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Articles

Volume 35, Number 2 (2010)

Sensation and Civility: Protecting the Confederation Family in Isabella Valancy Crawford’s Winona; Or, the Foster-Sisters

Submitted
January 31, 2011
Published
2010-06-01

Abstract

More than a decade before publishing Old Spookses’ Pass and Malcolm’s Katie and other Poems, Isabella Valancy Crawford won the Hearthstone contest with Winona; Or, the Foster-Sister,” a novel that locates its story of love and mystery within a carefully representative Canadian geography. Descriptions of Winona’s various settings—backwoods Ontario, urban Toronto, bucolic banks of the St. Lawrence, and fashionable Montreal—are imbued with a post-Confederation nationalist fervor, and the family at the centre of the novel is itself a “confederation” of Scottish, Quebecoise, and Native members. Winona contributes to the literary project of English Canada which Daniel Coleman has potently termed “white civility,” but by outsourcing civility’s inherent violence it simultaneously draws attention to a structural ambivalence at the heart of civility itself.