I had a major writer's block all weekend. Not good. Panic Mode has set in, which is good. I am to deliever a paper at a major conference next monday. I am flying out there on Wednesday. This is a call for help.
The paper is on race, gender, and the frontier in plays by Canadian Women before WW ii. Part 1 is the theory I am proposing, part 2 will analyse race and gender in the plays in the framewrok of a conservative frontier narrative, and part 3 is planned to speculate why that worked with Canadian and US American audiences.
I have no idea if this theory part makes sense at all. I know it is dense. This is a first draft/catastrophe. It is not spell-checked nor do I acknowledge any of the numerous sources (disclaimer *smile*). But I will.
Anyways: If anyone has comments, I would be more than grateful.
Fasten seatbelts!!!! This is part 1!
Of Women, Citizens and Half-Breeds: The Frontier in Early Canadian Women’s Drama
“All of these plays are bad in an intellectual sense, and some of them are bad in a moral sense. They no more come within the sphere of true dramatic art than the picture of a pound cake on the door of a Broadway stage comes within the sphere of the art of painting.”
In 1874, the New York Public Herald condemned with these words the dramatic genre of frontier plays that had evolved over the nineteenth-century. But the popularity of the frontier setting for the theatre had just reached its peak in both Canada and the United States and would last throughout the twentieth century. With the closing of the official frontier by the US census, the decline of the gold rush in the Northwest and British Columbia’s entry into the Canadian Confederation, the frontier had become part of the popular imagination.
The frontier presented the perfect setting for the melodramatic taste of the turn-of-the-century theatre-goer. But, moreover, it held particular implication for Canada’s colonial imagination and its discourses of nationalism. I will be looking at the issues of gender and race, as presented in frontier plays written before 1940 by Canadian female playwrights. Focussing on the “frontier plays” of Constance Skinner, Blanche Ibre Bremner, and Isabel Ecclestone MacKay, I'm investigating the challenge these plays pose to common notions of the frontier. The frontier is traditionally defined as a masculine space that demands certain forms of racial and gender tokenism; the frontier as written by these early female playwrights becomes a liberal panopticon in which notions of gender, nation, and race are displayed, imagined, altered, and played out. The nostalgic border between civilization and the unknown is re-imagined in these plays as a space in which to challenge the relationship between female and male, culture and wilderness, self and other. By constructing their own frontier, these playwrights participate in the public discourses restricted by late Victorian ideas
Various forms of cultural expression have been instrumental to constructing notions of national identity. Studies of cultural nationalism, such as Benedict Anderson’s "Imagined Communities," have analysed the historical development of nation-states, but to a large extent they undervalue the role of theatre. Progressive narratives of maturation which seek to ground national uniqueness in the unfolding of essential patterns – i.e. Laurentianism, Frontierism, and Toryism –have led feminist and postcolonial historians to scrutinize the evolution of Canadian cultural nationalism. Instead, they propose a model to read Canada as liberal project. Ian McKay, in particular, argues that we should perceive Canada “as an experimental transplantation and then expansion of an incipient liberal political order unto the terrain of the colony.” The self-representation that grounds itself in the principles of liberty, equality, and property is thus reframed as a project “involving the extensive projection of liberal rule across a large territory and an intensive subjectification, whereby liberal assumptions are internalized and normalized within the dominion’s subjects.” The English-Canadian vision was to establish a liberal order that would function across the array of social formations and territories that produced the Dominion of Canada.
In this sense, Canada is an extension of control by “freely” self-governing individuals into a new space with an undefined future, and can be viewed as a heterotopia.
In “Of Other Spaces,” Michel Foucault gives the example of a mirror that “functions as a heterotopia” because “it makes the place I occupy […] at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.” As a heterotopian object, this mirror is in a sense reversible – simultaneously real and unreal, transparent and opaque, a “me” and a “not me.” This liminal “thirdspace” quality characterizes all heterotopias, including the Canadian liberal experiment in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. Foucault demarcates a heterotopia as a “simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live” that is capable of “juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in itself incompatible.”
If notions of national identity are constructs continuously being contested by different groups within the nations, seeking to assert or impose their own cultural values at various points of time, early Canadian theatre can be read as mirror of the heterotopian mirror. Foucault writes: “Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me [from heterotopic space], I come back toward myself; I begin again to […] reconstitute myself there where I am.” Theatre, thus, becomes a mirror that projects, reflects, and fragments the heterotopian mirror indefinitely that reflects and distorts Canada as a liberal colonial project. This performance space constitutes a liberal panopticon that allows the possibility to articulate particular experiences and ideas as subjects in discourses of Canadian cultural nationalism. The distortion enables female playwrights to present experiences that potentially differ from the masculinist nationalist norm without threatening this discourse.
Slightly altered notions of gendered and racialized subject positions in these dramatic texts provide evidence for a literary practise of contributing to and resisting the colonial project that constitutes the cultural discourses.
Critical attention and analysis of early Canadian women’s dramatic texts reveals how they worked within the boundaries and conventions of their time and, at the same time, manipulated those limitations in order to advance the role of women and to influence the discourses of race and gender.
With this idea of the liberal panopticon in mind, let’s turn to the notions of gender and race that inform three plays by female Canadian playwrights: [namely] Constance Lindsay Skinner’s 190? “Birthright,” Blanche Bremner’s 191? “Juan Haya," and Isabel Ecclestone MacKay’s 192? Play “Treasure.”
If Frontierism is a potential pitfall of a narrative that naturalizes evolutionary nationalistic discourse, then what anthropologist Elisabeth Furniss would call the “frontier complex” informs all three plays.