CHRISTINE BOYKO-HEAD
This essay examines Sarah Anne Curzon’s artistic and political “obsession” with the story of Laura Secord. The essay argues the potential for auto/biographical criticism and performance theory to (re)create a point of access into Curzon’s work that suggests a personal bond between the mythic heroine and the 19th-century woman writer.
Cette communication analyse “l’obsession” politico-artistique de Sarah Anne Curzon à travers l’histoire de Laura Secord. Elle met en évidence le potentiel de la critique auto/biographique et de la théorie de la performance afin d’introduire un point de départ qui interroge le lien personnel et étroit entre l’héroïne mythique et l’auteur de la pièce du 19ème siècle.
Laura Secord: The Heroine of 1812 (1887) was Sarah Anne Curzon’s first work on the legendary woman and her first attempt at writing in the dramatic genre. Despite Curzon’s social and historical contribution to Canadian culture, both she and her work have been relegated to the margins of Canadian literary history. Contemporary feminist theory can, however, recover and revive, from the literary trash heap, such early works by Canadian women. This essay extends research into the complexities of nineteenth-century feminist literary practice by correlating Curzon’s suffragist agenda with her choice of genre. By integrating drama’s ritual potential with female autobiographical writing, my reading of Laura Secord reveals the relationship between gender and genre to be a highly-charged political act. This investigation connects drama and auto/biography in order to interpret Laura Secord’s spatial and kinesic elements as signs of Curzon’s political intentions that, consciously or not, become opportunities for self-exploration.1 First, I will establish drama’s ritual function and associate the dramatic process with recent findings in female autobiographical processes. Second, I will employ a combination of feminist autobiographical practice and theatre semiotics to explore the subversive message in Laura Secord’s performative discourse. By relating the play’s historical context to the development of a female autobiographical tradition, this essay entertains how and why Curzon disguises her personal need for self-expression and self exploration in an unaccredited form of life writing: drama. Such an investigation highlights the significance of non-verbal signifying systems that may afford previously ignored or devalued texts and their authors new considerations in the feminist literary tradition.
Sarah Anne Curzon’s first play, Laura Secord: The Heroine of 1812, is a closet drama. It was never intended for, nor has it ever received, a performance. Following the tradition of other closet dramas, Laura Secord is written as a dramatic poem with long monologues suitable only for private reading. While significant texts, such as Milton’s Samson Agonistis and Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, have taken this format, Curzon’s choice of the closet drama was, more than likely, historically determined and culturally influenced. First, nineteenth-century Canadian audiences inundated with foreign entertainment did not demand a distinctly Canadian theatre. Curzon herself comments on this situation in the Preface to Laura Secord: “The drama of ‘Laura Secord’ was written in 1876, and the ballad a year later, but, owing to the inertness of Canadian interest in Canadian literature at the date, could not be published. It is hoped that a better time has at length dawned” (95). It should also be noted that Charles Mair’s play Tecumseh (1886), often mistakenly hailed as the progenitor to Curzon’s text, was not staged until approximately ninety years after its publication. Second, while Canadian audiences appreciated the talents of Sarah Bernhardt, the representation of Curzon’s female hero would have presented numerous challenges. The scandalous label associated with the theatre, and especially with actresses, was something even a Bernhardt could not escape. In addition, the heroine’s introspective excessiveness would be a performative nightmare. Not since the Greeks or Shaw’s rarely produced “Don Juan in Hell” scene does one character dominate the stage so exhaustively. And Curzon’s verse is certainly not that of a Sophocles or a Euripides.
The poor literary quality of this text has made it convenient for critics to relegate it, as they have other women’s works, to the literary closet. Critics such as Edward Murray, Michael Tait, Eugene Benson, and L.W. Conolly dismiss the play’s feminist content and focus on the deficiencies inherent to most nineteenth-century poetic drama. Such critical practices overlook the historical and ideological contexts influencing the work and reveal what Carole Gerson calls “the still prevalent modernist critical embargo of ‘feminine’ concerns” (47). By ignoring the social concerns of nineteenth-century women and the material forces surrounding the production and reception of nineteenth-century works by women, critics fail to recognize the complexities of early feminist dramatic practices. Focusing on verbal communication, Celeste Derksen asserts that these texts, and Curzon’s in particular, are cultural scripts revealing the political, social, and ethical apparatuses of their time. I agree that Curzon’s text has “the power to subvert, challenge, or reconsolidate those apparatuses” (Derksen 16). However, little can compensate for Laura Secord’s deadly didacticism and patriotic rhetoric.
