classical drapery. She wears identifiers common to this post-Confederation period: the label “Canada” on her shield, the beaver at her feet, and maple leaves on her helmet. The choice of classical iconography is significant because it lends historical legitimacy to her role; the viewer immediately connects her to her antecedents and to her mother, Britannia, who is invariably so attired. Miss Canada is further legitimized and morally heightened by the association of this iconography with ideals such as “Justice” and “Peace” and “Truth.” The caption reads, “Well and bravely done, Mackenzie; now stand by that policy and I am with you always.” Bengough thus signals the nation’s pious approval and a promise of fidelity between Canada and Mackenzie’s Liberal Reform party. Two other Bengough cartoons, “Miss Canada’s School” (Fig. 4.7)45 and “Pity the Dominie, or Johnny’s Return” (Fig. 4.8),46 capitalize on the sheepish appearance of Sir John A. Macdonald, returned to Parliament from his Kingston riding after having won his seat even though his government had fallen to the Liberal Reformers under Mackenzie. In the former, he wears a dunce cap with the label “Bad Boy”; in the latter, he drags his feet and slate, casting a hang-dog glance at the “teacher,” Mackenzie. Bengough’s schoolroom backdrop is typical for him, reducing national events to simple, bounded settings and bombastic figures to mischievous boys. Chastising aphorisms are disguised as blackboard lessons. In terms of the cartoons’ humour and mild-to-moderate satire, the schoolroom is an effective graphic device, but what interests me is the potential for moral instruction and for Miss Canada’s role as a moral arbiter in this setting. Her relative size and position are telling details; that she is taller and more imposing within the frame confers status on her vis à vis the objects of derision and noticeably smaller figures, notably Macdonald.47 As a teacher or headmistress, Miss Canada is a disciplinary figure, and is thus exempt from the tawdry mischief of political intrigues. Her admonishment in the caption of “Miss Canada’s School”: “Now Alexander, be very careful, or I’ll put you where John is” (wearing a dunce cap in the corner!) and her warning in the caption of “Pity the Dominie” – “Here’s Johnny for you again, Mr. Mackenzie. You’ll find him apt enough, but frankly, he’s full of mischief ” – both speak to her disciplinary role and her wisdom regarding political high jinks. Like Miss

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4.7 John Wilson Bengough, “Miss Canada’s School,” Grip, 8 November 1873, p. 3. Early Canadiana Online

4.8 John Wilson Bengough, “Pity the Dominie! or Johnny’s Return,” Grip, 7 February 1874. A Caricature History of Canadian Politics, 99

Canada in “The Premier’s Model,” she can instruct or admonish and thus set a tone of moral indignation. Graphic satire can play with bombast and infantilize important figures in order to effectively ridicule political elites and skewer opponents, with humorous results. Miss Canada appears all the more like a moral beacon in such scenes. A final Bengough cartoon in this set also concerns the Mackenzie administration, though it appeared few years later (1877). The title, “What Investigation Revealed” (Fig. 4.9),48 refers to evidence that Macdonald’s government had received monies from Sir Hugh Allan’s railway company for election funds and for Macdonald’s stock in the Mail newspaper. Moral outrage was perhaps an expedient political response for the Liberal Reformers as they approached an 1878 election, having enjoyed a lack-lustre tenure: under Mackenzie, railways were being built at a fraction of the pace promised by Macdonald, British Columbia threatened secession if the railways could not be completed as promised,49 and the economy was in a slump due to an unsuccessful reciprocity agreement that died in the US senate.50 Unlike the schoolrooms of the previous two cartoons, the setting this time is a barn, showing ridiculous politicians (including Macdonald, of course) milking the sacred public cow labelled “Northern Railway (Impounded by Miss Canada).” In contrast to the childlike figures caught in the act, Miss Canada and Alexander Mackenzie are full-statured adults, observing the scene dolefully from the doorway. Miss Canada is indeed disappointed, and her look of resigned chagrin reads like a deep sigh of “Here we go again!” In these four cartoons, following on the heels of the profoundly satirical “Whither Are We Drifting?” Bengough concentrates on moral castigation. In each case, Miss Canada is positioned on the moral high ground, the unsullied female embodiment of an innocent populace. Allegory and myth are the discursive means by which she maintains that distance from the sordid political realm and from the intimate association between state and capital. Miss Canada appears, again, as a “natural” sign, in spite of her location in culture. The viewer is urged to forget how “nation” is constructed as an imaginary and tolerable face for the state. This forgetting is a key function of ideology and a means of discursively positioning the subject/viewer to allow the allegorical, idealized female body to stand in for the nation. In order to show precisely what has been foreclosed by mythic national female allegory in graphic satire, I return to the Pacific Scandal (the event that precipitated Bengough’s cartoons in the first place) and show how it circulated

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4.9 John Wilson Bengough, “What Investigation Revealed,” Grip, 7 April 1877. A Caricature History of Canadian Politics, 175.

in public discourse. This evidence explains how the business of government was (and arguably still is) tied to capitalist ventures and how the construction of a state necessarily entailed intimacy between government and capital. It was not a matter of partisan politics. In public addresses, pamphlets, and broadsheets, both parties took advantage of the opportunity for derision and grandstanding offered by the Pacific Scandal. From the perspective of the Liberal opposition, evidence that Allan’s funds constituted a direct payment for railway-building contracts was “incontrovertible.”51 It was felt that Parliament itself had been made a mockery of when the Conservatives, insisting that committee members assigned to investigate the scandal ought to take evidence only under oath, were accused of stalling the investigation.52 Macdonald’s decision to prorogue (suspend) Parliament was a real sticking point with the Liberals, who saw it as a manipulation of the House and a travesty of justice.53 In a scathing and condemnatory tone that by the fall of 1873 was becoming quite typical for Liberal Members of Parliament, David Mills delivered the following words: Enormous grants of land and enormous sums of money were proposed as subsidies and no man could be a stockholder in this Pacific Railway and a member of the House without placing his duty to the public in conflict with his personal interests … This proposal to admit members to share in the profits of the enterprise, and to open the door wide to a corrupt alliance between the Government and members and railway jobbers, and speculators, are so many concurrent facts consistent with the intention on the part of the Ministry to improperly maintain themselves in power.54 Little wonder, given the rancorous tone of debate, that Bengough was determined to rescue Miss Canada from such sordid depths. Like the artist, the subject/viewer takes up this note of rescue, either identifying with Miss Canada, or at least by responding with indignation for her sake, as a champion of the values she espouses. Conservatives did not shrink from their own defence, however, and the evidence that they mounted in order to settle the score and, later, to besmirch the Mackenzie administration, illustrates how interdependent were the functions of state and capital. An unsigned publication sponsored by the Montreal Gazette (1873) excused heavy contributions to elections by wealthy patrons as “the

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invariable practice since the introduction of party government.”55 Furthermore, the nearly treasonous allegation that Macdonald had sold out to American capitalists because they were partners in Allan’s scheme was answered as “intuited on terms that [Sir Hugh Allan] no doubt thought advantageous as a business man.”56 Conservatives argued that reprisals against the Pacific railway scheme had more to do with provincial rivalries between Ontario and Quebec than with moral repugnance. For instance, if the Pacific company were to amalgamate with the Inter-Oceanic, an Ontario-based company, a move that excluded the dreaded American capitalists from any railway charter, then the Grand Trunk railway company out of Montreal would necessarily be made “hostile”57 by a privileging of Ontario interests. Determined to share political ignominy with the opposition, the Conservatives soon found evidence of corruption to meet or exceed their own. Under the auspices of the Kingston Leader and Patriot, an 1874 pamphlet entitled “The Lake Superior Ring” and dubbed a “thorough exposé of Mackenzie and Brown’s treachery to their country” accused Alexander Mackenzie of rerouting the Pacific Railway away from the planned point of Lake Nipissing to the western shores of Lake Superior in order to benefit personally from his own mining interests in that region. The authors offered as evidence a public notice specifically naming Alexander Mackenzie as an applicant for “An Act to authorize the granting of Charters of Incorporation to Manufacturing, Mining and other Companies.” The incriminating portion reads as follows: The object and purpose for which Incorporation is sought are: the exploration, purchase, development and sale of mineral and other lands on the shores and in the vicinity of Lake Superior, and mining for gold, silver, copper and other metals, ores and other minerals, and the working, exploration and sale thereof.58 Conservatives lambasted Mackenzie and his compatriots (among them, George Brown, Liberal owner of The Globe) for having “prostituted”59 the Canadian government by ensuring that public policy would directly benefit private business. More than a simple quid pro quo, these and documents that Liberals used to slander Macdonald and his Ministers are evidence of the more inglorious fact that the business of government was undoubtedly tethered to capitalist ventures. More recent historical scholarship argues that railway construction, far

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4.10 John Wilson Bengough, “Cry Havoc and Let Slip the Dogs of War,” Grip, 4 April 1885, 4–5. Early Canadiana Online

from being a strictly nationalistic concern, was rather a bid for economic prosperity, first and foremost of a personal nature.60 Added to this intimacy between profit motive and state growth was the “standard knowledge that patronage was endemic to Canadian politics in the 1867–1911 period.”61 While we may not be surprised by the coziness between state and capital, we may indeed remark upon the ways in which a cultural image such as Miss Canada dissociates itself from such conditions through allegory and myth. The cartoons she appeared in allowed the viewer to imagine a romanticized, virtuous nation, free from the infection of capital. National subjects, willing to buy into the compensatory fantasy of nationhood through a cultural icon such as Miss Canada, could momentarily repress the unconscionable workings of the state in favour of the moral rectitude of the nation. Instead of depicting the functions of state and capital in a necessary, dialectical relationship with an idealized national imaginary, cartoonists like Bengough chose to separate them. While the state is undeniably always present, the Bengough cartoons I have described attempt to fix a dehistoricized narrative of morally intact national allegory, leaving the impression that nation and state are discrete entities. It was necessary for misrecognition to take place, however, in order that the state recede from view.

Miss Canada and the Northwest Rebellion The face of national moral allegory takes on a bolder, more implacable aspect during the Northwest Rebellion of 1885, the second rebellion led by Louis Riel and his Native allies, who hoped to gain land and other rights for the Métis and Native people. Acting on orders from the Canadian government, General Frederick Middleton led troops to Saskatchewan to end the uprising. After a skirmish at Duck Lake and battles at Fish Creek and Batoche (in what would later become Saskatchewan), Middleton’s forces defeated Riel, who surrendered on 15 May. My aim in discussing this historical crisis is not to assess the event or the prodigious scholarly and popular debate waged ever since, but rather to determine how specific political cartoons render Miss Canada in that moment. The first cartoon I consider, “Cry Havoc and Let Slip the Dogs of War” (Fig. 4.10),62 is from Grip, and is also drawn by J.W. Bengough. Here, Miss Canada, her face set in grim determination, grasps the standard and points the troops resolutely in the direction of the rebellion. She may be described both as a mother of

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the nation, in contemporary rather than classical dress, and as a masculinized emblem of martial prowess with a stalwart demeanour and a thick, muscular neck. This conflicted composition serves two purposes: first, as a mother figure Miss Canada represents an ideal for the nation’s imagined immemorial past and its limitless future; second, as a masculine, martial figure she represents the desire to see the forces under Middleton successful against the Métis and native insurgents. Perhaps female allegory’s affiliation with Athena, virgin goddess of war, lends a martial spirit to the image. She is pictured barefoot, a fact that may align her more closely with typical representations of Athena.63 This association with Athena does nothing to dispel the conflicted aspects of this image, for how can Canada be matron and virgin at once? The state, appearing through the military overtones and inflections upon Miss Canada here, may be encroaching on an allegory that most often succeeds in hiding it. Because of its particular cultural and historical valence, the caption, too, provides inspiration for military success. “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war,” Mark Antony’s rousing battle cry over Caesar’s body, would not be lost on an audience of mainly Anglo-Saxon Ontarians familiar with Shakespeare. The line invokes legitimacy for an Imperial cause: this battle against Métis insurgents is made parallel to such battles as Agincourt in Henry V, where the English were victorious over the French. To the right of Miss Canada in the cartoon are two unlikely comrades, Ontario premier, Oliver Mowat, and Sir John A. Macdonald, Liberal and Conservative respectively and, under any other circumstances, staunch rivals. That they are shaking hands in a gesture of rapprochement, united in the goal of quelling the uprising, is meant to reflect the degree to which Ontario and, for that matter, Quebec, were in the grip of what has been described as “a surge of jingoism.”64 In fact, according to Paul Maroney, the martial rallying cry could be heard in newspapers from coast to coast as troops were mustered in defence of the nation and of British ideals.65 One military historian reminisced a dozen years later: With splendid unanimity the people of Canada, from one end to the other, demanded that the authority of the law should be asserted at whatever cost … The order calling the regiment out for active service was received at midnight, and at eleven the next day, the roll was called, and not a man was absent. The regiment was in full strength, and there

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were so many applications to enlist that the regiment could have easily been recruited to three times its authorized strength.66 “Cry Havoc!” fixes this moment of unanimity, emphasizing loyalty and duty irrespective of Métis grievances. The cartoon signals mythic foreclosure of rupture and crisis. While havoc may be wrought in battle, at least in terms of the cartoon it would not be waged in debate. It is nonetheless important to note that debate did circulate around the rebellion. Western newspapers, whose readership had most to fear from Métis uprisings, were quick to sympathize with Métis grievances and to condemn government intransigence in settling them. The Calgary Herald (1883–) stated: Much as it may be regretted that the half-breeds are having recourse to arms, there is more than a feeling amongst the settlers that the breeds are fighting for what should have been granted them long ago, nay, more than that, that they will be better treated by the government and will be more likely to obtain their rights for having raised a rebellion.67 The Edmonton Bulletin (1880–1923) went as far as to imply that the uprising was inevitable: A match will not fire a pile of green wood, but it will a pile of dry. Had the Saskatchewan country been in a satisfied condition a hundred such men as Riel might have come into it and the only harm resulting would have been to themselves … The pile was made ready for the firebrand, and the firebrand ready lighted came in the person of Riel.68 Even after blood had been shed, the rebels caught, and Riel duly tried and hanged, the Edmonton Bulletin did not release the government from responsibility “for its share in the rebellion and its deplorable circumstances.”69 Central Canadian English-language newspapers, chastened and grown circumspect after Riel’s execution, continued to laud the decision that Riel hang for treason, but reported his death and resultant unrest in Quebec with apparent equanimity. The Ottawa Citizen (1846– ) reported painstakingly on Riel’s last rites, ministrations, prayers, letters, last hours, and the wish of the deceased to lie by his father in St Boniface Cemetery in Winnipeg. One writer noted

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the “charm of [Riel’s] speech” and commented: “looking at him and witnessing his manner, it was easy to discern the influence he had with his people.”70 The tone, if not reverential, is certainly deferential and lacking any vindictive pride. The Montreal Gazette, while typing French Canadians as “impressionable” and “filled with the pride of race” in their vehement disapproval of Riel’s sentence, noted that “no great harm will be done” by the “burning of effigies and like demonstrations.”71 These reactions were seen as natural outpourings of grief from Quebec’s citizenry. Perhaps editors did not wish to fan the fires of dissent, or perhaps they were tapping into a creeping collective guilt. For whatever reason, they chose not to proclaim a jubilant victory over Riel’s death. These representations of the rebellion and subsequent hanging of Riel offer a snapshot of the range of media reaction and an indication of the presence of debate. The “Cry Havoc!” cartoon is cast into relief accordingly. As A.I. Silver argues, Ontario “fanaticism” was more perceived than real. Both Ontario and Quebec citizens reacted appropriately, given the level of accuracy accorded their news media of the day.72 He notes that “easterners received much rumour, speculation, and contradictory report from the west.”73 Regarding Riel’s trial and execution and the resulting animosity and suspicion between Ontarians and Quebeckers, Silver states that “[Ontarians] judged Riel severely, but in accordance with the standards of their time and with their perception of the crimes he had committed,” leading Silver to conclude: “Neither the traditional notion of Ontario fanaticism nor the revisionist denial of real ethnic hostility seems correct in the end. There was real and long-lasting hostility, but it arose from a coherent and rational attempt to understand the events of 1885.”74 Seen through the lens of debate in the contemporary media of 1885, Miss Canada is once again profoundly ideological because she forecloses upon the historical vicissitudes that marked this period; as allegory, she lends herself to ideology because of her apparent integrity in the moment of rupture and crisis. The subject/spectator of the “Cry Havoc!” cartoon could safely turn away from an aggrieved historical moment, contemplating instead the moral sanctity of a military campaign as if it had already achieved success. In a different, but equally ideological move, Bengough responded to his growing unease around “half-breed” grievances following the rebellion – stemming especially from his animosity toward the Macdonald administration – with a cartoon that may be seen as a counterpoint to “Cry Havoc!” In an illustration entitled “Another Decoration Now in Order” of May 1886 (Fig. 4.11),75

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4.11 John Wilson Bengough, “Another Decoration Now in Order,” Grip, 22 May 1886, 6. Early Canadiana Online.

Miss Canada pins a “Redress of Wrongs” medal on a Métis soldier. She is very different from the stalwart woman of “Cry Havoc!” Her shape is softer, more motherly, her eyes both forgiving and beseeching as she looks toward the soldier with a gesture of hope for absolution.76 The occasion for the drawing was the awarding of medals to “gallant volunteers” who joined to suppress the rebellion, and the caption suggests that Métis soldiers ought to be compensated with the “rights they fought for.” While this was a laudable feeling and, as Bengough’s biographer states, “very much out of tune with the mood of Toronto,”77 it is difficult to view this shape-shifted Miss Canada in isolation. Since his chief audience was in Toronto, Bengough took a risk in his sympathies toward the Métis in this image. Seen in contrast to her figure in “Cry Havoc!” Miss Canada silences the martial rallying cry and diminishes the emphatic gestures that proclaimed the enthusiasm and glorification of the early days of the campaign; she thereby demonstrates again how an allegorical figure serves ideology by being filled up with meaning as necessary. Allegorical Miss Canada in graphic satire is singularly adept at mythic foreclosure of debate, rupture, and crisis. The stakes and terms of historical adversity are different in each of the three events examined, and this difference is reflected in the ways that her representation was put to use. The Washington Treaty cartoon muddies the terms of dominion/nation status, disguising an irremediable dilemma of national identification. The Pacific Scandal cartoons attempt to distance Miss Canada from the machinations of state and capital, urging the viewing subject to sublimate the real, material forces at stake in the building of nation. In the interests of political and social order, the Northwest Rebellion cartoons forestall debate. Allegorical Miss Canada was thus an effective tool in graphic satire for the imagining of nation in the nineteenth century. Her apparent flawlessness and moral exemplarity call for a nuanced historical analysis. A glimpse at historical discourse surrounding these events closes the gap between a palatable cultural construction of nation and the barely concealed workings of the state. This critical analysis of the Miss Canada cartoons in relation to historical public discourse determines how a popular cultural icon helped to perpetuate a homogenous ideology of nation and permits key interventions into scholarship about nation building. Not only do we discover the role played by graphic satire in proto-nationalist rhetoric but we may also assess the peculiar function of allegory and how its mythic sheen obscures the nation’s history.

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NOTES Edward Blake in Margaret Conrad and Alvin Finkel, History of the Canadian Peoples: 1867 to the Present, Vol.2 (5th ed.) (Toronto: Pearson, 2009), 39. Allegorical images of Britannia originating in eighteenth-century British graphic culture continued to be very popular in Canada, so it was understandable that artists would capitalize on Britannia’s progeny. In the nineteenth century, many (especially Anglo-) Canadians were familiar with the British magazine Punch (1841–1992; 1996–2002) in which Britannia frequently appeared. For example, the word “nation” was common in the Canada First movement begun in 1868. See Colonel George T. Denison, The Struggle for Imperial Unity, Recollections and Experience (Toronto: Macmillan, 1909). Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). Christina Burr extends this characterization to include Miss Canada as “the symbol of national community,” in the sense that Anderson intended. Christina Burr, “Gender, Sexuality, and Nationalism in J.W. Bengough’s Verses and Cartoons,” Canadian Historical Review 83, 4 (December 2002), 506. Carmen J. Nielson underscores this point about the role of the periodical press, especially the magazine Grip, in the formation of imagined community in her discussion of Miss Canada in graphic satire. Miss Canada’s recurring presence as an image in wide release through this medium makes imagined community possible. Carmen J. Nielson, “Erotic Attachment, Identity Formation and the Body Politic: The Woman-asNation in Canadian Graphic Satire,” Gender and History 28, 1 (April 2016), 104. Jonathan Kertzer, Worrying the Nation: Imagining a National Literature in English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 63. Ibid. I do not rule out the possibility that fear of US republicanism is at the heart of this discomfort. A notable exception is the frequent cartoon depiction of Miss Canada in the early 1900s by A.G. Racey in the francophone illustrated satirical magazine Le Canard (1877–1958). Paul Rutherford, A Victorian Authority: The Daily Press in the Nineteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982). Ramsay Cook, The Regenerators: Social Criticism in Late-Victorian English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985). This idea of Miss Canada as a hegemonic ideal, first tendered by Robyn Fowler

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(2005), is supported by G. Bruce Retallack (2006), who calls editorial cartooning a “hegemonic vehicle.” Retallack describes Miss Canada as a daughter figure to Britannia, as do I, but where we may differ in assessment of her representation is in Retallack’s assertion that Miss Canada gradually matured as mistress in her own house, invoking gradual independence from Britain. I argue that this movement is less a clear trajectory and is rather more recursive than that. The discussion here about the two Dominion Day cartoons is partial evidence of a more conflicted representation. Robyn Fowler, “Miss Canada as an Allegory of Nation” (PhD dissertation, University of Alberta, 2005). G. Bruce Retallack, “Drawing the Lines: Gender, Class, Race and Nation in Canadian Editorial Cartoons 1840–1926” (PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 2006), 26; 233–40; 306–14. The tradition of graphic satire and print culture out of which Canadian cartoons grew was moderate, opting to “accept the legitimacy of those [it] criticize[d]” (cf. note 14). British models for graphic satire are vital to this moderation, for after caustic invective in graphic satire held sway in the eighteenth century in Britain, a more conciliatory approach took hold in the mid-nineteenth century. In this, as in so many facets of cultural expression, Canada followed Britain’s lead. Charles Press, The Political Cartoon (East Brunswick, NJ: Associated University Press, 1981), 75. J.W. Bengough, “Whither Are We Drifting?” Grip [Toronto], 16 August 1873. My understanding of the way the politics of the image signifies is indebted to Barthes’s theory of myth. Barthes contends that as a second-order signification operating adjacent to language, myth turns history into nature; it “naturalizes” the image, emptying the allegorical signifier of contingency, of history, purifying, and, as Barthes puts it “depoliticizing” it. Barthes’s term “depoliticization” falls short of explaining the ways that Miss Canada is mobilized, but his definition of myth is valuable because it points to the way that ideology works within representations. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), 142. The precise ways in which each of these female allegories manifests ideals are not, however, identical. For distinctions, especially with allegories in France, see for example, T.J. Clark on Eugene Delacroix and Honoré Daumier in The Absolute Bourgeois (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), and Kirsten Powell and Elizabeth C. Childs in Femmes d’esprit: Women in Daumier’s Caricature (Hanover and London: The Christian A. Johnson Memorial Gallery University Press of New England, 1990). In the former, Clark contends that versions of Liberté and La

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République by Delacroix and Daumier were called upon by the artists to express different political conditions. In Delacroix’s Liberty Guiding the People (1830) for instance, Liberty represents the ardour and energy of the people in a moment of revolutionary furor. While the bared breasts suggest a certain “erotic force,” certainly, her “robust” image evokes the power required in this scene of danger, destruction, and apparent class equanimity (18). Artists may have harnessed women’s erotic power in these female allegories, but never must we suppose that these are images of women poised to experience the rights fought for. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Neitzsche, Rilke, and Proust (Boston: Yale University Press, 1979). Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” October 13 (1980): 59–80. Paul Smith, “The Will to Allegory in Postmodernism,” Dalhousie Review 62, 1 (1982): 105–22. Susan Hayward, “Framing National Cinemas,” in Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, eds., Cinema and Nation (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 89. Graeme Turner, British Cultural Studies: An Introduction (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 205. Theresa Kelley, Reinventing Allegory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 256. Christina Burr (cf. note 5) sees Miss Canada in the cartoon “Miss Dominion” (Grip, 2 July 1887) “represented as a brazen young courtesan.” This risqué version was intended to underscore Canada’s lack of fiscal and moral restraint during years of Conservative scandals and missteps. Sometimes such excess may have been required to “redirect critique” (533–6) as Burr argues, but the norms for Miss Canada still hold, because the courtship narrative cartoons and others where Miss Canada is indelicately treated in a sexual economy are vastly outnumbered by her morally upstanding versions. As I have argued elsewhere (Fowler 2005, cf. note 12), such unseemly versions equivocate with the hegemonic regulative model from which they derive. For more on the term “hegemonic regulative model” as it relates to graphic satire, see Mark Hallett, The Spectacle of Difference: Graphic Satire in the Age of Hogarth (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999). John Herd Thompson and Stephen J. Randall, Canada and the United States: AmbivalentAllies, 3d. ed. (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 36. D.N. Sprague, Post-Confederation Canada: The Structure of Canadian History since 1867 (Scarborough, on: Prentice-Hall, 1990), 21.

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25 In George Bolotenko, A Future Defined. Canada from 1849 to 1873 (Ottawa: National Archives of Canada, 1992), 215. 26 Thompson and Randall, Post-Confederation Canada, 40. 27 Unidentified artist, “The Right Kind of Valentine,” Canadian Illustrated News [Montreal], 18 February 1871. 28 Stuart Hall, “The Work of Representation,” in Stuart Hall, ed., Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practice (London: Sage, 1997), 59. 29 D.N. Sprague, Post-Confederation Canada, 21. 30 Bolotenko, A Future Defined, 214. 31 Sir John A. Macdonald, Speech of Sir John A. Macdonald, on introducing the Bill to give effect to the Treaty of Washington as regards Canada, Delivered in the House of Commons of Canada, on Friday the 3rd of May, 1872, 7. Reference to this Bill in the House of Commons can be found in Journals of the House of Commons of the Dominion of Canada, Being the 5th Session of the 1st Parliament of Canada, Session 1872 (Ottawa: Hunter, Rose, 1872), 81. Early Canadiana Online. 32 Ibid., 17. 33 Ibid., 26. 34 Barbara J. Messamore in “Diplomacy or Duplicity? Lord Lisgar, John A. Macdonald, and the Treaty of Washington,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 32, 2 (May 2004): 29–53, contributes much to the scholarly debate over these machinations, ascertaining that Governor General Lord Lisgar is unfairly maligned in the history of the Washington Treaty negotiations. Messamore argues convincingly that Macdonald was indeed crafty and protective of his interests in light of a looming election. 35 “Secret Political History. What the Memoirs of Sir John Macdonald Reveal,” New York Times, 25 November 1894, 17. 36 Ibid. 37 The term formerly used to denote “prime minister.” 38 Canadian Illustrated News [Montreal], July 1, 1871, 1. 39 “Uncle Sam–‘Waal, marm, I guess we’ll trade,” Canadian Illustrated News [Montreal], 24 June 1871, 400. 40 “Take Care, My Child,” Canadian Illustrated News [Montreal], 23 July 1870, 64. 41 For a thorough biography of Bengough and especially of his magazine Grip, see Carman Cumming’s book Sketches from a Young Country: The Images of Grip Magazine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). In Ramsay Cook’s The Regenerators: Social Criticism in Late-Victorian Canada (cf. note 11), the author

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pays particular attention to Bengough’s brand of reformist tendencies in chapter 7, “Toward a Christian Political Economy,” and chapter 8, “A Republic of God, A Christian Republic.” Cook argues that, in keeping with Bengough’s Presbyterian background and Grit leanings (though not always assiduously alongside the latter), J.W. was for Henry George’s single tax, prohibition, women’s education and rights, and against Macdonald’s National Policy (fearing it produced monopolies), the seven-day work week, land monopolies, and liberalizing Sunday laws. Cumming’s work is alert to the complexity of Bengough’s positions and focuses especially on this period of political history (and Bengough’s role in shaping our understanding of it) in chapters 3 and 4 of his book. Cumming notes that “[Bengough’s] bias often caused him to be blindly hostile to Macdonald and his Tory successors, a point that is seldom noted when the cartoons are reprinted” (23). A term I adapt from Mark Hallett’s work on eighteenth-century graphic satire in Britain. cf. note 22. In Bengough’s view women ought to have access to education and even receive the vote. However, his representations of Miss Canada belied this stance, as “men were given the exclusive power to set the terms of citizenship.” Burr, cf. note 5. 553. J.W. Bengough, Grip (Toronto), 29 November 1873. Ibid., 8 November 1873. Ibid., 7 February 1874. G. Bruce Retallack offers a very good discussion of the iconographic language of editorial cartooning, especially posture and relative size in terms of codes of power, operating through the spectator’s gaze. These codes, Retallack argues, are “equally central to the inner workings of cartoon messages.” Retallack, Drawing the Lines, cf. note 12, 132; 145. Bengough, Grip (Toronto), 7 April 1877. Conrad and Finkel, History of the Canadian Peoples, 39. Desmond Morton, A Short History of Canada (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1994), 94–5. Sir Edward Blake, “Address by Mr Blake at Bowmanville” (Ottawa: 1873), 9. The record of these proceedings, especially letters to Governor General Lord Dufferin concerning the prorogation of Parliament, can be found in “Message: Papers relative to the prorogation of Parliament on the 13th of August, 1873” (Ottawa: 1873). Sir Edward Blake, “Three Speeches of Sir Edward Blake on the Pacific Scandal” (Ottawa: 1873).

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54 David Mills, “The Pacific Railway Scandal: an Address by David Mills, Esq., M.P., Delivered at Aylmer on the 14th October, 1873” (St Thomas Ontario: 1873), 8. 55 “Comments on the Proceedings and Evidence on the Charges Preferred by Mr. Huntington, M.P.” (Montreal: Gazette Printing House, 1873), 7. 56 “Comments on the Proceedings,” 10. 57 Ibid. 58 “The History of the Lake Superior Ring” (Toronto: Kingston Leader and Patriot, 1874), 4. 59 Ibid., 6. 60 A.A. Den Otter, “Nationalism and the Pacific Scandal,” Canadian Historical Review 69, 3 (1988): 315–39. 61 Gordon T. Stewart, “Federal Politics after Confederation,” in Interpreting Canada’s Past, Vol. 2, A Post-Confederation Reader, 2nd. ed. J.M. Bumsted, ed. (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1993), 29. 62 Grip (Toronto), 4 April 1885. 63 The bare foot also directly connects this Miss Canada to Britannia as Athena in the image “Kith and Kin” Punch (21 February 1885), as Carmen J. Nielson observes in “Caricaturing Colonial Space: Indigenized, Feminized Bodies and Anglo-Canadian Identity 1873–1894,” Canadian Historical Review 96, 4 (December 2015), 494. This bare appendage may also trouble interpretation further because, as Nielson argues with respect to the cartoon “Another Decoration Now in Order,” bare limbs denote sexuality. Cf. note 76. 64 Cumming, Sketches, cf. note 41; 13, 136. 65 Paul Maroney, “‘Lest We Forget’: War and Meaning in English Canada, 1885–1914,” Journal of Canadian Studies 32, 4 (1997–98): 108–35. 66 Ernest John Chambers, The Origin and Services of the Prince of Wales Regiment, Including a Brief History of the Militia of French Canada (Montreal: E.L. Ruddy, 1897), 84. 67 “Half-breed Rising,” The Calgary Herald, 2 April 1885. 68 “Trouble,” Edmonton Bulletin, 11 April 1885. 69 “Riel,” Edmonton Bulletin, 21 November 1885. 70 “Riel’s Death,” Ottawa Citizen, 17 November 1885. 71 “Riel’s Execution,” The Gazette, 17 November 1885. 72 A.I. Silver, “Ontario’s Alleged Fanaticism in the Riel Affair,” Canadian Historical Review 69, 1 (1988): 23. Silver’s term “fanaticism” is akin to Cumming’s expression cited earlier: “a surge of jingoism.” The scholarly historiographic record of Ontario’s

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perception of the events in 1885 has grappled with this response. While Silver’s point is to contextualize the jingoism within the information available to readers of the day, others (like Cumming, for example) are not as inclined to let Ontario off the hook. Silver, “Ontario’s Alleged,” 24. Ibid., 50. Grip (Toronto), 22 May 1886. Nielson sees in Miss Canada’s demeanour in this instance more “sexual charge and vulnerability” than I have credited her with. While I acknowledge that Miss Canada’s “bare head, neck, arms and feet amplify” this and lead to Nielson’s reading, I do not see the sexual inflection as incompatible, because it separates Miss Canada from the native Other in the image, thereby underscoring the viewer’s championing of Miss Canada. Cf. note 5; 120. Cumming, Sketches, cf. note 41; 13, 145.

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Clubs, Axes, and Umbrellas: The Woman Suffrage Movement as Seen by Montreal Cartoonists (1910–1914) PIERRE CHEMARTIN and LOUIS PELLETIER The rise of mass media at the turn of the twentieth century pushed graphic satire to the forefront of many debates ignited by divisive issues in contemporary society. Nowhere is this more evident than in the coverage granted by illustrated newspapers and moving pictures to the controversy surrounding the international woman suffrage movement that arose across Western nations in the last decades of the nineteenth century and eventually peaked in the years leading to the First World War. Newspaper reports and editorials of the era generally reflected the still largely negative perception of this movement and its challenge to the status quo. A steady flow of cartoons and films mining for comic effect the fears and anxieties triggered by militant action and the transgression of gender roles soon followed suit. This controversy did not spare the city of Montreal, where cartoonists such as the Montreal Daily Star’s Arthur Racey and Le Canard’s “Joe” frequently tackled the issue of woman suffrage. A contextualized close study of a selection of cartoons taken from the extensive corpus of woman suffrage–themed graphic satire produced in Montreal will permit us to argue that, while Montreal cartoonists did make frequent use of the militant suffragette stock character developed by their British and American peers, their satirical representations

of suffrage supporters had another distinctive feature: their reliance on ethnic stereotypes. Suffragettes were branded as foreign agents set on imposing alien values on Canadian wives and mothers. Paradoxically, cartoons that denounced the meddling of British suffragettes such as Emmeline Pankhurst and Barbara Wylie in Canadian affairs routinely appeared in publications that were otherwise unconditionally supportive of Canada’s Imperial connection. This overt contradiction is ultimately symptomatic of the changing role of newspapers at the turn of the twentieth century. Media historians such as Jean de Bonville and Minko Sotiron have indeed demonstrated that, in the decades preceding the surge of the suffrage movement, the primary raison d’être of most newspapers had ceased to be the defence of the political ideas of their backers and publishers.1 The new type of modern newspaper that was then on the rise was first and foremost a commercial enterprise dependent on the sale of advertising spaces, and thus primarily interested, not in opinion per se, but rather in controversy.

The Suffrage Movement in Canada In Canada as in most of the Western world, the suffrage movement was initially launched by nineteenth-century groups and societies.2 It simmered for many decades, however, before it finally managed to outgrow its fringe status and become a force to contend with, largely thanks to the work of the vast coalitions of middle-class reformists and professional women assembled at the turn of the twentieth century. Canadian organizations dedicated to the cause included the Dominion Women’s Enfranchisement Association (created in 1889), the Standing Committee on Suffrage and Rights of Citizenship (1904), the National Council of Women (founded in 1893 and endorsing suffrage from 1910 onward), the Montreal Suffrage Association (1913), and the Montreal Local Council of Women.3 The tensions generated within the surging international suffrage movement during the first years of the twentieth century, both by the lack of cooperation offered by established political formations and by the downright hostility expressed by a significant portion of the citizenry, soon caused it to split into two camps. Law-abiding suffragists insisted on conventional campaigning methods such as assemblies, demonstrations, pageants, and appeals to established civic

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and political leaders. A significant number of militants, however, resolved to seek quick results through sensational – and frequently illegal – actions. The indecorous tactics employed by the radical arm of the movement included all sorts of spectacular disruptions, such as the heckling and mugging of politicians, the firebombing of buildings associated with the opponents of suffrage, the destruction of public property, and hunger strikes by incarcerated militants. By all accounts, these actions were successful in raising the profile of the international woman suffrage movement. Many newspapers around the globe reported the bold action of British suffragette Emily Davidson, who died of the injuries she had sustained from jumping in the path of the king’s horse at the Epson Derby on 4 June 1913. The shocking scene, captured by several newsreel cameramen, was shown in moving picture theatres across the world.4 These widely disseminated reports dealing with the sensational actions of militants soon led to the production of a great number of suffrage-themed fictional works. Suffragette characters and stories were more particularly exploited by the new medium of cinema, which was then becoming an unprecedentedly popular form of mass entertainment. The leading European film star of the era, Asta Nielsen, for instance, starred in a 1913 sensational multi-reel motion picture drama, Die Suffragette (Urban Gad, Germany),5 generally sympathetic to the plight of British militant suffragettes. Nielsen’s view of the suffrage movement was, however, in the minority position in the film industry, which generally chose to mock and deride supporters of woman suffrage. A case in point is that of the American film comedy The Pickpocket (George D. Baker, Vitagraph, 1913), which narrates the crisis faced by the comically mismatched couple formed by jolly fat man John Bunny – then the most popular American film comedian – and rail thin Flora Finch, when the latter decides to join a suffrage association. Frustrated by too many lonely evenings and cold sandwiches, Bunny conspires with his male buddies to frame Flora, who ends up in jail for a crime she did not commit. Freedom for the militant comes at the price of a promise to forgo all suffrage-related activities. The humbled female finally reintegrates into the domestic sphere, and all’s well that ends well.6 Bunny’s successor as the most popular American film comic, Charlie Chaplin, never produced any suffragethemed comedy. Still, the suffragette stock character was so well established by the time Chaplin entered the film business in late 1913 that a Keystone comedy showcasing his female impersonation abilities, A Busy Day (Mack Sennett, 1914), was occasionally shown under the titles Militant Suffragette and Charlot,

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Sufragista, so as to turn Chaplin’s coarse and violent female character into a woman suffrage supporter.7 Negative stereotypes were further propagated by the newly established newsreels, which commingled visual reporting and editorializing, just like the printed newspapers that they sought to emulate. An American Mutual newsreel from 1912, for instance, includes an animated sequence inspired by the countless editorial cartoons dealing with woman suffrage published by contemporary newspapers. Entitled “The Strong Arm Squad of the Future,” this short one-minute sequence depicts a succession of homely women dressed in police uniforms and armed with truncheons. A balloon proclaiming “Votes for Women” eventually crawls out of the mouth of the last creature imagined by the animator.8 The actions of the much-lampooned militant suffragettes came to account for a good deal of the media coverage of the woman suffrage movement in Canada in the early 1910s. This, in spite of the relative absence of proponents of radical tactics at the national level. The historian Catherine Cleverdon consequently does not hesitate to claim in her pioneering study of the Canadian suffrage movement that “Canadian feminists robbed their story of colour by waging a wholly dignified campaign.”9 Indeed, the genteel meetings and peaceful actions of Canadian suffragists were drowned in the pages of Montreal newspapers by a steady stream of reports dealing with the misdeeds of the American and British militant suffragettes.10 Both the documents produced by the suffragists themselves and the early accounts of the various first-wave feminist movements framed militants as brave society ladies seeking rights for every woman. This narrative, however, has been challenged by later historians. Carol Lee Bacchi and Mariana Valverde have, for instance, demonstrated not only that the suffrage movement had been initiated by middle- and upper-class wasp intellectuals largely influenced by Christian progressivism and the social purity movement, but that its rhetoric was deeply connected to the eugenics movement.11 Many suffragists endorsed the ideals of “race improvement” and “social engineering,” believing that the advancement of women’s rights was to play an important part in the defence of the “race.”12 Hence, when legislatures eventually voted laws granting the vote to “women” but disenfranchising large numbers of non-White or non-Anglo-Saxon women, most suffragists did not object. The coverage granted by Montreal newspapers to the suffrage movement further reveals the contrasting views commonly held within the English

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Canadian and French Canadian communities on the issue. French-language newspapers and periodicals such as La Patrie, La Presse, and Le Canard regularly printed reports and comments on the suffrage question, but usually showed much less interest in the debate than their English counterparts. Historians generally attribute French Canada’s relative lack of interest in this debate to the vigorous opposition of the Catholic Church and nationalist politicians to the movement.13 Cleverdon’s early study quotes research by sociologist Horace Miner suggesting that French Canadian society was centred not on individuals but on the family unit. Such an outlook might have helped legitimize a political system that disenfranchised women, as it assumed the female citizenry of the Province of Quebec to be part of an already enfranchised unit, and thus made woman suffrage seem redundant.14 As a result, the campaign for female suffrage in Quebec was led mostly by British or Anglo-Canadian women. Historian Denyse Baillargeon writes: In Quebec the struggle for women’s suffrage, which really began in 1913, developed at a moment when ethnic tensions were becoming more acute, affecting its evolution and outcome and also leading to the existence of two feminist umbrella groups in Montreal, one Francophone and one Anglophone. Various factors, such as the exodus of French Canadians to the United States, the treatment of Francophones in the other Canadian provinces, and the imperialist sentiments of some Anglophones, all coming on top of the industrialization that seemed an outright attack on the traditional way of life and values of French Canadians, helped to exacerbate nationalist feelings among the latter.15 Montreal’s English Canadian community, on the other hand, appears to have felt more troubled by the debate, and more particularly by events transpiring in Great Britain, where militant suffragettes were markedly more active. This connection was strengthened by several visits by leaders of the British suffrage movement. One of the first visiting suffragists to address a large Montreal crowd was the moderate Mrs Philip Snowden, who gave a speech at the prestigious Stanley Hall on 4 December 1909. Several representatives of the militant arm of the movement soon followed. Emmeline Pankhurst, the most high-profile British suffragette, stopped in Montreal in December 1911 to lecture on “The

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Englishwoman’s Fight for the Vote.” Two other militants who had served prison sentences in England, Mrs  Forbes-Robertson Hale and Miss  Barbara Wylie, also attempted to rouse their Canadian sisters in late 1912.16 The concerted actions of Canadian suffrage associations and foreign militants failed to bring quick results, however. Canadian women had yet to obtain the franchise at both the provincial and federal levels when war was declared in August of 1914. By mid-1915, the woman suffrage movement had (temporarily, as it would turn out) been silenced by the war effort.17

Suffrage and Outrage in Graphic Satire While the outbreak of the Great War was undoubtedly the main cause of the temporary setback suffered by the woman suffrage movement in the mid-1910s, one must be careful not to entirely discount the cumulative effects of the fierce opposition to the cause relayed by the mass media. Negative stereotypes and attacks on suffragettes were, as we have seen, prevalent internationally in the era’s moving pictures and newspapers. The latter published a steady stream of reports slanted against woman suffrage, as well as numerous editorials and cartoons denouncing its proponents. Montreal newspapers, with their abundant anti-suffrage content, did not escape this trend.18 The work of the city’s cartoonists, in particular, reliably reflected this widespread hostility to the cause. In Montreal, as in much of Canada and the United States, cartoons had been featured with increasing regularity since the late nineteenth century by the new crop of commercial newspapers seeking to reach a mass audience made up of men, women, and children recruited across classes. According to Jean de Bonville, Hugh Graham’s Montreal Daily Star was one of the earliest local proponents of the strand of visual journalism developed south of the border in the newspapers published by Pulitzer and Hearst. The largest English-language Canadian newspaper in the peak years of the suffrage controversy, the Star had hired its first illustrator, the celebrated local artist Henri Julien (1852–1908), back in 1888. Julien acted as the Star’s head artist throughout the 1890s, and remained attached to the newspaper for the remainder of his life. In 1899 the Star became the first Quebec newspaper to print cartoons daily. These were drawn by Arthur Racey (1870–1941), who would also remain at the employ of the newspaper until

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5.1 Arthur George Racey, “Montreal Women’s Answer,” Montreal Daily Star, 12 October 1912, 21. BAnQ Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie

his passing.19 His four-decade tenure permitted him to make a significant contribution to the newspaper’s visual identity, all the while weighing in on many contemporary issues. Racey specifically authored several editorial cartoons and comic strips dealing with the suffrage movement in the first half of the 1910s. Many of the Star’s Montreal competitors had also managed the turn to visual journalism by the time the controversy surrounding woman suffrage reached its peak in the early 1910s. The Montreal Herald, for instance, published daily news reviews made up of series of cartoons and caricatures, and made extensive use of cartoons in its sports pages. It should be noted, however, that the city’s French-language papers were, as a whole, slower to turn editorial cartoons into a regular feature. Though it had hired its first illustrator as early as 1891 and had made abundant use of illustrations, photographs, and colour comics since the turn of the twentieth century, Montreal’s leading French-language newspaper, La Presse, had yet to turn editorial cartoons into a regular feature by the time war was declared in 1914.20 Its main competitor, La Patrie, shared a similar attitude.21 Still, this lack of interest in graphic satire on the part of the leading French dailies does not mean that Montreal’s French-speaking community was entirely deprived of it. Indeed, Le Canard, the weekly satirical journal created in 1877 by Hector Berthelot, granted much space to editorial cartoons in the years of the suffrage controversy.22 A Racey cartoon published in the 12 October 1912 issue of the Montreal Daily Star provides a striking demonstration of the growing integration of editorial content and graphic satire in the first decades of the twentieth century (Fig. 5.1). Entitled “Montreal Women’s Answer,” the cartoon anchors a large two-page investigative piece expounding the results of a straw poll of Montreal women on the issue of suffrage.23 Both the poll’s results and Racey’s drawing convey an overwhelmingly negative vision of woman suffrage. According to the Star, more than half the women polled by reporters in each of the city’s wards (as well as in the autonomous City of Westmount, an affluent western suburb of Montreal) either claimed to be “entirely indifferent” to suffrage or plainly refused to express any kind of opinion, while no less than 88.2 percent of the fewer than 50 percent who had professed to have views on the matter declared themselves to be “emphatically opposed to the suffrage movement.” The Star paid attention to the diverging views of the city’s anglophone and francophone female populations, but claimed to have found that the outlooks of the two groups were actually quite similar.24

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Respondents to the poll organized by the Star are moreover reported to have almost unanimously expressed a deep hatred of the militant tactics adopted by British suffragettes (and by this point chronicled almost daily by the newspaper). Barbara Wylie, for instance, had urged Canadian women to forgo conventions and assert themselves: “Don’t be submissive. Don’t be docile. Don’t be ladylike. Don’t dread being conspicuous. Now is the time for deeds not words. Remember you are fighting for liberty.”25 This message did not fail to shock. One of the women questioned by the Star went as far as to denounce the actions of suffrage militants as “the rabid and empty vaporings [sic] of hysterical women,” while other female respondents variously described the movement as “foolish,” “disgraceful,” “crazy,” “rubbish,” “silly,” “ridiculous,” or “outrageous.” The many opponents of woman suffrage posited, in what was essentially a nowin situation for suffragists, that women were unfit to vote both because of their feminine nature, which rendered them too emotional to take part in public life, and because the franchise would rob them of their feminine qualities and consequently bring them to neglect their duties as wives and mothers. In one respondent’s opinion, “Women are women and men are men, each with their own work to do.” One Mrs Vallay further commented that “suffragettes were really half men and half women,” while a Miss Gratton declared that “militant methods are not becoming to our sex, and we don’t want them coming here to instruct us in such unwomanly things.” The large cartoon contributed by Racey to the piece exposing the results of the Star’s woman suffrage poll exploits the anxieties born out of this feared dissolution of the feminine and masculine spheres and identities.26 The cartoon depicts a young wife and mother of five, who stands in for the women of Montreal, in the company of her self-satisfied, prosperous, and trusting husband (as suggested by his erect posture, three-piece suit, and closed eyes). She is being addressed by a middle-aged militant suffragette (complete with banner, tracts, and menacing umbrella), who is made to look ridiculous by the contrast between her mannish physique and her feminine hat, veil, and handbag. The silliness of the suffragette is thus contrasted with the noble bearing of the Montreal woman, who does not have to resort to conspicuous accessories to look feminine. The suffragette is further marginalized by the composition of the panel, which pushes her against the left border. The focal point of Racey’s composition is the Montreal housewife who, in addition to being situated at the centre of the panel, wears a simple but tasteful eye-catching dark dress, and

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stands in the converging sightlines of the suffragette and husband characters. Moreover, by turning her back to the suffragette while gesturing her to stay away, the Montreal woman gently but firmly signals her refusal to embrace both the cause of woman suffrage and the tactics of militants. Her forward-looking (if somewhat vacant) glance suggests that progress rests not on the franchise, but on her socially sanctioned feminine duties, represented by the numerous children crowding the panel. Racey’s militant suffragist is fairly representative of the suffragette stereotype widely disseminated by satirists, especially in England and the United States at the turn of the 1910s. Like most film or cartoon suffragettes, she favours blatantly feminine clothes and accessories over the simpler hats and garments derived from masculine sartorial styles worn by many contemporary women. Though obviously amplified for comic effect, this dimension of the suffragette stereotype appears to have been grounded in fact. Fashion historian Diana Crane has documented how suffragette leaders used to instruct militants to adopt feminine modes of attire so as to pre-emptively deflect attacks centring on their purported lack of feminine qualities.27 This tactic appears nonetheless to have left the supporters of woman suffrage vulnerable to attacks presupposing the “irrational nature” of women. Indeed, controversies surrounding odd feminine garments and accessories abounded in the early years of the twentieth century. Many cartoonists, including Le Canard’s O. Asselin, for instance, lampooned the infamous “hobble skirts” (so called because their very narrow hem forced the wearer to hobble) worn by some fashionable ladies in the early 1910s.28 Several comments published in the Montreal Daily Star’s humour column and cartoons drawn by Racey also ridiculed the outsized hats in vogue at the turn of the 1910s.29 The “merry widow hat,” which could reach no less than three feet in diameter and was typically adorned with a wide assortment of feathers, buckles, ribbons, fake fruits, and stuffed birds, had been a major feature of 1908. While merry widows quickly fell out of style (1909 would be the year of the “peach-basket” hat; 1910 that of the plumed “Chantecler”), outsized ladies’ hats remained in vogue until the outbreak of the war, when economy and practicality suddenly became de rigueur. Controversy surrounding large, garish headgear was compounded by the fact that the ladies who wore them were mingling with increasing regularity with men in a variety of newly created hetero-social urban spaces associated with the emerging mass

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5.2 Arthur Racey, “What Men Will Look Like If Certain Tailors Have Their Way,” Montreal Daily Star, 26 November 1913, 26. BAnQ, reproduction of microfilm

culture.30 These outlandish feminine creations could simply not be ignored by the enfranchised males who had to deal with blocked sightlines in theatres and moving picture shows, or had to dodge threatening oversized hatpins in public transit. The dismay and outright contempt commonly expressed by the male population for “merry widows” and “hobble skirts” naturally provided fodder for those who wanted to argue that women were essentially irrational, and thus unfit to vote.31 A 1913 Racey cartoon carries out the ultimate demonstration of the purported silliness of female fashion by transferring a variety of current visual markers of femininity onto a male body. Entitled “What Men Will Look Like If Certain Tailors Have Their Way,” the drawing shows a foppish young man wearing a tight frock coat adorned with flowers, a hat decorated with a large feather and a small bird, high heel shoes, and copious lace and ribbons (Fig. 5.2). It could also be argued that, by turning a character explicitly identified with “the stronger sex” into a virtual woman, Racey merely produced ridicule. The

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5.3 Joe, “Le Mouvement Féministe,” Le Canard, 7 January 1912, 3. BAnQ Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie

fashionable man (an oxymoron, in the cartoonist’s mind) is contemptible and ridiculous, but ultimately non-threatening. Another cartoon published the preceding year, on 7 January 1912 by Le Canard’s “Joe” (whose style strongly evokes the work done by Edmond-Joseph Massicotte for La Bombe in 190932) might have been more unsettling for contemporary readers (Fig. 5.3). Entitled “The Feminist Movement,” it offers a warning complementary to the one implicitly relayed by Racey’s cartoon, in that it shows the reverse phenomenon: women turning into men. Joe’s cartoon thus depicts a female orator addressing a receptive assembly entirely made up of women. It seems to posit that the transgression represented by women’s newfound interest in politics would be consubstantial with the adoption of masculine garments, habits, and demeanours. The attendees of the feminist meeting imagined by Joe consequently all wear masculine suits and eschew the current normative conception of feminine beauty. Indeed, their female identity is only revealed by the buns and stray curls inconveniently popping out from under their assorted

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caps, bowlers, and stovepipe hats. The one lone feather visible in the cartoon’s background is surrounded by volutes of smoke produced by countless pipes, cigars, and cigarettes. What’s worse, the assembled feminists all seem relaxed and infused with a supreme confidence in the value of their cause. With his monstrous half-male, half-female feminists, Joe likely intended to simultaneously mine and feed the anxieties arising from the purported passing of a cherished ideal of femininity resting on the dual pillars of beauty and domesticity. If the women are out at the meeting or at the demonstration, who is cooking dinner and minding the kids? In fact, the comedic situation most commonly exploited in the many cartoons and motion pictures dealing with woman suffrage circulating internationally at the turn of the 1910s revolves around hapless male characters forced to take over domestic duties in their neglected home. Joe’s masculine feminists simply provide a local iteration of a negative stereotype that was well established across North America and Europe. Indeed, the only thing marking this cartoon as a Montreal creation might be its cryptic caption, which appears to refer to a now entirely forgotten French Canadian expression: “A voice. – If we keep trying to show our supremacy, we will end up showing our rooster.”33

Misguided. Hostile. English. While Joe’s take on the feminist movement was essentially indistinguishable from the bulk of the numerous anti-suffrage cartoons published around the world in the peak years of the suffragettes’ militancy, other locally produced cartoons developed a more Canadian way to attack and disparage militants. By combining the features of the new militant suffragette stock character with those of the stereotypical bony and shapeless Englishwoman, Montreal cartoonists attempted to brand suffragists as foreign agents set on imposing alien values on Canadian women. This association was, of course, greatly facilitated by the much-discussed Canadian tours undertaken by many high-profile British suffragists between 1909 and 1913. Depictions of English women somehow lacking in pulchritude were already quite common in literary and graphic satire by the time Montreal cartoonists decided to deploy such characters in their fight against woman suffrage. One can encounter this stereotype in an 1885 short story by Guy de  Maupassant,

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“Our Friends the English,” written from the point of view of an anonymous Frenchman. The delegated narrator of this story supposedly taken from a found diary thus describes the females from an English family holidaying in France: Second entry – Three ladies, three English women, a mother and two daughters … The daughters are as old as the mother, the mother is as old as the daughters. They are all three thin, with flat figures, tall, slow moving and stiff, and they show their teeth to inspire men and food with fear … All these ladies appear to have been preserved in vinegar, although there are among them five young girls, not bad looking, but hopelessly flat.34 Of course, it is notable that in this particular instance, the narrator’s disparaging view of English womanhood ultimately permits de Maupassant to invoke yet another stereotype – arguably the primary target of his satire – that of the chauvinistic Frenchman. Another example of the pervasive “tall, stiff, and hopelessly flat” Englishwoman stereotype can be found in a cartoon published in the 8 July 1910 issue of the French satirical weekly Le Rire. Skilfully drawn by Pierre Verjez, the cartoon offers a profile view of a walking Englishwoman. The artist’s brush strokes are particularly neat and precise: the stiff long arms, protuberant feet, long neck, snub nose, virtually non-existent waist or bosom, and blank expression of the character are all suggested by a few flowing lines. The woman’s plain features are further accented by her austere outfit, which is made up of a pair of black boots, a plain dark skirt (stretched in a visually striking way to suggest the character’s determined pace), a blouse, and a straw boater perched atop a boring chignon. The cartoon is accompanied by a saucy caption referring to the Thomas Cook & Son travel agency and using a pun on des seins / dessin to emphasize the lack of sex appeal of the character: “L’invasion des ‘Cook’: légende sans des seins” (“The ‘Cook’ Invasion: caption without breasts/drawings’).” Verjez’s plain Englishwoman seems to have struck a chord with the French Canadian editors of Le Canard, who reproduced it in the journal’s 9 August 1910 issue (Fig. 5.4). The Montreal journal kept the French artist’s signature, but added a new title and caption, turning this generic Englishwoman into a member of an affluent local English-speaking community. The new title announced, “A Westmount Beauty,” while the caption explained: “It is in Westmount, that pure and sinless city, that one can often find this most delectable type of

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5.4 Pierre Verjez, “Une beauté de Westmount,” Le Canard, 7 August 1910, 5. BAnQ Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie

woman.” The representation of the English enclave of Westmount as a shapeless woman was reprised by Joe a few months later in Le Canard, in an editorial cartoon on the “impossible wedding” of Miss Westmount (a forty-seven-year-old spinster with a big hat) and the City Council of Montreal (a silly middle-aged man in spats).35 Le Canard returned to the unappetizing Englishwoman stereotype two years later, on 6 October 1912, when the journal commented on the local visit of British militant Barbara Wylie by publishing on its front page a cartoon depicting an imaginary meeting between a generic “English suffragette” and Marie Scapulaire (spelled “Caspulaire” here, possibly to avoid direct offense and religious censorship), an elderly indigent woman famous for aggressively hawking scapulars around town and frequently featured in satirical journals, postcards, and songs of the era (Fig. 5.5).36 With her shapeless profile, long limbs, and masculine outfit, the English suffragette drawn by Joe appears to be cut from the same cloth as the Westmount Beauty lifted from Verjez. The small differences

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5.5 Joe, “Marie Caspulaire et les droits de la femme,” Le Canard, 6 October 1912, 1. BAnQ Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie

between the two characters cannot be described as improvements, to be sure. Indeed, whereas the facial features of Verjez’s character remained essentially bland, the prominent nose, hairy chin, and toothless grin of Joe’s suffragette are properly hideous. The meeting imagined by Joe thus works to define the militant through her repulsive physique rather than through her political agency. It is this defining feature of the English militants that establishes Marie Scapulaire as her natural local counterpart. Joe’s English suffragette arrives in Canada armed with nothing more than a suitcase and a hatpin. The exchange with Marie does suggest that a brawl is expected: “The English Suffragette: ‘Hello, Marie! I hope that you will … support … us.’ Marie Caspulaire: ‘If it’s for getting rough with inspectors, it’s all right. Otherwise, I couldn’t care less about getting involved. The Salvation Army, I ain’t.’” However, it is not the suffragette’s propensity for violence that is singled out for scorn in Joe’s renewed attack on feminism and woman suffrage, but her monstrous mannish physique.

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The threat of violent militant action is rendered much more explicit in a cartoon published in the Star on 19 September 1912 (Fig. 5.6). The scene depicted by Racey foreshadows the meeting between Marie Scapulaire and the English suffragette imagined by Joe less than three weeks later: a “Militant Suffragette” (so says her hat) reaches Canada, only to be cordially refused cooperation by a local figure. Racey’s English suffragette is more feminine than Joe’s, but ultimately just as unappealing. The main difference between Joe’s and Racey’s English militants resides in their suitcases: the bags carried by the Racey’s are brimming with “Votes for Women posters and placards,” “assorted bricks, hatchets and other missiles,” “kerosene for incendiary purpose,” and “clubs, axes and umbrellas.” The militant is, of course, refused entry by the genial Canadian customs agent, who holds a circular that places suffragettes in the “undesirable class” together with “criminals” and the “diseased.” “Prevention’s better than cure,” states the caption. The cartoons of Joe and Racey contrast the civil and common-sense Canadian approach to the controversial issue of suffrage with the quickly escalating campaign waged by English militant suffragettes. A few weeks before Wylie’s Canadian expedition, British prime minister Herbert Asquith had been targeted by militants in yet another widely reported incident. According to the newspapers, an axe thrown by suffragette Mary Leigh had landed in the carriage in which Asquith was travelling on 18 July 1912, during a visit in Dublin. It had missed him but lightly wounded another passenger, Irish nationalist leader John Redmond.37 Together with the umbrellas routinely carried by cartoon suffragettes (see Fig. 5.1 and Fig. 5.6), the axe used by Leigh would soon be adopted by cartoonists as a convenient shortcut for suffragette terrorism. It reappeared in at least two other Racey cartoons published later the same year: the first commenting on Wylie’s return to England (Wylie, with an axe poking out of her handbag, walks away from a safe bearing the inscription “Miss Canada’s wisdom safe containing her common sense and modesty”); the second on the lack of enthusiasm allegedly shown by Canadian women for the English suffragette’s message (a scrawny Christmas stocking filled with a block of “Canadian frost” and bearing a card with the inscription “Miss  Wylie” accompanied by the drawing of an axe).38 Joe also used the axe in a 1913 Canard front-page cartoon depicting Canadian prime minister Robert Borden “[faisant] sa petite Pankhurst” (“pulling a Pankhurst”): wearing a dress, he is trying to break down the Senate door with an axe.39 In the Montreal Herald, drawings of foreign

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3.9 Henri Julien, “On the Strike.” Canadian Illustrated News, 3 April 1875. McCord Museum, Montreal, M992x.5.74. Caption: “Yankee Pedlar: Strike away, boys! Guess I’ll take the opportunity to sell Canada all she wants for a year to come and when you go back to work, I reckon there’ll be nothing for you to do!”

1.3 Charles W. Jefferys, “Some of the Strange Gods Worshipped in Johnny Canuck’s Temple of Fame.” The Moon, 9 August 1902, 156. Queen’s University, W.D. Jordan Rare Books and Special Collections [Right] 7.2 Unidentified artist, “Les pouilleux de Québec: Skidou!” Le Goglu, 19 December 1930, 16. BAnQ Rosemont-La Petite Patrie

9.17 Albéric Bourgeois, [Two Hobos walking]. 12 May 1934. Pencil, India ink and wash on Bristol board, 41.9 x 38.1 cm. BAnQ Vieux-Montréal, Albéric Bourgeois Fonds, MSS346, 2006-10-001\6211

8.6 Henry Mayerovitch, “Quebec’s New Broom,” New Frontier, vol. 1, no. 6 (October 1936), 19. Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. With the kind permission of the Estate of Harry Mayerovitch

6.1 Charles Dana Gibson, “Her Day,” cover illustration, Life, vol. 42, no. 1079 (2 July 1903). The Gibson Girl with her modern pompadour hairstyle is given the Phrygian Cap, an attribute of Columbia, the allegorical figure representing the United States of America in celebration of Independence Day. Image: Jaleen Grove, from copy held by the Mechanics Institute Library of New York (library stamps digitally removed).

6.6 Oscar Cahén, Maclean’s, 15 August 1947, cover illustration

1.8. Aislin [Terry Mosher, pseud.] Caricature of Gilles Duceppe. Montreal Gazette, 2000. Original work of the artist from the year 2000. Courtesy of Terry Mosher.

1.9 Garnotte (Michel Garneau, pseud.), Justin Trudeau, Le Patriote? www.ledevoir.com, 18 February 2012. Courtesy of Michel Garneau.

5.6 Arthur Racey, “Wisdom,” Montreal Daily Star, 19 September 1912, 1. BAnQ Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie

militants carrying axes appeared all through September 1912 in the “Events of the Day as Seen by a Herald Cartoonist” section.40 The use of such symbols and shortcuts obviously serves the process of simplification, exaggeration, and quickness that constitutes an important aspect of graphic satire. Nineteenth-century cartoonists produced a body of material describing comic types rather than individuals: the spiteful spinster, the womanly woman, or the insufferable wife. Art historian Lisa Tickner argues: “Types were evoked in a kind of iconographic shorthand that was indispensable to the comic draughtsman, and in the process their visual symptomatology was developed and confirmed.”41 Early twentieth-century Canadian cartoonists indubitably created a very efficient synecdoche when, with a few brushstrokes, they conjured axes to stand in for a certain group of foreign militants, themselves standing in for a much wider and more diverse movement. Of course, this ruthless simplification process induced some – not entirely unplanned and unwanted, one suspects – distortions. Not all defenders of woman suffrage were foreign militants, and neither were all English suffragettes in the habit of throwing axes. But the argument was convenient to make, and newspaper cartoonists were certainly not expected to act as unbiased reporters. Still, editorial cartooning remains closely related to reporting, in that it also is all about topical events. Graphic satire is a dialogic process purportedly helping the reading public to make sense of the world while being also entirely dependent on a prior knowledge of current events. It can thus be presumed that this prior knowledge helped newspaper readers select from a multiplicity of options the meaning likely intended by the various cartoonists who included symbols and visual shortcuts in their drawings. By way of example, the axe constituted a sort of visual homonym, as it was also widely used at the turn of the twentieth century to represent another Progressive Era campaign led by women: the temperance movement militating for the prohibition of alcohol. The axe had famously been the choice weapon of Carrie Nation, a key figure of this US-based movement, in her raids on bars and saloons. It was subsequently used in the branding of the movement: a Hatchet Hall had been opened, souvenir hatchets sold, and a prohibitionist Montreal newspaper christened The Axe News.42 But the close proximity of the aforementioned cartoons by Racey and Joe with the numerous news reports and opinion pieces dealing with the deeds and declarations of Wylie and her fellow militants clearly nudged readers into decoding them as comments on the suffrage movements.43

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Selling Sensational Women The appearance of editorial cartoons in newspapers, as we have just seen, situated them in an intrinsically intertextual context that oriented their interpretation by the reading public. The numerous caricatures depicting cantankerous females in early 1910s Montreal newspapers make sense when examined in conjunction with the steady stream of reports and opinion pieces dealing with the numerous outrages committed by English militants printed in the surrounding pages. But how to interpret the fact that many of the Montreal newspapers which denounced suffragettes by using negative stereotypes branding them as quintessentially English – that is, a nefarious foreign influence – were also staunch supporters of the Imperial connection? The Star more particularly mounted a relentless campaign in support of the naval policy defended by Canadian prime minister Robert Borden in the fall of 1912. When Borden finally announced on 6 December that the Dominion would contribute three dreadnoughts valued at more than 35 million dollars to the defence of the British Empire, the Star triumphantly announced that Canada had “ris[en] in a night to the dignity of a nation” on a front page entirely dedicated to the news.44 Over the next few days Racey contributed two cartoons celebrating the announcement. The first one depicted Borden unveiling a monument to his decision (complete with beaver and coat of arms). In the second one, Young Man Canada parades in his new navy uniform in front of Mother Britannia.45 The aforementioned cartoon of 21 December showing a block of “Canadian frost” being offered to Wylie also included a Christmas stocking filled with “dreadnoughts from Canada” addressed to John Bull.46 When war finally broke in August of 1914, it goes without saying that the Star vociferously supported the war effort. The fact that the pro-Empire Star disparaged the suffrage movement by harping on its British origin is not the sole overt contradiction offered by the paper in the peak years of the suffragists’ campaign. Indeed, while the Star clearly aligned itself with the opponents of suffrage, it did not hesitate to also regularly publish pieces defending women’s rights, including suffrage. The Star’s “For Women Readers” column edited by Agnes Chesley, for instance, printed in December 1912 a very interesting letter coming from a male reader critical of the treatment reserved to British suffragettes by cartoonists. This letter, by one Harry R. Willcock, deserves to be quoted at length:

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Suffragettes in Caricature It is happily no uncommon thing to find able speakers advocating the intellectual claims of the sex, but the suffragist has so far found few to plead for a little less rancour and more justice in the realm of caricature. At the very least she is depicted as a dowdy – and a prehistoric one at that. Notions of the advanced woman seem to have been founded on the ideas of Artemus Ward away back in the “sixties.”47 There has been no progression in this ideal – an interruption has occurred in its evolution and the modern caricaturist sees nothing incongruous in the connection of this antiquated lady with this age of the motor-car and aeroplane. I have frequently tried to find a reason for the bitterness shown in the productions of our clever journalistic draughtsmen. The caricature should have a humorous tendency, it should possess the quality of light raillery; but it succeeds only too often in exciting … disgust. One who has seen the suffragists at work and heard their able speaking will readily see how very grossly the facts were misrepresented. [While] they were conducting a vigorous campaign in the North of England I remember seeing several of their ladies distributing leaflets at the street corners giving at the same time a cordial invitation to their meetings. Nothing could have been more becoming. They were adepts in the gentle art of persuasion, and many a rough man should find his crude ideas corrected and would bear a different notion of those redoubted ladies after that date. Their speakers are fine women and get through their work with a grace and ease that should be the envy of many male politicians … I have watched gleefully a turbulent meeting gradually reduced to order and become interested and sympathetic under the eloquence of an able lady. Those who came to scoff, remained to pay attention.

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While acknowledging, of course, that they make no claim to public attention on the score of personal attraction it is undoubtedly a fact that the movement numbers among its ranks some of the most handsome and intellectual faces it has been my lot to see. There was a gigantic poster extant at one time giving portraits of from twenty to thirty of the most prominent ladies. The criticism of the [Star’s suffragette cartoons] brought with it also a suggestion that a little knowledge of suffragist personality might be the means of producing a desirable modification in the pictorial representation of the “Suffragette.”48 In the short run, the chiding of cartoonists by the likes of Chesley and Willcock did not bring a change of attitude toward suffragists and militants. Willcock nevertheless seems to have hit the nail on the head when he accused the cartoonists and, implicitly, the newspapers employing them, of being out of step with the “age of the motor-car and the aeroplane.” Newspapers had quickly evolved since the last decades of the nineteenth century and, in the process, greatly contributed to the profound transformation of society at the end of the Victorian era. As most leading newspapers ceased to be primarily political organs in order to become modern profit-driven commercial enterprises, circulation figures quickly climbed. The Star’s circulation went up from 21,000 in 1884 to 90,000 in 1914, while La Presse (which replaced the Star as the Montreal paper with the highest circulation in 1896) increased its circulation even more spectacularly from 9,000 to 120,000 over the same years.49 Revenues, which once came primarily from political sponsors and subscribers, were now mainly generated by the sale of advertisement spaces. These, of course, increased in value as circulation kept rising. The changing nature of newspapers largely explains why heterogeneous contents and contradictory opinions were increasingly permitted to make their way into their pages in the first decades of the twentieth century. The defence of a strictly delineated party line had been replaced as the newspapers’ main raison d’être by the creation of a public of consumers as large and inclusive as possible. Women readers, who had been previously excluded from the political debates relayed and extended by newspapers, were particularly sought, as they were assumed to be responsible for most household spending. A diversity of contents (including women’s pages,50 cartoons, comics, photo and colour supplements,

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sports pages, and so forth) was consequently seen as an effective way to attract a wide range of readers. Furthermore, while most newspapers strove to retain a broadly defined editorial line, editors seem to have been aware that controversy begat news and sold copies, and consequently supported some degree of debate within the pages of their publications. The anti-suffrage position defended by several newspapers and cartoonists nevertheless remained slightly awkward, and maybe even counterproductive, since it mounted a defence of outmoded Victorian conventions and gender roles in order to generate profits for this quintessentially modern commercial enterprise. One should consequently not be surprised to see negative suffragette stereotypes quickly disappear from most newspapers in 1913, that is, well before Canadian women were enfranchised at the federal level in 1919. (One notable exception was the satirical journal Le Canard, which kept recycling its stock of suffragette cartoons well into the 1920s.51) The disappearance of this negative stereotype should be examined in light of the sudden appearance in 1914 of a new type of active woman, the serial queen, in the mass media. In Montreal, this figure was first introduced in the pages of the Star on 10 January 1914, with the publication of the opening instalment of The Adventures of Kathlyn. Like most of the serials published by newspapers over the following years, Kathlyn was a tie-in with a film producer (Selig Polyscope in this particular instance) concurrently releasing a film version of each new chapter every week. It would be followed on 27 June by The Million Dollar Mystery (Thanhouser), whose film version featured Montrealer Florence La  Badie, and then on 9 January 1915, by Runaway June (Reliance/ Mutual). At the peak of the serial craze in 1915, La Presse was publishing the novelized French version of the celebrated Perils of Pauline (Pathé), while the readers of La Patrie could follow The Diamond from the Sky (American Film Manufacturing Co./Mutual).52 All these serial tie-ins centred on young female characters who had decided to postpone marriage in order to live adventures. Kathlyn, Pauline, and the other serial queens were actually both unmarried and involved in dangerous activities – much like the typical suffragette.53 The second episode of The Perils of Pauline, which showed the heroine taking part in an aeroplane race, echoed a photograph depicting a suffragette boarding a plane “to carry aero-message on votes to women” published in the Star not long before.54 The essential difference (beyond the fact that militants were real women) between these serial queens

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and the suffragettes previously used to sell papers and movies consequently appears to have been one of outlook rather than essence. In other words, the qualities that rendered the serial queens glamorous in 1914 were essentially the same attributes that had caused the suffragettes to be mocked as “unattractive” and “unfeminine” in 1912. The sudden disaffection of the mass media for suffragettes should not necessarily be interpreted as a sign that the militants were running out of steam. In Great Britain, Prime Minister Asquith’s implementation of the “Cat and Mouse Act”55 in 1913 had very little, if any, impact on the movement. The suffragettes’ illegal actions rather ceased as a result of their support for the war effort. In Canada, the Wartime Elections Act, passed in September 1917 by the Conservative government of Robert Borden, granted the vote to female war widows and female relatives of men serving overseas. Soon afterward, in January 1919, the suffrage was extended to all Canadian women. By 1922 all Canadian provinces had also enfranchised women, with the notable exception of Quebec, which would wait until 1940 to grant the vote to its female population. This eventual victory of the suffrage movement appears to have had very little to do with the suffragettes, who had mostly halted their activities for the duration of the war. The Wartime Elections Act was arguably passed as a reward for the contribution of Canadian women to the war effort and as a means to solidify support for conscription. On the other hand, it is obvious that the militants’ actions had brought the cause to everyone’s attention. As Emmeline Pankhurst explained in a widely publicized 1912 speech by which she meant to encourage stone throwing and window smashing: “The argument of the broken pane of glass is the most valuable argument in modern politics.”56 The suffragettes knew they had to generate publicity in order to be heard. But the critical and condescending nature of the cartoons suggests that their acts of violence sometimes hindered their efforts. In the peculiar context of Montreal and Canada, the militants were much more passive than they were in Great Britain, yet the cartoons were just as critical as they were elsewhere. Racey’s and Joe’s cartoons in the Star and the Canard essentially stigmatized the movement as being foreign to Canadian values. The ugliness – hooked nose, jutting chin, shapeless figure, and so on – made the very appearance of the suffragettes a sign of a deceptive ideology. In the realms of cartoons and caricatures, contrasts work even better when two figures are dialectically opposed. Another cartoon by Racey – entitled “Wasted Energy” – confronts the

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“beautiful” Canadian, portrayed as an elegant and kind-looking lady with feathers and a maple leaf pinned to her hat. On the left side, the “ugly” suffragette is portrayed as stern-looking, hysterical, beady-eyed shrew.57 The caption under the cartoon is quite disconcerting. “Canadian Woman: ‘Why all this unnecessary and unasked for fuss on my behalf? If I wish for suffrage in my country, all I have to do is to ask for it.’”58 The “beautiful” Canadian is an embodiment of the ideal woman, while the suffragette is always shown as an intruder with an “un-Canadian” agenda. She clearly fits the long-standing negative stereotype of the over-educated militant. With her hooked nose, messy bun, and lack of composure, the only thing the cartoon suffragette shows is spite and bitterness. This depiction reflects none of the values associated with femininity and beauty. In contrast, serial queens such as Kathlyn and Pauline, were as “beautiful” and “good-natured” as the Canadian woman depicted in the cartoon, and as intelligent and articulate as the suffragette. Although directly related to the suffragette, the serial queen was a much better vehicle to carry the cause of women. Journalist and philosopher Walter Lippmann discussed stereotypes in a 1922 book entitled Public Opinion. In his essay discussing the press and the fabric of the news in modern mass media, Lippmann argues that the news is understood and evaluated through series of “pictures” or stereotypes that make reality tangible, yet overly simplified and static: For the real environment is altogether too big, too complex and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.59 Lippmann does not criticize stereotypes themselves, but rather readers’ inclination toward pre-made narratives and their acceptance of biased sources of information. Indeed, cartoons such as those signed by Joe and Racey exercised a subtle and insidious influence. That being said, these oversimplified and misinformed cartoons also unwittingly helped to publicize the cause of suffrage in Canada. In order to bring the cause to everyone’s notice, the militants had to create publicity by means of advertising, parades, conferences and, sometimes, in the case of British and American suffragettes, spectacular or violent stunts. Newspapers could provide readers with reports, photographs and, of course,

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cartoons. Being visible in the press was an absolute necessity for drawing attention to the movement. As Lippmann explained: “The suffragists knew this, did not particularly enjoy the knowledge but acted on it, and kept suffrage in the news long after the arguments pro and con were straw in their mouths, and people were about to settle down to thinking of the suffrage movement as one of the established institutions of American life.”60 The participants in the transnational suffrage movement faced a dilemma. On the one hand, marches and conferences seemed to have had very little effect on public opinion. Arson, stone throwing, and window smashing, on the other hand, proved to be successful means of catching the attention of the media, but generally evoked more negative feelings than sympathy. Cartoons mocking foreign militants in these years of struggle added to the general hostility. Montreal cartoonists, in particular, showed very little sympathy for the movement and depicted the militants as unattractive and unfeminine. The hostility toward these women who were breaking with Victorian mores and tradition is ultimately unsurprising. What is more puzzling is the fact that the suffrage largely ceased to catch the interest of Montreal cartoonists and humourists after 1912, that is, many years before this controversial issue was resolved and two years before the movement subsided with the onset of war. To what can this sudden disappearance be attributed? Some prosaic explanations come first to mind: that newspapers eventually decided that the militant suffragette character had been overused, offered a limited palette of comedic situations, or had simply been exposed as unfunny. Other contributing factors may have proceeded from the fact that commercial newspapers were not as strongly committed to the positions they defended as the political papers from the previous century. Newspapers editors may have sensed that their readers were increasingly embracing the new, modern views of gender roles exemplified by the serial queen and quietly dropped their anti-suffrage campaigns. Art historian Lisa Tickner has shown that the graphic satire targeting the suffragettes was based on representations borrowed from the nineteenth-century illustrated press: draughtsmen and cartoonists lampooned the suffragists, using the models of the “nagging wife” and the “embittered spinster.”61 Cartoons mocking the suffragettes were largely embedded in these outmoded stereotypical models. Another essential change relevant to the disappearance of suffragette caricatures may have been the decline of pictorial journalism and the advent of photojournalism, a major transition that had caused hand-drawn illustrations

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to be increasingly replaced by photographs in the 1910s. Photographs might have helped the cause of woman suffrage by offering an arguably more truthful representation of suffragists and a better understanding of their movement. Cartoons depicting militants as insufferable, aggressive spinsters appeared side by side with photographs of cheerful young ladies taken at suffrage-related events.62 While drawings had left the suffragettes at the mercy of draughtsmen and deprived them of any say in their image, photographs may have empowered them and, in the process, allowed them to break away from stereotypes and take control of their public image. Commercial newspapers had managed to position themselves at the forefront of the debate surrounding woman suffrage by keeping it both lively and visible. Their editorialists and cartoonists, however, unexpectedly found themselves lagging behind a reading public spurred in the direction of progress by the entertainment and visual spectacle offered by the same publications. Cartoonists would have to get free of their mental corsets to enter the age of the motor-car and the aeroplane.

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NOTES Jean de Bonville, La presse québécoise de 1884 à 1914. Genèse d’un média de masse (Quebec City: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1988); Minko Sotiron, From Politics to Profit: The Commercialization of Canadian Daily Newspapers, 1890–1920 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997). Early Canadian supporters of woman suffrage included the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (active at the local level since the 1870s) and the Toronto Women’s Literary Club (founded in 1876). See Catherine L. Cleverdon, The Woman Suffrage Movement in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974 [1950]), 11, 21–1, 217. Cleverdon’s take on the subject is sometimes considered dated and biased, but it is the first important study of early suffrage movements in Canada; her work remains essential reading. See also the two volumes of Maureen Moynagh and Nancy Forestell, Documenting First Wave Feminisms (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012–2014), 113–54. Cleverdon, The Woman Suffrage Movement in Canada, 12, 217–22. Vanessa Thorpe, “Truth Behind the Death of Suffragette Emily Davison Is Finally Revealed,” The Guardian (25 May 2013). http://m.guardiannews.com/society/2013/ may/26/emily-davison-suffragette-death-derby-1913, last accessed 26 May 2013.

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5 Die Suffragette is famous for its shocking force-feeding scene. The film is available on the Four Films with Asta Nielsen dvd edited by Edition Filmmuseum. 6 The Pickpocket is available on the dvd A Hundred Years Ago: Comic Actresses and Suffragettes, 1910–1914, edited by Cineteca Bologna. 7 A Busy Day is available in the Chaplin at Keystone dvd box set edited by Cineteca Bologna, Lobster Films, Flicker Alley, and the British Film Institute. The Internet Movie Database lists Militant Suffragette and Charlot, sufragista as alternative titles for A Busy Day. See: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0003733/releaseinfo#akas, last accessed 30 April 2013. 8 “The Strong Arm Squad of the Future” is available on the Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900–1934 dvd box set edited by the National Film Preservation Foundation and Image Entertainment. It can also be viewed on the website of the National Film Preservation Foundation: http://www.filmpreservation.org/dvdsand-books/clips/the-strong-arm-squad-of-the-future-ca-1912 (last accessed 10 April 2014). 9 Cleverdon, The Woman Suffrage Movement in Canada, Preface vii. 10 See for instance: “Suffragettes’ Raid Letter Boxes and Cause Great Loss,” Montreal Daily Star (29 November 1912), 6; “No Dynamite for Suffragettes,” Montreal Daily Star (6 December 1912), 25; “Suffragettes Contemptible Christmas Deed,” Montreal Daily Star (23 December 1912), 11; “Suffragettes’ Plan More Wicked Campaigns, One to Harass the King,” Montreal Daily Star (21 January 1913), 2; “Suffragettes Threaten Worse Things If Their Campaign Does Not Win,” Montreal Daily Star (23 January 1913), 1; “Suffragettes’ Threats to Burn London, Kidnap Premier, Annoy Ruler,” Montreal Daily Star (28 January 1913), 3. 11 Carol Lee Bacchi, Liberation Deferred? The Ideas of the English-Canadian Suffragists (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 114; Mariana Valverde, “When the Mother of the Race Is Free: Race, Reproduction, and Sexuality in First-Wave Feminism,” in Franca Iacovetta and Mariana Valverde, eds., Gender Conflicts: New Essays in Women’s History (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1992), 3–26; Lora Campbell, Tamara Myers, Adele Perry, eds., Rethinking Canada: The Promise of Women’s History (Toronto: Oxford’s University Press, 2016), 221–3. 12 This was the case of one of the most famous Canadian suffragists, Nellie L. McClung, whose writings promoted feminism and suffrage for women, but also sterilization and eugenic practices. See In Times Like These (Toronto: McLeod & Allen, 1915). 13 Moynagh and Forestell, eds., Documenting First Wave Feminisms, 117.