Perhaps Benson and Conolly are correct in saying Curzon was a “well intentioned but inept dramatist” (13). Perhaps “patriotic enthusiasm is no recipe for compelling drama” (12). Even Derksen must concede to the literary evidence: “although Curzon’s play does provide some challenge, it does not seriously undermine the status quo” (16). Despite the discordant, critical arguments that bury or retrieve Laura Secord as a significant text, the outcome remains a stalemate. Ultimately, Laura Secord is an unproduceable script; it is a poorly written, historical document.
Yet something shimmers beneath the play’s surface. Something stains these yellowed sheets–something suggesting a theatrical liveliness that would inflict serious damage on the status quo. I see the dramatic genre in general, and this play in particular, offering the nineteenth- century woman writer, and Saran Anne Curzon, freedom of self-expression and self-(re)creation through masquerade. The nineteenth-century woman writer’s motivation to (re)create the self through theatrical masquerade and mimicry unites her with a female continuum eager for social change. I contend that the text’s theatrical semiotics, ritual actions, spatial gaps, and visual/verbal dissension, disclose an early experiment in radical feminist theatre practices. These elements reveal Curzon’s generic choice to be a highly charged political act that contradicts the content’s conservative mediation between opposite ideological systems. (Re)reading this “inept” script from “the passionate urging of a different question, a different practice, and a different desire,” I propose that feminist auto/biographical criticism and theatre’s non-verbal signifiers provide modern readers the opportunity to go beyond the literary/verbal text and recover auto/political messages that decentralize and fragment common notions of gender and identity (de Lauretis 107).2 My reading (re)creates a point of access by which to consider the woman writer’s personal profile, a profile not based solely on biographical facts or Freudian psychology, but on her desire to pluralize female identity through non-verbal communication systems such as those found in the theatre.
My investigation begins with a simple question: why would Curzon narrate the compelling legend of Laura Secord in the dramatic genre, a form she would use only twice in her bounteous writing career? This initial question is compounded by the fact that Curzon returns to the legend of Secord on several occasions. Her obsessive repetition of the story signals a dialectical bond between heroine and writer that invites examination. As already mentioned, Curzon’s authority to speak was severely challenged by nineteenth-century attitudes towards women and the arts. If she were even permitted to write for the stage, she would certainly have felt the scandalous label associated with the theatre. Laura Secord sidesteps theatre’s bad reputation by being a quasi-performance piece; but this hardly explains why Curzon would disguise a play as a long poem, or why she would write a long poem using a structure with which she was inexperienced.
While exploring possible answers to these questions, I must also come to terms with the inherent discrepancy presented by the simple fact that the play is written as a closet drama. Is it erroneous to use performance theory on a literary text or literary theory on a dramatic text? In which realm does the closet drama belong? As I summarized above, applications of literary theory as a means to explicate this text results in a Formalist stalemate. Laura Secord is structured around entrances and exits, non-verbal communication, including costuming and setting, and most significantly, ritual actions and absences. Curzon’s conceptualization of non-verbal, kinesic elements suggests the use of performative methodologies to transcend the consistent, critical pigeon-holing of this text as a predominantly nationalist work with suffragist shadings.
Further complicating the discussion of generic choice is the precarious relationship between mimesis and history. If we take Curzon’s word that she was trying to “rescue from oblivion the name of a brave woman,” the poetics of the dramatic genre challenge the text’s biographical and historical accuracy (Wagner 94). In writing a closet drama, Curzon makes the decision to re-shape history in a manner that warrants dramatization rather than exposition and narrative intervention. Unlike prose, drama–even in written form–involves, according to Marvin Carlson, “multiple channels of theatrical reception . . . [allowing] simultaneous statements to be made by a variety of presences, often with powerful emotional effect” (291). Theatre makes the spectator “susceptible to [an] envisionment”; the closet drama startles the world of the written and the performed, and is capable of freeing the reader from the restrictive expression of the expository line through his or her envisionment of the scene in space (States 28).
In fact, it is Curzon’s use of non-verbal, ritual theatrics that encouraged me to look closer at this play. Writers, such as Merrill Denison, Lereine Ballantyne, A.M. Stephen, and Agnes Maule Machar, have explored the Secord legend. But none remove Laura from their texts before the story is complete. Curzon’s treatment of Secord presents a major discrepancy between her work and all other versions of the narrative. This difference is further extenuated by the method in which Laura is removed from the text. She is carried off the stage in an elaborate bit of stage business resembling a ritual procession: hammock is brought, and Mrs Secord is assisted into it by Lieut. Fitzgibbon, who wraps a blanket round her. The men fall into line, and salute as she passes”(136). The absent presence of this dominant character is, to say the least, suspicious. Yet no critic, not even Derksen, attempts to deal with this performance issue. Instead, critics fill the empty stage by speculating on Laura’s return to the domestic sphere “with [her and her husband’s] understanding of each other’s capabilities having evolved, but with their respective functions not having been seriously threatened” (Derksen 12). For critics to arrive at this faery-tale ending requires too much envisioning. In fact, this gap makes me suspect that the narrative’s historical nature is merely a ruse for a secondary narrative displaying the playwright’s auto/biographical explorations.
Setting the text’s nationalist concerns aside, I propose a connection between the dramatic genre and the woman writer’s personal desire for discursive latitude. Excluded from participating in legitimate political structures, women found other ways of voicing their political position. According to Cheryl Lee Bacchi, Karen Blair, and Heather Murray, women’s cultural associations were actually camouflaging their social activism. Research on American and Canadian women’s associations and Curzon’s involvement with literary and historical societies increases my speculation that personal and political agendas are encoded in Curzon’s theatrical signifiers. The scant biographical evidence on Curzon’s life makes this proposition more intriguing. Curzon came to Canada with her husband in 1862. After her husband’s death, she supported herself through journalism. She wrote short stories, poetry, and hymns for popular family periodicals. A regular contributor to the Canadian Monthly, Curzon also edited a women’s page in Canadian Citizen, and was co-editor of that Toronto paper for two years. Increasingly, she became interested in the status of women with her main goal being the admission of women to colleges and universities. Curzon’s interest in women’s history began as early as 1876, if not earlier, when she said she wrote Laura Secord. In the late 1880s, Curzon concentrated exclusively on historical subjects, writing pamphlets, speeches, and papers for the Lundy’s Lane Historical Society, the York Pioneer and Historical Society, and for the National Council of Women. She was an honorary member of these societies and a member of the Women’s Art Association of Canada. In 1895, three years before her death at the age of 65, she was elected the first President of the Women’s Canadian Historical Society. Considering Curzon’s commitment to women’s history, the dramatic genre’s multiple channels of communication provide an ideal masquerade for various political messages.
Recent feminist autobiographical theory provides a vibrant methodology for my reading strategy. Shirley Neuman states that “Canadian autobiography is perhaps not what we have taken it to be, and that it is many more things than we have taken it to be” (6). This statement invites a revisiting and revisioning of Canadian texts that easily fall within the autobiographical genre, as well as texts that stretch the generic profile, like Laura Secord, by initiating discussions of cultural self representation, psychological self-exploration, and political self-assertion. A feminist exploration of autobiography considers “the writer’s specific self-location as women in the text,” and challenges the traditional conventions and patterns of autobiography that have been based on masculine experience (Neuman 2). Scholars, such as Helen Buss, Marlane Kadar, and Shirley Neuman, view autobiographical reading strategies as a way of repositioning texts in a female tradition that provide knowledge “concerning the construction of female selfhood” (Buss, Doubled Discourse 2). Complimenting this vision, feminist autobiographical critics have expanded their definition of life writing to include fictive works, such as short stories, novels, and poetry.
Drama is another likely place where autobiographical impulses can reside. Drama’s ritual origin and Secord’s act of journeying present an archetypal movement with transformative potential. This pattern, in turn, becomes an ideal vehicle for Curzon’s auto/biographical exploration of identity. In Laura Secord, Curzon replays a rite of passage (the journey through the woods) that feminizes history by transgressing the breach between masculine activity and feminine passivity. Framing the journey archetype within the dramatic genre, Curzon (re)constructs a historical figure as a complex individual (re)enacting ritual sequences. Drama’s liminal space empowers the legendary journey as a cultural agent questioning social structures based on gender definitions. However, it is Laura’s ritualized exit from the script that invites a serious challenge to, and subversion of, the power structures that precipitate women’s removal from the public sphere.