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14 Cleverdon, The Woman Suffrage Movement in Canada, 243. Cleverdon’s analysis of French-Canadian society is indebted to Horace Miner, Saint-Denis: A FrenchCanadian Parish (Chicago, 1939). 15 Denyse Baillargeon, A Brief History of Women in Quebec (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012), 96–7. 16 “Advise Local Women to Take Militant Steps – Miss Wylie’s Speech Almost Caused Verbal Battle and Interference Necessary,” Montreal Daily Star (5 November 1912), 9; “Miss Wylie on Hatchet-Throwing”; “Don’t Be Patient Says Miss Wylie to Local Women,” Montreal Daily Star (11 November 1912), 10, 18; Cleverdon, The Woman Suffrage Movement in Canada, 221–2. 17 Cleverdon, The Woman Suffrage Movement in Canada, 224. 18 This observation is based on the systematic survey of Quebec newspapers and periodicals from 1895 to 1952 undertaken at Université de Montréal by the Groupe de recherche sur l’avènement et la formation des institutions cinématographique et scénique (grafics) and coordinated by Louis Pelletier. This survey led to a partnership with Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec and the subsequent digitization of several Quebec periodicals, including Le Canard and La Bombe. 19 Henri Julien remained the Star’s artistic director until his passing in 1908. De Bonville, La presse québécoise de 1884 à 1914, 222; Dominic Hardy, Drawn to Order: Henri Julien’s Political Cartoons of 1899 and His Career with Hugh Graham’s Montreal Daily Star, 1888-1908, Master’s thesis, Trent University, 1998, 92–9; “Arthur George Racey,” McCord Museum, http://www.mccord-museum.qc.ca/scripts/ explore.php?Lang=2&tableid=1&tablename=artist&elementid=02027__true, last accessed May 3, 2013. 20 On La Presse’s visual turn, see Sandra Gabriele and Paul S. Moore, “‘L’Univers Illustré’ de La Presse: The Animation of Newspaper Pages in the Late 19th Century,” Nouvelles Vues 15 (fall 2013). 21 De Bonville, La presse québécoise, 222. 22 “Hector Berthelot,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?id_nbr=5970, last accessed 3 May 2013. 23 The three questions asked by the Star’s reporter to Montreal women were: 1. Do you want the right to vote? 2. Are you in favor of militant methods to win that right? and 3. What do you think of the action of the British Suffragettes in sending an emissary to instigate a campaign in Canada? “Votes for Women! Do They Want Them?” Montreal Daily Star (12 October 1912), 21, 37. 24 This investigation of the English-French divide in Montreal was counterbalanced,

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however, by a lack of interest for the city’s fast-growing immigrant population. The section of the Star’s report dedicated to St Joseph’s Ward, for instance, mentions that “No notice has been taken of the foreigners or colored population, who are fairly thickly settled here.” Canadian Annual Review (1912), 305–7 and Cleverdon, The Woman Suffrage Movement in Canada, 118. The notion that gender lines were becoming blurred became prevalent at the start of the twentieth century, leading to a surge in caricatures depicting women engaging in masculine behaviour and vice versa. Martha Banta raises that issue in Barbaric Intercourse: Caricature and the Culture of Conduct, 1841–1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 356–7. The historian shows that the trauma of the war and the advent of the “new woman” changed the world as it was known and envisioned. She illustrates that point with a quite amusing cartoon entitled “A War Bridegroom” (Life, 21 March 1918), where an effeminate man, a veteran “stripped from his manhood,” is surrounded by a group of ladies dressed in fancy military uniforms. Banta has extensively discussed feminine types, including suffragettes, in Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). Diana Crane, Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 127. O. Asselin, “La mode au ‘Canard’” [cartoon], Le Canard (28 July 1912), 5. Throughout history women have frequently been mocked for their frivolousness and love of fancy garments. The depreciation of female intellectuals through reference to clothing is an enduring method used in graphic satire. Perhaps the most famous forerunner, before the fancy hat or umbrella, is the stocking. The derogatory term “Bluestocking” (or, in French, “Bas-bleu”) thus came to be used in the nineteenth century to mock supposedly pretentious, awkward, and masculine intellectual women. The Bas-bleus were famously satirized by a series of drawings published by Honoré Daumier in the 1844. (See Honoré Daumier, Lib Women: Bluestockings and Socialist Women, edited by Françoise Parturier and Jacqueline Armingeat [Paris/New York: Leon Amiel Publisher, 1974].) Daumier’s drawings show pretentious, frumpy and, of course, ugly young aspiring female intellectuals failing at being mothers, wives, and housekeepers. Most of these tropes would resurface in the 1910s in connection with the suffrage debate. See: Arthur Racey, “What we may logically expect as a sequence to Judge Piche’s theatre-hat decision” [cartoon], Montreal Daily Star (22 November 1907);

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“Le mauvais exemple!” [cartoon], Le Canard (8 December 1907), 7; “Le Merry Widow” [cartoon], Le Canard (28 February 1909), 2; “Au Gouinoscope” [cartoon] (2 May 1909), 1; Arthur Racey, “A couple of massive merry widows spoiled the view for a number of fans” [cartoon], Montreal Daily Star (9 July 1909); “Féminisme: une affaire d’honneur” [cartoon], La Presse (4 April 1910), 1. For more information on the controversy surrounding feminine headgear in the early twentieth century, see Louis Pelletier and Catherine Russell, “‘Ladies, Please Remove Your Hats’: Fashion, Moving Pictures and Gender Politics of the Public Sphere, 1907–1911,” Living Pictures 2, 1 (2003): 61–84. See for instance: “Hatpins, War and the Franchise,” The Standard [Montreal] (23 May 1914), 15. This striking resemblance suggests that “Joe” might actually be Edmond-Joseph Massicotte. It should be noted, however, that, while the artist did produce many drawings for Le Canard in the 1890s, Bernard Genest’s exhaustive catalogue of Massicotte drawings does not include any work for this publication after 1898. Furthermore, there is no obvious reason why Massicotte, who used to sign his work with his full name, would have had to use a different moniker in Le Canard. See: Bernard Genest, Massicotte et son temps (Montreal: Boréal Express, 1979); David Karel, Edmond-Joseph Massicotte illustrateur (Quebec City: Presses de l’Université Laval / Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 2005); La Bombe: juillet à décembre, Sandria P. Bouliane and Jasmin Miville-Allard, eds. (Montreal: Moult Éditions, 2011). “Une voix. – À force de vouloir montrer notre suprématie, nous allons finir par montrer notre coq.” We find no evidence that “le coq,” the French word for “rooster” or “cock,” was used to designate male genitalia in the vernacular language of the French-Canadians of the early twentieth century. The Miromesnil Edition of Guy de Maupassant (New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1910). Joe, “Un mariage impossible” [cartoon], Le Canard (20 November 1910), 1. Even the infamous Eden Museum operating on St Lawrence Boulevard eventually immortalized Marie Scapulaire (aka Marie-Henriette Laurier, c.1848–1919) in a wax figure. Conrad Laforte, Le catalogue de la chanson folklorique canadienne, vol. 6, Chansons sur des timbres, nouvelle édition augmentée et entièrement refondue (Quebec City: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1983), 490; Kristian Gravenor, Coolopolis, 28 June 2007, http://coolopolis.blogspot.ca/2007_06_24_archive.html, last accessed 13 December 2013; “Marie Caspulaire, la nymphe du pavé” [postcard] (Montreal: Roméo Roussi éditeur, c. 1907). Marie Scapulaire would also return to

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the front page of Le Canard on 16 February 1913. “Suffragettes Had Many Dangerous Weapons of War – Women Go for Trial on Charges Arising Out of Scenes in Dublin,” Montreal Daily Star (19 July 1912), 1. Arthur Racey, “Found the Safe Too Strong to Break” [cartoon], Montreal Daily Star (2 December 1912), 3; Arthur Racey, “Some Christmas Stocking Suggestions” [cartoon], Montreal Daily Star (21 December 1912), 3. Other Racey cartoons dealing with Wylie’s visit include a depiction of a Canadian prison “awaiting the arrival of English militant suffragettes” (5 September 1912), 3; “What Happened Next?” [comic strip] (12 October 1912), 19; “Wasted Energy” (5 November 1912), 17. [Joe], “Maître Borden se fâche” [cartoon], Le Canard (25 May 1913), 1. See the 6, 13, 14, 17, 18 and 23 September 1912 issues of the Montreal Herald. Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907–14 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 170. See also Alice Sheppard, Cartooning for Suffrage (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), 142–3. The Axe News was published in Montreal by John H. Roberts between 1922 and 1924. One consequence of graphic satire’s extensive reliance on context is that the various symbols and stereotypes deployed by cartoonists can become positively inscrutable when examined in a different place or time. One of the symbols used by early 1910s cartoonists to mark their characters as militants, the umbrella, thus unexpectedly found itself embroiled in one of the most shocking events of the twentieth century, the 1963 assassination of US president John F. Kennedy. Visual documentation of the assassination has indeed revealed that a man bearing an open umbrella had been standing next to the President’s limousine at the moment of the shooting – a most unusual fact, considering that it had been a sunny day in Dallas. This mystifying situation gave rise to a great number of theories in the years following the event: some believed that the “umbrella man,” as the man came to be known, was signalling the shooter, others that his umbrella concealed a weapon. But, in the fifteen years that eventually elapsed between the assassination and the moment the umbrella man, one Louie Steven Witt, came forward to give his version, not one expert managed to correctly guess the explanation for the umbrella. Witt revealed that his umbrella had actually been intended as a protest against the appeasement policies toward Nazi Germany defended by the president’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy, in the years leading to the Second World War. The black umbrella had gained currency as a signifier for appeasement at the time of the 1938 Munich Agreement through

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its connection with British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, who was known for carrying one everywhere he went. (A 1939 drawing by the celebrated British cartoonist David Low depicts a swastika-covered tiger holding a black umbrella labeled “appeasement” in its fangs. It is reproduced in: Colin Seymour-Ure and Jim Schoff, David Low [London: Secker and Warburg, 1985], 170.) Witt had simply been oblivious to the fact that this symbol had lapsed and become thoroughly opaque in the intervening decades. For more on the umbrella man, see the short film The Umbrella Man (2011) directed by Errol Morris for the New York Times: http://www. nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000001183275/the-umbrella-man.html. “Canada Rises in a Night to the Dignity of a Nation – Three Great SuperDreadnoughts Canada’s Imperial Gift to Increase Royal Navy for the Common Defence of the Empire” [cartoon], Montreal Daily Star (6 December 1912), 1, 3. Arthur Racey, “Unveiled” and “In His New Clothes” [cartoons], Montreal Daily Star (7, 9 December 1912), 3. Other contemporary Racey cartoons celebrating the collaboration between Canada and its “Mother Land” were published in the Montreal Daily Star: on 11 July 1912 (England, Australia, and New Zealand at a naval review from which Canada is conspicuously absent), 3; on 17 September 1912 (“Our Best Customer”: John Bull carrying a basket with Canadian exports), 3; on 21 October 1912 (“Not So Blind or Deaf as Those Who Refuse to See or Hear”: a blinkered Canadian taxpayer compromises Imperial safety by refusing to see the German arms factories working overtime), 3; and on 25 October 1912 (an advertisement for Black Night stove polish, also published on the same day in French in La Presse, showing Lady Canada helping preserve the Empire’s stoves by offering polish to a grandmotherly Lady Britannia), 10. Charles Farrar Browne, an American humour writer also known as Artemus Ward, had died in 1867. “Suffragettes in Caricature,” Montreal Daily Star (9 December 1912), 8. Sotiron, From Politics to Profit, 5; De Bonville, La presse québécoise, 259. An item from the Montreal Daily Star’s humour column comically reverses the sexist assumptions leading to women being considered a minority group in need of a reserved section. It relates the following exchange between a suffragette and her husband: Mr. Henballot: “You’re going to have a lot of nice features in your suffragette paper. Are you going to have a men’s page?” Mrs. Henballot: “Certainly not. But we may devote half a column to masculine interests in the weekly news supplement.” “Assigning the Space,” Montreal Daily Star (8 November 1913): 10.

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51 Le Canard recycled Joe’s 6 October 1912 [Fig. 5.5] suffragette in a cartoon published in a 1921 cartoon mocking the irrational impulses of the newly enfranchised (at the federal level) women voters. This time, the character was not presented as an Englishwoman, but simply as an ugly spinster pining to vote for “her chosen one.” “Les femmes ont droit de vote,” Le Canard (9 October 1921), 9. Joe’s “Le mouvement féministe” [Fig. 5.3] was also reprinted with a new caption, “Curieuse assemblée de dames,” on the front page of the 30 September 1917 issue of Le Canard. 52 The first chapter of The Perils of Pauline was published in La Presse on 2 January 1915 (14). The first chapter of The Diamond of the Sky appeared in La Patrie on 26 June 1915 (17). 53 One of Racey’s best suffrage-related cartoons showed Cupid in tears in front of a closed door leading to the office of the “Woman Suffrage Movement.” “Out in the Cold,” Montreal Daily Star (23 November 1912), 3. 54 “To Carry Aero-Message on Votes to Women,” Montreal Daily Star (20 January 1913), 1; “Les périls de Pauline,” La Presse (9 January 1915), 12. 55 The “Prisoners Act,” or “Temporary Discharge for Ill Health,” also known as the “Cat and Mouse Act” ensured that militants undertaking hunger strikes would be released until their condition improved. 56 This speech was given on 16 February 1912, in front of the members of the wspu. It was reproduced under the title “The Argument of the Broken Pane,” Votes for Women (23 February 1912), 319. Quoted in Paula Bartley, Emmeline Pankhurst (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 127. 57 Montreal Daily Star (5 November 1912), 17. 58 Racey seems to think Canadian women could easily get the vote if they wanted it. But the cartoon also suggests that reasonable women do not want to be bothered by such trifles. 59 See Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: MacMillan, 1957), 16. 60 See Lippmann, Public Opinion, 346. 61 Tickner, The Spectacle of Women, 163–4. 62 See for instance: “To Carry Aero-Message on Votes to Women,” Montreal Daily Star (20 January 1913), 1; “England’s Fighting Women in Their Den,” Montreal Daily Star (25 January 1913), 22; “Suffragettes Ready for a Long Tramp,” Montreal Daily Star (31 January 1913), 1.

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six

Crossing the Line: Canadian Satire of the “Pretty Girl” North and South of the 49th Parallel JALEEN GROVE As early as 1869, political cartoons in English-speaking Canada allegorically depicted Canada’s potential annexation to the United States as a scene of attempted seduction, in which Cousin Jonathan or Uncle Sam improperly wooed and accosted a comely, upright Miss Canada.1 As Robyn Fowler has shown, Miss Canada was a hegemonic figure coded as morally pure, a figure who masked Canada’s actual panoply of ruptures and political stances in support of a myth of unity that served Anglo-Canadian dominance.2 Her desirability, which represented both Canada’s vulnerability as it left the imperial fold and Canada’s potency to attract and negotiate international relations independently, was contained by her chastity. In the 1890s, however, the image of Miss Canada was challenged by the advent of a rival in mainstream North American visual culture: the generic “Pretty Girl.” Not just a pretty face, the new girl was also “The American Girl,” a more casual, down-to-earth version of the classical allegory of Columbia. By 1900, she was indistinguishable from the self-fashioning “Modern Girl,” who molded her progressive person in synch with modernity’s turn to consumerism; and who thus embodied the evolving political, racial, class, gender, and sexual expressions of the period.3 As a marriageable young woman embodying mainstream

beauty ideals4 as well as the economic prosperity and assumed superiority of the American people, the American Pretty Girl was a dangerous seductress to many Canadians just as Uncle Sam and Cousin Jonathan had been before, but more insidious because, unlike Miss Canada, she was not confined to the bracketed space of political cartoons. In fiction illustration, advertising, decorative prints, calendars, and especially, magazine covers, she appealed to women as well as men – and the American Dream she stood for was indeed enticing. The use of Miss Canada faded by the 1920s as the Pretty Girl became ubiquitous; it is possible that Miss Canada’s retirement was due to her inability to stand for pure ideals after the proliferation of the pretty girl associated the figure of a woman with increasingly materialistic matters and sexuality.5 As we shall see, the shift did not occur smoothly: the Pretty Girl met with dismay as well as acceptance in English Montreal and Toronto between 1902 and 1947, reflecting the wide range of positions that Canadians took in negotiating the terms of Anglo-Canadian visual culture vis-à-vis that of the United States. Satirical and ironic depictions of the Pretty Girl in the popular Canadian press kept critical evaluations of her at the forefront but paradoxically contributed to her ultimate acceptance as well. What follows explores pictures more normally considered “illustration” and “comics” than graphic satire (caricature and some cartoon), in order to question assumptions that the three are easily separable. The graphic satire and comics modes are but subsets of illustration, with the same functions of being narrative, descriptive, symbolic, and allegorical, and of providing some sort of counterpoint to a story, caption, or gag. Graphic satire is merely a specialization in exploiting certain illustrative attributes: its rhetorical aspect is usually declared openly rather than remaining implicit, for instance; and, while other types of illustration and comics may engage in word play (an advertising logo or mascot; a children’s book), graphic satire relies on visual puns more frequently. Where the modes do differ is that illustration tends to be sincere, and aims to represent the world (or an imaginary place) credibly, while graphic satire revels in irony, sarcasm, exaggeration, the ridiculous, the incredible. (Comic strips and related sequential graphics fall in between, embracing the entire gamut.) Yet – significantly – it is the straight-faced delivery of illustration that makes the comical delivery of graphic satire funny and hence effective. Conversely, illustration is always borrowing from the satirical repertoire to amplify regular characters and scenarios. The two cannot be separated; there is an interdependence and a continuum between them. Graphic satire cannot be understood without reference

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6.1 Charles Dana Gibson, “Her Day,” cover illustration, Life, vol. 42, no. 1079 (2 July 1903). The Gibson Girl with her modern pompadour hairstyle is given the Phrygian Cap, an attribute of Columbia, the allegorical figure representing the United States of America in celebration of Independence Day. Image: Jaleen Grove, from copy held by the Mechanics Institute Library of New york (library stamps digitally removed).

to illustration as a whole; and cartoon and caricature likewise feed back into mainstream straight illustration and comics. Accordingly, this chapter examines how creators and their work inhabit various points on the continuum between straight and satirical, and how each artist leverages differing admixtures of both in order to configure intervisual references that correspond to cultural attitudes. As I explore in later pages, the eventual effects of Pretty Girl caricature, comics, and illustration published in the first half of the twentieth century were unintentionally complicit in making the exaggerated female form the reigning ideal, while provoking Canadian cultural nationalist thinking into an increasingly binary model that failed to acknowledge or legitimize the actual extent of continentalist feeling in Canada. The Pretty Girl as an illustrators’ fad evolved out of Charles Dana Gibson’s (1867–1944) social commentary cartoons of the 1890s, which in turn capitalized upon the successful spectacularization of women in popular theatre acts, advertising, and the Pre-Raphaelite influence in art.6 Gibson specifically defined the glamorous Gibson Girl, as his iteration of the trope came to be called, as the ideal “American Girl,” the fittest offspring of what today’s scholars would recognize as social Darwinism (Fig. 6.1).7 Gibson’s creation was quickly commodified, sparking countless imitations including the Christy Girl, the Fisher Girl, the Petty Girl, the Varga Girl, and others named after their respective creators over the next half century.8 In illustrators’ circles, this specialization came to be informally known as “Pretty Girl” illustration. The scale of the trend is difficult to measure, but one of the most comprehensive collections of American pretty-girl illustration 1890–1950, amassed by collector Richard Huisking, contains over 14,000 magazine covers and over 10,000 calendar pictures.9 The rise of the Pretty Girl in print was accompanied by her increasing spectacularization in other media as well. New York revues such as the Ziegfeld Follies were quick to flaunt actual all-American Pretty Girls in the flesh, in exotic undress. Beauty pageants too grew out of the Pretty Girl phenomenon, generally adopting a nationalistic rhetoric to disguise their commercial function: the Miss America pageant was launched in 1921 to prolong the summer tourist season in Atlantic City.10 Pageants were judged by famous Pretty Girl illustrators, whose renown added to the hype. Continent-wide, sex appeal became increasingly visible as advertising became more competitive and as Hollywood’s commodification of glamour weakened Victorian prudery, causing the Pretty Girl figure to become, for some critics, indelibly identified with

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immoral American materialism.11 For nationalists, insofar as cooperating with America was considered treason against Mother Britain (as Miss Canada’s spurning of Cousin Jonathan’s advances, and as widespread rhetoric protesting the 1892 free trade deal and the 1911 Reciprocity deal reflected clearly),12 any temptation the Pretty Girl might have stirred among Canadians liable to engage in cross-border business symbolically equated to economic and cultural adultery committed against prim Miss Canada. Rotogravure formats such as colour newspaper magazine sections and “slick” magazines in new, large sizes encouraged more realistic, painterly imagery to supersede cartoon and caricature line drawings and wood engravings as the primary visual idioms of mass print media. Beginning circa 1900, the faces and bodies of attractive women that rapidly came to dominate the newly pictorial American magazine covers soon outnumbered Canadian ones on Canadian newsstands eight to one.13 To compete, national magazines such as Maclean’s, Canadian Home Journal, Chatelaine, Mayfair, Western Home Monthly, and Liberty14 also added more representations of pretty women’s heads, ladies at leisure, and bathing beauties – frequently illustrated or photographed by Americans.15 Ironically, the period from 1890 to 1950 was also a time when Anglo-Canadian nationalists, including these same magazines’ editors, agitated for a show of difference from the United States.16 Caricatures of the Pretty Girl appearing in Canadian publications reflected unease over creeping “Americanization” in business and in culture, and served to offset the Pretty Girl’s incursion into the public sphere. Caught between the need to make a living and the desire for cultural legitimacy, Canadian artists who chose to “Americanize” by earnestly following the Pretty Girl vogue, or who pursued opportunity south of the forty-ninth parallel, were viewed by nationalists as products of the invader culture and hasteners of Canada’s impending annexation to the United States. On the other hand, influential continentalist writers such as Winnipeg newspaperman J.W. Dafoe did not think trade or Americanism compromised Canadian autonomy – rather, friendliness and fluency in American culture to them meant security, prosperity, and cosmopolitanism.17 Here, I examine rhetoric about and representations of the Pretty Girl by Canadian illustrators based in Montreal, Toronto, and New York; namely, Arthur Racey (1870–1941), Charles W. Jefferys (1869–1951), Arthur William Brown (1881–1966), Russell Patterson (1893–1977),18 and Oscar Cahén (1916–1956). Each

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man’s works corresponds to common Canadian attitudes towards Americanism: for, against, or compromising. At stake was the recurring question of whose principles would frame Canadian policy and identity, those of nationalists or those of continentalists? Besides raising the spectre of continentalism, the Pretty Girl was unnerving because she coincided with the movement of women into the public sphere. Ladies who made bold public appearances risked condemnation: when in 1902 Lady Ragland raised money for charity by appearing in regalia she had worn to King Edward’s Coronation, the overtly nationalist, Toronto-based satirical paper The Moon (1902–03) (edited and part-owned by Jefferys) compared her to actresses posing for vaudevillian “living pictures” (in which actresses posed motionless in salacious skin-coloured tights or white body paint to be ogled as classical statuary and Old Masters paintings), snidely saying her conduct was “a new way of putting [oneself] before the public.”19 A respectable Victorian lady was not supposed to appear in print at all save for her marriage announcement and her obituary. But with the boom in print media in the early twentieth century, this was changing. Women began to use rather than avoid the media to organize community work, to make the social register, to publicize causes such as temperance, or to demand the vote.20 Housewives, thought to be the key decision-makers in purchasing, also began figuring frequently in advertising. The editors of Chatelaine and Canadian Home Journal in the 1920s and 1930s framed their magazines in terms of maternal feminist principles, in which home economy and women’s work were ennobled as the building blocks of national economy and moral health. Women’s proven success at homemaking, community building, and child-rearing was, they felt, qualification enough for the Canadian Woman to take elected office.21 They took pride in showing the pretty face of the modern Canadian Woman: sophisticated, worldly, interested in national and international governance – an important rhetorical strategy to counter the commonly ugly and mannish caricatures of suffragettes, as seen in the preceding chapter. By contrast, caricatures of alluring women for magazines that assumed a male readership manipulated long-standing patriarchal discomfort over women’s visibility in the public sphere (like that of Lady Ragland), a distrust that hearkened back to ancient Western (Biblical) patriarchal censure of sexually attractive women. Gibson’s own cautionary portrayals of love-struck men

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6.2 Arthur Racey, “The American Girl,” The Moon, 20 July 1902, 126. These first appeared on covers of previous issues.

begging aloof women for mercy exemplify this.22 Condemnation of the Pretty Girl in print publicity was intended not just to contain females in outmoded traditional roles but also to curtail male capitulation to the attractive, powerful modern woman.

Arthur Racey’s Caricatures of the “American Girl” Several caricatures of the Gibson Girl produced by Arthur Racey for The Moon are great examples of the stirring up of sexist, racist, and classist fears to remind the Canadian man not to let his guard down when faced with tartedup American business offers.23 Racey was an established caricaturist who from 1899 to 1941 produced for the conservative newspaper the Montreal Star (1869– 1979).24 The Moon’s express purpose, as editors C.W. Jefferys and Knox Magee said in the very first issue on 28 May 1902, was to reduce Canadian dependence on illustrated humour magazines that were “so intensely ‘American’ that they [were] always objectionable.”25 Two weeks later, Racey’s series titled “The American Girl” commenced on the first inside page. Additional sketches ran on the covers of five subsequent issues, and the six were reprinted together in a finale on one interior page in the seventh week (Fig. 6.2). In the visual language of caricature, the artist had multiple inflections at his disposal: as a gestural homage, he could faithfully adopt Gibson’s facile hand and line weights to approximate the stock Gibson Girl in appearance, in order to then redeploy her in an ironic mode to whatever subversive ends he wished. Or, he could ignore style but playfully mimic the Gibson Girl’s demeanour in order to mock. He could also push parody into satire by making mockery serve a biting moral purpose, unmasking a hidden “truth.” Racey took this last approach, using a dismissively casual and unremarkable hand that made no pretense of matching Gibson’s masterly, autographic line. He included more exaggeration of physiognomy than homage or parody could admit, making the Pretty Girl hideous and challenging her supposed racial and cultural superiority. Titles, captions, and verses guided the reader’s interpretation. The series was announced with great sarcasm: “As it is the fashion for almost every American Illustrated paper to publish a series of sketches of Typical American Girls, we do not intend to be left behindhand … [Racey’s] sketches are more nearly typical of the beauty of the American girl than any other similar art collection heretofore published on this continent.”26

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The first girl, “Sweet Sylvia, the Society Girl,” is a direct send-up of the most typical Gibson Girl (a beautiful, poised socialite). Sylvia is Caucasian and she displays a tasteless arrangement of gaudy jewels, looking for a husband to “trap with cash.” Her features are decidedly plain, and she slouches and plays with a wad of chewing gum in her mouth, unconscious of public scrutiny, her comportment contrasting with the elegant bearing of the Gibson prototype. The second Girl is an African American, with smiling lips grossly exaggerated, ironically named Snowdrop to emphasize her blackness. Her pretension to privilege is indicated by the proud elevation of her head, the genteel fan she holds, and the pearls she wears.27 The third is the Athletic Girl, with heavy simian features denoting Irish heritage, crudely shouting “Fore!” down the golf links (Gibson had portrayed this subject previously with the caption “Fore! The American Girl to All the World”28). Her unfeminine attire consists of sensible flat shoes, practical gloves, skirt with bold argyle tartan pattern, miniature top-hat, cravat, plain blazer hanging unbuttoned, and big belt buckle in the shape of the American coat of arms.29 Girl Number Four, the Sporty Girl, is dressed in an “Amazon” riding costume with masculine high collar and cufflinks, top hat, and gloves, with a gaudy horseshoe brooch, a riding crop, and spectacles. Her face calls up the centuriesold iconography of the hag, with pointed nose and chin, hint of saggy jowl, and a mole. With veiled homophobia, the caption assures the presumed male reader: “She will hold thee, when her passion shall have spent its novel force / Something better than her dog, slightly better than her horse.”30 Returning to racial slurs, the fifth Girl, Rebecca, is marked by the standard caricaturist’s symbol for a Jew, the enormous hooked nose. Like Snowdrop, she smiles with a self-satisfied air, and she too exhibits over-large gems. Nevertheless, she could pass for patrician, as the caption warns: “Beware of imitation / Her Pa is the pillar of Uncle Sam’s great nation.”31 Finally, Number Six, a despondent Native American woman with severe worry-lines in her face, is pictured with a bottle – “Minnie-ha-ha, the original American girl.”32 When the six were printed together as a culmination to the series, a parodying notice associated them with both popular art prints and billboards, announcing that the set was to be reproduced at eighteen by twenty-three feet in size, in an edition of nine million, with a few million signed by the artist and available for $1,000.23 each, paid in advance.33 This cartoon series asserts that the Gibson Girl was not really representative of the American populace, but that was not because Racey was making any

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kind of sympathetic plea on behalf of the under-represented. The caricatures depended upon (and perpetuated) straight illustration’s normative assumptions about race, class, and gender in order to joke about the legitimacy of American claims to superiority. The drawings suggested that the Gibson Girl’s lily-white visage was simply a white-washing mask hiding an objectionably large number of less desirable social-climbing Americans. The pedigree of America’s elites themselves was questioned in the figure of the Jewish woman whose Pa was a “pillar of the nation.” This racism and classism reflected the presumed values and homogeneity of The Moon’s intended audience, a section of Toronto’s class-conscious middle and upper classes who were themselves overwhelmingly of English and Scottish Protestant backgrounds (Jefferys himself was born in England). Working in the realm of national mythologies, the cartoons suggested that American ideals were dangerous in their too-democratic emphases on acquisitiveness and equality. The idea that anyone could achieve a position of power simply by getting rich was an affront to British class order based on heredity34 – hence the fearful exaggerations of race, liberated women, and jewelry in the cartoons. Such representations fanned existing prejudice against what had already been seen as an American preference for style over substance.35 In 1893, out of concern for Canadian moral and intellectual fitness as it affected nation-building, political scientist John Bourinot had referred to American culture as being dominated by “a spirit of materialism” and had admonished wealthy Canadians to invest in legitimate, permanent public art, in contrast to what was exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.36 Like the overly lavish temporary structures of the Exposition’s classical White City, made of staff to mimic marble, The Moon’s cartoons suggest the American Girl was a sham: a figure that contrasted sharply with the English Arts and Crafts philosophy preferred in English Canada, in which industrial sham craftsmanship was considered morally depraved.37 To mock Gibson’s American Girl was to remind patriotic Canadians that flaunting attractive bodies and faces went hand in hand not only with the sale of mass-produced American goods but with corrupt American values as well. While men were warned against being trapped by Sweet Sylvia’s cash, or fooled by Rebecca’s Aryan looks, the caricatures also served to warn women – held responsible for consumerism – away from the wasteful and pretentious Yankee display of false luxuries. Anti-American sentiment ran especially high during and after the Alaska Boundary Dispute that Britain settled in favour of the United States in 1903,

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6.3 Charles W. Jefferys, “A Quiet Evening in a Canadian Home,” The Moon, 25 June 1902, 52

to Canada’s everlasting disgust. The Moon conflated annexation with print culture imperialism in a large cartoon by Jefferys that appeared inside the issue bearing the head of American Girl Number Three. Captioned “A Quiet Evening in a Canadian Home,” it shows a supposedly patriotic family of ten (for the nine provinces and Newfoundland) with decorated portraits of the King and Queen on their wall, hypocritically reading American periodicals (Fig. 6.3). The headlines shout: discontent in canada, annexation inevitable; american commercial invasion; shall we annex canada?; american exports $87463577200000000. The Pretty Girl is present as well, in tawdry form: a woman, perhaps the lady of the house, reads Sadie’s Home Journal, which prominently bears a full-page advertisement of a curvaceous figure surmounted by the directive, wear columbia corsets, and a front-page article is titled, inside the boudoirs of 500 american girls.38 Despite Racey’s distaste for the American Girl, “Beauty” itself remained unbesmirched. By rendering ugliness, Racey backhandedly confirmed that legitimate beauty existed somewhere; otherwise there would have been nothing upon which to build a joke. This subliminally provoked the reader to imagine what “true” beauty would look like – and given The Moon’s editorial policy and the parodic element in the series, the answer would be, “The Canadian Girl.” As a contrast to the eugenically suspect six American Girls, the Canadian Girl must be the real McCoy: truly white, without pretensions to a class she was not born to, free of pecuniary thirsts, and certainly without the fakery of cosmetics. Such a Girl appeared on the very next cover of The Moon. Presumably, calling her “The Canadian Girl” would have been slavishly imitative, so she appeared instead as an ironic “Summer Girl of 1902” (Fig. 6.4) – ironic, because “summer girl” usually denoted a conventional Pretty Girl in revealing summer clothes.39 Drawn in a straight mode by Jefferys, this Summer Girl is a pleasantlooking but pointedly unsmiling young woman who nevertheless knowingly meets our gaze, as she walks in a rainy, undeveloped wilderness setting. She is clothed unpretentiously in what might be a man’s voluminous overcoat, one hand informally in a pocket – the exact opposite of the overly posed, sultry looks of the usual Pretty Girl faces with their “toothpaste smiles.”40 Even so, a tiny heart-shaped brooch fastens her high collar, marking her (in the manner of emblems in caricatures) as a sweetheart “type.” Although Racey’s covergirl caricatures reject American glamour on the surface, the preservation of a notion of ideal beauty embodied in this young woman betrays a desire to

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6.4 Charles W. Jefferys, “The Summer Girl of 1902,” The Moon, 2 August 1902, cover illustration

have what Americans have anyway. Paradoxically, Jefferys’ Summer Girl is both like and unlike the American Girl: not a glamour girl, but a desirable girl nonetheless. The slope to accepting the Pretty Girl was slippery indeed.

Canadian Production of the Pretty Girl in New york Arthur William Brown and Russell Patterson demonstrated a completely different attitude toward commercialization in what Brown unabashedly called “the glamour girl racket.”41 Both men had pursued opportunity in the United States like some thousands of other Canadian writers and illustrators (the exodus of whom, thought by nationalists to be weakening Canada’s economic prospects, fuelled prejudice against expatriates).42 Young Brown had his start doing all manner of illustration, including caricature, for the Hamilton Spectator (some Gibsonesque cartoons also appeared in The Moon). By 1901 he had saved up enough money to go to New York. He did not immediately take up glamour girl subjects, but he was more than conscious of them, drawing a tell-tale parody of a 1903 Collier’s Weekly page that famously publicized Collier’s’ $100,000 contract of 23 October 1902 with Charles Dana Gibson for a hundred drawings.43 Brown rendered Gibson’s name as Chawles Diana Getsome, and included a dilapidated Gibson Girl cameo in the upper right-hand corner. This drawing shows what an impact Gibson’s success had on Brown, who later attested that he specifically took up the illustration of fashionable girls in order to get some of that money too.44 A bit younger than Brown, Russell Patterson worked as a staff artist at the newspaper La Patrie in Montreal alongside veteran caricaturist Albert-Samuel Brodeur (1862–1933), a contemporary of Henri Julien (1852–1908) and Raoul Barré (1874–1932). Brodeur had formerly collaborated with both men and had worked for La Presse (1836–1935) and Le Canard (1877–c. 1958).45 At La Patrie, Patterson completed both sober and comic croquis for front-page news stories, and he contributed decorated and illustrated page layouts for the pictorial Saturday covers. In 1913 he commenced his own French-language comic strip, Pierrot et Pierrette (28 June 1913–8 August 1914). Although not terribly original, the titular naughty children foreshadowed Patterson’s later transgressive material that reflected the generation gap between those born in the Victorian period and those born after – specifically, college boys and a new breed of independent

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woman: the flapper. Little Pierrette, approximately eight years old in 1913, would turn eighteen in 1923, exactly when Patterson – who had spent a year studying art in France and had moved to Chicago by 1920 – began illustrating the excesses of her age group. Influenced by cubism, the cartoons of contemporaries such as John Held Jr. (1889–1958), Ralph Barton (1891–1931), and the clear line of Parisian fashion illustration, Patterson developed a breezy manner of drawing that connoted modernity and sophistication, a style that he marketed in a self-designed correspondence course.46 The popularity of this course, which was widely seen in the United States and advertised in the Canadian youth-oriented magazine The Goblin,47 made him a trendsetter. According to an obituary, he was the one who made the raccoon coat the quintessential 1920s fashion statement, after observing the apparel of trendy Montrealers.48 In about 1926 Patterson moved to New York and met Brown there. The men became friendly with Charles Dana Gibson himself and with other established Pretty Girl illustrators at the New York Society of Illustrators. The two let no opportunity slip to promote their own expertise in representing chic, beautiful women. Critics like Racey and Jefferys had not exaggerated the magnitude of commercial exploitation available to Brown and Patterson in New York. The Saturday Evening Post, for instance, had a circulation in Canada and the United States of around a million in 1908, two million in 1919, and three million by the late 1930s; while Maclean’s had a mainly Canadian circulation of about 15,000 in 1913 and 100,000 in 1921.49 The ability to boost one’s earnings and fame by going to the States was correspondingly multiplied: where Jefferys struggled to make ends meet despite working constantly,50 Brown’s invested profits were worth over $1,100,000 (before he lost much of it in the 1929 stock market crash).51 Brown mostly drew idealized, chic Pretty Girls and produced very few satirical images after 1910. Patterson arguably achieved more than Brown in terms of variety, mastery, and renown. Four intersecting venues in particular built Patterson’s fame: humour magazines aimed at what was then commonly referred to as “flaming youth” – the likes of College Humor, Life (owned by Gibson), and the especially sexualized Ballyhoo (all three titles circulated in Canada as well); the Society of Illustrators’ annual girlie show, which he (and Brown) planned and participated in alongside g-stringed topless models in risqué skits for a select audience full of leading entertainment and advertising producers and directors; highly publicized beauty pageants which he (and

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Brown) judged, including the Miss America pageant; and, most widely seen of all, syndicated Sunday comics pages from the late 1920s to the 1950s featuring his own Patterson Girl, a plucky heroine with sex appeal and a fashionable wardrobe.52 With his fame established through these means, Patterson launched into further ventures in the 1930s: fashion design; costume and set design for upscale chorus-line acts; interior design for swank nightclubs; Macy’s window display and parade float design; film production; and a successful nightclub act starring puppet versions of sexy Patterson Girls, diminutively called Personettes. In 1937 he and fellow Pretty Girl illustrators (Brown included) appeared as themselves in the box office hit movie Artists and Models – and so did some Personettes, two women flirting in the street with Esky, the dirty old man mascot of Esquire magazine (Patterson strategically left it ambiguous whether the fashionable women are passersby or prostitutes).53 Patterson has been credited with defining the visual identity of the jazz age, with motivating the shift from the sprightly, boyish flapper of the 1920s to the swanning, willowy vamp of the 1930s, and with developing the “dumb blonde” stereotype.54 In his correspondence course, Patterson dubbed his semi-caricature, semiillustration work “humorous illustrations.” The rapid line, the inking in solid blacks, the conventionalized faces, and the presence of gag lines also place them in the category of comic strip art. An important point is that the actual manner in which his women were rendered does not strike us as humorous today because the current normative aspect of overt glamorization and female sexuality, established in part by mainstream Pretty Girl illustration, has erased our ability to view sexiness itself as laughable. To see with a period eye, we must recall that in low burlesque theatre, women were ridiculed by exaggerations of their busts, as a caricaturist might do with noses; while striptease acts began around 1920 as derisive parodies of female sexuality.55 When nudes were hung in the Canadian National Exhibition art gallery, members of the public reported that men and boys “were jeering and laughing” at the paintings.56 It was this censure of female sexuality that made the transgressive Patterson Girl an object of humour. Patterson explained that he couldn’t draw a girl unless there was “something funny about her.”57 As a page of sketches titled “The Pretty Girl in Caricature” indicates, the artificially elongated legs, wasp waists, flowing hair, pouting lips, and exaggerated hip-shot poses were all, to him, gross exaggerations – not ideals (Fig. 6.5).

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6.5 Russell Patterson, “The Pretty Girl in Caricature,” in Gene Byrnes, A Complete Guide to Drawing, Illustrating, Cartooning and Painting (New york: Simon and Shuster, 1948), 118

Patterson’s cartoons make frequent reference to kept women and prostitution, where tuxedoed men proffering money and jewels pursue such posing women. Flappers unabashedly look in mirrors as they apply lipstick – combining the ancient emblem for vanity with a low-brow signal of sexual availability.58 As with Racey, girls with fine clothes and showy jewels are perhaps sham ladies – but where Racey’s caricatures exaggerate and condemn, ultimately challenging credulity, Patterson, using just the right amount of illustration’s straight face, made the Pretty Girl in his “humorous illustrations” so winsome and shameless that she shifted Janus-like from being only an object of ridicule to becoming also an enticing, even enviable character for youth. A cover of Life provides an example. It is captioned “Pity the Poor Working Girl” – a double-entendre reference to charity drives for the exploited factory workers of the day, who sometimes climbed out of poverty through sex work and the entertainment industry,59 and it features a young woman who, by her orange hair and revealing green dress, may be read as Irish-American, a disadvantaged ethnic group. She perches on the arm of an overstuffed chair, toying with the sparse hairs on the head of the much older, unattractive-looking man in the chair, who wears a natty robe and slippers and seems more interested in his newspaper than in her. As in most of Patterson’s images of living space, a modernist work of art on the wall behind them suggests that the couple follow avant-garde trends and maintain a corresponding repudiation of stuffy Victorian values that would frown upon open relationships between older men and young “working girls.”60 The joke turns on the notion that, far from being an object of pity because she has to liaise with a homely and possibly impotent old man, the sly girl is clearly entering his lap of luxury with little more to do than wear stylish gowns. While Life magazine and the risqué College Humor enjoyed large circulations, Patterson’s syndicated comics pages had an even bigger one. It was there that he wielded the most influence on a wide audience, including children. The main plot device of their months-long story arcs made the fast life, and the attainment of riches through glamour, look extremely attractive and realistic. Runaway Ruth, for instance, works her way up from artist’s model to catwalk model to nightclub hostess to personal assistant, before predictably netting a wealthy fiancé.61 At the other end of the spectrum from comics was the humour magazine Ballyhoo, to which Patterson contributed many covers throughout the 1930s.

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Far more sexually explicit than Life, Ballyhoo permitted Patterson to indulge his pornographic tendencies with semi-nudes, bathroom humour, and voyeur gags: a nude sex worker wears a sandwich board stating cabaret staff are on strike; a nonchalant female plumber in overalls cut down to short shorts walks in on a cowering naked man in his bath; a co-ed in a dunce cap sits immodestly with knees parted and skirt hiked up, as she points to a sex education lesson on the blackboard featuring storks and numerous spelling mistakes – linking the blonde’s sex appeal to a lesser mental capacity.62 Meanwhile, for a book planned by the Society of Illustrators, Patterson executed numerous sketches of uniformed sailors cavorting with spread-legged, torpedo-breasted nudes.63 In much of Patterson’s work, females seem at first glance to be achieving goals through independence; however, the figure of the Patterson Girl, derived as it is from a caricature of promiscuity, is not about emancipation, but is rather a misogynist indictment of female self-determination.64 This becomes obvious in many of his single-panel newspaper cartoons of the 1940s in which he belittles women’s ambition (and war effort) by undercutting their honest work with references to sex appeal and vanity. For example, a curvy female taxi driver in form-fitting slacks instructs the male mechanic to adjust her rearview mirror so that she can do her make-up while driving.65 The great irony in Russell Patterson’s oeuvre is that the skinny, bosomy figures that he considered caricatures became ideals. This was true in Canada as well as in the United States. The most comparable magazine in Canada was The Goblin, which ran advertisements for College Humor subscriptions. The Goblin, which, with a circulation of 47,000, claimed to have the highest newsstand sales of any periodical in Canada,66 ran saucy jokes and cartoons, short stories, serious literary reviews, political commentary, and journalism. The founders later joined advertising agencies, indicating a comfort with commercialism that would have informed their editorial choices.67 In April 1930 they featured a cover by Canadian illustrator Victor Child (1897–1960) based on Patterson’s distinctive way of drawing girls, with heavily kohled eyes in round faces, sporting snazzy outfits on lank figures, drawn in the fine clear-line style used in fashion plates.68 The Goblin evidently filled an important niche for progressive young women readers like Mary Clark of Winnipeg, who wrote, “I am a woman who nevertheless is interested in other things besides recipes and care and feeding of children and I find in Goblin just the sort of spirit that appeals to a Canadian

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girl who is in keeping with the times.” She noted that her mother enjoyed reading The Goblin too.69 Clark’s reference to recipes and home-making was directed at Western Home Monthly, Canadian Home Journal, and Chatelaine – all of which put “straight” pretty girl illustrations on their covers,70 although the staid Canadian Home Journal did use Patterson-like illustrations by Norman Fontaine (untraced) for articles on young moderns.71 While puritanical cultural nationalism clashed with the pressures of commercial popular culture and erupted in naked-lady controversies at Toronto exhibitions in 1927 and 1931,72 the ideal Canadian Woman in Canadian magazines gradually became more and more glamorous, anxiously comparing herself to American glamour girls.73

Holding the American Girl Close While Keeping Her at Bay Sex, commerce, race, art, and American-style glamour came together as contested issues in the 15 August 1947 Maclean’s cover by Oscar Cahén, which depicted a blonde bombshell setting up a canvas to paint a picturesque town in the distance (Fig. 6.6). Like Racey and Patterson, Cahén had misgivings about the Pretty Girl, and like Patterson, he still enjoyed drawing her. Erudite, partJewish, Cahén had arrived from Europe in 1940, and when not illustrating he was, from 1946 on, working hard at a serious painting career, eventually cofounding the abstract artists’ group Painters Eleven in 1953.74 Coming from an Eastern European tradition that valued the popular graphic arts, Cahén held illustration to a high standard, and initially eschewed illustrating what he called “American junk,” meaning boy-girl romance fiction.75 “Mind you,” he also admitted, “I get a bang out of drawing cute babes! It’s a lark!”76 In fact, he well knew the Pretty Girl had a therapeutic side: his pin-ups leavened the two years he and others spent locked up in Canada’s barbed-wire internment camps under the watchful eye of armed soldiers, with whom Cahén traded naughty drawings for cigarettes.77 Cahén reconciled artistic aspiration, American junk, and cute babes by introducing humour tinged with satire into his representations of Pretty Girls. By August 1947 he had compiled an inventory of goofy-looking babes with jutting chins, large behinds and busts, and wide-eyed “Gee, Gosh!” expressions.78 A different sort of Summer Girl, his buxom blonde for the 15 August 1947 Maclean’s cover enhances her conspicuous natural beauty with the aid of

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6.6 Oscar Cahén, Maclean’s, 15 August 1947, cover illustration

a mirror and lipstick, just as Patterson’s girls did. That we are meant to find her ridiculous is hinted at by her prioritizing face-painting over plein-air painting, despite having no audience but the Disney-like birdies that cue an ironic reading. Just as Patterson’s dumb blondes couple incompetence with sex appeal, her cliché beret, How to Paint book, improperly laid out palette of colours, and sunglasses (which would distort her ability to see and mix colour) borrow strategies of graphic satire to render her a silly amateur. Cahén, who “didn’t believe in sketching trips,” also mocks landscape paint79 ing. Rhetorically, he, an immigrant, thus asserts his legitimacy as a full Canadian citizen by proving he knows enough about Canadian art to skewer its sacred cow. Although the Group of Seven had disbanded more than a decade earlier, their works had achieved iconic status in part through government-sponsored reproduction of their works for commercial and state-run distribution in 1928 and then again through the 1940s.80 Cahén may not have been directly referring to that campaign, but his association of the Pretty Girl with landscape painting implies that landscape painting was a mere commodity. The image also alludes to his own belonging in the very scene depicted: the idiosyncratic red steeple on the town church identifies it as King, Ontario, near which he had recently built a house and studio. A mated pair of butterflies, his personal symbol for scenes of domestic tranquillity but also an international graffito of political resistance that he probably deployed back in Nazi Europe, dances above the easel.81 Another of his favourite autographic motifs, a childish stickman in the lower right corner of the canvas on the easel, symbolically steals the canvas away from the amateur girl by tagging it as his own.82 As a type, the tanned girl resembles his wife Mimi, a glamorous strawberry blonde Jewish woman who had been working in a beauty salon when Cahén met her. Derisive and fond, the cover captures the paradox of Oscar Cahén’s own complex experience of citizenship, cultural elitism, and taste for popular culture. At that moment in 1947, a debate was taking place among prominent thinkers in Maclean’s over American cultural and political annexation.83 A torrent of angry letters expressed resentment of any suggestion that Canada should become American; yet a few writers thought that Canada could gain sophistication from greater collaboration with Americans.84 The dilemma for Maclean’s was then, just as it had been for Jefferys in 1902, how to be distinctively Canadian when Canadians themselves habitually purchased the Saturday Evening Post

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and Collier’s Weekly. Strategically, Oscar Cahén’s cover sold Maclean’s by borrowing the style of American illustrators such as Robert O. Reid (fl. 1945) and Earl Oliver Hurst (1895–1958), whose cartoony girls appeared on Collier’s in this period. Cahén thus mediated an average Maclean’s-reading Canadian’s middleground experience by melding Canadian landscape with the American Pretty Girl trope, and offering all the pleasures of Yankee glamour plus the institutionally promoted Canadian landscape. For himself and on behalf of readers negotiating their own cultural citizenship, Cahén had the guilty pleasures of both enjoying glamour and holding state-sanctioned duty to the land(scape) at a critical arm’s length. This two-minded attraction and suspicion echoed Canadians’ reception of glamour as expressed in magazine content and reader feedback toward the end of the Second World War and just after. Letters published in Liberty and Maclean’s, more than two dozen of them, alternately protested and championed the legitimacy of photographed “sweater girls and half-dressed hussies.”85 In March 1947 a reader demanded: “Why doesn’t the average Canadian girl look as smart and as pretty as the average American girl? Is it the climate? Is it because Canadian girls don’t know how to make-up?”86 Canadians lacked “polish” compared to American girls, another agreed.87 A reader’s rebuttal in January 1948 advised, “Perhaps if our Saskatchewan friend read a few more Canadian magazines instead of those phoney [sic] Hollywood publications he would have a better eye for natural beauty.”88 Like Jefferys’ wholesome Summer Girl, perhaps? To no avail: months before, in summer 1947, as Cahén’s cover was coming out, the formerly low-key Miss Canada beauty pageant had been held for the first time as a highly-hyped official preliminary of the Miss America pageant, as if Canada were just one of the states. Arthur William Brown himself was brought home to judge it.89 Miss Canada, formerly a symbol of national moral superiority and anti-Americanism, was now embodied by blonde Margaret Marshall, glamourized along Hollywood lines in a then-daring strapless gown.90 She won Second Runner-up at the Miss America finals and used her prize to study acting in New York (which Liberty magazine dismissed as her “oblivion” since she had not landed a major acting contract).91 Rather than see Marshall as cultural traitor, another reader proudly wrote, “Canadian girls … can hold their own with American girls any day. Didn’t Miss Marshall when she was in competition with 60 Southerners?”92

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Status of Popular Graphic Media in Canada While the public debated the Pretty Girl, the critical reception of caricature, comics, and illustration was another story. Art criticism generally did not mention Pretty Girl art (one design critic in Canadian Art magazine, however, went out of his way to condemn it)..93 In Ontario the Canadian Society of Graphic Arts admitted illustration to annual exhibitions, but perusal of catalogues indicates that caricature and advertising art rarely made the cut. Whereas guardians of Canadian cultural chastity recognized the value of recent immigrant Oscar Cahén’s efforts to revolutionize Canadian graphic and fine art in their positive art show reviews and in Art Directors Club awards,94 the omission of expatriates like Arthur William Brown and Russell Patterson meant they were effectively disowned. Brown and Patterson probably did not attempt to exhibit in Canada, but gatekeepers did not invite them either, even though Brown kept visiting Toronto and published in Canadian Home Journal as late as 1948.95 One such gatekeeper was Howard Angus Kennedy, president of the Canadian Authors Association. For an exhibition of Canadian book illustration that he organized in 1931, Kennedy said: On this occasion I think we should confine our exhibit to artists living in Canada, or at any rate not living in the US – those who have crossed the line should not complain of this [emphasis in original].96 Research by Randall Speller shows curatorial selection for that exhibition was highly nationalistic. Line-crossers like Brown (whose magazine illustrations appeared in book editions and who was at his career high point) were omitted and the filtered result was presented as a purportedly Canadian purebred: “Canada has something for its writers, painters, and composers, which is primarily and essentially Canadian – not derived from the literature, art or music of other lands,” claimed writer Donald French in his speech at the opening.97 What such rhetoric intentionally obscured was that American influence (as well as English and French) had always been integrated into Canadian culture.98 By making the continental sharing of print culture invisible, Canadian selfregard was boosted – but self-knowledge was compromised, and a significant percentage of Canadian artistic activity (including more respectable fare than

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the glamour girl stuff) was orphaned.99 But rather than being illegitimate, “faux” Canadians Brown and Patterson actually represent that large portion of English-speaking Canadians who identified as North American and who valued the liberal individualist freedom to pursue self-improvement wherever it took them. Brown’s and Patterson’s success demonstrated that Canadians could be influential in determining the course of popular culture for both Canadians and Americans at the source (New York), a power few Canadians could realize at home. For continentalists and free trade advocates, crossing the line and enhancing American prosperity was tantamount to ensuring Canadian prosperity too. The public debates over annexation and Pretty Girls in the postwar years reflected the impetus behind the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (1949–1951) (now referred to as the “MasseyLévesque Commission”), which legitimized state support of Canadian culture specifically to counteract American cultural domination.100 This in turn led to the establishment of the Canada Council in 1957, which drew the line at funding visual arts deemed commercial, pigeonholing Canadian artists’ work more sharply into legitimate and illegitimate categories. Canadian illustrators continued to cross the line. The absence of official recognition meant that even those who stayed in Canada were increasingly left out of the dialogue on the role of visual culture in Canada, while the expression of continental culture as epitomized by Patterson and Brown was excised from Canadian art discourse, except to be denigrated, just as it had been in the aforementioned 1931 illustration show.101 While we trust that this allowed an autonomous Canadian culture to thrive, as was intended, the ways in which it may also have contributed to an increasing distance between elite and popular art and public support of Canadian arts funding deserve a separate study.102

Conclusion: The Pretty Girl in Caricature The legacy of the Pretty Girl for women has been twofold. On one hand, even though many have deplored the limitations that her stereotyped, idealized aspects prescribed for women, the Pretty Girl’s visibility at least encouraged, and perhaps even legitimized, women’s entrance into the public sphere. On the other hand, the modern woman in public has continued to blur with the “public woman” in satirical and humorous imagery. For instance, Playboy cartoonist

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Douglas Sneyd (b. 1931), directly influenced by Oscar Cahén, has reiterated the trope of the vacuous, busty, blonde sex object for over fifty years.103 Caricature of the Pretty Girl was perhaps doomed to failure, because it is near impossible to caricature beauty. For instance, in most caricature, when an unusual nose or chin is made bigger or smaller, the person’s identity (be it a stock type or an individual) stays intact and recognizable. By contrast, any exaggeration of a beauty’s particular physiognomy either makes her more beautiful, or destroys her beauty. That which was to be mocked disappears, which nullifies the joke because the viewer would have no way of seeing or knowing who or what was being mocked. We only know that Racey’s ugly Sweet Sylvia, Athletic Girl, and Sporty Girl are supposed to be caricatures of Caucasian beauty (rather than caricatures of homeliness) because we are already familiar with the Gibson Girl’s features and because the text has informed us that the American Girl is the target. The allure of the Gibson Girl and of Jefferys’ Summer Girl is in fact unintentionally heightened rather than diminished by the contrast with great ugliness. Using a different tactic, Patterson’s “The Pretty Girl in Caricature” with her impossibly small waist and long legs epitomizes (and therefore reiterates) certain ideals. Although Patterson may not have intended it, the images he created contributed to the adoption and emulation of the Patterson Girl and to our resulting inability to see her as humorous, let alone satirical. Oscar Cahén’s painting girl recoups an element of the farcical, but, signalling a slight but important change in purpose and social values from those of Racey and Patterson, the physical appearance of her Hollywood beauty is not questioned or mocked – rather, her vanity is. Racey’s and Patterson’s efforts to caricature idealized, popular beauty did not in fact undercut regular Pretty Girl illustration. Instead, Patterson’s popularity and Cahén’s cover art suggest that visual critiques of the Pretty Girl had been assimilated, adding to her iconicity and ubiquity even as criticisms persisted. In 1951 Marshall McLuhan would identify the American “love-goddess assembly line” as the archetypal visual identity of commercialized modern life;104 and in 1958, historian Arthur Lower would declare that the Canadian masses worshipped the American “symbol-goddess” of “drug-store pornography” as their own.105 It is not surprising that despite policy and criticism, the Pretty Girl has remained a fixture of popular culture. Canadians no longer fear physical annexation, but Canada has become more Americanized over time.106 Have

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Anglo-Canadians completely succumbed to American culture industries, as Jefferys’ cartoon suggested? A reply from a reader in 1930 mused: It is a fact that as a rule the better American Magazines are superior to the better Canadian Magazines … Do not think that I am not a regular reader of U.S. publications. I am. But I am like a great many Canadians. The magazines from across the line … no matter how good they may be, still leave something unsaid from our point of view. In a sense only Canadian publications and Canadian writers “speak our language” and they will always be first with us.107 It is interesting to note that the writer assumed all of Canada had one uniting language. Arthur Racey’s aggressive caricature of the Pretty Girl ensured that a “Canadian language” was “spoken” in order to emphasize and preserve difference from Americans for anglophones, but this handily subsumed French Canadian and many other voices in the process, just as the political cartoon figure of Miss Canada had done. Russell Patterson, on the other hand, demonstrated the fluidity of cultural languages and suggested that that influence could be a two-way street when he, an American-born Montrealer, penned a French-language comic strip and popularized Parisian style and Montreal trends in Chicago and New York. Patterson represented the less-acknowledged but very present continentalist voice of commercial enterprise among Canadians – and also a seeming confidence that Canadian art needed no insulation, just freedom to pick from the world’s offerings. This perspective emerged again in Oscar Cahén’s importing of multilingual European influences. His mediation of commercial American and nationalist Canadian values showed that Canadians could speak a lingua franca with a Canadian accent, which captured the everyday paradox of being Canadian in North America.

NOTES 1 “A Pertinent Question” [cartoon], Diogenes (June 1869). See also J.L. Granatstein, How Britain’s Weakness Forced Canada into the Arms of the United States (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989); David R. Spencer, Drawing Borders: The American-Canadian Relationship during the Gilded Age (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).

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2 Robyn Fowler, “Miss Canada and the Allegory of Nation,” PhD dissertation (University of Alberta, 2005) and Fowler’s chapter in this book. 3 The most comprehensive Canadian study is Jane Nicholas, The Modern Girl: Feminine Modernities, the Body, and Commodities in the 1920s (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2015). 4 Beauty standards are not stable. All references to “beauty,” “standards,” and “ideals” are understood to refer to the general average of what was presented in the mass magazines of the particular month or year under discussion. For a study of American beauty standards and their shift, see Lois W. Banner, American Beauty (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 5 Scout-like Johnny Canuck, another personification, became more commonly used for a while, probably thanks to Canadian soldiers’ performance in the Boer War and the First World War. No cartoons have yet been located showing Johnny seduced by a Gibson Girl – or by Columbia – but such a find is highly imaginable. 6 Martha Banta, Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). 7 In explaining the Gibson Girl’s significance, Gibson claimed she was the result of the “melting pot,” citing playwright Israel Zangwill, who popularized the term in the play of the same name then touring. But where Zangwill specified all the European races, including Jews, Gibson assumed that British heredity would win out due to superior fitness: “Evolution has selected the best things for preservation as man and woman have climbed up from the monkey … Why should women not be beautiful increasingly? … And where should that fittest be in evidence most strikingly? In the United States of course, where natural selection has been going on [resulting in] a fine combination of the best points of all those many races which helped make our population. The best part of her beauty will and has come from the nation of our origin – Great Britain.” Charles Dana Gibson quoted in Edward Marshall, “The Gibson Girl Analyzed by Her Originator,” New York Times (20 November 1910). One commentator identified the Gibson Girl specifically with New York: Percival Pollard, “Sundry ‘American Girls’ in Black and White,” Book Buyer, A Review and Record of Current Literature 14, 5 (June 1897), 475. 8 Carolyn L. Kitch, Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 9 Huisking to Grove, personal email, 3 March 2017. 10 Elwood Watson and Darcy Martin, eds., “There She Is, Miss America”: The Politics of Sex, Beauty, and Race in America’s Most Famous Pageant (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004): 27–40.

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11 Jaleen Grove, “A Cultural Trade: Canadian Illustrators at Home and in the United States,” PhD dissertation (Stony Brook, New York: State University of New York, forthcoming). 12 In both 1892 and 1911, the government had attempted to negotiate agreements with the United States in which tariffs would be reduced or eliminated on certain imports and exports. While Western farmers, for instance, welcomed the ability to sell in the United States and to purchase cheaper American-made machinery, powerful Ontario manufacturers feared American competition. In both years, the issue triggered elections and a resurgence of pro-imperialist sentiment. 13 Theodore Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956), 112–13. 14 Called New Liberty for a time after it became wholly Canadian-owned in 1947. To avoid confusion, all issues will be referred to as Liberty here. 15 Maclean’s appears initially to have been the worst offender, using around 40 percent American illustrators in the 1920s, but Chatelaine used mostly American illustrators after 1933. 16 Frederick Paul, “National Periodicals or Annexation,” Saturday Night (20 March 1926), 2. 17 J.W. Dafoe, Canada: An American Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935). 18 Some may argue that Patterson was never Canadian since he was born in Omaha. But he was brought to Montreal as a child and according to his 1920 US passport application, his father was from Newfoundland, and Patterson had not been naturalized as an American citizen. His citizenship was given as Canadian. 19 The Moon 1, 14 (30 August 1902), 196. Living pictures were also known as tableaux vivants. It was a most risqué act. 20 Even in the Victorian era, the taboo against having one’s name in print was an ideal rather than a reality. See Janice Fiamengo, The Woman’s Page: Journalism and Rhetoric in Early Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). 21 See Canadian Home Journal, May 1938, 4. Chatelaine’s editors were Anne Elizabeth Wilson and Hope Byrne Sanders. Jaleen Grove, “A Castle of One’s Own: Interactivity in Chatelaine Magazine, 1928–1935.” Journal of Canadian Studies 45, 3 (fall 2011): 166–87. 22 For example, Charles Dana Gibson, “The Weaker Sex” [cartoon], Collier’s Weekly 31 (4 July 1903), 12–13. Original art in collection of Cabinet of American Illustration (Library of Congress). Accession no. DLC/PP-1935:0140. 23 A.G. Racey, “The American Girl (No. 1),” The Moon 1, 3 (11 June 1902), 27.

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24 A.G. Racey, “Annexation: Two Views of the Situation” [cartoon], Grip 20 (20 May 1893), 313. Racey had formerly drawn Miss Canada avoiding the clutches of Uncle Sam. 25 The Moon 1, 1 (28 May 1902), 11. 26 A.G. Racey, “The American Girl (No. 1),” The Moon 1, 3 (11 June 1902), 27. 27 A.G. Racey, “The American Girl (No. 2),” The Moon, 1, 4 (18 June 1902). 28 Charles Dana Gibson, “Fore! The American Girl to All the World” [cartoon], in Gibson, Americans (New York: R.H. Russell, 1900), n.p. In this book the cartoon is marked “Copyright, 1899, by Life Publishing.” 29 A.G. Racey, “The American Girl (No. 3),” The Moon 1, 5 (25 June 1902). 30 A.G. Racey, “The American Girl (No. 4),” The Moon 1, 6 (6 July 1902). 31 A.G. Racey, “The American Girl (No. 5),” The Moon 1, 7 (12 July 1902). 32 A.G. Racey, “The American Girl (No. 6),” The Moon 1, 8 (19 July 1902). Minnie-haha – phonetically, “mini ha-ha” or “little joke” – is a pun on Minnehaha, the heroine of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1855 poem “The Song of Hiawatha.” In it, the idealized beauty Minnehaha dies of famine and fever, thus becoming a symbol of the “disappearing Indian.” Racey’s inclusion of the bottle perpetuated the presumed doom of Native peoples, which rhetorically justified assumptions of Caucasian supremacy and perpetuated stereotypes. 33 A.G. Racey, “The American Girl: Final Announcement,” The Moon 1, 9 (26 July 1902), 126. 34 S.M. Lipset, The First New Nation (New York: Anchor Books, 1968), 293. For further discussion comparing national mythologies in popular visual culture, see Grove, “A Cultural Trade?” 35 Dallas Cullen, J.D. Jobson, Rodney Schneck, “Anti-Americanism and Its Correlates,” The Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie 3, 1 (winter 1978): 103–20. The association of Americans with materialism and obsession with status is discussed on pages 108, 111, and 116. An informal poll at mid-century also showed respondents negatively associated “dollar chasing” with Americans: “Let’s Not Join the USA,” Liberty (July 1948), 32–3. 36 John Bourinot, Our Intellectual Strengths and Weaknesses: A Short Historical and Critical Review of Literature, Art and Education in Canada (Montreal and London: Foster Brown and Co., 1893), 57. 37 David Latham, ed., Scarlet Hunters: Pre-Raphaelitism in Canada (Toronto: Archives of Canadian Art and Design, 1998). 38 C.W. Jefferys, “A Quiet Evening in a Canadian Home,” The Moon 1, 5 (25 June 1902), 52. 39 The regular definition of “summer girl” is learned from other cartoons and copy in The Moon.

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40 C.W. Jefferys, “The Summer Girl of 1902,” The Moon 1, 10 (2 August 1902), 1. 41 Arthur William Brown, “I Think with My Eyes,” unpublished manuscript from speech delivered to advertising salesmen of the Saturday Evening Post (1937). Collection of the New York Society of Illustrators. 42 Nick Mount, When Canadian Literature Moved to New York (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). 43 Collier’s Weekly 30, 19 (7 February 1903), 5. Clipping in a scrapbook in Brown’s fonds, New York Society of Illustrators Archives. 44 Arthur William Brown, “F. Scott Fitzgerald and Booth Tarkington,” in Fifty Years with Artists, Models, and Authors [autobiography], (unpublished manuscript, c. 1950). Collection of the New York Society of Illustrators. 45 “Albert-Samuel Brodeur,” Lambiek http://www.lambiek.net/artists/b/brodeur_ albert-samuel.htm Accessed 22 February 2013. 46 The Russell Patterson Course: The Last Word in Humorous Illustration, promotional pamphlet (n.d., c. 1925). Collection of Illustration House. 47 “Humorous Illustration by Russell Patterson [advertisement],” The Goblin 8, 8 (April 1928), 34. The Goblin (titled New Goblin in its later days) ran 1921–30 out of Toronto and then Montreal. C.W. Jefferys was on the advisory board. 48 “‘Flapper’ Cartoonist Patterson Dies,” Chicago Tribune (19 March 1977), A11. 49 Douglas B. Ward, “The Geography of an American Icon: An Analysis of the Circulation of the Saturday Evening Post, 1911–1944,” American Journalism 27, 3 (July 2010), 60; Donna Braggins, “Maclean’s: The Accidental Nationalist: How Hustling for Ads Built a National Icon,” Master’s Thesis (Toronto: York University, 2008), 4. 50 Insight into Jefferys’ family finances is kindly provided by Anthony Allen [email] (28 November 2012). 51 Brown, “College Humor,” Fifty Years with Artists, Models, and Authors [autobiography] (unpublished manuscript, c. 1950), 4. Collection of the New York Society of Illustrators. 52 Like the Gibson Girl and other namesake Girls, the Patterson Girl was not one specific girl – she was a type, whose name, hair colour, and circumstances would differ with each series. What united them was outlook on life, chic quality, and Patterson’s autographic style. Their face shapes are also quite interchangeable, although Patterson morphed the face from round to sharp-featured between 1923 and 1940. 53 In the film, leering, bug-eyed, dumpy Esky was a puppet. In print, Esky was rendered as a three-dimensional cartoon character in clay, and stripped into the magazine or portrayed on its cover in every issue of the 1930s.

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54 John T. McQuiston, “Russell Patterson Is Dead at 82; Set the Fashions for Flapper Era,” New York Times (19 March 1977); Shane Glines and Alex Chun, eds., Top Hats and Flappers: The Art of Russell Patterson (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2006); Patterson sketchbook page reproduced in Rowland Elzea, Russell Patterson (Delaware Art Museum, 1977), 6; Walt Reed to Grove, in conversation, 2008. 55 Robert Clyde Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 56 Jane Nicholas, “‘A Figure of a Nude Woman’: Art, Popular Culture, and Modernity at the Canadian National Exhibition, 1927,” Histoire sociale/Social History 41, 82 (November 2008), 331. 57 “Valentine Day Touch to Radio Tonight,” (c. 1926). Unidentified newspaper clipping, collection of Illustration House. 58 Unfortunately, archives of illustration tearsheets rarely include full publishing details, so it is difficult to cite specific sources and dates. Images mentioned here are derived from three tearsheet collections: Illustration House, New York Society of Illustrators at the New Britain Museum, and those that appear in Chun and Glines, eds., Top Hats and Flappers. 59 “Pity the Poor Working Girl,” Russell Patterson, Life, 8 March 1929. Sociological studies on New York include Sharon R. Ullman, Sex Seen: The Emergence of Modern Sexuality in America (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997); Randy McBee, Dance Hall Days: Intimacy and Leisure Among Working-Class Immigrants in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Elizabeth Clement, Love for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1820–1920 (New York: Norton, 1992); Angela Latham, Posing a Threat: Flappers, Chorus Girls, and Other Brazen Performers of the American 1920s (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 2000). 60 Insight into this circle can be found in the memoirs of the madam Polly Adler, A House Is Not a Home (New York: Rinehart, 1953). 61 Russell Patterson, “Runaway Ruth” [syndicated comic series], New York Journal (spring 1929). 62 Ballyhoo, unidentified tearsheet c. 1935. Collection of New Britain Museum. 63 Collection of Illustration House, New York, viewed in 2009. A mock-up of the book is in the archives of the Society of Illustrators. 64 A journalist reported that Patterson dictated how his wife and daughter should dress,

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65 66

67 68

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indicating a very patriarchal personality. Penelope McMillan, “The Girls of Russell Patterson,” New York News Magazine (5 October 1975), 31. Russell Patterson, “Pin-Up Girls” [syndicated comic] (King Features, 1944). Clipping in collection of Illustration House. John Mappin, The Goblin: A Brief History of Canada’s Humour Magazine of the 1920s. (Montreal: Printed for J.N. Mappin by The Porcupine’s Quill, Erin, Ontario, 1988), 13. James A. Cowan, “The Goblin’s Editor Adds a Footnote,” in Mappin, The Goblin, 25. Regular illustrator Ricardo also showed some Patterson influence – and Ricardo in the later 1930s departed for the United States to become a famous cartoonist for the New Yorker under his proper name, Richard “Dick” Taylor. Arthur Racey and C.W. Jefferys also appeared in The Goblin. Mary Clark, “Applause from a Traitor of Her Sex,” The Goblin 10, 6 (April 1930), 26. Rex Woods painted a pretty girl head for the majority of Canadian Home Journal covers between 1930 and 1947, in the “bread-and-butter” style associated with American advertising art. Hall Smith was the counterpart for National Home Journal. For example, Ellen Evelyn Mackie, “Bachelors Turn the Spotlight on the Modern Girl,” Canadian Home Journal (October 1931), 6–7; Ellen Evelyn Mackie, “Does Modern Cupid Get a Break?” Canadian Home Journal (June 1932), 17. Michele Grandbois et al, The Nude in Modern Canadian Art; Jane Nicholas, “A Figure of a Nude Woman,” 313–44. For instance, Gwenyth Barrington, “Is the Canadian Woman Better Dressed than Her American Sister?” Chatelaine (March 1932), 7; Helena Rubenstein, “A Canadian Woman,” Chatelaine (September 1935), 30. Jaleen Grove, Oscar Cahén: Life and Work (Toronto: Art Canada Institute, 2015). Oscar Cahén, quoted by Dick Hersey, quoted in: Stan Furnival, Typescript of speech given at the Art Gallery of Ontario (25 March 1959), 7. Collection of the Cahén Archives. Oscar Cahén, quoted in Mackenzie Porter, “Volcano with a Paint Brush,” The Standard (Montreal), 7 April 1951, n.p. Clipping in collection of the Cahén Archives. Eric Koch, “Double Vision: The Transformation of Oscar Cahén,” Sketches (28 September 2015), http://erickoch.ca/2015/09/28/double-vision-the-transformation-of-oscar-cahen/. Koch has documented the effects of incarcerating the Jewish refugees in Deemed Suspect: A Wartime Blunder (Toronto: Methuen, 1980).

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78 The most complete collection of tearsheets is Cahén’s own, unfortunately clipped from their original publications and pasted in scrapbooks, making identification difficult. Collection of the Cahén Archives. 79 Furnival, 9. 80 Joyce Zemans, “Establishing the Canon: Nationhood, Identity and the National Gallery’s First Reproduction Program of Canadian Art,” Journal of Canadian Art History 16, 2 (1995), 7–35; “Envisioning Nation: Nationhood, Identity and the Sampson-Matthews Silkscreen Project: The Wartime Prints,” Journal of Canadian Art History (1998), 6–48. 81 The European significance of the butterfly is discussed by Tom Smart, “The Butterfly,” Smart on Art (19 October 2011) http://www.smartonart.ca/index.cfm/2011/10/19/TheButterfly. Accessed 21 February 2013. 82 The stick man appears as graffiti, which sometimes included the inscription “Oscar loves Mimi” in the background of other illustrations. The stick man is also featured on the canvas pictured in a Christmas card image Cahén drew of his own studio. Collection of the Cahén Archives. 83 Hugh MacLennan, “How We Differ from Americans,” Maclean’s (15 December 1946), 9; Vincent Massey, “Should Canada Join the Pan-American Union? Maclean’s (15 August 1947), 22; George Ferguson, “Are the Yanks Invading Canada?” Maclean’s (1 September 1947), 18; Blair Fraser, “Why Canadians Leave Home,” Maclean’s (15 October 1947), 7; Hugh MacLennan, “What Does Uncle Sam Want?” Maclean’s (1 April 1948), 57; Arthur Lower, “If We Joined the USA …” Maclean’s (15 June 1948), 7. 84 “Canada and the US,” in “Mailbag,” Maclean’s (1 August 1948), 51. 85 “It’s the First Time We’ve Heard This One,” in “Vox Pop,” Liberty (11 March 1944), 50. 86 John Carnegie, “Careless Talk,” in “Vox Pop,” Liberty (1 March 1947), 2. 87 Thomas Leitch, “Canadian Girls Lacking,” in “Vox Pop,” Liberty (6 December 1947), 1. 88 L. Cooper, “Plenty of Zip,” in “Vox Pop,” Liberty (10 January 1948), 51. 89 Wallace Reyburn, “Judging Miss Canada,” Liberty (27 September 1947), 21. 90 Ibid. 91 “What’s Happened to?: Margaret Marshall,” Liberty, August 1948), 27. 92 N.P., “Body, but No Soul?” in “Vox Pop,” Liberty (31 January 1948), 1. 93 Allan Harrison, “Advertising Art in Canada,” Canadian Art 2, 3 (March 1945), 108. 94 Jaleen Grove, “Bringing Things into the Light,” in Oscar Cahén: Canada’s Groundbreaking Illustrator (New York: Illustration House, 2011), 9–31. 95 From his personal correspondence, we know Brown visited his parents in Toronto occasionally. Arthur William Brown, “My Friends Say I’m Beautiful,” edited by Evelyn Cooper, Canadian Home Journal (February 1948), 6–7.

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96 Howard Angus Kennedy, quoted in Randall Speller, “Fragments of an Exhibition: A Loan Exhibition of Drawings by Canadian Illustrators,” Devil’s Artisan 42 (spring 1998), 9. 97 Donald French, quoted in “Canadian Authors Enjoy Treasures of Art Gallery,” Toronto Globe (23 June 1931), 16. In Speller, “Fragments of an Exhibition,” 12. 98 Allan Smith, “Canadian Culture, the Canadian State, and the New Continentalism,” Canadian-American Public Policy 3 (October 1990), 9–11. 99 Other Canadian expatriate illustrators whose lack of renown in Canada seems out of proportion to their accomplishments are Palmer Cox, David Thompson, Norman Price, Jay Hambidge, George Bridgman, Robert Fawcett, Wesley Neff, Mike Mitchell, and Denver Gillen. 100 Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (Ottawa, 1951). 101 For instance, Canadian Art magazine ceased publishing reviews of advertising art. In 1966 Sybille Pantazzi noted that the history of book illustration had been “overlooked.” Sybille Pantazzi, “Book Illustration and Design by Canadian Artists 1890–1940, with a list of books illustrated by members of the Group of Seven,” Bulletin 7 (4:1), 1966, National Gallery of Canada Library. 102 Work I have undertaken in this vein includes “Drawing Out Illustration History in Canada,” racar: Revue d’art canadienne/Canadian Art Review 40, 1 (fall 2015), 114–28. 103 Sneyd cites Cahén as an influence. Douglas Sneyd in Beauty Illustrator Doug Sneyd, “Doug Sneyd: Illustrator, Playboy Cartoonist,” Part 2, Comicology,tv (hosted by Jeff Peters, co-hosted by Anna Cody). Comicology.TV 2009 August 1–8 and posted to YouTube 7 August 2009). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmkFoHvtTTQ. Accessed 16 September 2012. 104 Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (New York: Vanguard Press, 1951), 95–7. 105 Arthur R.M. Lower, Canadians in the Making: A Social History of Canada (Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., 1958), 423. 106 Lower, Canadians in the Making, 436, 441; Granatstein, Britain’s Weakness, 7. 107 Barney Shaw, “Publications Here and There,” The New Goblin 10, 6 (April 1930), 26.