In act III.i, after Laura has walked through the wilderness, she is brought to Captain Fitzgibbon. She delivers her message, Fitzgibbon responds appropriately, and then she faints. The stage directions then initiate a reincorporation rite that often follows the experience of a rite of passage: “The men run out and bring water. Fitzgibbon gets brandy from a buffet, and Mr. Jarvis unloosens her bonnet and collar. They bathe her hands with the spirit and sprinkle her face with the water, and at last Mrs Secord sighs heavily” (135). The religious pose this action takes is obvious. Having awakened, Laura states she can walk and will leave the men to their business. Fitzgibbon objects: “Madam you cannot. Let these carry you; / An honour I do grudge them” (136). The play’s prolixity is replaced by stage business that, taking time to perform, draws attention to the scene’s ritual (re)movement. Secord’s escorted exit from the political arena mirrors the play’s manifest agenda: Curzon wants the Canadian public to honour Secord. She also wants them to recognize the repetitive, unjust removal of women from the world stage.
Since theatre is a potentially subversive art form whose ritual origin embodies personal/political transformations, it is the ideal vehicle for Curzon’s suffragist agenda. Despite the play’s subject, style, or even physical presentation, the essence of theatre/drama, where “all that is on the stage is a sign,” points to selfhood as an ideological construction based on cultural assumptions and power relations (States 19). The theatrical sign’s transformability bespeaks the transformability of social signs by inviting a flow of identities, roles, and discourses. Curzon orchestrates the tension and timbre between drama’s circulating languages, between word and image, in order to question definitions of identity.
Despite its status as a closet drama, Laura Secord is organized around performance elements and scripted dialogue that pluralize identity. Drama’s dialogue problematizes the origins of discourse, and releases the playwright from the burden of language by placing its responsibility elsewhere, nowhere. Ultimately, the playwright as originator can only be known as a floating imprint appearing in the mise en scène, in the discourse of one character, many characters, or none at all. An example of Curzon’s floating imprint in the script occurs in act I. Here Laura uses religious rhetoric to convince her husband that she is capable of the dangerous journey to Fitzgibbon:
I am thy neighbour; loved as thyself:
And as thyself wouldst go to warn Fitzgibbon
If thou wert able, so I, being able,
Thou must let me go-thy other self. (106)
Reinforcing the holy mission of the United Empire Loyalists, Secord argues for a subject position based on sexual equality. Her argument’s feminist implications cannot, unquestionably, be traced to Curzon’s political agenda, which is “to set [Secord] on such a pedestal of equality; to inspire other hearts with loyal bravery such as hers” (95). Theatre’s shifting accountability gives the nineteenth-century woman writer the courage to write [for] her life, and/or that of another’s. Mieke Bal comments that in theatre,
the integration of social norms and individual desires can be acted out, ideally, through language, since the expression of fantasies in language is culturally validated and allows for otherwise unacceptable thoughts to escape from expression. (6)
Laura’s masculine behavior is acceptable because her (or Curzon’s) manipulation of the Scriptures integrates female piousness with unfeminine actions. On the other hand, Laura’s daughters, who “wish they were men, to fight / In such brave times as these,” voice rebellious desires not mitigated by circumstance, appropriate discourse, or an acknowledgment that their wish is contrary to their gender (100). Unlike Secord and Curzon, they have not yet learned the art of camouflage. Both Secord and Curzon express the socially subversive notion that women can equal men through their appropriation and mimicry of acceptable discourses: religious and literary. The popularity of Curzon’s text is due precisely to the characters’ theatrical mimicry of various discourses. Drama’s lack of a narrative voice, then, makes the origins of these discourses ambiguous. Whether their ideology stems from the imaginary or the real world can never be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. The mimetic masquerade provides Curzon with the opportunity to speak her politics, while not having to be painfully responsible for the enunciation since the note of truth is played in a mask.