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seven

Anti-Semitic Caricature in 1930s Montreal: Language and National Stereotypes in Adrien Arcand’s Le Goglu (1929–1933) JOSÉE DESFORGES Translated from the French by Ersy Contogouris

On 11 April 1930, a caricature signed Loulou Goglu1 and entitled “Nos “grands” hommes ont ouvert un delicatessen”2 (Fig. 7.1) appeared on page 3 of the Montreal weekly Le Goglu. In it we see members of the provincial Liberal Party, whose bodies the artist has deformed. These protagonists often reappear in Le Goglu, which had been attacking them since the paper’s inception in 1929. Led by Premier Louis-Alexandre Taschereau (1877–1952), the Liberals had been governing the province of Quebec since 1920.3 In addition to the premier, Le Goglu’s caricaturists regularly targeted two other politicians: Louis-Athanase David (1882–1953), provincial secretary for Quebec from 1919 to 1936, and the influential Joseph-Léonide Perron (1872–1930), minister of public works from 1921 to 1929, minister of agriculture from 1929 to 1930, and director of the Canada Cement Company and various other companies. “Nos ‘grands’ hommes ont ouvert un delicatessen” depicts members of the Liberal Party in a circular composition that disregards perspectival codes. The caricaturist did not choose the setting randomly: delicatessens serving fine cooked and smoked meats had been opened in Montreal in the 1910s

7.1 Loulou Goglu, “Nos ‘grands’ hommes ont ouvert un delicatessen.” Le Goglu, 11 April 1930, 3. BAnQ Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie

Caption: Maintenant qu’ils sont plus juifs que les Juifs, nos “grands” hommes ont ouvert (toujours pour faire de l’argent), un delicatessen kosher. On y verra Taschereau vendre du hareng boucané, Laferté vendre du marsouin, Barbe-à-Poux Authier vendre des parts de mine, Perron vendre du taureau pourri, Parquement Bouchard vendre du… pain azyme triangulaire, Parasol Plante vomir des cornichons à sa ressemblance, Phiphile DuTremblay vendre du fromage puant, Sathanase vendre du maquereau, Affameur Galipeault vendre des actions de maisons à appartements, Red Poulin vendre du saucisson à l’ail en forme d’assommoir et Alex. Thurber vendre des promesses. Les autres de la Clique sasseront les cendres ou verront aux vidanges.

and 1920s by Jewish families from Romania.4 While the Liberals may have been the ones overtly criticized in Le Goglu, as we shall see, the actual targets were Montreal Jewish communities. One of Le Goglu’s strategies in attacking Liberal politicians was to link them with the Jews, thereby ascribing to them faults attributed to Jewish people, particularly an anti-patriotism manifested by economic liberalism. In “Nos ‘grands’ hommes ont ouvert un delicatessen,” not only does the scene’s locale promote the analogy between the Liberal government and the Jewish communities but so do the food, clothing, and language. Members of the Liberal Party are satirically depicted along with kosher foods such as fish, dry sausage, garlic, cheese, and pickles. At the top left of the composition, the head of the “Clique libérale du Québec” (clq), Louis-Alexandre Taschereau, brandishes a smoked herring (hareng boucané), a reference to Harensky Boucanesky, the nickname the premier is given in some Goglu caricatures.5 To Taschereau’s left are Hector Laferté (1885–1971), minister of colonization, hunting, and fishing, trying to sell a porpoise illegally fished with dynamite, and Hector Authier (1881–1971), mla from the riding of Abitibi, hawking mine shares. To the left of Authier and Laferté, Joseph-Léonide Perron is about to carve into a rotten bull’s head (a jab at English industrialists?) that he will try to sell at an exorbitant price as “fresh.” Just below him, the speaker of the legislative assembly, Télesphore-Damien Bouchard (1881–1962), is selling triangular unleavened bread. In front of him, Anatole Plante (1893–1981), deputy of the riding of Montreal-Mercier, regurgitates pickles in his own image. The owner of La Presse, Pamphile Du Tremblay (1879–1955), uses a page from his newspaper to wrap a stinking (“puant”) cheese. In the lower left of the cartoon, the provincial secretary, Louis-Athanase David, and the minister of public works and labour, Antonin Galipeault (1879–1971), are flogging mackerel. The circle closes with Ernest Poulin (1885–1943), the mla from Montreal-Laurier, selling garlic sausage shaped like abbatoirs and Alexandre Thurber (1871–1958), the representative from Chambly, peddling “promises.” The members of the Liberal Party are dressed in clothing associated with Jewish people: all, except Thurber, are wearing black hats,6 while Du Tremblay sports a kippah. Similarly, the use of Hebrew in Loulou Goglu’s caricatures link the Liberals with Jewish communities. Three words – “Tous ‫ר‬ ‫ש‬ ‫כ‬ kosher!” – in, respectively, French, Hebrew/Yiddish, and English, are inscribed in the centre of the composition. The term ‫ר‬ ‫ש‬ ‫כ‬, meaning kosher, is spelled the same way in Hebrew

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and Yiddish. Repeated in Hebrew/Yiddish and in English, the term “kosher” reinforces the links between Jewish food and the Liberals. French is used for the various inscriptions that decorate the kiosks, as well as for the word tous, whose inclusive meaning identifies the Liberals with the kosher diet. French is also used in a parody of Quebec’s motto, “Je me souviens” (I remember), which, placed above the prime minister’s head, becomes “La marque dont je me souviens” (“The brand that I remember”). This “brand” refers, in a double entendre, to the three words at the centre of the composition, whose radiating beams evoke the branding of cattle with hot metal. Not only does the use of three languages reinforce Loulou Goglu’s antiliberal and anti-Semitic message but it also evokes a linguistic cacophony. Far from being an isolated case in Le Goglu caricatures, this cacophony plays a central role in the elaboration of an identity discourse by exploiting and fuelling the anxiety of a possible linguistic and “racial”7 hybridity. The reason language can play such an important role in this image is that it reflects a larger identity discourse in Quebec. Indeed, a number of historical events had spurred French Canadians to fight for the survival of their language: among them, the handing over of New France to the English after the 1759 conquest and the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763; the relative marginalization of French through the confederation of three anglophone provinces with one francophone province; and the dominance of the mainly English ruling class in the industrialization of cities in the province of Quebec. By the beginning of the twentieth century members of French-Canadian nationalist groups were very aware of the extent of what they saw as a linguistic threat. Adrien Arcand (1899–1967),8 Le Goglu’s owner, was no exception. It was not, however, the competition between English and French that worried Arcand and his caricaturist Loulou Goglu: rather, it was the mounting presence of Hebrew and Yiddish in Montreal. In this chapter I address the question of the use of language in Le Goglu’s anti-Semitic caricatures. More specifically, I consider the xenophobic anxiety felt by Arcand and his crew with respect to a possible linguistic contamination that itself constructed a fictitious difference, opposing Jews and Canadians as if they were separate categories exclusive of one another. The resulting linguistic chaos portrayed in these anti-Semitic cartoons ends up, I believe, defeating the Manichean identity discourse conveyed by Arcand. But at the same time, it makes that discourse more acute: indeed, hybridity is depicted as a behaviour

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that must be corrected by sharpening stereotypes, so as to bring back nationalist distinctions and racial purity. To show how these operations work, I first of all introduce Le Goglu and its editor and then sketch the sociolinguistic context of 1930s Quebec. By analyzing the role that each language played in this body of caricatures, I want to show how their “mixity” contributed to the discourses of fear propagated by Arcand. * * * Adrien Arcand was a prolific editor of fascist periodicals throughout the 1930s in Quebec. In addition to Le Goglu, Arcand, who referred to himself as the Canadian Führer,9 published five other journals containing anti-Semitic caricatures: Le Miroir (1929–33), Le Chameau (1930–32), Le Patriote (1933–38),10 Le Fasciste canadien (1935–38), and Le Combat national (1938–39). Three of these journals were also the official organs of the various fascist parties that Arcand founded and led. The weekly Le Goglu spoke for l’Ordre patriotique des Goglus (1929–33), the monthly Le Fasciste canadien was the official organ of the Parti national social chrétien (1934–38), and Le Combat national was associated with the Parti de l’unité nationale du Canada (1938–2003).11 These organizations and their journals defended issues that were important to Arcand, such as Hitlerian fascism, the British monarchy, the Christian – preferably Catholic – religion, and the supposed worldwide Jewish plot that must be fought at all costs.12 Arcand worked at La Presse, the largest French-language daily in Quebec, until 1929, when he was fired after trying to establish a Catholic trade union (which explains the presence of Pamphile Du Tremblay, La Presse’s owner, among the Liberals in “Nos ‘grands’ hommes”).13 It was in this period that Arcand launched his first three journals – Le Miroir, Le Goglu, and Le Chameau – which survived for three years during the economic depression that followed the Wall Street crash. Le Goglu is by far the most lavishly illustrated and the most satirical of the three publications. The 11 April 1930 edition, in which “Nos ‘grands’ hommes” appeared, contained seven mid-sized satirical drawings in the eight pages of the journal, with additional small sketches sprinkled among the articles. In fact, each issue of Le Goglu included on average about ten satirical drawings, making it the Quebec publication of that era with the greatest number of caricatures, more than were published in the big dailies such as La Presse and the Montreal Star or in the 1930s opinion journals such as Olivar

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Asselin’s (1874–1937) L’Ordre (1934–35) and Paul Bouchard’s (1908–97) La Nation (1936–39). A goglu is, literally, a bobolink, a small songbird found in fields. The word also alludes to the old French word gogue, which means “rejoicing.” According to the French dictionary Le Robert (2003), a goguenard is someone who uses mockery in a joking way. The journal’s artists all signed under the patronym/ pseudonym “Goglu.” Loulou Goglu and Al Goglu were by far Le Goglu’s most prolific caricaturists.14 The top dog was Émile Goglu – Adrien Arcand – who was variously “rédacteur, éditeur, reporteur, garçon d’ascenseur, photographe, agent de circulation, distributeur et balayeur.”15 Though the exact print run of the weekly is unknown, the figure of 85,000 that Jean Hamelin and André Beaulieu report should be revised downward:16 Arcand is known to have merrily inflated the numbers and impact of his periodicals in a way that was half joking (Le Goglu declares in its header that it is the second-largest Frenchlanguage newspaper in America, which would place it right after La Presse) and half serious (Arcand never denied rumours about the impact of his journals).17 The public that Le Goglu targeted, however, consisted mainly of members of l’Ordre patriotique des Goglus, who were no more than a handful of individuals, far from the 50,000 that Arcand claimed. The exaggeration of the print run is not the only way Le Goglu parodied the journalistic codes of the day. From its inception, it published misleading articles, false advertisements, reworked photographs, and titles of columns that aped those of the big dailies such as La Presse.18 Le Goglu’s principal function was to denigrate Montreal’s Jewish communities. The anti-Semitic discourse conveyed through the caricatures in Arcand’s journals rests on a simplistic structure that systematically contrasted the “handsome and good French Canadian” with the “bad and vile Jew.” In this imagery, the Jewish and French-Canadian communities are subject to a process of “caricaturization” that deforms the former and idealizes the latter. The Jew is represented as a small, misshapen man, hairy, and with disproportionately large ears, lips, and hooked nose. He is associated in turn with Communism, capitalism, socialism, atheism, and Judaism.19 Next to him, the stereotype of the Catholic French Canadian, with his well-proportioned and balanced traits, acts as a positive foil that heightens the repulsive appearance of the stereotyped Jew. The use of different languages and their graphic representation contribute to the anti-Semitic discourse in the same way that the visual iconography of

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the Jewish and French-Canadian stereotypes does. While only three languages – English, Hebrew/Yiddish, and French – are used in “Nos ‘grands’ hommes,” Latin also figures in Le Goglu’s satiric imagery. In some caricatures, moreover, French is divided into two separate idioms, popular French and literary French. In this sense, imagery in Le Goglu uses five different languages, each one playing a role in classifying and isolating political, ethnic, and religious groups in order to reinforce the journal’s anti-Semitic and anti-liberal discourse. This is at least plausible, a priori, if we consider the dichotomous structure that neatly and systematically contrasts the stereotypes of the Jew and the French Canadian: ugliness and beauty, immorality and morality.20 On a number of occasions, though, the linguistic references transgress the stereotypes of the Jew, the French Canadian, and the Liberal. For Arcand and his caricaturists, this was a means of condemning what they perceived as the anxiety induced by a contamination of the French language. It is important to point out that the residents of Montreal in the 1930s spoke many languages, each of which had its own variants. In order to paint the sociolinguistic portrait of the city, I borrow the analytical grid elaborated by the French literary theorist Henri Gobard, who distinguishes four different functions of language (hence the use of the term “tetraglossic”) in the context of 1970s France.21 This grid allows us to analyze the different languages at work in the caricatures. Though Le Goglu’s use of language and Gobard’s tetraglossic structure present slightly different linguistic frameworks, the ideological objectives that shape them are similar. Gobard and Arcand share a common anxiety in the face of an anticipated linguistic tragedy. For Gobard, this tragedy would be the supremacy of one form of language over the others. For Arcand, on the other hand, the distressing element resides in the hybridity of (stereotyped) languages. In other words, the systematic categorization drawn by Gobard brings out the excessive hybridity in the Le Goglu caricatures. In both instances, the relationship between language and identity is foregrounded. Gobard’s tetraglossic analysis, which is articulated around four functions of language, allows him to escape the Manichean dialectical framework that often opposes, in postcolonial terms, the language of the victor and the language of the vanquished. In this model, multilingualism can be described not as a battle between languages, but as a coherent whole in which each language occupies its own function. Gobard describes four different kinds of language – vernacular, vehicular, referential, and mythical – which can variously take

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the form of patois, dialects, or jargons. The vernacular, or maternal, language is spoken from birth in a precisely defined territory. It is often associated with patois. Vehicular language is used in commerce, and is therefore principally an urban language. Referential language, as its name indicates, refers to a culture other than the vernacular culture. It is a cultural model intended to outline the way to national cohesion based on the reconstruction of the past. And mythical language invokes spirituality, religion, or magic.22 In spite of this four-part division, however, Gobard cannot escape binary oppositions. When he analyzes the linguistic context of 1970s France, for instance, he highlights the power relations between vernacular (French) and vehicular (English) languages. And his preference is hardly hidden: English is “diabolique” and it tends to destroy “les langages vernaculaires,” which are “naturels.”23 Gobard argues against all forms of linguistic hybridity.24 By qualifying some languages and their functions as being good or bad for France, Gobard actuates a nationalistic discourse that allies language and nation,25 a discourse that can also be found in 1930s Quebec, where fear of linguistic and racial hybridity was at the heart of the nationalist and Catholic debates over language. English, with its connotation as urban, political, and economic, was in 1930 the vehicular language of the province of Quebec. The economic and industrial sectors were primarily in the hands of the anglophone community.26 Industrialization thus promoted the anglicization of French Canadians, who were migrating en masse toward the cities in order to find work, since there were insufficient new lands available for farming in the St Lawrence Valley.27 French, the maternal language of the majority of the population of Quebec (79.8 percent in 1931), was taught in educational establishments led by the Catholic clergy, who were also responsible for charitable organizations and health.28 Despite the important role of the Catholic Church in the teaching of French, the different nationalist movements of the time had divergent opinions as to the relationship between language and religion. For some, in particular the Catholic youth movement (Jeunes-Canada) influenced by the cleric Lionel Groulx, religion and linguistic nationalism were inseparable. For groups under the influence of the Dominican Georges-Henri Lévesque (1903–2000) – such as the Jeunesse étudiante catholique and the Jeunesse catholique ouvrière – it was important to separate the issues: they believed language and religion should be treated independently of one another in order to keep the nationalist question subordinated to the religious one.29 Others still, following Paul Bouchard,

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favoured the political question over the linguistic one, all the while criticizing religion.30 As for the Liberals, they remained guarded on the language issue. They avoided intervening, first of all because they were afraid of retaliation from the clergy, who wanted to keep their control over the teaching of French,31 and also because an overt favouring of French might have threatened economic growth (although, by speaking French, English, and Hebrew/Yiddish, the Liberals in Loulou Goglu’s caricature actually maximize their chances of selling their products).32 In reality, the waves of protest over the protection of the French language at the time were directed mostly at the federal government, which allowed some provinces, among them Ontario, to restrict the teaching of French.33 The French language and its many expressions were themselves at the heart of a number of disputes in the province of Quebec. At the end of the nineteenth century, some intellectuals argued against popular French.34 This criticism became louder during the twentieth century, when literary French became the referential language for purists who criticized the pronunciation of popular French, and its archaisms, anglicisms, and Canadianisms. Their criticism was fed by the increasing contact with France and the prejudices of anglophones against the “French-Canadian patois” that deformed “Parisian French.”35 Popular French was perceived as a hybrid language, impure, between English and literary French. Other groups argued instead that Canadianisms incarnated French-Canadian history, and that its archaisms were vestiges of the Ancien Régime.36 Hebrew and especially Yiddish were languages in use in Montreal in the first third of the twentieth century.37 Both were spoken by the Jewish communities who, after the French Canadians and English Canadians, formed the third-largest ethnic group.38 Hebrew seems to have been relegated to a mostly sacramental role, while Yiddish was flourishing with the arrival of immigrants from Eastern Europe.39 But it was English that Jews privileged for their business dealings. This anglicization was partly the result of the fact that children of Jewish origin were forced to study in English Protestant schools, since only Catholics had the right to be schooled in French (by the clergy). Leaders of Protestant schools complained more and more about the economic burden that Jewish students represented. Furthermore, some Jewish communities called increasingly for their own schools. In response to these demands, Louis-Athanase David presented a draft bill at the beginning of 1930 which would allow Jewish

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communities to develop their own school system.40 With this, the Church felt threatened by the prospect of losing some of its power. These were some of the issues of religion and language that motivated the anti-Semitism of the Le Goglu caricatures. According to historian Robert Rumilly, the coadjutor-archbishop of Montreal, Georges Gauthier (1872–1940), the archbishop, personally asked Arcand to use his journals to fight the law on Jewish schools.41 Arcand’s response was swift: to attack Jewish communities and the Liberal government in Le Goglu’s articles and caricatures. As a fervent Catholic, Arcand forcefully opposed David’s proposed law, which he believed to be unconstitutional, since, indeed, according to its own constitution, Canada recognized only two religions (Protestantism and Catholicism) and two languages (English and French).42 Arcand’s position, however, was complex. His love for the imperial British regime differentiated him from the nationalists of his time: when he talked about the “nation,” he meant the whole of Canada, not the province of Quebec. Although he believed the country should acquire some autonomy from England, he didn’t want it to break away completely from England’s political guardianship.43 Given the importance he ascribed to the Imperial regime, Arcand automatically accepted that political and economic leaders should adopt English. In fact, some of the Parti de l’unité nationale’s assemblies began with the anthem God Save the King, and the agendas distributed in these meetings were in English.44 Nevertheless, in spite of the political power that Arcand accorded English, this vehicular language is present in Le Goglu only in the form of anglicisms.45 The terms “snapshot,” “hold-up,” “overall,” and “uppercut,” which dot the caricatures’ captions, for instance, speak to the linguistic reality of Montreal at the time. All Montrealers – Conservatives, Liberals, Jews, and French Canadians – incorporated English words into their speech. However, this popular and anglicized language was neither homogenous nor unanimously accepted. An article published in 1937 in the weekly Le Patriote illustrates this point. The (anonymous) author condemned the speech of Baptiste Ladébauche, the stereotypical cartoon figure of the French-Canadian peasant, popularized at the time by Albéric Bourgeois (1876–1962), caricaturist at La Presse: La Presse, “known and admired by many academics?” Who among them, pray tell, admire Ladébauche, introducer of false folklore,

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propagandist of a bastardized language created in its offices and that unfortunately passes for our habitants’ speech, whose language is more original and more flavourfully archaic.”46 If we follow the author’s logic, the vernacular language changes according to its degree of purity (as opposed to bastardization), as revealed by the presence of archaisms. Bizarrely, the “flavourfully archaic” speech described in the article was not spoken by the habitants in the caricatures in Le Patriote and Le Goglu, but rather by Taschereau’s Liberals. A caricature by Al Goglu entitled “Un problème qui leur tracasse la caboche,”47 for instance, shows three members of the Liberal party – Thurber, David, and Bouchard – discussing the new law on Jewish schools. The caption is in the form of a dialogue punctuated by anglicisms, Canadianisms, and contractions: PROMETTEUX THURBER: “Session’s starting soon. Wha’ we gonna do ’bout them Jewish schools? I got pummelled coz o’ them in my district.” SATHANASE DAVID: “Dunno how we can fix it. We got real bashed coz’ o’ that business. Wha’d’you think, Tédé?” TÉDÉ PARQUEMENT BOUCHARD: “Sort yourselves out. Me, I’m the Speakster and I didn’t vote on all that.”48

7.2 Unidentified artist, “Les pouilleux de Québec: Skidou!” Le Goglu, 19 December 1930, 16. BAnQ Rosemont-La Petite Patrie Caption: Un beau gars, vigoureux, fier de son sang français,

De leurs communs efforts surgit beaucoup de bien,

Vint jadis dans Québec, forêt vierge et sauvage,

Une grande nation par eux fut préparée,

Pour fonder un pays de bonheur, de progrès,

Et quand on n’eut plus qu’à récolter, le youpin

Y donnant ses labeurs, son cœur et son courage.

Vint pour leur dérober les pains de la fournée.

Vint bientôt un Anglais qui s’installa chez lui.

Mais surpris sur le fait, l’hypocrite pouilleux

Tous deux furent d’accord sur un nouveau régime,

Reçut au derrière un puissant coup de bottine

S’unirent pour atteindre un but bien défini

Qui l’enverra … voler (bénissons-en les cieux!)

Et trimèrent ensemble en mutuelle estime.

Dans le pays des poux-volants: la Palestine.

Why did the Liberals adopt the language of the French-Canadian habitants who got pummelled (“coulés”) and bashed (“massés,” or “ramassés”) because of the law on Jewish schools? Was it to get closer to the masses and thus fool the voters? Was it to ridicule this “flavourfully archaic” language? This contamination by popular French of the speech of a political elite who are supposed to communicate in proper French disrupts the functioning of the vernacular language as defined by Gobard. By being broken up into many variants and being used by Liberal “enemies,” popular French in the caricatures published by Arcand no longer fulfills its function of national cohesion. But most of all, it is not the habitants – those who, according to Gobard, speak the vernacular language – who use this popular language. In fact, in Le Goglu’s caricatures, French Canadians rarely speak at all. Rather, they are described by journalists and caricaturists, and more often than not in refined French. Literary French overrides the French tinged with archaisms. Though some anglicisms find their way into the illustrated fable entitled “Les pouilleux de Québec: Skidou!” – notably in the title49 – the literary vocabulary and style of the caption are closer to referential language, as can be seen in the quatrain below the first vignette (Fig. 7.2): A handsome lad, vigorous, proud of his French blood, Came to Quebec long ago, to that virgin and wild forest, To establish a country of happiness and progress, Giving it his labours, his heart, and his courage.50 The draughtsmanship in this series is as smooth as the language. The grey nuances and white highlights set this anonymous work apart from “Nos ‘grands’ hommes ont ouvert un delicatessen,” in which the sinuous lines predominate in spite of some flat black areas.51 Other formal aspects differentiate the two drawings: the backgrounds in “Pouilleux de Québec” are more elaborate, ranging from the lush forest, to a bakery, to the arid land of Palestine. The clothes of the character types of the French Canadian, of the Jew, and of John Bull, who personifies England, are rendered with volume and detail, which is not the case in “Nos ‘grands’ hommes.” In the serial novel Popeline, written by Émile Goglu (Adrien Arcand), which appeared in every issue of Le Goglu except the first, the French Canadian, though mute in the caricatures, does speak. The four main characters – Popeline, Flannellette, Sirop, and Jack – express themselves in a popular

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French that is itself a caricature of the dialect used by Montrealers of the time. These characters may be naïve with respect to politics (still not understanding the supposed harm caused by the Liberal government), but their awareness of language is sharp. Despite the heroine Popeline’s use of popular language, she who wears the “brittechezes”52 judges those she does not know by their language: “Y a l’air smatte pas pour rire et y parle pas joual, celui-là.”53 Should we read here a criticism of Quebec speech and a desire to become more “smatte” by no longer speaking joual? Is this why Popeline finesses her language in a chic café: “Et apportez du thé, avez [sic] bien beaucoup du sucre dedans [sic]”?54 The gap between vernacular and referential French widens with the introduction of Latin-sounding words. When Sirop wants to impress Flannellette, he utters a litany of words that resemble childish magical incantations: “Potitobus caracabam optimus satanitas autobus. Je peux vous en sortir du latin, moi aussi.”55 The phonetic game is also used to link the Liberals to the Russian accent (and more specifically to the Bolshevik accent). In two reworked photographs from 1930, Alexandre Taschereau becomes Harensky Boucanesky, or Tascherostein, while Louis-Athanase David is renamed Sathanasia Davidsky.56 These linguistic references act in the same way as the use of the word “kosher” written in Hebraic script in the centre of “Nos ‘grands’ hommes,” which brands with a hot iron the links between the Liberals and the Jewish communities. This idea of an imprint takes physical shape in Loulou Goglu’s caricature entitled “Une tare que la famille des Cliqueux ne pourra laver”57 (Fig. 7.3). Standing in front of JosephLéonide Perron and Louis-Alexandre Taschereau, Louis-Athanase David exposes his posterior branded with the word “kosher” in Hebrew/Yiddish. The imprint comes from the woven seat of the chair on which David had been seated in spite of the badly misspelled warning, “peintur freshe des Bôzars.”58 “Bôzars” here refers to the École des beaux-arts de Montréal (ebam) and the École des beaux-arts de Québec (ebaq), art schools that were then under the jurisdiction of Louis-Athanase David.59 A set of associations is created between the Hebraic script, the beaux-arts – whose emblematic work is a simple chair – and the faulty use of French. The numerous spelling mistakes suggest a deficiency at the level of art education, due, presumably, to the presence of Jewish artists in artistic institutions.60 In fact, in the background, two figures display the stereotyped Jewish physiognomic and clothing characteristics: the protuberant nose and lips, hairiness, long coat, and hat. The association of the term “kosher” with the arts implies a dimension that is more cultural than sacramental.

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7.3 Loulou Goglu, “Une tare que la famille des cliqueux ne pourra laver. ” Le Goglu (9 May 1930), 5. BAnQ Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie Caption: Quand il alla s’asseoir sur le banc de la trahison pour préparer une loi répudiée par les juristes, les juges, les éducateurs, le clergé et le peuple canadiens, Sathanase-Phiphi David crut qu’il s’en tirerait indemne. Mais la trahison, qui fut précipitée en 48 heures, laissa sur Sathanase une tare dont doivent partager ses chefs et protecteurs, Toropoury et le Hareng Boucané, qui ont beau se désespérer mais ne devront pas moins faire face à la musique des Goglus.

This is not the case for Latin, which, other than some references to childish magical incantations, symbolizes the religious identity of the French-Canadian people in the Le Goglu caricatures. The lower part of Al Goglu’s “Comment les archevins [sic] du zoo ont accueilli le résultat du 24” (“How the Archeldermen of the zoo Welcomed the Result of the 24th”)61 (Fig. 7.4) features the aldermen of the City of Montreal council, led at the time by Camillien Houde (1889–1958).62 They are surrounded by bottles of alcohol and wads of banknotes. The furniture is knocked over, the frightened aldermen’s eyes are bulging, and their mouths are deformed. The chaos is explained by the upper part of the caricature: on the wall, an index finger traces out in Latin the biblical citation, “Mané Thécel Phares.” This is a reference to the feast of Balthazar during which the king of Babylon used gold utensils stolen from God’s temple and “praised the gods of silver and gold, of bronze, iron, wood and stone.”63 In response to Balthazar’s blasphemous actions and words, God’s fingers materialized and wrote, in Hebrew,64 “Mene, Téquel, Perès.” The prophet Daniel was the only one who could translate the meaning of the prophecy, into “Your days are numbered.” In “Comment les archevins du zoo ont accueilli le résultat du 24,” the corruption of the City of Montreal council is linked to the king of Babylon’s doom. Contrary to the biblical episode, however, it is not the hand of God that traces the prophetic words, but the arm of the people. To the right of the composition is a bobolink singing out the time remaining before the municipal council is defeated: “plus que huit mois.”65 The bird became the prophet; close to a year after the publication of this caricature, Camillien Houde did in fact lose the election by over twelve thousand votes. The placement of text within the images in Le Goglu caricatures serves to associate French Canadians, Jews, and Liberals with particular languages: the position of a word at the centre of the composition (“Nos ‘grands’ hommes”); the treatment of the image in relation to the caption (“Pouilleux de Québec: Skidou!”); the typography of a word that refers to Hebraic script (“Une tare que la famille des Cliqueux ne pourra laver”); the imaged reference to a biblical episode that involves script (“Comment les archevins du zoo ont accueilli le résultat du 24”). The functions of the different languages are, however, not always clearly defined in the imagery of Le Goglu. The presence of Latin and Hebrew/Yiddish fits into a Manichaean structure that opposes good and evil, but Hebrew is never presented in its sacramental form, and Latin sometimes refers to pseudo-scientific words that are almost magical. Furthermore, the

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7.4 Al Goglu, “Comment les archevins [sic] du zoo ont accueilli le résultat du 24.” Le Goglu, 4 September 1931, 3. BAnQ Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie Caption: Ils étaient tous ensemble et se frottaient les mains en ricanant de joie, bien sûrs de prendre le pouvoir. Une heure après, nos archevins voyaient le bras du peuple écrire sur le mur les mots prophétiques “Mané, Thécel, Pharès,” “Vos jours sont comptés.” Ce fut une panique indescriptible, un sauve-qui-peut comme il ne s’en est jamais vu. Les Brayè, les Savignac, les Dupuis, les Mathieu, les Demers, etc., s’enfuirent terrorisés, gardant l’idée fixe que ce sera leur tour, en avril prochain, et qu’ils vont manger une pire ratatouille que celle du 24 août.

7.5 Al Goglu, “Au diable les Canayens, c’est la prospérité des Juifs qui compte.” Le Goglu (11 April 1930), p. 6. BAnQ Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie Caption: le contremaître isaac: “Ces pauvres Canayennes n’ont pas eu un jour de congé depuis huit mois, boss. Pensez-vous pas que c’est dangereux, les faire travailler le dimanche?” le boss abie : “Bah! si elles crèvent, on en trouvera d’autres. Et puis, nous sommes protégés contre la

loi qui ordonne de fermer le dimanche. Taschereau est plus Juif que nous-autres et, quand l’Union des Couturiers s’est plainte à Desroches et au chef Langevin, ils ont refusé d’intervenir. Au diable les Canayens! Ce qui compte, c’est d’avoir leur argent et de devenir les maîtres à Montréal.”

linguistic hybridity in Le Goglu’s caricatures points to an absence of consensus as to which dialect of French to adopt. Literary French is used to define French Canadians, who do not speak in the caricatures. The heroine Popeline in the novel, however, speaks the same popular, anglicized French, replete with Canadianisms and just as archaic as the French of the Liberals. The latter are, moreover, linked to the Hebraic language. Should we see in Le Goglu a critique of the porosity of languages in the context of 1930s Montreal? Are the relationships between text and image in Le Goglu a simple depiction of Montreal’s linguistic diversity or are they a satirical crusade condemning linguistic contagion? One thing is clear: the caricatures published by Adrien Arcand expose the weaknesses of Henri Gobard’s tetraglossic structure – unless they are about putting into images an anxiety-producing linguistic hybridity that Gobard would condemn almost thirty years later. The ultimate meeting between the languages of French-Canadians and Jews takes place in Al Goglu’s caricature entitled “Au diable les Canayens, c’est la prospérité des Juifs qui compte”66 (Fig. 7.5). As the English inscription on the door at the left of the composition indicates, the scene is a textile factory managed by two Jews, “Abie Nathankson & Isaac son.” On the wall, two calendars – one in French, the other in English – mark the date of the event: Sunday, 12 March 1930.67 Abie and his son Isaac discuss the fate of the grim-faced FrenchCanadian working women who toil in front of them. They have not had a single day off in the last eight months – at least, this is what the caption that translates Isaac’s strange language states. Isaac expresses himself in a word bubble filled with pipes that, shown from the side, resemble hieroglyphs. This incomprehensible language is not only associated with Jews, for the pipe plays an important role in both the imagery and language of the French Canadians. The pipe had long been one of the attributes of the French-Canadian stereotype. It was already present in the debut caricatural representation of Baptiste Ladébauche by Hector Berthelot (1842–1895) in Le Canard on 9 August 1879. It was found in Albéric Bourgeois’s representations of Baptiste in La Presse. And it often accompanied the stereotype of the French Canadian in Al Goglu’s caricatures.68 In French Canadian idioms, the word pipe recurs in a number of common expressions. According to the Glossaire du parler français au Canada published in 1930, pipe implies a measure: Attendre une pipe means “to wait for a long time.”69 It is also found in the expression casser sa pipe, which means “to miss one’s chance, to be disappointed, to fail,” or even “to die.” In his book of Québécois

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expressions, Pierre DesRuisseaux adds the French-Canadian expression Perdre sa pipe jamais sa blague, which means “to lose the battle but not the war.”70 Is this a call to arms on the part of the caricaturist? By turning to this identity symbol to render Isaac’s language visual, the linguistic link between the Jews and the French Canadians is made. But from this fusion comes a confusion. The “spelling out” of words with pipes in the satiric imagery of Le Goglu creates a new linguistic function that lies outside of Gobard’s quadripartite analysis. Contrary to English, to popular and referential French, to Hebrew, or to the Yiddish seen in Le Goglu caricatures, this new dialect underlines both the incomprehensibility and the contagion of languages that takes the shape of a veritable infection, of a post-Babelesque nightmare where union and division are both impossible. We can easily imagine that the fascist Adrien Arcand and his caricaturists would fear such a linguistic contagion. This anxiety over hybridity, especially relating to anglicization, was also alive in the nationalists and their leaders Lionel Groulx and George-Henri Lévesque. The close association between language and identity in Quebec would for years translate as frictions between French and English in Quebec caricatures. Indeed, only a year after the publication of Henri Gobard’s analysis, the anglophone caricaturist Terry Mosher (known as Aislin) published his famous and controversial caricature “Speak French, English Dogs” in the Montreal Gazette, just before the adoption of the Charter of the French Language (law 101) on 26 August 1977.71

NOTES 1 In their history of caricature in Quebec, Mira Falardeau and Robert Aird associate Loulou Goglu with the French caricaturist Pierre Saint-Loup (1894–1963) (Robert Aird and Mira Falardeau, Histoire de la caricature au Québec (Montreal: vlb, 2009), 116. A certain L. Piersaint produced caricatures for Le Miroir, which would confirm Falardeau and Aird’s hypothesis. The two pseudonyms relate to each other, as does the roundness of the characters’ physiques in these two bodies of work. For a historiographic and aesthetic analysis of the caricatures published by Adrien Arcand in Le Goglu (1929–1933), see Josée Desforges, “Entre création et destruction. les comportements des types du Juif et du Canadien français dans les caricatures antisémites publiées par Adrien Arcand à Montréal entre 1929 et 1939” (Master’s thesis, Université du Québec à Montréal, 2012), 190 ff.

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2 “Our ‘Great’ Men Have Opened a Delicatessen.” 3 The Liberals stayed in power until 1936. 4 Eiran Harris, “Montreal-Style Smoked Meat: An Interview with Eiran Harris Conducted by Lara Rabinovitch, with the Cooperation of the Jewish Public Library Archives of Montreal,” Cuizine: The Journal of Canadian Food Cultures / Cuizine: revue des cultures culinaires au Canada 1, 2 (2009), http://www.erudit.org.proxy.bibliotheques. uqam.ca:2048/revue/cuizine/2009/v1/n2/037859ar.html (accessed 18 November 2012). 5 See, for instance, the unsigned photomontage “Non, vous vous trompez!” (“No, You Are Wrong!”) (Le Goglu, 30 May 1930), 6. 6 The long overcoat, the wide collar, and the black hat are characteristic of Jewish clothing in anti-Semitic French caricatures. See Christian Delporte, “Image et représentations: xénophobie et antisémitisme dans le dessin de presse français (1919–1944),” L’Information Historique 54 (1992), 99; and Bertrand Tillier, “La caricature antisémite pendant l’Affaire Dreyfus,” Hommes & Migrations 1216 (November–December 1998), 103. 7 The word race was used in Quebec at that time in its cultural sense, particularly by the priest Lionel Groulx (1878–1967), who inspired many nationalists. In his novel L’Appel de la race (The Call of the Race), first published in 1922, Groulx (writing under his pseudonym, Alonié De Lestres) defines the Catholic French-Canadian race as superior and universal. Lionel Groulx, L’Appel de la race (Montréal: Fides, 1956), 109, 115. 8 Joseph Ménard co-edited the newspaper with Arcand. Very little is known about him, not even the dates of his birth or death. 9 Jean-François Nadeau, Adrien Arcand, Führer canadien (Montréal: Lux, 2010). 10 Although Arcand left Le Patriote in 1934, some of Le Goglu’s caricaturists continued to publish in it. Joseph Ménard, “Le départ de M. Arcand,” Le Patriote (24 January 1935), 2. 11 “The Patriotic Order of the Goglus,” “Christian National Socialist Party,” “National Unity Party of Canada.” When Arcand died, Gérard Lanctôt became head of the National Unity Party of Canada. 12 For more information on Arcand’s political organizations, see Nadeau, Adrien Arcand, 50–5, 176–99, 227–47. 13 Nadeau, Adrien Arcand, 32. Arcand also worked for La Patrie in 1920 and for the Montreal Star the following year. Precisely when Arcand left the Montreal Star for La Presse is unknown. 14 Al Goglu is recorded as being a certain Albert Labelle, about whom almost nothing is known. Among the other pseudonyms signing Le Goglu caricatures, are Jacques Goglu (James McIsaac) and the mysterious md Goglu, Pioche Goglu, Camille, and Gogluette. Desforges, “Entre création et destruction,” 33–4.

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15 This translates as “editor, publisher, reporter, elevator boy, photographer, circulation manager, distributor, and sweeper.” See a boxed text on page two of the journal. 16 Beaulieu and Hamelin, “La presse québécoise,” 186. 17 On Arcand’s tendency to inflate his figures, see Nadeau, Adrien Arcand, 54–5, 173–99. 18 For a more in-depth study of Le Goglu as a parody of La Presse, see Josée Desforges and Dominic Hardy, “Photographie et caricature dans le journal humoristique fasciste québécois Le Goglu (1929–1933),” Ridiculosa 17 (2010): 181–203. Arcand’s other newspapers are much more serious in tone. Le Miroir, for instance, which was published at the same time as Le Goglu, was much closer in tone to La Presse, with no parodic reversal. 19 The stereotype of Jewish physiognomy and character were influenced by representations in anti-Semitic caricatures published during the Dreyfus affair in France, particularly in the publications of Édouard Drumont (1844–1917). See Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci, “L’image, figure majeure du discours antisémite?” Vingtième siècle. Revue d’histoire 72 (October–December 2001), 30. 20 Desforges, “Entre création et destruction,” 190 ff. 21 Henri Gobard, L’Aliénation linguistique. Analyse tétraglossique (Paris: Flammarion, 1976). Gobard is one of a number of French scholars who study the relationship between linguistics and sociology. (See, for instance, Jean-Baptiste Marcellesi and Bernard Garin, Introduction à la sociolinguistique [Paris: Larousse, 1974]; William Labov, Sociolinguistique [Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1976]; and Pierre Encrevé, “Linguistique et sociolinguistique,” Langue française 34 [May 1977]: 3–16. Encrevé’s article is the introduction to a special issue of Langue française dedicated to the relationship between linguistics and sociology). Gobard, whose stated aim was to study the functions of language, is relevant to the study of caricatures in Le Goglu; my contention is precisely that the different forms of language in the satirical imagery of the paper are used to convey Arcand’s nationalist message. I use Gobard’s model to highlight the linguistic characteristics of Le Goglu. I will not address in any detail the problems raised by the tetraglossic grid in relation to its original context. For a critique of some of the problems raised by this book, see Yves Winkin, “L’aliénation linguistique. Analyse tétraglossique by Henri Gobard,” Language in Society 9, 1 (April 1980), 100–2. 22 Gobard, L’Aliénation linguistique, 9. 23 Ibid., 28, 36, 53 (“diabolical,” “tends to destroy the vernacular languages,” and “natural.”) 24 Gobard, L’Aliénation linguistique, 47. Gobard wrote this study in reaction to the Americanization of France that was increasingly felt after the Second World War.

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Armand Mattelart and Michèle Mattelart, “‘L’aliénation linguistique’ d’Henri Gobard,” Le Monde diplomatique, November 1976, http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/1976/11/ MATTELART/33977 (accessed 13 February 2013). See also Richard Kuisel, Le Miroir américain. 50 ans de regard français sur l’Amérique (Paris: JC Lattès, 1996), 21–2. Gobard, L’Aliénation linguistique, 23. Paul-André Linteau, “La nouvelle organisation économique et sociale,” in Pierre Georgeault and Michel Plourde, eds., Le français au Québec: 400 ans d’histoire et de vie (Montreal: Fides, 2008), 210. The English language also became more prevalent in parts of the countryside, partly through the influence of big forestry companies. Linteau, “La nouvelle organisation,” 211–12. Louis Duchesne, La situation démographique au Québec. Bilan 1999 (Quebec: Publication du Québec, 2000), 20; Paul-André Linteau et al., Histoire du Québec contemporain (Montreal: Boréal, 1989), vol. 2, 94–5. Regarding the relationship between language and nation in Groulx and in Lévesque, see Yvan Lamonde, La modernité au Québec. La Crise de l’homme et de l’esprit 19291939 (Montreal: Fides, 2011), 108–9, 112, and Serge Gagnon, “La langue, gardienne de la foi,” in Georgeault and Plourde, Le Français au Québec, 232. Lamonde, La modernité au Québec, 160–3. Paul Bouchard’s newspaper La Nation included anti-Semitic caricatures and articles. Unlike Arcand, Bouchard was a separatist who severely criticized Catholicism, all the while singing Lionel Groulx’s praises. What’s more, La Nation, which published one or two caricatures per issue, was completely different from Le Goglu with its saturation of satiric imagery. François Harvey, “Le Canada français et la question linguistique,” in Georgeault and Plourde, Le Français au Québec, 207. Louis-Alexandre Taschereau broached the linguistic issue timidly in the 1910s, when he stressed the importance of teaching French throughout Canada and criticized the inactivity of the federal government on this subject. Bernard Vigod, Taschereau (Sillery: Septentrion, 1996), 86–7. Linteau, “La nouvelle organisation,” 215. Harvey, “Le Canada français,” 199–200. In particular Thomas Maguire (1776–1854) with his Manuel des difficultés les plus communes de la langue française (1841). Chantal Bouchard, “Anglicisation et autodépréciation,” in Georgeault and Plourde, Le Français au Québec, 255–6. For instance, the members of the Société du parler français au Canada organized three conferences on the specificities of the French-Canadian language (in 1912, 1937, and 1952). Bouchard, “Anglicisation et autodépréciation,” 260–1. See also Thomas

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38

39

40 41 42

43 44 45

Lavoie, Louis Mercier, and Claude Verreault, eds., 1902–2002, la Société du parler français au Canada cent ans après sa fondation: mise en valeur d’un patrimoine culturel (Sainte-Foy: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2006), in particular the essays by Jean-Denis Gendron, “Historique de la Société du parler français au Canada”: 5–28, and Simon Langlois, “L’époque de la Société du parler français au Canada: arrière-fond sociographique”: 187–208. On the efforts to valorize the French-Canadian language, see also Louis Mercier, “Des différences à décrire, un parler à revaloriser,” in Georgeault and Plourde, Le Français au Québec, 265–8; and Lucie Robert, Le Manuel d’histoire de la littérature canadienne de Mgr. Camille Roy (Quebec: Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture, 1982), 196. Another account of the heteroglossic “effect” described by Gobard is given by Rainier Grutman, Des langues qui résonnent: L’hétérolinguisme au XIXe siècle québécois (Montreal: Université de Montréal/ceq, 1997). In 1931, 99 percent of Montreal Jews over the age of fifteen reported that Yiddish was their mother tongue. Pierre Anctil, Trajectoires juives au Québec (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2010), 53. In 1931 Jewish communities made up 5.9 percent of Montreal’s population. Pierre Anctil, Le rendez-vous manqué: Les Juifs de Montréal face au Québec de l’entre-deuxguerres (Quebec: Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture, 1988), 34. It is true also that Jewish communities themselves were divided in Quebec. The Uptowners, from the first wave of immigration that occurred before 1900, were well to do and resided in the comfortable Outremont neighbourhood; they were fluent in English and pretty resistant to change. The Downtowners, who arrived with the second wave of immigration during the early decades of the twentieth century, lived along Saint-Laurent Boulevard. They favoured secularity and expressed cultural independence by speaking Yiddish. See Anctil, Le rendez-vous manqué, 183. Anctil, Le rendez-vous manqué, 165–209. Nadeau, Adrien Arcand, 68. Adrien Arcand, Chrétien ou Juif? Les Juifs forment-ils une “minorité” et doivent-ils être traités comme tels dans la province de Québec? (Montreal: Éditeur Adj. Ménard, 1930), 19–20. Arcand does not try to name the many forms of Protestantism, thus maintaining a binary division. Adrien Arcand, Fascisme ou socialisme? (Montreal: Éditions du Patriote, 1933), 59–60. Nadeau, Adrien Arcand, 183. punc meetings started in 1938. At the time, it was therefore a king, George VI, and not a queen, on the throne. Unlike the weekly Le Patriote, which published an issue in English in 1936.

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46 “La Presse, ‘connue et admirée de plusieurs académiciens?’ Lesquels, s’il vous plaît, admirent Ladébauche, introducteur de faux folklore, propagandiste d’un parler bâtard créé dans ses bureaux et qu’on fait malheureusement passer pour le parler de nos habitants qui ont une langue plus originale et plus savoureusement archaïque.” Anonymous, “La ‘Presse’ et la mort de René Doumic,” Le Patriote (25 December 1937), 4. 47 A problem that worries their noggins, published in Le Goglu (28 November 1930), 3. 48 Al Goglu gave the politicians nicknames: “Prometteux” Thurber, the one who promises much (and presumably delivers little); Sathanase David, merging Satan and Athanase; and Tédé Parquement Bouchard, Tédé, from Bouchard’s intials T.D. and “Parquement,” the one who keeps people or things in an enclosed space, rendering them static or immobile. PROMETTEUX THURBER: “La session s’en vient. Quoi c’qu’on va donc faire avec les écoles juives ? Dans mon bout ça m’a coulé.” SATHANASE DAVID: “J’sais ben pas quel skîme on pourrait trouver. On s’est fait masser pas pour rire avec c’t’affaire-là. Qu’est-ce que tu proposerais, Tédé?” TÉDÉ PARQUEMENT BOUCHARD:  “Arrangez-vous comme vous pourrez. Moi, j’suis l’Orateux et j’ai pas voté là-d’sus. 49 “Hobos of Quebec: Skidou!” Since the Skidoo brand only appeared in the 1960s, the term “Skidou” here is probably a reference to the English word “to skid,” or to the US slang expression “23 skidoo,” popular in the 1920s, meaning “to leave quickly.” 50 “Un beau gars, vigoureux, fier de son sang français / Vint jadis dans Québec, forêt vierge et sauvage / Pour fonder un pays de bonheur, de progrès / Y donnant ses labeurs, son cœur et son courage.” For the entire fable, see the caption to Fig. 7.2. It is read from top to bottom, and from left to right. 51 I believe both caricatures are by Loulou Goglu, as some drawings that are signed by him display workmanship similar to that of “Pouilleux de Québec: Skidou!” See among others, Loulou Goglu, “M. Athanase David” (Le Goglu, 6 December 1929), 4. 52 A phonetic transliteration of the English “breeches.” Émile Goglu, “Popeline” (Le Goglu, 15 November 1929), 7. 53 Émile Goglu, “Popeline,” (Le Goglu, 14 February 1930), 7. “This guy looks real smart, and he doesn’t speak joual.” “Smatte” is a phonetic transliteration of the English “smart”; joual is the French-Canadian dialect. 54 Émile Goglu, “Popeline” (Le Goglu, 18 October 1929), 7. “And bring some tea, with plenty lots of sugar in it.”

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55 “Potitobus caracabam optimus satanitas autobus. Me too, I can give you some Latin.” Émile Goglu, “Popeline” (Le Goglu, 19 September 1929), 7. 56 Anonymous, Non, vous vous trompez! (No, You Are Wrong!), and La jongleuse du Ghetto (The Female Juggler from the Ghetto) (Le Goglu, 20 June 1930), 6. 57 “A Flaw that the Cliqueux Family [i.e., the Gang] Won’t Be Able to Wash Away.” 58 “Fresh Beaux-arts Paint.” 59 Suzanne Lemerise, “Insertion sociale de l’École des beaux-arts de Montréal: 1923–1969,” in Francine Couture, ed., L’Enseignement des arts au Québec (Montreal: Université du Québec à Montréal, 1980): 1–8. 60 This critique of Jewish painters, who occupied an important place on the Montreal artistic scene, is found only in Arcand’s periodicals. Apart from an article signed by Titus published three years later in Le Patriote (Titus, “Les Juifs et les beaux-arts” Le Patriote, 22 June 1933, 5), no mention of this ethnic group’s presence in Quebec’s artistic institutions is as explicit as in Loulous Goglu’s works. For more information on Montreal’s Jewish painters, see Esther Trépanier, Peintres juifs de Montréal. Témoins de leur époque, 1930–1948 (Montreal: Éditions de l’Homme, 2008). 61 The neologism “archevins” is presumably a hybrid of the titles archevêque (archbishop) and échevin (alderman). 62 Camillien Houde was mayor of Montreal intermittently between 1928 and 1954. 63 Daniel: 5:1–4, 25–9. 64 Loulou Goglu chose to write the prophecy in Latin and not Hebrew. 65 “Only eight more months.” 66 “To Hell with Canajuns, it’s the Prosperity of the Jews that Counts.” 67 At the time, the Sunday Observance Law (Loi sur l’observance du dimanche) forbade Catholics from working on Sundays, but a 1925 amendment to the law allowed Jews who had observed the Sabbath to work on Sundays. This caused a certain amount of friction between the clergy and the government. 68 See, for example, Al Goglu, “[On] voulait légaliser la façon judaïque de procéder” (“They wanted to legalize the Judaic way of doing things”). Le Goglu (4 March 1932), 5. 69 La société du parler français au Canada, Glossaire du parler français au Canada (Quebec: l’Action sociale, 1930), 517. 70 Pierre DesRuisseaux, Le livre des expressions québécoises (Ville Lasalle: Hurtibise hmh, 1979), 202. 71 The cartoon was published 14 July 1977.

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eight

New Frontier (1936–1937) and the Antifascist Press in Canada LORA SENECHAL CARNEy

The circumstances behind the appearance of New Frontier magazine in Toronto in April 1936 are easily explained. The year before, there had been a sweeping policy change within the Communist International, the Moscow organization that was set up to promote and coordinate the progress of Communism worldwide. From its beginnings in 1919 and throughout the so-called Third Period (1928–35), which was supposedly the time of the death of capitalism, the Communist International had been intent on worldwide class struggle and revolution. But in 1933, Hitler and the Nazi Party had crushed other German political organizations and had proceeded to rule Germany as a police state, and in the spring of 1935, Hitler announced that his army would grow to half a million. The Treaty of Versailles was dead and the League of Nations was ineffectual. Alarmed by all this and by a possible alliance between Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, the Communist International decided to put the class struggle on the back burner and concentrate instead on the organization of a broad antifascist United Front, or “Popular Front,” as it is sometimes called.1 Communists worldwide were no longer to see social democrats and other moderate leftists as capitalist enemies, lumped together with everyone to their right. Instead, Communists were asked to act in alliance with everyone who opposed fascism.

In Canada, social democrats remained more than wary of this, just as most Canadians remained wary of Communism, period. In the editorial pages of the Canadian Forum (1920–2000), a Toronto magazine taken over in 1936 by the social democrats and turned into an instrument of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, the Canadian social democratic party, it was stated firmly that the ccf would never join the Communists.2 So, in order to oppose the Canadian Forum, Communist Party faithfuls who were involved in arts and culture began New Frontier as a monthly literary and political magazine to attract teachers, social workers, writers, artists, and other middle-class intellectuals to a united front against fascism.3

The Magazine New Frontier’s official mandate was “to acquaint the Canadian public with the work of those writers and artists who are expressing a positive reaction to the social scene” (when so much creative work disregarded the social realities) and “to serve as an open forum for all shades of progressive opinion.”4 Of course, its Communist editors had a hard time creating an open forum with their party so widely mistrusted, but they tried, especially at first. New Frontier became the main Canadian standard-bearer for the United Front and, as literary historian Candida Rifkind notes, at least some of the authors who published there did bridge the gap between the ccf and the Communists.5 This bridging of political divides was to a certain extent the case as well for the Montreal and Toronto visual artists associated with New Frontier, who gave the magazine its remarkable visual aspect with a total of seven or eight contributions per issue. The most important of these works were graphic satires, but it is worth mentioning other kinds of visual material that were also included to support New Frontier’s broad mandate, material that was often thematically related to the satires. Sometimes, the magazine featured full-page stand-alone reproductions of works of art that, without the use of caricature or satire, evoked sympathy for the working class, for the unemployed, and for civilians under attack in the Spanish Civil War, just as did the short stories and poems printed in the magazine. Like the literary contributions, these reproductions reflected what Rifkind calls a “leftist documentary impulse,” a Marxist intent to represent workers not yet organized to represent themselves.6 These

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images were related in tone to the magazine but not directly to articles or to themed issues. The artists who produced the stand-alone works, all Canadian, represented various shades of the left; they were sometimes “pink,” sometimes “red.” They included Ernst Neumann (1907–1956), Fritz Brandtner (1896–1969), Louis Muhlstock (1904–2001), Margaret Fairley (1885–1968), Nathan Petroff (1916–2007), and Ellen Simon (1916–2001).7 It appears, however, that the fact of reproducing individual works by these artists was about as far as the journal went, or could go, toward engaging them. Except for Brandtner, whose further involvement is described below, they don’t appear to have had anything else to do with the magazine. Evidently, even though there was a great deal of socializing across the various political loyalties among Toronto and Montreal artists and writers, New Frontier’s dealings with “pink” artists were really quite limited, reflecting the broader Canadian political atmosphere in those years. Two other kinds of non-satirical visual work appeared in New Frontier, more closely related to the graphic satires than were the stand-alone reproductions. Like most of the visual work in New Frontier, these other images were from drawings or prints: in fact, in the entire run of the magazine from April 1936 through October 1937, only three visual elements were drawn from paintings, in keeping with the long tradition that associated the graphic media with popular art and painting with the bourgeoisie (and of course, graphic art was also easier and cheaper to reproduce). First, there were small incidental drawings of workers and other characters, sometimes imported from American leftist journals. These simple drawings were socially oriented, matching the magazine’s tone, but were largely decorative.8 Second, there were modest-sized illustrations of short stories and articles. A special December 1936 issue on the Spanish Civil War had a set of images by the young American illustrator John Groth (1908–1988) borrowed from New York’s left-wing New Theatre magazine (1934–37).9 The illustrations within articles also included some fine work by the Toronto artist Laurence Hyde (1914–1987), which is unusual in New Frontier in that it occasionally plays off the formal innovations of cubism rather than referring to older traditions. The content, however, remains straightforwardly readable as with all New Frontier visual material. For the May 1937 issue, to illustrate an article called “Bombardment at Albacete,” Hyde contributed a stark image that expressed the terror created by the bombing of Spanish civilian towns by Franco’s (and Hitler’s and Mussolini’s) troops and equipment (Fig. 8.1).10 Deploying sharp modernist angles to show a black night broken by

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8.1 Laurence Hyde, illustration for “Bombardment at Albacete,” New Frontier, vol. 2, no. 1 (May 1937), 17. Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. With the kind permission of Anthony Hyde

the harsh lights of planes and fires, this image parallels Picasso’s Guernica in moment of creation as well as content: buildings burn in the night, and against the backdrop of destruction one sees the same desperation and weeping. In themselves, the works described above build a picture of a world rife with urgent social and political issues. From an ideological perspective, however, the graphic satires carry much more weight. The satires make the case against fascism by doing what satire does so well: putting often-caricatured figures into simplified metaphorical contexts to drive home a specific point. They combine effective condemnation – here, of fascism in its various contemporary forms – with the hope for change, for a stop to fascism’s international escalation.

The Graphic Satires The poet Leo Kennedy, central to New Frontier as an editor and as a writer, declared early in the magazine’s existence: “We need poetry that reflects the lives of our people, working, loving, fighting, groping for clarity. We need satire – fierce, scorching, aimed at the abuses which are destroying our culture and which threaten life itself. Our poets have lacked direction for their talents and energies in the past – I suggest that today it lies right before them.”11 It is strange, hearing this call, that although several of Canada’s most important socially minded poets and prose writers contributed to New Frontier, I found only four written texts that could be called satirical in the entire run of the magazine: a one-page comment on Empire loyalty entitled “The Patriotic Geese,” and three poems – “Epitaph for a Canadian Statesman” by Leonard Bullen (one of Kennedy’s own pseudonyms), “Agenda: Fascism for Vultures” by Norman Macleod, and a major long poem by A.M. Klein, “Of Daumiers a Portfolio.”12 So, the graphic satire, with its social and political bite in the tradition of Daumier, had a central place in the magazine’s engagement with the specifics of Canadian antifascism. While it enlivens the magazine’s pages visually and offers something of the comic – an otherwise scarce element in New Frontier -– it is at the same time the main satirical element, “fierce, scorching, aimed at the abuses which are destroying our culture and which threaten life itself.” Although there was some diversity in New Frontier’s graphic satire – for instance, in the work of Laurence Hyde just described – much of it used the “proletarian style” that had survived the shift from the anti-bourgeois Third

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Period to the era of the United Front. Prominent in North American leftist periodicals of the early thirties, this style was based on two centuries of British and other political cartoons, and developed by illustrators rather than by directives from Party authorities. The proletarian style, as defined by Cecile Whiting in her book Antifascism in American Art, was “spare and focused,” with only a few easily identified figures; it was exclusive of modernist formal experiment, sometimes formally naïve (perhaps deliberately so), full of direct oppositions, stripped of all ambiguity, and politically highly charged.13 That had been the style of the graphic satire published in the Toronto monthly Masses (1932–34), the journal of the Progressive Arts Club (the city’s Communist cultural unit). In an April 1932, for instance, Masses cartoon by Toronto artist Avrom Yanovsky (1911–1979) bearing the caption “Group of Seven: Famous Canadian ‘Painters’ at Work,” the heroes of post–First World War nationalist Anglo-Canadian art are transformed into stereotypical figures of the fat capitalist and his cronies – politicians, the police, and the military – and the swastika is prominent on one easel. This is typical of Third Period Communist ideology, in which fascism is merely the extreme version of capitalism.14 Avrom Yanovsky – “Avrom” as per his signature – contributed to New Frontier as he had to Masses. For the cover of the October 1937 issue, he drew a double caricature of Ontario premier Mitchell Hepburn and Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis. The image is a complement to a pair of long editorials in which Hepburn, about to be re-elected, is described as a tool of the rich and therefore an enemy of the worker, and really no better than Duplessis, who was already on the road to fascism as far as New Frontier was concerned.15 In fact Yanovsky, alone among the magazine’s graphic satirists, not only continued the proletarian style but also hung onto the Third Period politics of class struggle. He had done a graphic satire earlier that year for New Frontier in which Ontario’s Conservative Party leader, Earl Rowe, is dressed in workers’ overalls and cap. Rowe looks most sincere, but beside him is the stereotypical fat capitalist pointing to a box he is holding labelled “very soft soap.”16 (Editor William Lawson, who cared less about United Front policy than did other New Frontier editors, had a piece in that issue on Rowe’s phony friendship with labour.17 The editorial and Yanovsky’s work together may simply show that, as Rifkind suggests, the United Front couldn’t “shake off all the residual sectarianism that clung to it” from the Third Period.18) A certain amount of graphic satire in New Frontier was imported from American journals. The very fact that the editors pursued this practice is

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interesting. It shows that they kept up the radical leftist tradition of encouraging a free flow of material back and forth across borders – and this was true not only for visual art: literary historian Dean Irvine notes that New Frontier printed “an international range of progressive-minded authors” and that “with the May– June 1936 issue, Jack Conroy and Edwin Seaver were added to its list of associate editors, at a time when both were still editing Partisan Review & Anvil.”19 This free flow was in the collectivist spirit of the left, a spirit that grew even stronger with the breakout of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936 and with the increasing certainty of the coming of another world war. More broadly speaking, it had of course long been the practice within the traditions of graphic satire for artists to “borrow imagery from their predecessors and adapt it in inventive ways.”20 Also, the practice of international borrowing shows that, although New Frontier often spoke specifically to Canadian issues in its satires as well as its writing, the magazine was anything but nationalist. As the poet and founding editor Dorothy Livesay later recalled: “We were as much at home in New York as in Toronto, as leftists you see, or in Europe or in Russia or wherever. The whole nationalist thing suddenly fell away completely in the Depression years because we believed that there had to be international revolution which would change every country and make it socialist.”21 The American graphic satire that appeared in New Frontier was all by artists who are now quite well known, who worked in the “proletarian style.” In the first issue, in April 1936, there is a piece signed “A. Redfield,” a pseudonym used by the young Jewish humourist Syd Hoff (1912–2004), soon to become a children’s book author and long-time contributor to the New Yorker (1925–). (Aliases are rampant in the leftist press, often masking the identities of important mainstream writers, illustrators, and cartoonists.) Redfield’s cartoon, which had first appeared in New Masses (1926–48), shows a stereotypically Jewish young man being presented to a movie director. The caption reads, “At last ... the perfect type for a union organizer.” This satire likely responds to the fact that it was a time of labour activism; a pro-union film featuring a union organizer, Millions of Us, was made that year in the United States.22 New Frontier borrowed another graphic satire two months later for its literary review section, this one by New York painter, writer, caricaturist, and illustrator Peggy Bacon (1895– 1987), who published work in New Masses as well. In fact, this very satire had appeared in that American magazine’s book review section earlier that year.23 Bacon, who had been described by a New York art critic as “the only woman

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artist to successfully rival Daumier and Hogarth,”24 here depicts two society women sitting in a comfortable interior, one saying to the other: “The Bridge of San Luis Rey was a good book too. I wonder what ever became of it?” That bestselling novel by Thornton Wilder had been published nine years earlier and had won a Pulitzer Prize; however, it was possibly because of a critique of Wilder by Michael Gold, the prominent leftist writer and co-founder of New Masses, that Bacon chose to include it in a satire.25 In his 1930 article, which created quite a controversy among readers of The New Republic where it was published, Gold fiercely denounced the “air of good breeding, decorum, priestliness, [and] glossy high finish” that he found in Wilder’s books, which he felt had refused to engage with the struggles of the present. The figures in Bacon’s satire, themselves with an air of good breeding and decorum, seem similarly unengaged. Another important borrowing was made for an October 1936 New Frontier article about how reactionary Canadian newspapers were making false reports on the Spanish Civil War. This borrowing was in the form of two sharp, vivid wood engravings by the Belgian-born pacifist Frans Masereel (1889–1972), then living in Paris. One of the two shows a portly newspaper writer at his desk, the ink bottles in front of him labelled (in French) “Treason,” “Hatred,” “Blood,” and “Lies”; the other engraving is of a wounded man spurting blood. The previous month, a small reproduction of Masereel’s captionless L’Éloquence was on the cover of New Frontier. In L’Éloquence, a politician in vest and coattails orates and gestures in front of a crowd in the city, unaware of a tall skeleton behind him that eerily apes his gesture.26 One more American work, this time by the printmaker Russell Limbach (1904–1971), appeared in the July–August 1937 issue in an article on rising anti-Semitism in Italy. In this untitled image from New Masses (where it carried the title The Plowman),27 Limbach depicts a grossly caricatured, corpulent Mussolini wearing spurred military boots and walking behind a plough; the soil he tills is full of half-buried skulls, which he ignores. Other than Avrom Yanovsky’s, the Canadian graphic satire in New Frontier works very clearly along United Front lines: in other words, the target is no longer the capitalist but rather the fascist, who may be found on home soil as well as foreign. Fritz Brandtner, originally from Danzig and in Canada since 1928, contributed a drawing of three black-robed nuns, standing in a circle and looking very much like Macbeth’s witches (Fig. 8.2). New Frontier used this image twice, with completely different captions, to address the war in Spain.

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8.2 Fritz Brandtner, “ … ‘and we are making a special novena for General Mola,’” New Frontier, vol. 1, no. 6 (October 1936), p. 23. Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. With the kind permission of Paul Kastel

8.3 Laurence Hyde, “Lovers Sheltering from a Storm,” New Frontier, vol. 1, no. 9 (January 1937), 17. Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. With the kind permission of Anthony Hyde

In October 1936 the caption read, “And we are making a special novena [nine consecutive days of prayer] for General Mola” (a leader of the fascist forces attacking the Spanish Republic). The following month Brandtner’s drawing bore the caption, “Ah, if only Father Coughlin were in Spain now!” in reference to the “radio priest” who had begun as a populist but had turned to broadcasting anti-Semitic and pro-fascist messages in North America.28 Whoever created these captions – whether it was Brandtner himself or an editor – completed the satire implicit in this potent image. In any case, these two images were his only contribution toward the magazine’s graphic satire, although other works of his were reproduced as the sort of stand-alone image described earlier. Brandtner was listed as an associate editor in May and June 1936, and there was an article about his work in the May 1936 issue, in the slightly less urgent pre–Spanish Civil War days when New Frontier still had arts columns.29 Laurence Hyde, mentioned above for his Spanish Civil War illustration, contributed to the January 1938 issue one of the most powerful satires found anywhere in New Frontier (Fig. 8.3). Though it is only just barely satirical, this piece follows the long tradition in satire of moral judgment and condemnation of its target, and in addition, as Dominic Hardy has pointed out, its caption, “Lovers Sheltering from a Storm,” actually satirizes the very type of caption that characterized the domain of graphic satire.30 Satire is also produced by the incongruity between the title and the image, since the “storm” is a firestorm from German bombers. The lovers who dominate this full-page wood engraving stand nearly as tall as the tree under which they shelter. They would be shockingly dehumanized by the huge-eyed gas masks covering their heads were it not for their young and supple bodies, united by love and fear. On the steeply curved distant horizon stands a farm building, still intact although surrounded by flames. Hyde uses sharp black-white contrasts in order to heighten the opposition between the bucolic setting and the imminent destruction. There is nothing about the landscape or the lovers to suggest Spain: this could be rural Canada, and the fascist threat could come this way. The white dove behind the lovers adds a small touch of irony. For the April 1937 issue, Hyde provided a more obviously satirical piece entitled “Still Life,” which here means death. At the centre of the arrangement, upon and partly covered by bombing rubble, the rounded body of a girlwoman lies, her long hair flowing into a pool of blood. Behind the body and untouched by the destruction are two towering swastikas and a tombstone-like

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form bearing the words “Viva la Libertad.” Hyde was only twenty-two when he made these two works, but he had already found a way toward evocative power and precision through mastery of the medium of wood engraving.31 As Hyde explained late in his life, his student years in Toronto were: “a time of upheaval in Europe. Hitler was threatening to gain power and these simple graphic mediums were very popular. The Russians were doing a lot of engraving. It was very very uncomplicated, you know.”32 As mentioned above, Hyde’s love of wood engraving places him outside the long history of graphic satire that is integral to New Frontier and the North American leftist press in general. It links him instead within a modern revival of wood engraving in Europe, a revival of which Frans Masereel, cited here for his illustrations, was the star. This revival featured a form invented by Masereel which he called “romans en images,” novels in pictures, in which a narrative is constructed through a wordless or near-wordless series of wood engravings (others artists would use woodcuts, linocuts, or leadcuts).33 Hyde also made “romans en images” with wood engravings, as did the American leftist artist Lynd Ward (1908–1985), who was most likely Hyde’s link to this European wood engraving tradition.34 One important aspect of the tradition as deployed by Masereel, Ward, and Hyde was that it did not use caricature, which is so important to the dominant tradition of political and social satire.35 In fact the wood engraving tradition is not often satirical at all. The focus is rather on figures that function as everyman and everywoman, caught up in the big themes of life and death. In this sense, Hyde’s two New Frontier works are somewhat exceptional in his own oeuvre. Hyde’s “Lovers Sheltering” was matched in satirical understatement by an extraordinary work from the artist Charles Comfort (1900–1994), who was at the time the envy of the Toronto artistic community for having obtained a major mural and frieze commission at the Toronto Stock Exchange. “Engines in an Orchard” (Fig. 8.4) appeared on a full page of the third issue of New Frontier, weeks before the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. It is a landscape as elegantly reductive as a Japanese ukiyo-e print, with a shapely row of trees framing one side of the image. But standing boldly beside the trees, in incongruity with the mild title and the peacefulness of the orchard, are two of the latest model Panzer tanks from Hitler’s rearmament project, ominously close to the viewer. These engines of war could be moving into action; mud falls from their treads. Comfort’s minimal landscape could be, like Hyde’s, a Canadian pastoral scene,

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8.4 Charles Comfort, “Engines in an Orchard,” New Frontier, vol. 1, no. 3 (June 1936), 9. Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. With the kind permission of Fraser Jackson

8.5 Henry Mayerovitch, “Ulysse and the Sirens,” New Frontier, vol. 1, no. 5 (September 1936), 8. Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. With the kind permission of the Estate of Harry Mayerovitch

but as cultural historian Paul Fussell once remarked, “since war takes place outdoors and always within nature, its symbolic status is that of the ultimate anti-pastoral.”36 Far more predictable for a magazine of the left in this era, and central to New Frontier’s life, is Harry Mayerovitch’s work (1910–2004). It represents a Canadian high point in the tradition of artistic engagement with satire that began in Europe in the nineteenth century and was translated and renewed in the twentieth by the North American left.37 Mayerovitch was an associate editor of New Frontier from the sixth issue onward, and he contributed graphic satires for six of the magazine’s fifteen issues as well as various illustrations and incidental images. He never joined the Communist Party, but like Avrom Yanovsky, who did join, he published in liberal journals and newspapers as well as in those of the far left and in between. Just three years before he began working with New Frontier, he was awarded a travelling scholarship given annually to McGill University’s best graduate in architecture, and spent a year in Europe. “And there I met developing fascism head on. I met radical artists and began to sketch and felt the taste of Nazism and war coming. From all this and Paris I became aware of what the world was about – how can you separate art from all this? When I came back to Montreal I made my choice and even while I opened a partnership architecture firm I began painting, cartooning and writing to communicate my ideas and the world as I saw it.”38 Mayerovitch’s first New Frontier satire appeared in the September 1936 issue, two months after he became associate editor. “Ulysse and the Sirens” (Fig. 8.5) is a classic United Front image, and it testifies to the fact that, having lived in Montreal all his life, Mayerovitch had a profound interest in Quebec politics. Here, a strong young male whose shirt names him a “Quebec worker” faces off against four ugly sirens, who back away in alarm. These characters have the female breasts and finlike feet of sirens, but they are otherwise heavily masculine. They have Hitler moustaches, and what at first reads as hair on their legs is really clusters of swastikas. They are Quebec fascists and fascist sympathizers: Adrien Arcand, the “Canadian führer;” Joseph Menard, who worked with Arcand on Le Goglu (1929–33) and other newspapers; Saluste Lavery, politician and associate of Arcand; and Paul-Émile Lalanne, a physician who funded Arcand’s activities. Behind them is a figure I take to be Hitler himself, also fullbreasted, holding up a black, skull-topped swastika flag. These hybrid figures with their caricatured faces echo a long satirical tradition of using the grotesque

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8.6 Henry Mayerovitch, “Quebec’s New Broom,” New Frontier, vol. 1, no. 6 (October 1936), 19. Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. With the kind permission of the Estate of Harry Mayerovitch

to represent crudity and moral poverty.39 While the sexist aspect of the image may make one cringe today – the virile male representing virtue, the feminine and hybrid sexuality representing evil – it nevertheless transmits its antifascist message very clearly. The apocalyptic setting for this battle between the forces of good and evil is interesting. There is lightning in the sky. A chasm of breaking waves and rocks separates the warrior-worker from the sirens, who either remain within the chaos or have clambered onto a barren sharp-edged shoreline. I am reminded of a point made by George A. Test in his book Satire: Spirit and Art: speaking of the attack on aggression as an element of satire, he remarks that “producing the effect of ‘disorderly profusion’” can itself symbolically represent aggression.40 The chaos surrounding the sirens certainly seems to add to the hellishness of their intent. Of course, the worker is unfazed by the threatening scene and stands his ground, not giving in to their temptation. This visual satire was placed within the issue’s lead story: “Meet Quebec’s Fascists.”41 The following month New Frontier carried another image by Mayerovitch; this one, “Quebec’s New Broom” (Fig. 8.6), is a fully worked out caricature of Maurice Duplessis, who had just been elected premier. The magazine placed it prominently within an article that detailed the far-right premier’s proposals to clean out Liberal corruption in the Quebec government, as well as the reasons why his program would fail. The author notes that “the fascist-separatists, fascists, plain anti-Semites and politicians who had gathered around the Union Nationale [Duplessis’s coalition party] clung stoutly to Duplessis” in the leadup to the election.42 Throughout his career Duplessis was a famous target for caricatures, and the job of producing them, according to a prominent anti-Duplessis journalist, was not difficult: “He had a face made for caricature. With his exaggeratedly long nose, a few especially distinctive strokes were enough to represent him.”43 Here, Mayerovitch presents a housemaid-Duplessis with a hawk’s beak of a nose, hand on broad hip, quizzically examining a very inadequate, broken-down broom. Water pours from holes in the dented bucket beside him. Concerning the nose, it would not have escaped Mayerovitch’s attention that the story on Quebec fascism in the previous issue included a reproduction of “one of a series of postcards now being circulated in this country” that shows two caricatured “Pioneers of the Revolution,” figures identifiable as Jewish stereotypes primarily by their exaggerated noses.44 In December 1936, when Madrid came under attack by fascist forces and the Spanish Civil War had taken on globally threatening proportions,

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8.7 Henry Mayerovitch, “At last we have produced the perfect Aryan,” New Frontier, vol. 1, no. 10 (February 1937), 13. Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. With the kind permission of the Estate of Harry Mayerovitch

New Frontier published its special issue on Spain. Mayerovitch’s contribution to this issue was a graphic satire inscribed “Oh Canada,” in which Hitler and Mussolini lead a parade of marchers carrying the banner “Quebec fascists,” all of them performing the Nazi salute. Soon afterward, Mayerovitch took on the European situation directly. To the February 1937 issue he contributed “At last we have produced the perfect Aryan” (Fig. 8.7), where a caricatured Nazi officer – possibly Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess – holds in his hands a skinny male figure, tiny and pale against the black uniform of the giant officer. Across the lower torso of this scrawny figure is written “Mayerovitch.” The signature itself is unusual, since Mayerovitch’s habit at this time was to sign his graphic satires with the pseudonym “Henri.” The fact that he chose to identify himself by writing his Jewish surname across the body of this figure adds a particular element of irony. By that spring, as Nazi rearmament continued and as the outlines of the “master race policy” became clearer and clearer, Mayerovitch made an exasperated visual comment in New Frontier about the non-intervention policies of England and other countries, who were performing a “fine balancing act.” Mayerovitch’s “The Daring Young Man” (Fig. 8.8) shows an effete-looking Sir Anthony Eden, the British prime minister, standing high above the crowds on a trapeze labelled “British diplomacy.” In his ridiculous little outfit he balances, unperturbed, on one foot, not bothering to use his hands.45 Visually, this work shows Mayerovitch at his closest to the “proletarian style” and particularly to the famous American William Gropper, who was providing full-page satires to New Masses week after week as its primary illustrator.46 But Mayerovitch was his own artist, and his production of original works such as “The Daring Young Man” was a major element of Canadian, and North American, graphic satire in this period and for long afterward.

New Frontier, Graphic Satire, and the Modern Candida Rifkind makes a very interesting argument in regard to the Popular Front and modernism: “Popular Front poetry and its interest in choral repetition rather than experimentation provides one example of how the recycling of existing images needs to be contextualized as a modernist practice of the literary

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left. As such it challenges the critical tradition that bifurcates aesthetic forms into the traditional and the new to designate only the latter as modernist … The frequent assumption that 1930s socialist writers rejected modernism wholesale needs to be reframed with the understanding that the term ‘modernism’ is increasingly understood to include the many and varied artistic developments, both transcultural and asynchronic, elite and popular, of the cultural and institutional formations of modernity.”47 The poetry in New Frontier is in fact mostly written in traditional metred lines rather than as free verse. The magazine’s graphic satire is modernist in just the same sense. In art history, modernism is usually thought of either in terms of formal “progress” through experimentation or, in work such as dada and constructivism, as the rejection of barriers between life and art. It is worth going beyond those polar opposites and considering, for instance, how the borrowing of work from other publications, so much a feature of New Frontier graphic satire, can be thought of as a modernist visual practice too. Mayerovitch and other New Frontier artists were in the midst of a struggle in the Canadian metropolis between the modern emphasis on subjectivity and the urge toward collectivism, a struggle brought on by the urgent social and political issues stemming from the Depression and the Spanish Civil War. Certainly, the collective wins out in their work, but as Rifkind points out, that anti-individualism is not un-modern. New Frontier graphic satire has an upto-the-minute quality related to a stream of modern art going back to Goya and Daumier, and to Romantic painters such as Géricault, who chose to engage with current events rather than with the classical revivalist repertoire of the art academies against whom modern artists had rebelled. Similarly, graphic satire refuses to idealize, which was the business of academies, and it has been pointed out that historically, caricature and the grotesque, liberally used by Mayerovitch in the examples just seen, are strategies opposite to idealization.48 These points have particular relevance because the Royal Canadian Academy still had some influence in Canada, especially in Montreal where Mayerovitch lived and worked, and because some of the artists associated with New Frontier were part of the post-nationalist shift in modern Canadian art toward humanist subjects. The Toronto critic Graham McInnes, still very young like some of the New Frontier satirists, promoted such artists as having found ways to be modern and

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8.8 Henry Mayerovitch, “The Daring young Man,” New Frontier, vol. 2, no. 1 (May 1937), 1. Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. With the kind permission of the Estate of Harry Mayerovitch

at the same time socially and politically engaged. Significantly, he summed up this thesis in New Frontier itself, in a long review of recent Toronto exhibitions entitled “New Horizons in Canadian Art.” In this piece he named six of the artists published in New Frontier, including two of its satirists, Laurence Hyde and Fritz Brandtner, whom he placed within the vanguard of the new movement. To this movement he opposed the now-atrophied Romantic nationalist aesthetic of Group of Seven followers as well as the “sterile little universe” of the Royal Canadian Academy, and he described the recent work of the new movement, often in watercolour and in “the various graphic media,” as socially engaged but no less involved with “essentially artistic means – truth to material, selection

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and suppression, emphasis and synthesis, an appreciation of form, and a depth and sincerity of aesthetic emotion.”49 In a book entitled On the Discourse of Satire, Paul Simpson describes satire as always displaying three of several functions of humour, or what we might more specifically call the comic: the aggressive function, the social function, and the intellectual function. “What is significant about satire,” he says, “is that it synthesizes these three functions and carries them out simultaneously”: “Satire clearly has an aggressive function. It singles out an object of attack; in fact, it cannot, strictly speaking, be satire unless it demonstrates this capacity. Satire also has a social function ... because inter-group bonds, in particular, are consolidated in ‘successful’ satire. Yet it also has, perhaps in greater or lesser degree depending on the particular satire, an intellectual function because it relies upon linguistic creativity which extends the full resources of the system of language.”50 Simpson’s model suggests why graphic satire works so well in a magazine like New Frontier. The object of attack is clear, the desire to promote social unity is clear in United Front ideology, and the intellectual function matters greatly when one is trying to attract an educated group of people, as this magazine was. Satire was vital to New Frontier’s project, and graphic satire was its main vehicle.

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NOTES “United Front” was the term more commonly used in English Canada in the 1930s and therefore the term used in this essay. For instance, Frank Underhill, “United Front,” in “Notes and Comments,” The Canadian Forum 16, 181 (February 1936), 5. Dorothy Livesay, Journey with My Selves: A Memoir 1909–1963 (Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1991), 83 and 156–7. Editorial statement, New Frontier 1, 1 (April 1936), 3. Unless otherwise indicated, all visual and literary works cited are from the issues of New Frontier identified therein. Candida Rifkind, Comrades and Critics: Women, Literature, and the Left in 1930s Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 27. Ibid., 73. Stand-alone works in early New Frontier issues included: Ernst Neumann, “Unemployed No. 5,” 1, 1 (April 1936), 17; Fritz Brandtner, “Non-Combattants,” 1, 2 (May 1936), 17; Y. Kaplansky, “Comrades,” 1, 4 (July 1936), 19; Louis Muhlstock, 1,

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10 11 12

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5 (September 1936); “Two Drawings by Louis Muhlstock, 1,7 (November 1936), 15; “Sevilla,” untitled, 1, 8 (December 1936), 17; Margaret Fairley, 1, 10 (February 1937), 17; Brandtner, “Triptych for a Mural,” 1, 11 (March 1937), 27; Nathan Petroff, “SweatShop,” 2, 2 (June 1937), 17; Ellen Simon, “Lithograph,” 2, 3 (July–August 1937), 24. Such as on the cover of the May 1936 issue (1, 2); and within the issues, untitled drawings by Gordon Webber, 1, 1 (April 1936), 7; and Harry Mayerovitch, 1, 5 (September 1936), 27. In the December 1936 issue (1, 8) there are Groth drawings on the cover (a fighter with a rifle) and on pages 7 (an armed figure on horseback wearing a sombrero), 8 (a figure in what appears to be torero’s costume shooting a rifle), 14 (a worker with a hoe), and 15 (a running worker with a gun). Groth’s drawings appear again in the June 1937, issue (2, 1): on pages 12 and 13, the figure with the hoe and the running figure are shown in a story written from Spain. These same two figures show up once more in the September 1937 issue (2, 4) on page 7, in another story written from Spain. In Ted Allan’s article “Bombardment at Albacete,” 2, 1 (May 1937), 17. Leo Kennedy, “Directions for Canadian Poets,” 1, 3 (June 1936), 21–4. A.T. McFarlane, “The Patriotic Geese,” 1, 4 (July 1936), 17; Leonard Bullen (Leo Kennedy), “Epitaph for a Canadian Statesman,” 1, 1 (April 1936), 12; Norman Macleod, “Agenda: Fascism for Vultures,” 2, 2 (June 1937), 20; and A.M. Klein, “Of Daumiers a Portfolio,” 2, 4 (September 1937), 10–11. Cecile Whiting, Antifascism in American Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 24–6 (quotation on p. 26). As well as producing images for Masses, Yanovsky had been the main cartoonist for The Worker (1922–36), Toronto’s Communist Party newspaper, and he was a member of the Progressive Arts Club as were two of the New Frontier founders, Dorothy Livesay and Jean Watts. Dennis McColl, “Hepburn,” 2, 5 (October 1937), 6–7, and Peter Quinn [Leo Kennedy], “Duplessis,” 2, 5 (October 1937), 7–8. Avrom, “Labor’s Man!” 2, 2 (June 1937), 5. Dorothy Livesay, from an interview conducted by Doug Beardsley and Rosemary Sullivan, Canadian Poetry 3 (fall/winter 1978), http://www.uwo.ca/english/canadianpoetry/cpjrn/vol03/sullivan.htm. Rifkind, Comrades and Critics, 80. Dean Irvine, Editing Modernity: Women and Little Magazine Cultures in Canada, 1916-1956 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 58–9 (quotation on p. 58).

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The Partisan Review & Anvil was a merger of Partisan Review, begun 1934, and Anvil; the Partisan Review continued until 2003. Constance C. McPhee, with contributions by Nadine M. Orenstein, “’Shoot Folly as It Flies”; Humor on Paper,” in Infinite Jest: Caricature and Satire from Leonardo to Levine (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011), 3. Livesay, interview conducted by Doug Beardsley and Rosemary Sullivan. There was also a widespread perception that the Hollywood film industry was rife with Jewish Communists. New Masses 18, 4 (21 January 1936), 26. See also Virginia Hegelstein Marquardt, “‘New Masses’ and John Reed Club Artists, 1926–1936: Evolution of Ideology, Subject Matter, and Style,” Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 12 (spring 1989), 60. Roberta K. Tarbell, “Peggy Bacon’s Pastel and Charcoal Caricature Portraits,” Women’s Art Journal 9, 2 (autumn 1988), 34. Michael Gold, “Wilder: Prophet of the Genteel Christ,” The New Republic 64, 829 (22 October 1930), 266–7. Both these works by Masereel had appeared in the New Masses article “John Reed in Czarist Russia” by Granville Hicks, 17, 12 (17 December 1935), “L’Éloquence” on page 33 and the newspaperman image on page 35. The other piece used by New Frontier in October 1936 was in this same New Masses article, page 36. New Masses 17, 10 (3 December 1935), 3. New Frontier had previously run a piece on Charles Edward Coughlin and his “monster audience” (William Lawson, “Father Coughlin,” 1, 4 [July 1936], 24–6). Lawson’s article includes a caricature of Coughlin by “Denis” (unidentified). Other works by Fritz Brandtner reproduced in New Frontier are listed in note 6. The article on Brandtner was: Robert Ayre, “Expressionist in Montreal,” 1, 2 (May 1936), 29–30 (previously published in the Montreal Gazette (15 February 1936) as “Fritz Brandtner’s Work Is Exhibited.” Thanks to Annie Gérin and Dominic Hardy for their 22 January 2013 email messages to me raising these points. Wood engraving is a more refined version of the woodcut; the artist uses an engraver’s burin and usually works the end grain of the wood, which offers a harder surface than the side grain used in a woodcut. Patricia Ainsley and Alan Horne, “Laurence Hyde: An Interview,” The Devil’s Artisan 21 (1987), 10. Elsewhere in the interview Hyde mentions that some of the work he did for publications in that period, possibly including New Frontier,

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35

36

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38 39

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might have been done in pen and ink or in scratchboard, which looks like wood engraving (20). Peter Kuper, introduction, David A. Beronä, “Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels (New York: Abrams, 2008), 10. Beronä, Wordless Books, 213; Martin S. Cohen, “The Novel in Woodcuts: A Handbook,” Journal of Modern Literature 6, 2 (April 1977), 191. Hyde mentioned that he studied British wood engravings by Paul Nash, Eric Gill, and Eric Ravilious in Studio magazine as well as seeing books showing the Americans Lynd Ward and Rockwell Kent (Ainsley and Horne, “Laurence Hyde: An Interview,” 10, and “Patricia Ainsley interview with Laurence Hyde, October 21, 1985: part II,” 22 [1988], 8). Hyde’s wordless book was Southern Cross: A Novel of the South Seas, told in wood engravings (Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press, 1951), a narrative about the atomic bomb testing the United States conducted in the South Pacific. Hyde had also made over fifty wood engravings in the 1930s for a wordless book to be called Discovery, but it was never published (“Laurence Hyde: An Interview,” 15–16). Frans Masereel, text by Roger Avermaete, tr. Haakon Chevalier; bibliography and catalogue by Pierre Vorms and Hanns-Conon von der Gabelentz (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 19. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford, 1977), 231, cited in Rifkind, Comrades and Critics, 92. Rifkind shows that the pastoral-war antithesis is also an aspect of antifascist poetry published in New Frontier by Dorothy Livesay and others (90 ff). Dominic Hardy, “Un modernisme de bon aloi: réception critique et politique de la caricature en 1937,” in Denis Saint-Jacques and Yvan Lamonde, eds., 1937. Un tournant culturel. Actes du colloque du 7–9 novembre 2007, Presses de l’Université Laval/crilcq (Quebec, 2009), 299 and 307–8. Harry Mayerovitch, quoted in Lou Seligson, “Harry Mayerovitch: A Jack-of-alltrades,” Canadian Jewish News (Montreal edition), 28 July 1988. McPhee and Orenstein, 8. The authors note that “grotesque faces and bodies in British, French and American satires of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries generally use ugliness to underscore moral failure or at least to indicate boorishness,” and that the grotesque can morph into caricature. George A. Test, Satire: Spirit and Art (Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1991), 17. Test is quoting from Alvin B. Kernan, Cankered Muse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 7–8. Peter Quinn [Leo Kennedy], “Meet Quebec’s Jews,” 1, 5 (September 1936), 5–8.