Curzon’s interest in the relationship between discourse, social role, and internal character is evident in the way she uses theatrical signs to establish representations only to make incongruous the relationship between linguistic and non-verbal signifiers. The play’s opening scene is both economical and ideological; it frames the play within the War of 1812, introduces key characters, and provides light comedy. It is also a comic inversion of the dialectic struggle Laura will face in the wilderness between her social function and individual self-awareness. The theme of war is brought into the domestic realm by a culturally-recognized symbol of peace: John Penn the Quaker. His words overwhelm the sanctity of the hearth and encourage Laura to question the discrepancy between the teller and the tale:
You speak, friend Penn, as if you saw the fight,
Not like a simple bearer of the news . . . You did!
Pray tell us how it was; For ever have I heard that
Quakers shunned the sight of blood. (98)
Laura is intrigued by the incompatibility of the Quaker’s violent enunciation and his social role. She challenges his relationship to his narrative until he admits that “innate forces sometimes tell o’er us / Against our will” (98). Penn’s transformation from an outsider to an insider of the war action illustrates to Laura that social definitions can be restructured and redrawn.
From a feminist, theatrical perspective, this opening scene raises the stakes concerning discursive ambiguity and identity. John Penn’s passionate battle story and admission that he feels “as if / whatever happed [he’d] had a hand in it” (99) demonstrates that the individual is, like the theatrical space, a “locus where discourses intersect and subjectivity as a social construct” (Benstock 150) is constantly reorganized. Readers would be distracted by the battle’s verbal description. However, in visualizing a performance, the reader-turned-spectator can either foreground Laura or James Secord’s audience positions: either, seriously contemplating the fluidity of identity or mocking the juxtaposition of discourse and social costuming: “Ha!ha! friend John, thine is a soldier’s brain / Beneath that Quaker hat” (99). A similar semiotic contradiction occurs in scene iv when an American sentry harshly interrogates Laura. His military linguistic presence demonstrates the American democratic threat to Imperialist Canada. Once alone, however, the sentry’s monologue contradicts the message processed moments earlier, and reveals the uniform as a false witness to the individual underneath.
While dialogue reveals these and similar discrepancies in a diachronic manner, an imagining of the text poses multiple synchronic alterations to the visual/verbal relationship. Attention to the drama’s complex communication systems destabilizes the linear act of reading and exposes Curzon’s personal/political self-assertion. Theatre’s heterogeneous presence of identities pluralizes the reader’s ideological playing field and temporarily opens him/her to new possibilities of reading. Theatre accentuates this pleasure of the text by merging the act of imaging with the act of being, so both activities become ideologically (con)fused. The play establishes a pattern of contradictions between a character’s discourse and his or her ‘costumed’ presence. Interestingly, Curzon extends this pattern to Laura where feminine gestures camouflage her real intent:
Fearful of being observed, they part without an embrace. Mrs Secord walks down the garden slowly, and gathers a few clove pinks; at the gate she stops as though the latch were troublesome, raises the flowers to her lips, and makes a slight salute to her husband, who yet stands within the porch watching her. (107)
Masquerading as an overdrawn, feminine caricature, Laura presents a non-threatening pose in the public realm. She only explores the issue of disguise when in a liminal space. Once again, Curzon hides her feminist politics beneath literary and ritual conventions. Characters under duress often envision and express the possibility of radical, social reorganization when in an uncivilized zone, such as the wilderness. Voicing ideas that run contrary to ideological norms while in liminal spaces presents no real social or political threat to dominant power structures. However, as Shakespeare and Curzon show us, characters returning from their pastoral or liminal experience are, indeed, altered by their new-found self-awareness. With one eye on the text and the other on an imaginary stage, resisting readers could read against the grain of Laura Secord’s patriotic content to its gendered nationalism disclosed in a semiotic subtext. Readers can interpret the Quaker’s contradictions comically; they can attribute the American’s contradictions to cultural inferiority or they can read both as political statements. I can only speculate whether Curzon’s public read the play as a proactive female ritual allowing them “the possibility of changing [their] goals and . . . restructuring . . . what [their] culture states to be reality” (Turner 168). Yet the ironic tension between the text’s verbal and visual communication systems suggests a feminist message with the ritual potential of altering power structures.