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42 Ted Allan, “Mr. Duplessis’ Right Turn,” 1, 6 (October 1936), 18–20 (quotation on p. 18). 43 “Il avait une tête à caricature. Un nez exagérément allongé, quelques traits plus prononcés suffisaient à le représenter.” Journalist Pierre Laporte, quoted in Dominic Hardy, “Une grande noirceur: splendeurs et mystères de la caricature au Québec, 1899–1960,” in Ségolène Le Men, ed., L’art de la caricature (Paris: Presses universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2011), 163. Hardy notes that there was a “vaste production caricaturale consacrée à Maurice Duplessis tout au long de sa carrière” (168). 44 “Pionniers des revolutions/Pioniere des Revolution/Pioneers of the Revolution,” in “Meet Quebec’s Fascists,” 6. This reproduction had appeared in the 4 February 1936 issue of New Masses, p. 4. 45 Library and Archives Canada, which holds Mayerovitch’s papers, has a drawing of this subject which may be the original for the New Frontier piece; in brush and black ink and opaque white on wove paper (24.8 x 31.0 cm), Harry Mayerovitch Fonds, MG30-D400, R864-125-X-E 46 Whiting, Antifascism in American Art, 36–7. 47 Rifkind, Comrades and Critics, 14. 48 For instance, in McPhee and Orenstein, “Shoot Folly,” 9. 49 Graham McInnes, “New Horizons in Canadian Art” 2, 2 (June 1937), 19–20. 50 Paul Simpson, On the Discourse of Satire (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2003), 3. Simpson actually uses the broader term “humour” rather than “the comic.”

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nine

Albéric Bourgeois … a.k.a. Baptiste Ladébauche LAURIER LACROIX Translated from the French by Ersy Contogouris

A significant number of caricatures by Albéric Bourgeois (1876–1962) address issues that relate reflexively to satirical drawing and parody.1 Along with the usual commentaries and remarks about the many instances of ineptitude, intrigue, and dishonest behaviour that he observed in contemporary society – mostly political in nature2 – Bourgeois developed a discourse on his art itself, a reflection on his daily craft that sheds light on elements of his research and on the motivations behind his work. He was decidedly a Montreal figure, even though he started his career in Boston (1900–03), and his reputation grew to be Quebec-wide. Bourgeois was raised in Montreal and studied first at the Conseil des Arts et Manufactures, and then at the school of the Art Association of Montreal. From 1903 to 1905 we find him in the pages of La Patrie, where he drew what has been acknowledged as the first francophone Canadian comic strip. His reputation was above all founded in his long continuous involvement with La Presse (1905–57), where he began by adopting the figure of Ladébauche invented by Hector Berthelot in 1877, drawing his hero’s adventures first in comic strip format and then in the weekly column En roulant ma boule, for which he illustrated his own text, composed in

9.1 Albéric Bourgeois, “Puisqu’il ment c’est qu’il existe.” (“He lies, therefore he exists”). December 1952. White opaque, pencil, India Ink, wash and erasures mounted on card, 32.3 x 32.8 cm. BAnQ Vieux-Montréal, Albéric Bourgeois Fonds, MSS346, 2006-10-001/6242.

a popular idiom. His drawings covered municipal as well as provincial, federal, and international politics; they constituted a repertoire of portraits of personalities who were in the news and a chronicle of the events of the period. The Causettes hebdomadaires de Baptiste et Catherine pour les enfants au-dessus de 21 ans appeared on Saturdays in the last section of the newspaper. By opening and closing this daily newspaper, Bourgeois’s drawings bookended its editorial point of view. The caricatural personality of Baptiste Ladébauche is modelled on the personality of Albéric Bourgeois, the satirist. Ladébauche mimics and reproduces Bourgeois’s strategies so as to provide a critical look at the very specific activity of commenting on a community’s moods and quirks. Through his alter ego, the caricaturist shows us what is at play in caricature (Fig. 9.1). Bourgeois’s drawings seem to be looking for ways to enable commentary on the present, and his inspiration lies in an area between past and present, truth and error, creating a space in which transgression confronts the norm. Here, independence of spirit is nourished by dream and imagination. This chapter focuses on elements in Bourgeois’s drawings that indicate that they should be read as considerations on their own making and reception. In the text and meta-text expressed through the subject matter and captions of these representations of Ladébauche, Bourgeois is commenting on his satirist’s craft, on its role, and on what is at play. By placing irony in a mise en abyme, Bourgeois positions his understanding of satire within his own discourse. This self-reflexive approach is not unusual in caricature: it can be found in the nineteenth century, for instance, with Gavarni and Daumier among others. My hypothesis and my demonstration – which are presented here perhaps too hastily – will need to be validated by looking at the hundreds of drawings that Bourgeois produced for La Presse during the more than fifty years he worked for this newspaper.

Portrait of Albéric Bourgeois as an Artist I begin by recalling Albéric Bourgeois’s interest in the fine arts. His “official” portrait photograph, taken when he was forty-three (Fig. 9.2), shows him with the stereotypical attributes of the bohemian artist that had been popularized half a century earlier – the beret and cigarette – to which he has added a

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9.2 Unknown photographer, Portrait of Albéric Bourgeois with a cigarette in his mouth, in a program of the cabaret Au matou botté, December 1929. BAnQ Vieux-Montréal, Albéric Bourgeois Fonds, MSS346, 2006-10-001\2562.

9.3 Albéric Bourgeois, “Le métier d’humoriste (“The humourist’s job”).” “y’a c’te note-là à payer!” “ As-tu vu mon chapeau neuf?” “Ça vaut rien c’joual-là! Giddap!!” “Marche-donc!”, n.d. Pencil, India ink, wash with glued and scraped pentimenti on Bristol board, 35.5 x 52.5 cm. BAnQ Vieux-Montréal, Albéric Bourgeois Fonds, MSS346, 2006-10-001\6268

pince-nez. Bourgeois, we are told, thought of himself as a “painter who draws caricatures to make a living.”3 Today, his painted oeuvre has been largely forgotten, and it is as a satirist that we remember him. In fact, at the beginning of his career, he drew the satirical draughtsman as a man of genius, a kind of J.S. Bach who collapses under the weight of the work that he must do in order to fulfill his financial responsibilities to his large family (Fig. 9.3). Bourgeois remained close to the world of visual creation, but he used it as a foil and situated his own art in reaction to academic artistic production. He was active in the Arts Club, the organization that brought together creators from different backgrounds as well as amateurs.4 He had friends who taught

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9.4 Albéric Bourgeois, École des Beaux-Arts, 23 May 1924. Mechanical reproduction on Bristol board, 32.6 x 42.2 cm. BAnQ Vieux-Montréal, Albéric Bourgeois Fonds, MSS346, 2006-10-001/6275. We can recognize from left to right and from top to bottom: Alfred Laliberté (1878–1953), professor of sculpture; Aristide Beaugrand-Champagne (1876–1950), professor of architecture; Joseph-Albert LaRue (1891–?), professor of architecture; Charles Mayard (1887–1973), professor of drawing; Jules Poivert (1867–1955), professor of architecture; Edmond Dyonnet (1859–1954), professor of drawing; Emmanuel Fougerat (1869–1958), director; Paul Morin (1889–1963), secretary (translator and author of the Paon d’émail); Robert Mahias (1890–1962), professor of decorative arts.

9.5 Albéric Bourgeois, Group portrait of the surgeons of the Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal in the manner of seventeenth-century Dutch masters. 26 October 1926. Pencil, India ink and wash with glued and scraped pentimenti on Bristol board. 52.7 x 72 cm. BAnQ Vieux-Montréal, Albéric Bourgeois Fonds, MSS346, 2006-10-001\6197

at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal, which was inaugurated in 1923, and he drew a magnificent gallery of caricatured portraits of the professors who taught there in what seems to have been a climate of joyous anarchy5 (Fig. 9.4). Emmanuel Fougerat, the director, and Edmond Dyonnet stand on either side of a bust of a “Canayen” smoking a pipe and wearing a Phrygian bonnet, undoubtedly an allusion to the difficulty of transposing the French academic model onto Canadian soil, while a female student (possibly Simone Dénéchaud) bids farewell to a sobbing god Pan, whose horns hold out handkerchiefs – a reference to the antiquated academic teaching that, according to many, had prevailed at the École. The painting on Robert Mahias’s easel shows a chimeric composition of a winged elephant sitting atop what seems to be a pile of hats. The various pedestals are decorated with caricatures, and at the upper left, Alfred Laliberté is disfiguring his own self-portrait bust.6 Bourgeois sometimes drew inspiration from famous artworks, as in a group portrait of the Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal surgeons dated 26 October 1926 (Fig. 9.5). Here Bourgeois borrows from the genre of the theatrical group portrait of members of a corporation that was popular, for instance, in seventeenthcentury Holland. The artist represented himself at the lower left, sweating with fright as he sketches the operating room. This commentary suggests that his craft came with a number of risks and that he was sometimes exposed to the most comical and outlandish situations. Bourgeois was also an author and composer, and he socialized with the performers of his plays and songs. He would also accompany himself at the piano while he sang his own compositions. He took part, for instance, in the popular Festival de la chanson et des métiers du terroir, held from 24–28 May 1928, at the Château Frontenac.7 Socializing with creators from both the stage and the fine arts was a boon for his art. His engagement with multiple artistic disciplines gave him different mediums of expression and a grounding that enriched his reflections on art and on his own draughtsmanship. As a commentator on current events, Bourgeois was interested in whatever was the talk of the town, and especially in what was fashionable. Thus he dragged Ladébauche into the world of the visual arts. This is how Ladébauche came to visit contemporary art exhibitions (Figs. 9.6 and 9.7). While he didn’t seem to understand the art that he saw, his critical position toward it was nevertheless tinged with curiosity. In 1945 Bourgeois depicted Ladébauche visiting an exhibition of surrealist paintings, which were still relatively rare in Montreal,

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and it seemed to interest and amuse him. Ladébauche and his partner Catherine repeated the experience in 1949, and here it was Catherine’s empathetic gaze that led Ladébauche to consider the relationship between contemporary art and the society in which it was developing. Catherine’s wisdom can be seen again in 1951, when she admitted that her preferences were linked to her age, which allowed her to sidestep adapting to the latest aesthetic trends.8

Bourgeois/Ladébauche, or the Present Interpreted in Light of the Past Catherine’s posture openly displays its conservatism and is linked to a valorization of the past.9 It is by drawing on their respective experiences that the dual personality consisting of Bourgeois and Ladébauche (hereafter “Bourgeois/ Ladébauche” as a single person, a single entity) can denigrate its contemporaries’ behaviours and position its appearance in the satirical universe. Yesterday becomes the norm according to which the present is assessed. I am restating the premise that the practice of satire implies a critical and self-reflexive position and calls on its author, as well as its readers, to show creative thinking, with regard not only to the situation upon which that position enables critique but also to the conditions of its distantiation. In other words, the satirical draughtsman, whose aim, in the words of Linda Hutcheon, “is to correct some of the vices and ineptitudes of human behaviour (‘almost always of a moral or social dimension’) by ridiculing them,”10 places himself in a position that allows him to interpret the idiosyncrasies of his time, while offering a commentary on the formulations of his opinion which shed light on the very strategies used to keep his object at a distance. Hutcheon further notes: “Theoreticians recognize that the level of ironic effect in a text is inversely proportional to the number of obvious signposts necessary to achieve this effect. Nevertheless, these signposts have to exist, and to exist within the text, if they are to direct the reader toward the evaluative intention that the author has encoded.”11 This ability to read the text and the intertext plays a central role in the reception of the message. “The comical,” as the historian of humour Robert Aird reminds us, “fosters … the strengthening of collective cohesion and represents a resistance and a defense of one’s own self and environment.” He continues:

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9.6 Albéric Bourgeois, Catherine and Baptiste admire the avant-garde art works, 14 April 1945 White opaque, pencil, India ink and wash with scraped pentimenti on Bristol board, 32.5 x 37.5 cm. BAnQ Vieux-Montréal, Albéric Bourgeois Fonds, MSS346, 2006-10-001\6229

9.7 Albéric Bourgeois, “C’est le portrait de l’âme moderne, vieil arriéré!” (It’s the portrait of the modern soul, old has-been!), 7 May 1949. White opaque (corrector and highlights), pencil, India ink and wash with scraped pentimenti on Bristol board, 35.4 x 35.9 cm. BAnQ Vieux-Montréal, Albéric Bourgeois Fonds, MSS346, 2006-10-001\6237

Baptiste Ladébauche … incarnates in some ways the spokesperson and the identity of the French-Canadian people. According to Nicole Allard (Hector Berthelot [1842–1895] et la caricature dans la petite presse satirique au Québec entre 1860 et 1895), he is an archetype of the old French-Canadian peasant with the look of a patriote. His language is coarse and uncouth, his morals unbridled, his frankness enlightened, and his naïveté feigned. Ladébauche is also crafty, grouchy, nationalistic, provocative, and excessive. Most of all, he is not an oppressed figure, which makes him a notable exception in the history of Quebec humour … It is possible to think that he offered French Canadians a way of escaping their situation of inferiority and a momentary feeling of being larger than life. But if Ladébauche’s laughter is directed against the powerful of the world, it also does not spare his compatriots.12

Bourgeois/Ladébauche deploys the tools of satire, thereby distorting the discourse by inverting the unequal power relations and asserting himself as the one who controls the situation thanks to his understanding of what is at stake. By comparing a previous, traditional, sometimes conservative way of life to the weaknesses of his contemporaries, he aims to make the latter aware of certain habits or beliefs that seem ridiculous, vile, or hypocritical to him, and that are thus likely to attract sarcasm and mockery.13

The Caricaturist in Disguise: Strategies of Distantiation Bourgeois/Ladébauche proposes a number of reflections on the art of caricature. First, he features himself with numerous accoutrements and disguises. By modifying his personality and imitating others, he emphasizes how satire, by its very nature, forges, modifies, or exaggerates the appearance of the message and the messenger. Alterity defines us as much as it distinguishes us. Ladébauche likes to wear costumes and other disguises.14 Bourgeois’s aim is to enrich his vocabulary and his character while amusing the reader. Some of his disguises are female ones, a recurring phenomenon that would be worth analyzing.15 The character of the wise Catherine, although she has her own personality, is often reduced to the status of accomplice or foil to her husband.16 Questions

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9.8 “Mon double!” (My double!) Albéric Bourgeois, 2 August 1947. Pencil, India ink and wash with glued and scraped pentimenti on Bristol board, 35.8 x 36.8 cm. BAnQ Vieux-Montréal, Albéric Bourgeois Fonds, MSS346, 2006-10-001\6234

of identity and the definition of personality are at the heart of the character of Ladébauche, who examines his own nature as much as that of the community. Bourgeois develops strategies that lead his character to define himself, to distinguish himself from others, and to know himself, by multiplying the sides of himself that he presents to the public. Most of all, the draughtsman closely associates himself with his creation, leading the reader to recognize himself in the figure of the caricatured caricaturist. Psychoanalysis, following first Freud and then Lacan, has taught us that the “I” is formed early in an individual’s development, at the mirror stage according to Lacan, allowing the individual to construct his or her persona at the same time as that persona learns to distinguish itself from the persona of the Other and others (Fig. 9.8). This observation on the relationship between the satirist and the variants of his character also applies to the drawings in which one is compared to the other. Bourgeois often represented himself in profile, with his pince-nez and a large felt hat covering his bald spot. This insistence on self-representation points to another kind of commentary on art and the role of caricature. The banner headline of the regular column En roulant ma boule leaves no doubt as to this parallel (Fig. 9.9). Ladébauche is depicted drawing the very recognizable head of Bourgeois (who has lost his pince-nez). This reversal of character and draughtsman reminds the reader every week that he and his subject are one and the same. The creation recovers/discovers his creator. In a drawing published on 29 December 1917, Ladébauche is shown offering his good wishes to all the political and cultural figures he has encountered over the year (Fig. 9.10). This series of vignettes ends in a turnabout: Ladébauche occupies the spot in which the different public figures had stood, and salutes Bourgeois, who is disguised as an ink stand with a feather in his hat and a pencil holder in his hand; Ladébauche has taken the place of his creator. In this way, the latter becomes an alter ego for his creator, as defined by the French psychoanalyst Jean-Claude Rolland: “It is through this other me, this specular me, that identity is constituted and that the encounter with the exterior world takes place.” He continues: “I will name “specular” the physical act whereby I understand what I am in the reflection that the other sends me. This action is the most enigmatic figure of the transfer. It structures the informal, but initiating, experience of the intersubjective encounter.”17 The specular side of the Bourgeois/Ladébauche phenomenon constitutes a “being-me,” at the same time as it outlines another “me,” a collective one this time, which is defined by

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9.9 Albéric Bourgeois, Paste-up of the banner headline En Roulant ma Boule. BAnQ Vieux-Montréal, Albéric Bourgeois Fonds, MSS346, 2006-10-001\6264

9.10 Albéric Bourgeois. [n.d.]. Pencil, India ink and wash with glued and scraped pentimenti on Bristol board, 44.5 x 71.4 cm. [Reproduced under the title “Bonne et Heureuse” in La Presse, 29 December 1917]. BAnQ Vieux-Montréal, Albéric Bourgeois Fonds, MSS346, 2006-10-001\6280. From left to right, top to bottom: Bourgeois stages the meeting between Ladébauche and his characters, and concludes with a face-to-face meeting between himself, disguised as an inkwell, and Baptiste.

the French-Canadian community that also identifies with this character.18 The author uses the space of the satirical drawing to create a situation of identity configuration. Bourgeois/Ladébauche holds up a mirror by way of a piece of paper covered with lines and a caption, and the dual figure thus constructs its composite identity, not as a simple reflection but as an evolving entity that allows the character to exist historically and socially. In this sense, Bourgeois/Ladébauche is a single figure that is in the process of constructing itself, as in the famous drawing by M.C. Escher that shows a hand drawing another hand. Bourgeois draws Ladébauche at the same time as he draws himself. With this mise en abyme, the caricaturist opens a phase of reflection that shows the different stages and the process of his work and which highlights the means he as a draughtsman has at his disposal. Ladébauche chooses the pencils and quills that can depict, with thicker or thinner lines, the aspects he wants to accentuate,19 just as he represents the sheet of paper, the ruler, and the compass that allow him to rectify wrongs; he comments on the poetics of his drawings that lie between reality and utopia (Fig. 9.11). Ladébauche finds his inspiration in reverie, and Bourgeois associates him with a daydreamer who seeks truth through the imaginary. Among Bourgeois’s different fantasized images of the self, he proposes an association between the figure of Baptiste and that of the undertaker, whose task it is to prepare the corpse in the coffin and to oversee the funeral (Figs. 9.12 and 9.13). This figure is emblematic, as suggested by a caption on the back of an undated drawing in which Baptiste says to the undertaker, “You’ve got a bunch of real suckers to put behind a hearse! I’ll have you called when I wanna be buried” (“Vous en avez des sacrés (sic) poires pour mettre derrière un corbillard! J’vous ferai demander quand j’voudrai m’enterrer”). Baptiste wants to remain in charge of his destiny even though he is aware that as a commentator on society, he is walking a tightrope. Is Bourgeois celebrating the end of an era, or is this another incarnation of the satirist who, like the undertaker, oscillates between two states, “interestedness and disinterestedness,” in order to keep the “right emotional distance from his subject?”20 Or is it the posture that the caricaturist’s situation requires that leads to “dying of laughter?”21 Elsewhere, Bourgeois depicts the stages of his inspiration when he suggests that it emanates from a puzzle or a visual rebus,22 and he represents the ways in which popular culture and current affairs constantly offer him opportunities to express satirical commentary through his drawings.23

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9.11 Albéric Bourgeois, [n.d.]. Pencil, drop-out blue, India ink and wash on Bristol board, 30.7 x 46.5 cm. BAnQ Vieux-Montréal, Albéric Bourgeois Fonds, MSS346, 2006-10-001\6254 We can see on the images the directions given to the printer. At the centre: “ Process S.V.P.” At the bottom: “27 September 5 cols-”

9.12 Albéric Bourgeois, Baptiste, Catherine, and the undertaker. [n.d.]. Pencil, India ink and wash with scraped pentimenti on Bristol board, 27.5 x 50.2 cm. BAnQ Vieux-Montréal, Albéric Bourgeois Fonds, MSS346, 2006-10-001\6260

9.13 Albéric Bourgeois, Croque-mort… (Baptiste as an undertaker). Pencil, India ink and wash on Bristol board, 35.8 x 43 cm. BAnQ Vieux-Montréal, Albéric Bourgeois Fonds, MSS346, 2006-10-001\6253

Also by highlighting the role of laughter, the importance of laughing at oneself, and creating one’s own amusement, Bourgeois/Ladébauche places himself in the universe of caricature and expounds on the function of satire. He invites his readers to adopt a position similar to his own, and to become critical agents of the space they occupy in the world, from the standpoint of their values and ideas. In representing the very act of joking, of making fun of oneself, the dual figure initiates a different kind of relationship with its readers insofar as the latter are led to substitute themselves for the draughtsman/narrator (Fig. 9.14). It is because Bourgeois understands satirical drawing as an illusory representation, as subterfuge and trickery, that the image acquires and surpasses its primary status. By asserting himself as a liar who dupes and bamboozles, who creates situations that lead to misunderstanding and error (Fig. 9.15),24 Bourgeois/Ladébauche reveals his reflexive power on the foundations of satire as he refers back to the gesture of satirical creation. By presenting his actions as illusion, imposture, and trickery, Bourgeois/Ladébauche confesses to the very wrongdoing that he denounces. The satirist is satirized. As Sophie Duval and Marc Martinez explain: “[The] symbolic assassination [of the satirist] also marks satire’s entrance into the realm of artistic creation: by forgoing the first degree of vituperation, satire reaches irony, dialogism, and ambiguity, which, according to modern criticism, characterize any great satiric work, whether in verse or prose.”25 By praising lying and trickery, Bourgeois/Ladébauche proposes a metacommentary on the nature of his art, which carries a morality that does not weigh it down. By presenting the satiric image as a deceit, Bourgeois suggests a completely different way of thinking about his art and about the nature of human relationships. He offers a meditation on identity through the mystifications that are necessary to the constitution of any existence. His art evokes the tragic and absurd sense of life by outlining a philosophy of skepticism and doubt that inscribes Ladébauche in the genealogy of modern heroes.

Imaginary and Rebelliousness, the Foundations of Satire In concluding, I would like to bring together these different strands of Bourgeois/ Ladébauche’s relationship to satire through the issues of disguise, self-representation, and satire satirized. I draw on the form of diagrams (Fig. 9.16) that borrow freely from the Greimas semiotic square.

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9.14 Max (Albéric Bourgeois, pseud.) “Écoute-moi ça, Catherine” (Listen to this, Catherine). La Presse, 23 December 1916. Mechanical reproduction, 14.8 x 20.7 cm. BAnQ Vieux-Montréal, Albéric Bourgeois Fonds, MSS346, 2006-10-001\6280

9.15 Albéric Bourgeois, “C’est une trompe!” BAnQ Vieux-Montréal, Albéric Bourgeois Fonds, MSS346, 2006-10-001\6229

Diagram 2

Diagram 1

past

past norm / common sense, Ladébauche, selective witness lie/ deceit/ mistake

truth

independence of thought lie/ deceit/ mistake

truth utopia / dream, masquerade

present

transgressions, Bourgeois, transgressive agent present

9.16 Diagrams of historical metafictions and satiric systems (adapted by the author from Greimas’s semiotic square).

Ladébauche/Bourgeois situates satire between past and present, between truth and trickery (Fig. 9.16, diagram 1). By leaning on the past, Bourgeois/ Ladébauche can construct what Linda Hutcheon calls a “historiographic metafiction,”26 a concept that allows us to describe the works of our satirist that draw on a past that is both historical and metafictive, and always reinvented. By incorporating the wholly subjective truth of a discourse based on memory, recollection, and the past, and by insisting we should think about the present in terms of deceit, lies, or “mistakes,” Bourgeois/Ladébauche unveils and unmasks satire as a system that allows us to make sense of the world to which it is destined (Fig. 9.16, diagram 2). Along these axes of work, Ladébauche is a biased witness of a past from which he can extract a way of life, a popular wisdom whose deforming mirror helps proffer counter-truths and anti-phrases that denounce contemporary behaviours made up of transgressions and unreasonable practices. Another side of Bourgeois then becomes visible: his dreamy and rebellious temperament reveals his uncertainty about his art and proposes an ethic in which epicureanism allows for the acceptance of the conflicts, troubles, and concerns that are a fact of existing in society.

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9.17 Albéric Bourgeois, [Two Hobos walking]. 12 May 1934. Pencil, India ink and wash on Bristol board, 41.9 x 38.1 cm. BAnQ Vieux-Montréal, Albéric Bourgeois Fonds, MSS346, 2006-10-001\6211

As a more intensive study of his work as a whole would demonstrate, Bourgeois’s reflexive approach is revealed also in the expressivity of his other drawings. For him, the power of a caricature, its synthesis, and its ability to condense a complex situation must all be given in a few lines that at the same time suggest a commentary on his art. As with all draftsmen, his only tool is the expressive power invested in his line and in his (essentially limited) ways of rendering the efficacy of his message. We can see this, for example, in one of his drawings of two Hobos (Fig. 9.17). Bourgeois exploits the continuous India ink line and the dynamic of the broken line, emphasizing the expressivity of his figures’ profiles through his play with the weight of the line. Form is enriched and completed by means of the different textures that arise from the repetition of crossed, hatched, or parallel lines. In the process, Bourgeois defines the planes, where the paper stock creates effects of colour and depth. The light source suggested by the fluid and light-cast shadow echoing the shape of the dog amplifies the movement and defines the ground, the figures moving into the void of the background. By its highlighting effect, the alternation of lights and darks brings variety to the image and suggests relief and displacement. Here, the clearer figure of the man with a frock-coat who crouches to catch the still-smoking cigar butt is outlined against the dark silhouette of the figure holding it, suggesting two phases in the action. The space around Bourgeois’s classless characters is doubly enclosed by the suggestion of a fence and the continuous line that determines the limits of the image on the page. In this drawing, as he often did in his work, Bourgeois suggests a mirror effect, a doubling of representation and drawing. In this way, he enriches the social dimension of his caricature by making it an observation on the art of making one think, through humour as it is manifested every day.

NOTES 1 I would like to thank casgram (Caricature et satire graphique à Montréal) for its assistance in the research that led to this article, as well as Micheline Cambron and Dominic Hardy for their comments during the preparation of the French version of this text. The main fonds of original drawings by Bourgeois is at the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (banq). The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts also houses a few dozen. The works at the banq were catalogued by the casgram research team. The works studied here were produced mainly between 1913 and 1953.

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2 When Mussolini was defeated, for instance, Bourgeois represented himself with the dictator in an image that bore the caption, “The only memory he leaves behind” (“Le seul souvenir qu’il laisse”; 30 July 1943). Micheline Cambron and Dominic Hardy, eds., Quand la caricature sort du journal: Baptiste Ladébauche, 1878–1957 (Montreal: Fides, 2015), 217. Later, he commented elsewhere, “Democracy is useless for images” (“La démocratie ça vaut rien pour les images; 9 September 1944). 3 Léon-A. Robidoux, Albéric Bourgeois, caricaturiste (Montréal-Nord, vlb, 1978), 18. 4 Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (mmfa), Archives of the Arts Club, drawing of a costume ball at the Arts Club, 6 February 1925, showing a gypsy. 5 There are many caricatural portraits of Bourgeois’s artist, actor, and musician friends at the Bourgeois fonds at the banq. They often bear the signature of the sitter, a sign of the bonds that united the artist and his models. At the beginning of the 1950s, Bourgeois drew posters for the philanthropic group Les Amis des arts. 6 A preliminary drawing for this caricature, held at the mmfa (Dr.1970.317), is reproduced in Cambron and Hardy, eds., Quand la caricature sort du journal, 249, fig. 178. In it the statue of Pan is replaced by a nude, armless, kneeling, and seen from the back. This is a plaster cast (original at the Munich Glyptothek) that Bourgeois had drawn when he was a student; it is now in the Bourgeois fonds at the banq. 7 Luc Bellemare, “Baptiste Ladébauche, du folklore au cabaret: à propos des collaborations d’Albéric Bourgeois et de Charles Marchand dans les années 1920,” in Quand la caricature sort du journal, 187–212. 8 See “I’d rather look out of date than have an eye on my forehead” (J’aime mieux dater que d’avoir un œil dans le front), 5 May 1951. 9 See, among others, the drawings of 5 June 1943, “It is written with words from that time” (C’est écrit en termes de ce temps-là), and of 24 June 1950, “Folklore, that’s us lot” (Le folklore, c’est nous autres). Quand la caricature sort du journal, 291. 10 Linda Hutcheon, “Ironie, satire, parodie: une approche pragmatique de l’ironie,” Poétique 46 (April 1981): 140–55: 144. 11 Ibid., 144. 12 Robert Aird, “La nation québécoise et l’autodérision,” Bulletin d’histoire politique 17, 3 (2009) http://www.bulletinhistoirepolitique.org/le-bulletin/numerosprecedents/volume-17-numero-3/la-nation-quebecoise-et-l’autoderision/ (accessed 10 April 2013). Professor and theoretician Linda Hutcheon notes that, “historically, parody and satire seem to have flourished in democratic societies that have

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13

14

15

16

17

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achieved a level of cultural development.” Hutcheon, “Ironie, satire, parodie,” 150–1. The drawing dated 22 July 1944, “I promise you that thunder won’t fall on barns anymore” (“Je vous promets que le tonnerre ne tombera plus sur les granges”), is one example of this among many. Among Ladébauche's many disguises are a policeman (30 October 1937; 19 September 1943), Santa Claus (11 December 1937), a soldier (2 November 1946), a Native chief (21 January 1949). “I am the last of the Baptistes” (“Je suis le dernier des Baptistes”) sums up some of his personifications: as a blackface, a habitant, a Native chief, a gentleman. Quand la caricature sort du journal, 55, 263, 91. Ladébauche sometimes refers to himself as an Other, even when he is not wearing a costume. For instance, on 10 May 1947, he greets his interlocutor, a businessman, with the words: “It is a negro who is speaking to you” (“C’est un nègre qui vous parle”). Among Bourgeois’s drawings for La Presse, we see on 18 February 1905, “Ladébauche goes to the masked ball” (“Ladébauche va à la mascarade”). In “Disguises” (“Déguisements”) from 31 October 1936, Ladébauche wears a woman’s costume and, while blackening Catherine’s face, says, “People will think you’re a Josephine Baker” (“Tu vas passer pour une Joséphine Baker”), Quand la caricature sort du journal, 263. “That’s a surprise, Catherine!” (“C’est un’surprise Catherine!”), from 23 September 1950, shows Ladébauche wearing nail polish. Catherine often wears extravagant clothes and hats, as well as outrageous makeup, a characterization that is ambiguous, to say the least, for a woman living in a poor environment. See 24 October 1936; 24 August 1940; 20 March 1930; 4 March 1944; 20 January 1945; 31 March 1945; 4 May 1946; 16 April 1949; and 8 April 1950. Julie-Anne Godin-Laverdière puts forward a more nuanced portrait of Catherine in Quand la caricature sort du journal, 113–32. In fact, Catherine asserts her own autonomy: “Don’t be fresh with me, Baptiste. I’m not your rib anymore” (“Fais pas le frais Baptiste. Je ne suis plus ta côte”), 9 February 1945. We should not therefore consider her as deriving from Baptiste/Adam. Jean-Claude Rolland, “L’alter ego,” Libres cahiers pour la psychanalyse 11 (2005): 29–51, www.cairn.info/revue-libres-cahiers-pour-la-psychanalyse-2005-1page-29.htm (accessed 13 April 2013). In an undated drawing bearing the caption “I know myself, though” (“Jme connais pourtant”), Ladébauche meets his doppelganger. He is surprised by this

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21

22 23

24

image of himself, which indicates that he doesn’t recognize himself in this constantly evolving double. The drawing is dated 1 October, but the year is not specified. See Fabienne Duteil-Ogata, review of Julien Bernard, Croquemort. Une anthropologie des émotions (Paris: Éditions Métailié, 2009) in Archives des sciences sociales des religions 152 (October 2010): 152–53, http://assr.revues. org/22635 (accessed 20 April 2013). In his review of Bernard’s book (Frontières 23, 1 [2010], 88), Luc Breton notes that the “profession of undertaker is part of what the US sociologist called the looking-glass self, in other words, the way in which participants adjust their behaviour in relation to the image they have of the others … The undertaker is constantly revising the image he projects in order to adapt himself to the representation that the mourners may have.” http://www.erudit.org/revue/fr/2010/v23/n1/1004029ar (accessed 8 July 2016). A drawing dated 5 June1946 says, “It’s better to die laughing, Catherine!” (“Vaut mieux crever de rire, Catherine!”). In another undated (2 February) and uncaptioned drawing, we see Baptiste reading a text and Catherine laughing, with her hand covering her mouth. The drawing dated 30 April 1947 entitled, “Here’s how I got the idea” (“V’la comment l’idée m’est venue”) is a good example of this. “You see the catalogne rugs on the clothesline, well that’s an ‘intelligence test’ right there, Baptiste” (“Tu vois les catalognes sur la corde à linge, eh bien c’en est un ‘intelligence test’, ça, Baptiste”), 340 (28 May 1949). Like Calderon, Baptiste exclaims, “La vie c’est une trompe” (“Life is a mistake”), 664 (n.d.). The word trompe, according to linguist Sylva Clapin, is synonymous with “error,” “mistake,” or “miscalculation” (“erreur, méprise, faux calcul” in Dictionnaire canadien-français ou Lexique-glossaire des mots, expressions et locutions ne se trouvant pas dans les dictionnaires courants et dont l’usage appartient surtout aux Canadiens-français (Montréal: Beauchemin; Boston: the author, 1894, 323). A 1917 drawing captioned “It was a mistake!!” (“C’était une trompe!!”) (on 13 January 1945) is a probing example of this. Another drawing (5 November) depicts Ladébauche telling his interlocutor, “It’s a mistake!!” (“C’est une trompe!!”), thus questioning his partner’s remarks. On 3 January 1948, Ladébauche asserts, “A well-spun lie is better than a poorly clad truth” (“Une menterie bien collée ça vaut mieux qu’une vérité mal emmanchée”), while Catherine exhorts him to stop this practice, “Stop spinning yarns, Baptiste” (“Conte pas de menteries Baptiste”), 18 April 1953.

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25 Sophie Duval and Marc Martinez, La satire (littératures française et anglaise) (Paris: Armand Colin, 2000), 252. 26 Linda Hutcheon, “Historiographic Metafiction: Parody and the Intertextuality of History,” in P. O’Donnell and Robert Con Davis, eds., Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989): 3–32.

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Epilogue: Humour, Wit, and Satire in Canada ANNIE GÉRIN

There certainly seems little in Canada that is not (or has not been) inherently doubled and therefore at least structurally ripe for ironizing. Linda Hutcheon1

In 1916 Canadian writer and political scientist Stephen Leacock published a short essay titled “American Humour,” which took stock of recent comic trends and strategies in North American literature.2 This was to be the first of a series of critical and theoretical articles, chapters, and books on the mechanisms and functions of humour, wit, and satire.3 Having published Sunshine Sketches in 1912, Leacock was also well on his way to becoming one of Canada’s most prized literary humourists. His reflections were grounded in writings on the comic that were popular at the time, those of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Herbert Spencer, W.M. Thackeray, and George Meredith. They were also in dialogue with those of his contemporaries, most notably Sigmund Freud, who wrote his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious in 1905, and Henri Bergson, who published Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic in 1900, originally as a series of three essays in La Revue de Paris.