Entering the liminal realm through the act of writing or journeying, the individual can rework the cultural paradigms that lock her within a restrictive discourse/identity. Curzon articulates Secord’s private journey in a liminal space where theatre’s polyphonic noise and semiotic playfulness is reduced, subsequently diminishing the reader’s interpretative choices. Laura’s identity reformation does not run the risk of being comic or patriotic. Instead, it is presented as a ritual transformation of self. But Secord’s self-awareness is problematic to the play’s structure because every rite of passage must conclude with a rite of reintegration. It is at this juncture in the text that the character’s story clashes with the author’s political desires, thus signaling the text’s auto/biographical disguise. Marlene Kadar writes that “in ritual we have the basis for the current theory that autobiography is an active re-living of the past and for the notion that in the course of articulating the self one creates the self” (207). Curzon’s personal desire to rescue the Secord narrative from oblivion parallels her simultaneous desire to narrate her politically motivated life, and recover her own future by amending women’s silenced stories.
Carolyn Heilbrun observes that the female writer’s “identity is grounded through relation to the other. Without such relation, women do not feel able to write openly about themselves . . . [T]hey do not feel entitled to credit for accomplishments” (24). Since Curzon is writing her life, as well as Secord’s, she either does not know how to, or she simply cannot, reintegrate her heroine into masculine society. Laura’s absence, and hence silence, at the end of the play suggests that Curzon, as an independent, working widow, cannot (re)position her heroine in a restrictive role which she herself has transcended. Interestingly enough, historical evidence indicates that the real Laura did not experience the conventional, happy ending claimed for her by other writers.
In essence, Curzon creates a narrative for her own ritual journey as a late nineteenth-century woman writer, a narrative that uses repetition (the mark of mimesis) in order to recollect (the mark of auto/biography) the story of another courageous woman. Shari Benstock emphasizes that women’s (re)constitution of self was not a straightforward task in the nineteenth century. The woman writer, she says, struggled against her “desire for self-assertion and the need for self repression” (177) because women in the nineteenth century were indoctrinated by the “ideology of self-subordination” (181). From my twentieth-century female stance, it is evident that a bond exists between Secord and Curzon. Both were restricted by their gender and both were victims of imposed silence.3 They also shared a determination in challenging cultural assumptions that construct women in order to restrain them. Curzon, however, was better at masquerading feminist practices than the real Secord whose blatant assertions of equality went unnoticed by local government officials. Even when the Prince of Wales financially rewarded her tenacity, friends and neighbors responded with scorn and ridicule.
Since theatrical masquerade makes ambiguous the relationship between dramatic discourse and the “I” who speaks/writes, theatre provides the perfect cover for a writer motivated by self- desire. Mitzi Meyer observes that it is precisely the element of disguise that separates female autobiographers from their male counterparts. However, the paradox of achieving freedom through disguise is that the mask can eclipse the individual. Laura Secord: The Heroine of 1812, and Curzon’s other prose works, support Brooks’s opinion that “the assumption of another’s story, the entry into narratives not one’s own, runs the risk of an alienation from self that . . . evokes the threat of madness and aphasia” (219). Ironically, Curzon fulfills her feminist mission and motivates the Canadian public to recognize Secord’s role in the War of 1812. But in so doing, she expunges herself from Canadian literary history. Curzon’s Secord becomes a lasting cultural icon by mastering the art of disguise, a disguise puppeteered by Curzon’s feminist theatrical practices.
The parallels between Curzon’s life story and the one she (re)creates for Secord indicate an ongoing auto/biographical process between the two women. Helen Buss says such a process is a “subject/subject dialect where ‘I as a person am in conversation with the voice of another person” (22). The most obvious difference between the play and the prose works is that in the latter Curzon speaks as an historian. “Memoir of Laura Secord” (1887) and “The Story of Laura Secord, 1813” (1891) are exemplifications of Helen Buss’s observation that “it is difficult for women writers to resist the dominant life scripts of their culture, life scripts that often coerced the female self into male-defined scripts” (183). The closet drama’s iconization of the word is replaced by omniscient narration, factual data, and genealogical details. As a result of Curzon using these biographical conventions, the protagonist becomes a limited sign in the mythic system of Loyalist Tradition: “That Mrs. Secord should be brave, ready, prompt in action, and fervent in patriotism is not surprising, seeing that all the events of her childhood and youth were blended with those of the settlement of Upper Canada by the U.E. loyalists, in whose ranks her family held so honourable a position, and whose character and sentiment were at all times to be depended upon” (“Memoir” n.pag.). As a fully-bloodied sign of female agency, Laura is now a cultural icon devoid of individual signification.
Forsaking the dramatic masquerade, Curzon states her ideological position near the beginning of “The Story of Laura Secord.” She writes that “the strife that proved to the full the patience and heroism of Canadian men, brought to the surface the devotion and courage of Canadian women” (13). After telling the story of Secord’s heroism, she emphatically asserts:
It is a wonderful story. To-day, when we are lost in admiration of the pluck of a Stanley, a Jepson, and a Stairs, with their bands of men diving into the heart of Africa, we may reasonably ask ourselves which was the greater, theirs or Laura Secord’s. The distinction is only a difference of climatic conditions; the end was the same, the unity and glory of the British Empire, and the heroism is surely equal. (15)
She uses the traditional biographical structure to openly declare her suffragist politics. Her decision to be explicit about her cause demonstrates that textual signification is tied to contextual reception. Curzon’s speeches were presented at historical events whose audiences were comprised largely of women and obvious sympathizers. Since Laura Secord had a wider audience–a second edition came out in 1898–having been published in an anthology of her work, genre becomes even more significant. In fact, Curzon may have employed the closet drama so that the dominance of the written line would feed the general public’s nationalist pride, while quietly introducing her feminist attack on conventional representations of women.
Although Laura Secord and Other Poems received favorable reviews, Curzon’s obsessive return to the Secord story suggests an ongoing relationship with the legendary woman. The fact that she switches genres also suggests an ongoing experimentation with theatrical disguise. In Curzon’s only other drama, The Sweet Girl Graduate (1882), she introduces a protagonist who disguises herself as a male, demonstrating the extremes women would resort to in order to get an education. In the prose works, Curzon appropriates masculine biographical traditions to assert her political agenda and, by 1890, her language dons the mask of an asexual historian in order to promote the image of Laura Secord. In her speech to the annual commemoration of the battle of Lundy’s Lane, she erases all ethnic and gender distinctions by writing, “we are ONE when our country is assailed” (Curzon “The Story,” 5). She uses rhythm and repetition to stress that “[i]t has always been so; it will always be so . . . we are all Canadian” (Curzon “The Story,” 5). In addition to its unilateral message, the speech lacks identifiable signs of Curzon’s identity. She omits her accomplishments, accentuating instead a knowledge of Canadian history legitimized by male testimony, rather than by her own investigative journalism. The absence of a strong female or feminist presence in her language suggests Curzon camouflages her gender politics in order to gain access to the public realm. Enhancing her discursive self- effacement, she physically masquerades as a fragile, proper lady mimicking the acceptable discursive practices of nation building. Note Lady Edgar’s description of Curzon to the Women’s Canadian Historical Society: “Beneath a frail form and gentle bearing dwelt a brave spirit and with many disadvantages of health and fortune she accomplished much. With all her strength she fanned and kept alive a true Canadian spirit and fostered also an intense love for the motherland” (Armstrong n.pag.). Her strength as an orator in the late nineteenth century is only equal to her masquerade’s success in downplaying her gender politics. It is unfortunate that her masquerade also erases the pluralized self-awareness evident in her closet drama.
In effect, Laura Secord does more than blend history with mimesis; it highlights drama’s ritual connection with the populace to make them recognize the gaps in their cultural myths. Curzon, like other women writers, produces “new stories so as to inscribe into the picture of reality character and events and resolutions that were previously invisible, untold, unspoken, (and so unthinkable, unimaginable, impossible)” (de Lauretis 11).