For Leacock, as for all the European authors mentioned above, the comic4 served a social purpose. But what differentiated him from contemporary commentators is that his position on the comic was straightforwardly aligned with his own Tory,5 humanist worldview, and coloured by Canadian society and politics. The comic could serve to shed light on and mock inappropriate social behaviour, and therefore encourage conformity to the accepted norm; but he preferred to see it function as kindly mediation between various (mainstream Canadian) worldviews and ultimately promoting tolerance of human fallibility and acceptance of social responsibility. As Gerald Lynch explains, Canadian Tory-humanist thought “informs Leacock’s conception of humour”: Humour is for Leacock the literary manifestation of humanism. It is the literary vehicle of the middle way. Humour exists midway between caustic satire and sentimentality, softening satire with pathos. Humour can be of service in the moral melioration of mankind, though it should not be satirically reformist, and it can offer a reprieve from disillusioning reality.6 Leacock’s conception of humour is widely regarded today as the founding Canadian understanding of the comic, grounded in the literary and philosophical thought of the turn of the twentieth century. A similar understanding certainly permeated creative practices such as those of Russell Patterson and Oscar Cahén, who kindly poked fun at the Pretty Girl fad, as Jaleen Grove describes in this book. But other, much less benevolent conceptions of the comic were also at play in pre–Second World War Canada. These occupied a place on the comic spectrum much closer to satire than humour. They had an overtly destructive and tendentious bent, and were developed through the practice of creators whose mindset was far from Leacock’s benevolent Tory-humanist position. Let’s think for example of the militant anti-Semitic satire published in Le Goglu by Adrien Arcand and his team, explored in the chapter written by Josée Desforges, or the socialist, antifascist imagery produced for the United Front journal New Frontier, described by Lora Senechal Carney. Canada has never been a homogenous country, in spite of what the Miss Canada allegory attempts to convey, as Robin Fowler explains in chapter 4. As Linda Hutcheon argues in the lines quoted above, the country is structurally doubled and always rife with potential incongruities, and therefore constitutes

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an auspicious context for the comical examination of contradictions, whether through humour or satire. Canada was indeed shaped by a history that relied on binary opposites: native/colonial, federal/provincial, English/French.7 But these dualities have evolved and become even more complex throughout its history, with the multiplication and the recognition of marginal or less visible racial, linguistic, social, and political positions that further enhance the potential for incongruity. To paraphrase Hutcheon, there certainly seems little in Canada that is not or has not been inherently doubled, tripled, quadrupled, or incessantly multiplied, and is therefore at least structurally ripe for ironizing, poking fun at gently, or sharply satirizing. If the Canadian context calls for comic examination of its contrasting and conflicting diversities, it also calls for a variety of understandings of the comic. Leacock’s theoretical work is the proof that eighteenth-, nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century ideas about the comic circulated internationally. But, as Dominic Hardy, Paul Chemartin and Louis Pelletier, and others demonstrate in this book, the same can be said of satirical journals such as the British Punch and the French satirical journal Le Rire. They travelled across national borders and provided a variety of models to be emulated or reacted against by Canadian creators. Furthermore, as Christian Vachon demonstrates with his analysis of the Uncle Sam figure, iconography did more than circulate. It was often created collectively through dynamic interchanges that extended across borders. Two main difficulties are associated with the study of the comic. The first is rooted in language. Scholars often make no distinctions among the humorous, the satirical, the absurd, the witty, the farcical, or the jocular. These are all understood as variants of the comic linked by a common purpose – the production of laughter or amusement. Although in this book we have used the general term “graphic satire,” our readers will likely have noticed that the particular kind of laughter matters greatly to understanding the actual intent behind a given image. In fact, the type of comic that is at work in a representation provides more than a tone or intensity – it affords rhetorical means that produce specific affects and effects. Because of this, the comic often plays an important role in shaping social and political debates, orienting understandings of events, deconstructing assumptions, and discrediting people and their views. A second difficulty that burdens the study of the comic is interpretive. It is, indeed, the locus of deeply cultural and contextual forms, and it draws on topical themes, vocabularies, and images. Some of the wit of the period extending

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from Confederation to the eve of the Second World War might therefore seem unfunny to our twenty-first-century eyes. We may not recognize the sources of parodies or know their targets. We may not fully understand the general context or the importance of norms being transgressed. Umberto Eco once remarked with regard to the telling of jokes: “What remains compulsory, in order to produce a comic effect, is the prohibition of spelling out the norm. It must be presupposed both by the utterer and by the audience. If the speaker spells it out, he is a fool or a jerk; if the audience does not know it, there is no comic effect.”8 Obviously, this judicious remark on the art of jokesmanship does not apply to research in the scholarly context. In fact, the opposite is true. In order to bring light to the array of comic significance produced in instances of graphic satire and link them to broader visual, cultural, political, and intellectual frameworks, the authors presented in this book have had to attempt reconstructing contexts. They have also conducted meticulous descriptions and iconographical analyses, investigated norms and traditions, and examined the formal mechanisms that produce laughter effects. Finally, they have spelled out the comic strategies used in individual representations: parody, caricature, irony, and so forth. Even so, it remains impossible to recreate for the contemporary viewer the initial affective reaction that captured those who first saw a given image, presented in its original setting and appearing in a particular context. Bearing all this in mind, the study of the comic can provide valuable insight into society. This is because it targets popular debates, values, and everyday practices by playing with expectations. It puts the finger on points of tensions to poke fun at norms and rules, rebel against them, fuel conflict, or offer a respite from awkward situations; it amuses, distracts, celebrates, informs, attacks, and chastises. It also partakes in complex social processes by challenging and integrating worldviews. This function is particularly determinant when a country like ours, founded in 1867 as the Dominion of Canada, is barely taking shape. Contemporary scholarship on the comic divides theoretical approaches into three main streams: superiority theory, release theory, and incongruity theory. Superiority theory goes back to Plato, Aristotle, and Quintilian, who believed humans take pleasure in laughing at deformed, ugly, or morally inferior individuals, or at the misfortunes of others.9 For Thomas Hobbes, who built on the Aristotelian tradition, “The passion of Laughter is nothing else but a suddaine Glory arising from suddaine Conception of some Eminency in our selves by Comparison with the Infirmityes of others, or with our owne formerly.”10 At the

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turn of the twentieth century, Henri Bergson revisited this conception, placing a particular emphasis on the aggression that fuels laughter. As he explained it: “Laughter cannot be absolutely just. Nor should it be kind-hearted either. Its function is to intimidate by humiliating. Now, it would not succeed in doing this, had not nature implanted for that very purpose, even in the best of men, a spark of spitefulness or, at all events, of mischief.”11 Release theory appeared in the nineteenth century in the work of the English philosopher, biologist, and sociologist Herbert Spencer. Spencer approached the comic from the angle of psychophysiology. He understood it as “the discharge of arrested feelings into the muscular system” that happens when one who is concentrating is suddenly distracted or liberated from stress. “Laughter naturally results only when consciousness is, unawares, transferred from great things to small.”12 Freud’s work Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) shifted release theory toward the unconscious. He argued that laughter occurs as a symptom within what he called “an economy of psychic energy” that is achieved when forbidden thoughts or feelings (that would usually need to be repressed in deference to society) are expressed as a joke. Finally, incongruity theory can be traced to Aristotle’s Rhetoric, but it was rediscovered and expanded on periodically over the centuries by Francis Hutcheson, Arthur Koestler, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard, and others. While the two previous theories can be considered affective, incongruity theory is cognitive and structural. It suggests that laughter results from the failure of perceptions to accord with expectations. Schopenhauer emphasized that the element of surprise caused a mismatch of this kind: “the greater and more unexpected ... this incongruity is, the more violent will be his laughter.”13 In the context of graphic satire, incongruities leading to bursts of laughter will be found in the subject matter (either intrinsically or in relation to its context), but will also arise from formal issues: composition, style, colour, scale, and liberties taken with conventions of representation.14 These three main approaches are by no means exhaustive. Other theories have been developed to address, for example, a posited evolutionary advantage of those endowed with a good sense of humour,15 the benevolence of laughers in uncomfortable situations (what Michael Billig calls “the nice guy theory”16), or the need to use humour as a kindly influence to encourage tolerance and goodwill, as Leacock would argue. Furthermore, superiority, release, and incongruity theories are not impervious to one another. Freud, for instance, writes about

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the malice and tendentiousness that often shapes and causes laughter, and the sense of self-importance it may provide; Spencer insists on the fact that surprise caused by incongruity is what triggers the stress and emotional discharge that lead to laughter, and Hobbes comments on the potential relief that can be generated by the expression of scorn. The various understandings of laughter that emerged and evolved in the Canadian context from Confederation to the eve of the Second World War seem to borrow from all three theories. Leacock’s Toryhumanist brand of humour, for instance, was shaped by both release theory (with relation to its intent) and incongruity theory (with regards to its means). He indeed defined humour as “the kindly contemplation of incongruities of life, and the artistic expression thereof.”17 But he was also keenly aware of superiority theory and the disparaging variations of the comic that it serves to interpret, and he repeatedly tried to refute such practices in his work. He wrote, for example: “The minute they begin to bite and wound that is not humour. That is satire and as it gets more and more satirical the humour dries out of it, leaving only the snarl and rasp of sarcasm.”18 As a writer and pedagogue, Leacock understood well that there are mechanisms and tactics that creators must use to provoke affect and create a comic effect. In the most technical chapter of Humour and Humanity, titled “Humour and Craftsmanship,” he points out very concrete strategies, all rooted in incongruity theory. These have to do with the play on resemblance to and contrast with something the targeted public knows, with the isolation of certain features, and with the productive use of inharmonious or absurd juxtapositions within a single text.19 Indeed, it is crucial to remember that the comic, in the visual as in language, rarely emanates solely from subject matter. Form, colour, technique, medium, scale, kinetic properties, mismatch between the subject matter and the way it is drawn, or between an image and its caption, are what provoke a comic effect, or encourage a second-degree interpretation of a representation. As Leacock proposed, “the humour becomes the method, not the matter.”20 One of the main comic strategies that prompts viewers to rethink their assumptions is parody, a mode that is essentially trans-textual; that is to say that it necessarily refers to another, pre-existing image. A parody is a productive imitation, created to comment on, mock or trivialize its original source. It resembles its referent, but also exhibits differences and hence plays with the expectations of the viewer, which it challenges to a certain degree. For parody to be efficient, its public needs to know its source well. Because of this,

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parody is often ambivalent, at once affirming the cultural importance of the source and discrediting it, or ridiculing practices that are contiguous to it. The graphic satires crafted by Russell Patterson and Oscar Cahén that feature Pretty Girls, for example, are successful because they refer to an American design fad that was well known to Canadian publics of American popular journals; they mock the emerging trend by playing with its newfangled conventions. But their appropriation also constitutes a homage to their creators. In a much more direct way, the Frankenstein figure discussed by Dominic Hardy, reproduced in 1844 in Le Charivari canadien, borrows an image drawn in 1843 by Kenny Meadows for the British Punch. With adjustments to the character’s posture and a new caption, it transposes well-known British political debates into the Canadian context as a fear-inducing cautionary tale. In these representations, the doubling of meaning (the source and the differentiated other) does more than play with semblance/difference. When disseminated in various contexts, the parodic image can eventually destabilize, redirect, or even rewrite the meaning of its source, to the point where the meaning of the original could become lost. When Leacock speaks in “Humour and Craftsmanship” of the isolation of certain features, he is referring to caricature. In its most common meaning, a caricature is a representation that exaggerates or overly simplifies certain features of a face, a body, an object, or a situation. It does so in order to highlight these elements, give them a disproportionate importance, reduce the target’s stature to isolated traits, or reveal some hidden character symbolized by the overblown attribute. Sometimes entire groups or classes of people are caricatured. Since there are no individual markers that artists can draw from in those instances, they often resort to stereotype. The caricatures of suffragettes discussed by Chemartin and Pelletier, for example, exaggerate the height and the noses of the women, masculinizing their features. In a context of growing anxiety with regard to the women’s emancipation drive and the blurring of gender roles, these caricatural traits function to discredit the suffragettes as neither men nor women. In Fowler’s piece, the allegory of Miss Canada serves to concentrate and naturalize values that refer to Canada in a single figure, and thereby obscure diversity. It often operates as a reductive yet positive foil that enhances the threat of adverse figures attempting to thwart Canada’s political and economic sovereignty. For caricature to be effective, it needs to be grounded in some degree of reality or experience. More precisely, it must

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oscillate incessantly between fiction and reality, as Laurier Lacroix explains in his chapter on Albéric Bourgeois’s practice. It should be easily linked to its mark, and it needs to poke fun at it, by deforming it. Only then can it fulfill its critical conditions. Parody is grounded in incongruity theory, because it sets a previously assimilated image up against one that resembles it yet departs from it. The same is true of caricature, which relies on the public’s knowledge of the features or types that are exaggerated by the creator’s pen. It requires the viewer to already be “in the know” with regard to the situation that the comic serves or attempts to highlight. So, if it may produce laughter, it also garners another, perhaps more important, effect. It includes the laughing subject in a community of laughers, while excluding those who do not grasp the compounded meaning. Along with parody and caricature, the productive use of incongruity and absurdist juxtapositions is a staple in the arsenal of graphic satire. This strategy, which relies on doubling and multiplication, is what Hutcheon described in her famous book on irony in contemporary Canadian art as a coping mechanism or a strategic response to Canada’s inherently multiple positions. Incongruous imagery mashes up into single representations different realities that should not normally be found together; the resulting uneasy coexistence is what causes cognitive play and triggers the comic effect. Several examples of graphic satire described in the texts by Josée Desforges and by Lora Senechal Carney overtly rely on this strategy. In “Nos ‘grands’ hommes ont ouvert un delicatessen,” for example, caricatures of French Canadian political figures are bluntly fitted with stereotypically Jewish attributes, and words written in script reminiscent of Hebrew are slapped onto the surface. The clash of well-known figures with elements belonging to a different culture ironically suggests similarities in what the image’s creator deems antipatriotic attitudes in both the Liberal politicians and Jewish cultural sensibilities. The collage of image and text is particularly efficient here, because it provides “information” and contradicts it immediately, in a single ironic gesture. Another noteworthy example of incongruous juxtaposition is found in an image produced by Harry Mayerovitch for New Frontier in 1937. Here, the drawing style is devised to trigger the comic: the Nazi officer is portrayed in scales of grey, monstrously large and covered in decorative detail. The diminutive character of the Jewish figure, in sketchy black lines on white, contrasts visually by scale, colour, and technique. The two figures don’t – or shouldn’t – belong to the same image, to the same reality. The visual sobriety

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of the outlined figure paradoxically ridicules the graphic excesses of its oppressor and hence conveys his grotesque nature and inhumanity. These very few examples highlight how the practice of the comic in graphic satire relies on the savoir-faire of creators who are masters of their medium and know how to mobilize form, colour, composition, and technique to signal a transgression or a subversion of meaning in the image. It is important for today’s scholars to examine graphic satire produced in past eras, since it may afford them deeper, broader, or more nuanced understandings of history. But they need to remain cautious; comic images are often duplicitous and call for a skeptical attitude with regard to representations – all representations – as active constructors of knowledge. Only through a close examination of the strategies of the comic will viewers be able to decode what is represented, what is left out, what is subverted, what is ultimately meant, and how it plays out in historical processes. For example, a long list of well-known historical figures cross the pages of this book, including Canadian prime minister John A. Macdonald, Métis political leader Louis Riel, Quebec nationalist leader Lionel Groulx, anti-Semitic publisher and activist Adrien Arcand, and Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis, to name just a few. Some act out wellknown incidents; others play out fictional ones, or contribute to contesting and rewriting events. In these images, perceptive viewers will discover tensions (often signalled by incongruities) that have been forgotten or glossed over by mainstream historical narratives. In the cases that interest us, these have to do with such issues as conflicting political ideals, evolving gender roles, the coexistence of different communities on Canadian territory, and so forth. Comic or otherwise, images do more than record historical events. They constitute a “matrix to history,” as Eric Michaud has argued.21 In other words, they give ideas, facts and events an intelligible shape that renders them accessible. They do this by introducing opinions into public debate through the media and sometimes blunt graphic means. They orient meaning through the rhetoric of the image, with satirical inflections, for example. Their succession is what allows them to collectively construct, fix, and challenge understandings. If Michaud’s conception applies to all images, it is especially accurate with regard to representations such as comic ones, explicitly created to provoke affect and generate some kind of effect. When today’s viewers try to extract meaning from images produced in the past, they therefore need to understand who their creators were, and what motivated their publication in newspapers and journals,

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taking notice of how the media’s role and targeted publics have changed and expanded over time. This is a point that Laurier Lacroix brings to the fore in his discussion of Albéric Bourgeois’s Ladébauche character since, as Lacroix argues, Bourgeois’s works contain markers and clues that allude to the satirist’s craft and to satire’s own role and mechanisms. Much more research remains to be done on the history of Canadian graphic satire from Confederation to the beginning of the Second World War. This book provides an overview of its main targets, techniques, and practitioners, creators such as Albéric Bourgeois, Hector Berthelot, Arthur Racey, Avrom Yanovsky, and Harry Mayerovitch, to name just a few. With Stephen Leacock as a guide in this epilogue, it also offers a glimpse of theoretical considerations that have shaped the practice and the later interpretation of graphic satire. Mainly, we hope our collective effort shows how, through careful examination of graphic satire, readers can begin to understand a little more about Canadian history; not just about the great political movements and events but rather, against the grain, about the tensions and frictions that irritated the overt political and social structure of the country in the first two centuries of its existence.

NOTES 1 Linda Hutcheon, Splitting Images: Contemporary Canadian Ironies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 15. 2 Published in Essays and Literary Studies (New York: John Lane, 1916): 97–136. 3 Leacock’s main theoretical works on humour include: Humour and Humanity: An Introduction to the Study of Humour (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1937) and Humour, Its Theory and Technique: With Examples and Samples; A Book of Discovery (London: John Lane, 1935). 4 Leacock often used the term “humour” as an umbrella term, nevertheless differentiating between the rhetorical functions of humour, satire, and comedy, etc. To avoid confusion, the term “comic” will be used here as a general term. 5 Toryism is a political philosophy grounded in social traditionalism, benevolent hierarchy, and economic conservatism, opposed to any form of radicalism. It was prominent in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century in the politics of the United Kingdom, and also appeared in parts of the Commonwealth, particularly in Canada, where it involved loyalty to England. In the second part of the twentieth century, Canadian Toryism

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6 7 8 9 10

11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

evolved into neo-conservatism, which renounced many of its original principles, calling for the reduction of taxes, market deregulation, and privatization of services in order to generate prosperity. Gerald Lynch, Stephen Leacock: Humour and Humanity (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1988), 6–7. Hutcheon, Splitting Images, 15. Umberto Eco, “The Frames of Comic Freedom” in Umberto Eco, V.V. Ivanov, and Monica Rector, eds., Carnival! (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1984), 6. Aristotle, Poetics [c. 350 bce], translated by Gerald F. Else (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 23–4. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme & Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiaticall and Civill, edited by Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 42. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic [1900], translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York: Macmillan, 1911), 198. Herbert Spencer, “The Physiology of Laughter,” in Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative (London: Williams and Norgate, 1863), 115–16. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2 [1818], translated by E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1966), 91. See Annie Gérin, “A Second Look at Laughter: Humor in the Visual Arts,” Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 26, 1 (2013): 155–76. Joseph Polimeni and Jeffrey Reiss, “The First Joke: Exploring the Evolutionary Origins of Humor,” Evolutionary Psychology 4 (2006): 347–66. Michael Billig, Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour (London: Sage, 2005), 225–8, Leacock, Humour and Humanity, 11 Stephen Leacock, How to Write (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1943), 214. Leacock, Humour and Humanity, 207–31. Ibid., 227. Éric Michaud, “La construction de l’image comme matrice de l’histoire,”  Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 4, 72 (2001): 41–52.

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Contributors Pierre Chemartin is a lecturer in the Département d’histoire de l’art et d’études cinématographiques at the Université de Montréal. Josée Desforges is a doctoral candidate in art history at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Robyn Fowler is a member of the academic teaching staff in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Annie Gérin is professor of art history at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Jaleen Grove is a postdoctoral fellow in popular print in the Douglas B. Dowd Modern Graphic History Library at Washington University in St. Louis. Dominic Hardy is professor of Quebec and Canadian art history and historiography at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Laurier Lacroix, CM, is professor emeritus of the Université du Québec à Montréal. Louis Pelletier is a postdoctoral fellow and a lecturer in the Département d’histoire de l’art et d’études cinématographiques at the Université de Montréal. Lora Senechal Carney, retired from the University of Toronto, specializes in twentieth-century Canadian art history and is the author of Canadian Painters in a Modern World, 1925–1955: Writings and Reconsiderations. Christian Vachon is head of collections management and curator of paintings, prints, and drawings at the McCord Museum, which includes the world’s third-largest collection of Canadian editorial cartoons.

Index aesthetics, 23, 25, 28, 250–2, 265

Arts and Crafts philosophy, 179

British Museum, 66

affect, 287–8, 290, 293

Asselin, Olivar, 145, 210–11

Brodeur, Albert-Samuel, 184

African American, 7, 178

Athena, 76, 98, 124

Brother Jonathan, 76, 79–80, 82,

Aird, Robert, 22, 265

Aubin, Napoléon, 26, 41

Aislin. See Mosher, Terry

Authier, Hector, 207–8

Akin, James, 79

84–5, 88–9. See also Cousin Jonathan, stereotype Brown, Arthur William, 174,

Allan, Hugh, 112, 118–21

Bacon, Peggy, 238–9

allegory, 24, 76, 99, 102–3, 112–13,

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 22

Brown, George, 28, 121

118, 123–8, 171; allegorical

Baldwin, Robert, 28, 41–3, 57, 62

burlesque, 82, 186

figure, 28–9, 76, 80, 84, 98–9,

Ballyhoo, 185, 188–9

102–3, 118, 128, 130n16. See also

Banta, Martha, 8, 10, 13, 21

Cabu (Jean Cabut, known as), 37n5

Athena; Britannia; Brother

Barré, Raoul, 184

Cahén, Oscar, 174, 190–4, 196–7

Jonathan; Columbia; Cousin

Barton, Ralph, 185

Caiserman, Ghitta, 36

Jonathan; Liberty; Miss

beauty, 147–50, 160, 171, 177, 182,

Canada Council for the Arts, 195

Canada; Nike alterity, 268 Americanization, 174

190, 193, 196, 212; beauty pageants, 173, 185–6, 193. See also stereotype

Anderson, Benedict, 33, 99

Bellew, Frank, 78, 85, 94n10

anglophone, 7–8, 26, 32, 34, 41, 56,

Bengough, John Wilson, 10, 20,

99–100, 140–3, 197, 209, 213–14, 225. See also English language annexation of Canada to the

22–3, 29, 31, 93, 97n47, 100–2, 112–23, 126–8

184–6, 193–5

Canadian Authors Association, 194 Canadian Forum, 233 Canadian Home Journal, 174–5, 190, 194 Canadian Illustrated News, 31, 72, 82, 89–91, 100, 105–11 Canadian

Bengough, William, 100

National Exhibition, 186

United States, 85, 170, 174, 182,

Bergson, Henri, 285, 289

Canadian Society of Graphic

192, 195–6

Berthelot, Hector, 8, 10, 16, 20, 35,

anti-American sentiment, 179, 193 antifascist: imagery, 286, 233–53; movement, 232–53 anti-Semitism, 10, 32–3, 209–12,

45, 143, 224, 257, 268, 294 Blades de Walden, Thomas, 59 Borden, Robert, 152, 155, 159 Boston Post, 34

Arts, 194 capital of Canada, 27, 39, 41, 115. See also Kingston; Montreal; Quebec; Toronto capitalism, 7, 13, 26, 118–23, 128,

215, 227n19, 288n30, 239, 241,

Bouchard, Paul, 211, 213, 228n30

211, 232, 237–9

286, 293

Bouchard, Télesphore-Damien,

Caran d’Ache, 10

Arcand, Adrien, 32–3, 206, 209– 12, 215, 218, 224–5, 245, 286, 293. See also Goglu, Émile

207–8, 216 Bourgeois, Albéric, 16, 34–5, 215, 224, 257–80, 292, 294

caricature, 111, 143, 155–6, 159, 161, 171–5, 177, 179, 182, 184, 186–9, 194–7, 206–25, 233, 236–7, 239,

Aristotle, 288–9

Brandtner, Fritz, 234–41, 251

242, 245, 247, 249–50, 257, 259,

art criticism, 194–6, 238, 250, 275

Britannia, 29, 76, 88, 98, 102–3,

261, 264, 268, 270, 275, 280,

Art Directors Club, 194

105, 111, 115, 129n2, 155

288, 291–2

Carr, Emily, 36

cubism, 185, 234

En roulant ma boule, 257, 270–1

cartoon, 3, 10, 13, 16–23, 26, 29–35,

Curnoe, Greg, 36

Escher, M.C., 272

80, 85, 98–118, 123–8, 136–62,

Esquire, 186; its mascot Esky, 186

170–89, 193, 195–7, 208–9, 215,

Dale, Arch, 22

237–8, 245

Daumier, Honoré, 23, 165n29, 236,

Cartier, George-Étienne, 28 Champeau, Julien, 43, 47, 57, 69 Chaplin, Charlie, 138–9

239, 250, 259 David, Louis-Athanase, 206, 208,

68, 111, 138, 148, 190–2, 197, 238, 242, 245, 249, 286; Eastern Europe, 8, 190, 214

214–16, 219–20

Chapman, Jake and Dinos, 25

Davidson, Emily, 138

Fairley, Margaret, 234

Charb (Stéphane Charbonnier,

De Barasse, Jean-Baptiste, 45

Falardeau, Mira, 22

deceit, 275–8

fascism, 32–4, 210, 245–8; fascist

known as), 37n5 Charlie-Hebdo, 37n5 Chatelaine, 174–5, 190

Depression of the 1930s, 32, 34, 210, 238, 250

Child, Victor, 189

Desbarats, George, 31

civil war: American, 79–80, 85,

Desbarats, Peter, 21

press, 32–3, 210, 225. See also antifascist fashion, 80, 82, 85, 145–7, 185–6; fashionable girls, 184–6; fash-

90, 104; Spanish, 233–4, 238–9,

Diogenes, 88, 90

241–2, 247, 250

disguise, 268–75

Fenian, 104–5

Dominion of Canada, 13, 20, 88,

Ferres, James Moir, 66–7

College Humor, 185, 188–9 Collier’s Weekly, 184, 193

98–100, 103, 104, 107–9, 128,

Columbia, 76, 98, 102, 105, 108,

130, 137, 155, 288

111, 170

Doyle, Richard, 84

Comfort, Charles, 242–3

Dreyfus affair, 10, 227n19

comic: effect, 136–8, 145, 154,

Drummond, Lewis Thomas,

236, 264, 288–93; as a genre,

43–7, 57

13, 32, 171–3, 184, 194, 252, 265,

Duceppe, Gilles, 17

285–93; strips, 34, 143, 157, 171,

Duplessis, Maurice, 23, 34, 237,

184, 186, 188, 194, 197, 257 Communism, 31, 33–4, 211, 232–3, 237, 245 Confederation, 6, 8, 20, 27–9,

247, 239

290, 294 Conseil des Arts et Manufactures, 257 conservative: government, 6, 102,

ion illustration, 185, 189

Festival de la chanson et des métiers du terroir, 264 First Nations, 6–7, 10, 13, 20, 99. See also Indian Act; Native American First World War, 32–4, 81, 100, 136, 141–5, 155, 159–61 fisheries, 91–3, 104–11 Flagg, James Montgomery, 81

Durham, Lord, 41–3, 68

flapper, 185–8

Du Tremblay, Pamphile, 208, 210

Fontaine, Norman, 190

Dyer, John, 43

Forain, Jules, 10

32, 85, 90, 98–9, 115, 209, 288,

Fortier, August, 44–5, 70n9 École des beaux-arts de Montréal, 219, 257, 264 École des beaux-arts de Québec, 219

France, 8–10, 24, 102–3, 149, 185, 194, 212–14 francophone, 3, 7–8, 26, 32–3, 53, 69, 140–3, 209, 257. See also

120–4, 159, 215, 237; policies,

The Education of Annie, 34

112; press, 177

Elgin, Lord, 28, 57, 62–6, 68, 104

Frankenstein, 27, 51–7, 69, 291

continentalism, 175

England, 22, 53, 66, 80, 102, 141,

French: art, 23, 264; Canadian,

French

Côté, Jean-Baptiste, 22, 28

145, 152, 179, 215, 249. See also

10, 19, 43, 126, 140, 148–9,

Cousin Jonathan, 88, 90, 170, 171,

Great Britain

197, 206–25, 268–72, 287, 292;

174. See also Brother Jonathan Cross, James, 17

300

Europe, 6–8, 13, 27–8, 33, 59, 62,

index

English language, 209, 212–15, 224–5. See also anglophone

language, 47, 59, 140–3, 148–9, 158, 184, 197, 206–25, 239; press,

26, 41, 57, 149, 287; Revolution,

Grant, Ulysses S., 89

76, 79. See also France;

Great Britain, 3, 21, 28–9, 53, 82,

francophone French, Donald, 194

99, 104–11, 140, 159, 174, 179.

285–7, 292 Hyde, Laurence, 234–6, 240–2, 251

See also England

Freud, Sigmund, 270, 285, 289–90

Grinchuckle, 87–8

Front de libération du Québec, 17

Grip, 6, 10, 20, 23, 29, 31, 100–2, 123

Frye, Northrop, 6, 20, 24–5

Grit, 112 Groner, J.M., 100

iconography, 17–19, 23, 28–9, 32–3, 75–85, 93, 115, 154, 178, 211–12, 287–8 identity, 7–10, 20–1, 24–6, 31–5,

Galipeault, Antonin, 207–8

Gropper, William, 249

56, 76–93, 99–100, 107–8, 147,

Garneau, Michel. See Garnotte

grotesque, 6, 25, 89, 245–7, 250,

175, 186, 196, 209–12, 209–25,

Garnotte, 19

293. See also ugliness

268–75

Gavarni, Paul, 259

Groth, John, 234

illusion, 275

The Gazette (Montreal), 43, 62,

Groulx, Lionel, 213, 293, 225,

illustration, 17, 27, 34, 51, 54, 68,

100, 120, 126, 225 gender, 21, 25, 136–62, 170–1, 179,

226n7 Group of Seven, 192, 237, 251

161, 170–97, 234, 241–52; See

Harper’s Weekly, 28, 80–2, 88

imaginary, 7, 93, 103, 118, 123, 150,

291, 293. See also Girl; sexuality; stereotype

75, 82–93, 98–113, 126–7, 143, also fashion illustration

General Idea, 36

The Hecklers, 21–2

Géricault, Théodore, 54, 250

hegemony, 99–102, 113, 170

Indian Act, 6–7

Gibson, Charles Dana, 32, 172–8,

Held, John (Jr), 185

Ireland, 53, 104

Heward, Augustus, 67

Irish, 10, 13, 43–56, 104, 152, 178,

184–5. See also Girl Gillray, James, 29, 76

Hides, E., 63

Girl: American Girl, 32, 170–3,

Hincks, Francis, 43

177–84, 190–3, 196; Christy Girl, 173; Fisher Girl, 173;

Hitler, Adolf, 34, 232, 234, 242, 245, 249

272–8

188 irony, 3, 6, 13–17, 24–8, 34–6, 53, 66–8, 112, 171, 177–82, 189, 192, 241, 249, 259, 265, 275, 288, 292;

Gibson Girl, 32, 172–9, 184, 196;

Hobbes, Thomas, 288, 290

Modern Girl, 170; Patterson

Hoff, Syd, 238

Girl, 186–90, 196; Petty Girl,

Hogarth, William, 25, 29, 66, 239

173; 173; Pretty Girl, 170–97;

Holmes, Benjamin, 85–6

Jackson, Andrew, 84

Summer Girl, 190–6; Varga

Honoré, Philippe, 37n5

Jefferys, Charles W., 174–85,

Girl, 173

Houde, Camillien, 221

militant irony, 6, 20, 25 Irvine, Dean, 238

192–3, 196–7

The Globe, 100

Houle, Robert, 36

Globe and Mail, 100

House of Commons, 31, 107–8

214–18; diaspora, 8, 206–8;

The Goblin, 185, 189–90

House of Parliament, 39, 63–9

stereotype, 10, 178–9, 208–13,

Goglu, Al, 211, 216, 221–4, 226n14

humanism, 250, 286, 290

218–25, 238, 247–9, 292. See

Goglu, Émile, 211, 218. See also

humour, 16, 22–4, 33–5, 62, 68, 79,

Arcand, Adrien Goglu, Loulou, 206–11, 214, 219–20, 225n1

Jewish: community, 206–8,

also anti-Semitism

85–8, 115, 145, 161, 177, 185–90,

jingoism, 124

238, 252, 268, 280, 285–92. See

Joe, 136, 147–52, 159–60

also theories of humour

John Bull, 88, 93, 155, 218

Goya, Francisco, 250

Hunter, Sam, 10–13

Johnny Canuck, 10–11, 31, 91, 93

Graham, Hugh, 3–6, 141

Hurst, Earl Oliver, 193

Judge, 8

Grand Trunk, 121

Hutcheon, Linda, 24, 265, 278,

Julien, Henri, 3–4, 6, 9, 17, 22–3,

index

301

29–31, 82–4, 88–91, 93, 100,

Le Perroquet, 27–8

Marshall, Margaret, 193

141, 184

Le Rire, 149, 287

Marxism, 233

Leacock, Stephen, 285–7, 289–91,

Masereel, Frans, 239, 242

Kennedy, Howard Angus, 194

294 Leech, John, 84

Keppler, Joseph Ferdinand, 82, 90

Légaré, Joseph, 27, 63

Kingston, 115, 121

Leggo, William, 31

Massicotte, Edmond-Joseph, 147

Kyle, James Fergus, 13

Leigh, Mary, 152

Mayerovitch, Harry, 34, 244–51,

Leslie, Frank, 82 La Bombe, 147 La Caricature, 23, 26 La Nation, 211

Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly Newspaper, 81 Lévesque, Georges-Henri, 213,

La Patrie, 34, 140, 143, 158, 184, 257

225. See also Massey-Lévesque

La Presse, 16, 32, 34, 140, 143,

Commission

157–8, 184, 208, 210–11, 215, 224, 257, 259

Liberal: ideology, 47, 102, 112–15,

Massey-Lévesque Commission, 195

292, 294 Mayfair, 174 McCord, David Ross, 22 McCord Museum, 22, 63, 72n18, 75, 82 McInnes, Graham, 250 McLuhan, Marshall, 196

195; Party, 3, 7, 32, 115, 118, 120–

Meadows, Kenny, 51–3, 55–7, 291

Lacan, Jacques, 270

1, 124, 206–24, 247, 292; press,

metaphor, 24, 236,

Ladébauche, Baptiste, 8, 16, 34–5,

43, 100, 245, 121

Métis, 29, 123–8, 293

45, 215, 224, 257–9, 264–80, 294 Ladébauche, Catherine, 16, 259, 265–8

Liberty, 174, 193

middle-class, 100–3, 113, 137, 223

Liberty, as allegorical figure, 57,

Middleton, Frederick, 123–4

84, 98, 102, 130–1n17

Milton, John, 55

Laferté, Hector, 207–8

Life, 185, 188–9

mirror stage. See Lacan, Jacques

Lafontaine, Louis-Hyppolite,

Limbach, Russell, 239

mise en abyme, 259, 272

Lippmann, Walter, 160–1

Miss America beauty pageant,

41–3, 57, 62, 67 LaPalme, Robert, 23

Livesay, Dorothy, 238

Laporte, Pierre, 17

Lock, Frederick W., 28, 59, 66

Laurier, Sir Wilfrid, 3–6, 31–2

London Illustrated News, 62–3

29–32, 88, 98–128, 152, 170–1,

Le Canard, 8, 20, 32, 45, 136, 140,

L’Ordre, 210–11

174, 193, 197, 286, 291; beauty

Lower Canada, 20, 26–7, 41, 62

pageant, 193

143, 145, 147, 149–51, 158, 184, 224 Le Chameau, 33, 210 Le Charivari canadien, 23, 26–8, 39–57, 67–9, 291

173, 186, 193 Miss Canada: as an allegory,

modernism and graphic satire, Macdonald, John A., 10, 28–9, 31, 102–8, 112–21, 124, 126, 293

249–51 Molson, William, 43–51, 57

Mack, W.G., 67, 82, 90, 100

Monkman, Kent, 36

Le Combat national, 210

Mackay, James G., 82, 90, 100

Montgomerie, H.E., 67

Le Devoir, 23

Mackenzie, Alexander, 3, 29,

Montreal, 19–36, 39–69, 75, 82–5,

Le Diable bleu, 26, 41

112–21

121, 136–62, 171, 174, 177, 184–5,

Le Fantasque, 26–7, 34, 41

Maclean’s, 174, 185, 190–3

Le Fasciste canadien, 210

MacPherson, Duncan, 22

Le Goglu, 32–3, 206–12, 215–18,

Mad Magazine, 32

Montreal Arts Club, 261

Magee, Knox, 177

Montreal Daily Star, 3, 10, 23, 31,

220–5, 245, 286

302

Masses, 237. See also New Masses

Kennedy, Leo, 236

Le Miroir, 33, 210

The Mail, 118

Le Patriote, 210, 215–16

Mallet, Guillaume, 43

index

197, 206–25, 233–4, 245, 250, 257–80

136, 141–5, 177, 210 Montreal Gazette. See The Gazette

Montreal Herald, 100

Opinion publique, 31

Montreal Tattler, 26, 41

Ordre patriotique des Goglus,

Montreal-Toronto axis, 19–20, 26–7, 32, 100, 233–4

210–11

Mowat, Oliver, 124

Punch, or the London Charivari, 8, 51–57, 82–5, 93, 287, 291

Ottawa Citizen, 125

The Moon, 10–13, 31, 175–84 Mosher, Terry, 18, 21, 225

57–69, 85

Quebec: city, 26–8, 41; province Pacific Railway. See Pacific Scandal

of, 8–10, 17, 26–7, 34, 99–100, 121, 124–6, 140–1, 159, 206–25,

Muhlstock, Louis, 34, 234

Pacific Scandal, 99, 112–23, 128

237, 245–9, 257, 268, 293.

Mussolini, 232, 234, 239, 249

Pankhurst, Emmeline, 137, 140,

See also French; Lower Canada

myth, 55, 99, 102–4, 112–28, 170, 179, 212–13

152, 159

Quintillian, 288

Parliament, 10, 26, 29, 31, 85, 105–7, 112–15, 120; burning of,

race, 23, 66, 88, 126, 139, 190, 249

N.E. Thing Co., 36

39, 62–7. See also House of

Racey, Arthur G., 10, 13, 31–2, 100,

Nast, Thomas, 75, 80–4, 88–93

Parliament

Nation, Carrie, 154 nationalism, 99; Canadian nationalism, 121–3, 128, 140, 173–5, 184, 194, 197, 237–8; cul-

parody, 177–8, 184, 209, 257, 288, 290–2 Parti de l’unité nationale du Canada, 210

tural nationalism, 102, 173, 190,

Parti national social chrétien, 201

251; French Canadian national-

Partisan Review & Anvil, 238

ism, 209–15, 225, 268, 293; Irish

Patterson, Russell, 174, 184–97,

nationalism, 53–6, 152 Native American, 76, 123–8, 178, 287. See also First Nations

286, 291. See also Girl Perron, Joseph–Léonide, 206–8, 219

136, 141–55, 159–60, 174, 177–82, 185, 188, 190, 196–7, 294 Redfield, A. See Hoff, Syd Refus Global, 36 Reid, Robert O., 193 Responsible Government, 41, 57–62, 68 rhetoric, 6, 25, 107, 128, 139, 171–5, 194, 287, 289, 293 Riel, Louis, 6, 123–6, 293 Rifkind, Candida, 233, 237, 249–50

Nazism, 192, 232, 245–9, 292

Perry, Alfred, 67

Royal Canadian Academy, 250–1

Neumann, Ernst, 234

Petroff, Nathan (Paul Petroff), 234

Royal Commission on National

New Frontier, 232–52

Philippon, Charles, 23

Development in the Arts,

New Masses, 238–9, 249. See also

The Phunny Phellow, 85

Letters and Sciences. See

physiognomy, 47–51, 177, 196

Massey-Lévesque Commission

Masses The New Republic, 239

Picasso, Pablo, 236

Runaway Ruth, 188

New York City, 34, 59, 79–81, 93,

Pierrot et Pierrette, 184

Ryan, Alonzo, 100

173–4, 184–5, 193–7, 234, 238

Plante, Anatole, 208

New Yorker, 238

Plato, 288

sarcasm, 171, 177, 268, 290

New York Times, 108

Playboy, 195–6

Saskatchewan, 123–6, 193

Nicol, Pegi, 36

Pootoogook, Annie, 36

satire, 24, 68, 177, 190, 247,

Nike, as allegorical figure, 98

Poulin, Ernest, 208

252, 257–9, 265–8, 275, 278,

Norris, Len, 22

Progressive Arts Club, 237

285–87, 290, 294; criticism of,

Northwest Rebellion, 99, 123–8

proletarian style, 236–8, 249

155–7, 161; definition of, 6; early

psychoanalysis, 270

history of Canadian graphic

O’Connell, Daniel, 45, 53, 56

Puck, 8, 10, 90

satire, 19–20, 26–8; functions

Ontario, 10–13, 100, 121, 124–6.

Pughe, John S., 90

of, 6–7, 16, 20, 21, 68, 118, 128,

Punch in Canada, 27–8, 39–42,

241, 252, 265, 268, 275; graphic

See also Upper Canada

index

303

satire, 6–36, 39–69, 85, 98–128,

Tarte, Joseph-Israël, 34

136, 141–62, 171, 192, 233–52,

Taschereau, Louis-Alexandre,

287–9, 291–4; historiography of

206–8, 216, 219

Canadian graphic satire, 21–6;

Tenniel, John, 82

satire and public opinion, 7–8,

theories of humour, 285–92;

39–74

anti-American sentiment Upper Canada, 20, 41, 59 utopia, 272, 278

incongruity theory, 289; su-

vanity, 55, 188–9, 196

The Satirist, 27, 41

periority theory, 288–9; release

Vanity Fair, 8

Saturday Evening Post (The),

theory, 289

Verjez, Pierre, 149–51

185, 192

Thompson, John Herd, 31, 104–5

Victoria, Queen of Canada, 3, 8

Saturday Night, 100

Thurber, Alexandre, 208, 216

Victorian era, 29, 35, 100, 157–61,

Scapulaire, Marie, 150–2

Tignous (Bernard Verlhac,

Scott, Sir Walter, 67 Seath, Ethel, 36 Second Northwest Resistance, 29. See also Northwest Rebellion Second World War, 35, 189, 193, 245 self-representation, 56, 80–1, 93,

known as), 37n5 Toronto, 7, 13, 19–36, 100, 128, 171,

173, 175, 184, 188 Volney (Constantin-François de Chausseboeuf, known as), 55

174–5, 179, 190, 194, 232–52 Toronto World, 10 Toryism, 27, 39–41, 47, 51–5, 59– 62, 68–9, 286–90, 294n5

Walker, John Henry, 28, 58–66, 83, 85–93 War of 1812, 79

Townshend, George, 22

Warburg, Aby, 54

trade reciprocity, 104–5, 118, 174

Ward, Lynd, 242

semiotics, 275–8

trickery, 275–8

Washington Treaty, 99, 104–12, 128

Seven Years’ War, 76

Trudeau, Justin, 17

Western Home Monthly, 174, 190

sexuality, 171, 186, 247

Trudeau, Pierre Elliott, 21

Wieland, Joyce, 36

Shakespeare, William, 67, 124

truth, 47, 98, 105, 115, 162, 177, 251,

Willson, F.J., 100

264–5, 268–80

Shanly, Charles Dawson, 59

259, 272, 278

wit, 6, 66, 285, 287

Shelley, Mary, 53–7

Turner, Joseph Mallord William, 63

Wolfe, James, 22

Simon, Ellen, 234

Tyler, John, 84

Wolinski, Georges, 37n5

Sneyd, Douglas, 196

Wylie, Barbara, 137, 141, 144, 150–5

Society of Illustrators, 185, 189

ugliness, 159–60, 175, 182, 196, 212,

Songs of the By-Town Coons, 31

245, 255n39, 288. See also gro-

Yankee Doodle, 76, 79, 84

tesque; stereotype

Yanovsky, Avrom, 237–9, 245

Spanish Civil War. See Civil War Spencer, Herbert, 285, 289–90 Star-Spangled Banner, 88 stereotype, 10, 247, 291; antiSemitic and French Canadian, 206–25; “dumb blonde,” 186, 192; Pretty Girl, 195; of suffragettes, 136–62. See also beauty; caricature; grotesque; ugliness

304

of Canada to the United States;

Uncle Sam, 28–9, 75–93, 103, 108, 111, 170–1, 178, 287 United Canada, 27, 39–41 United Front, 232–33, 237–9, 245, 252, 286 United Kingdom. See Great Britain United States, 8, 27–8, 75–93, 98,

Stratton, James Robert, 13

102, 104–11, 121, 136–41, 145,

suffragettes, 32, 136–62, 175, 291

160–1, 170–97, 238. See also

surrealism, 264

Americanization; annexation

index

Young Canada, 57, 88, 155