Strategically, Curzon turns the conventional passions and emotions associated with discussions of nation to a feminist advantage. Overall, what she does to the myth of Secord, Loyalist Canada, and history is analogous to Evelyn Hinz’s view of autobiography as “less a matter of imaginative creation and more a matter of recreation . . . a matter of reshaping” (199). Curzon reshaped history and declared this revolutionary intent through rhetorical camouflage. In the play, her auto/political statement is overtly expressed through performance elements. The non-verbal signifiers in Laura Secord: The Heroine of 1812 present a questioning of identity formation and culturally imposed roles leading to the rupture of social equilibrium and narrative closure. Yet Curzon’s Laura Secord was not viewed as a transgressive threat to social order. On the contrary, the text’s popularity with the Canadian people signals their identification with the Secord narrative. Laura’s non-threatening presence is due to her common, as well as individualized, depiction. In the private realm, Laura is dutiful, maternal, and pious. Circumstance inflects her actions and subsequent notoriety. Forced into the public realm, she challenges the enemy’s hegemonic structure, while latently questioning her own society and its gender assumptions. Emphasizing that Laura is forced into striking against a foreign enemy, Curzon brilliantly hides the fact that as a woman writer she “take[s] the power of words, or representation, into [her] own hands . . . [and] projects onto history an identity that is not purely individualist. Nor is it purely collective. Instead, this new identity merges the shared and the unique” (Benstock 40). Not only does Curzon articulate Laura’s history, but she shows that gender identity–like cultural identity–is a historical creation based on performative acts played within a given social context.
Curzon gambles that the audience will transform Laura’s difficult return to her domestic position into a golden myth negating the harsh realities of women’s lives. In her preface, Curzon states, “while the heroism of the men of that date was dwelt upon with warm appreciation and much urgency as to their desserts, Mrs. Secord, as being a woman, shared in nothing more tangible than an approving record” (94). Laura’s exit from the text may be imposed by Fitzgibbon, but her subsequent silence is cleverly orchestrated by a woman who understands theatre’s polyphonic communication codes and their potential to convert the past’s tragic details into a self-asserting call for action. Laura’s common, yet unique characterization invites readers to sympathize with her transformation from an historically-imposed self to an individual aware of the self’s plurality and the impossibility of “playing” her new-found self in the social context of 1813. Laura Secord’s feminist masquerade shows how women have been constructed through a manipulation of language and image into cultural representations serving a homogenous ideology that fails to account for women’s experience. By having Fitzgibbon validate Secord’s action in an off-hand manner (“yes, thanks to a brave woman’s glorious deed. Exeunt.”), Curzon produces a feminist statement concerning female objectification (139). While a ‘Laura’ is trapped by Fitzgibbon’s testimony, an Other ‘Laura’ escapes the theatrical frame. Narrative closure is juxtaposed by a performative openness inviting concerned and sympathetic readers to “write [Secord’s] name in enduring marble upon the spot where she lies buried” (95). But which Laura will be inscribed there?
Curzon invites female spectators to connect Laura’s story with their own journeys as women. This article springs from Curzon’s invitation: “The story, to a woman’s mind, is full of pathos, and, though barren of great incidents, is not without a due richness of colouring if looked at by appreciative eyes” (95). Through the orchestration of non-verbal signifiers, Curzon imprints gender issues within her chosen genre thereby erasing the borders and boundaries that divide nineteenth century women writers from their twentieth-century counterparts. Theatre’s ritual potential encourages audiences to participate in the subject’s metamorphic journey from socially-defined citizen to pluralistic self-aware individual. Female autobiographical criticism and performance theory can provide an alternative methodology for (re)reading works classified as “sentimental, formless and characterless” (Benson and Conolly 13), by seeing them as disguised, politically charged, self-narrations that bridge 19th-century women writers to women of today.
NOTES
1. My insertion of the slash (/) auto/biographically signifies a text’s duo status as onething, be it historical, biographical, fictive, while harboring traces of self and Otherwithin its generic constitution and artistic choices. Auto/biography also indicates that
the work is not the life story of an individual, but a speculative re-imagining by readers,
who in turn become authors.
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2. Evelyn Hinz sees drama as a touchstone form for female autobiographical comparativeanalysis. See Hinz, “Mimesis: Drama as the Touchstone for a ‘Poetics’ of Life-Writing,”in Essays on Life-Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice. Ed. Marlene Kadar.
Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992. 195-212
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3. In 1860, Secord “claimed the privilege” of signing a veteran’s petition to the Prince ofWales. She often recounted her war act in order to improve her families economic
conditions. Yet James B. Secord is quoted in “Memoir of Mrs. Secord” as writing,
“My grandmother was of a modest disposition, and did not care to have her exploit
mentioned, as she did not think she had done any thing extraordinary. She was the
very last one to mention the affair, and unless asked would never say any thing about
it” (vi).
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