CÉLESTE DERKSEN
Canadian modernist critics have tended to denigrate the works of nineteenth-century closet dramatists, including Sarah Anne Curzon. In their own ideologically-laden "aesthetic" evaluations, such critics have failed to attend to the historical and ideological frameworks that underpin early literary-dramatic practice. This first of a two-part essay on the dramatic works of Sarah Anne Curzon considers how the ideologies of gender and nationhood are interwoven in Laura Secord, The Heroine of 1812 to provide a scripting of nineteenth-century Canadian feminist dramatic practice.
Les critiques modernistes au Canada ont eu tendance à dénigrer les oeuvres des auteurs de pièces de « théâtre à lire » du 19e' siècle, dont celles de Sarah Anne Curzon. Dans leurs évaluations « esthétiques » idéologiquement chargées, ces critiques ne sont pas parvenus à rendre compte des cadres historiques et idéologiques qui soutiennent cette pratique littéraire et dramatique à ses débuts. Cette première partie d'un essai sur les oeuvres dramatiques de Sarah Anne Curzon considère la manière dont les idéologies de genre et de nationalité sont entremêlées dans Laura Secord, The Heroine of 1812, de façon à proposer une écriture qui relève de la pratique dramatique féministe du dix-neuvième siècle au Canada.
Sarah Anne Curzon's dramatic works (Laura Secord, The Heroine of 1812, written 1876, published 1887; The Sweet Girl Graduate, published 1882) have remained in the closet of Canadian literary criticism virtually since the turn of the century-that is, until both plays were reprinted in Anton Wagner's Canada's Lost Plays series (1978-9). This two-part essay provides a point of access to a literary figure and a dramatic oeuvre which has, thus far, received inadequate critical attention. When submitted to historical and feminist critical analysis, Curzon's dramas provide insight into the complexities of nineteenth-century feminist literary practice. In particular, her plays reveal the ways in which she operated within, and was complicit with, colonial patriarchal ideology and how, nonetheless, she attempted to introduce social change for women, using drama as a form of activism.
In a survey of the critical field surrounding nineteenth-century Canadian drama, one finds that Curzon is not the only playwright to receive critical neglect and denigration. "Of all the branches of Canadian literature, nineteenthcentury drama has received least attention," Michael Tait surmises, "for reasons that are entirely understandable" (5). Tait's article is characteristic of most critical evaluation of early Canadian drama: "Formlessness, ineffective characterization, pretentious moral attitudes, lack of stylistic distinction, stupefying prolixity, together with other unfortunate qualities vitiate most of the serious attempts at drama in Canada between 1860 and 1914" (Tait 5). Previous studies of nineteenth-century drama have also tended to overlook the particular characteristics of plays by women. Tait's article, for instance, does not mention Curzon's Laura Secord, and dismisses The Sweet Girl Graduate in passing, along with two other "similarly feeble" (17) social satires. Murray Edwards' book on early Canadian drama discusses Laura Secord at some length, mainly to point out the dramatic deficiencies he believes it shares with other nineteenth-century poetic dramas. However, he dismisses the feminist content of Curzon's work in one, rather contradictory, sentence: "Her interest in Canada ... was somewhat coloured by an intense concern with the rights of women" (119, my emphasis). Thus modernist critics have failed to attend to the significance of women's social concerns and how they manifest themselves in dramatic discourse. Such studies point to what Carole Gerson terms "the still prevalent modernist critical embargo of 'feminine' concerns and the subsequent demotion of social and domestic issues as 'sentimental"' (47). Indeed, by the evaluative standards of late modernist dramatic critics, Curzon's plays are easily criticized--even ridiculed-as stylistically derivative and unsophisticated, worrisomely imperialistic and élitist, and painfully melodramatic, sentimental and didactic. These terms, which are submitted and read as estimations of value by modernist critics, actually denote techniques that Curzon used to advance her ideas and address social concerns within the constraints of nineteenth-century Canadian literary conventions and social mores. By criticizing the fact that early Canadian dramatists adopted British forms, that they prized conventionality over innovation, that they had little contact with the realities of the stage, or that they employed stereotypes rather than idiosyncratic characters, modemist critics fail to give credence to what a playwright like Curzon was doing. First by exclusion, and secondly by their evaluative criteria, these critics hinder (or dismiss) examination of feminist practice in dramatic discourse and fail to consider how women manipulated conventions and "conventionality" for their own purpose.
In their zeal to point out the "failings" of nineteenth-century drama as a whole, critics have neglected to provide even the most basic analysis of Curzon's plays or to offer a historical basis for their interpretation. I contend that if we do treat these texts seriously, and critically, they offer interesting interpretative potential. This potential lies in viewing them as cultural scripts that reveal how conceptions of "gender" and "nation" were constructed and manipulated by a nineteenth-century Canadian woman dramatist. My analysis proceeds on several fronts: first, I want to provide a historical context in order to elucidate (rather than evaluate) why and how these dramatic works appeared as they did, where they did and when they did; secondly, I will employ feminist critical practice to explore the "spoken" and "unspoken" ideologies regarding gender and nation manifest in these plays; and thirdly, I wish to move beyond modernist evaluation and provide a recognition of feminist practice in nineteenth-century drama.
Sarah Anne Curzon was born and educated in England and moved to Canada in her late twenties. After her husband's death, she supported herself through journalism, combining this financial enterprise with her suffragist aspirations (Bacchi 26). She acted as co-editor and contributor to the "woman's page" of the Canada Citizen, a prohibitionist paper sympathetic to the suffrage movement, and furnished essays, fiction, and reviews to magazines as diverse as The Week, The Grip and The Evangelical Churchman. She also wrote articles advocating suffrage, women's education and temperance for Canadian, as well as American, newspapers (Lady Edgar 3). Curzon was a founding member of the Toronto Women's Literary Society which, as Carol Lee Bacchi comments, was "ostensibly a society for the development of women's intellectual interests," but actually "a front for suffrage activity" (26). The kind of journals to which Curzon contributed, and the camouflaged interest of her "Literary Club," provide insight into the conservative audience she addressed, and the type of veiled, sometimes paradoxical, messages found in her dramatic work.
In many ways, Curzon epitomizes the early Canadian suffragist. According to Carol Lee Bacchi, the "relatively easy victory" of Canadian women's reforms was due to "the moderate character of the movement, the nature of its leadership, and political opportunism. Most Canadian suffragists were social reformers and members of a social dlite. They asked that women be allowed to vote in order to impress certain values upon society. Protestant morality, sobriety, and the family order, 'Women's Rights' in their view of things meant the right to serve" (3). Such views are articulated straightforwardly in Curzon's dramas. It should be noted, however, that the conservative quality that Bacchi attributes to the Canadian suffrage movement is derived from analysis of public pronouncement, and it is difficult to determine whether this conservatism was a manifestation of suffragists' actual views or a practical strategy. As Anton Wagner notes, Curzon's works can be categorized as "policy" plays (Wagner I: 10); that is, they are forms of public pronouncement which serve political ends. And like suffragist statements, it is difficult to ascertain how much Curzon adhered to the relatively conservative views she asserts and how much she employed them as a means of promoting other, more subversive, causes. This difficult, indeed unanswerable, question will be explored through analysis of the ambiguities, contradictions, and subtle undercuttings of convention found in Curzon's texts.
One of the most interesting aspects of Laura Secord, The Heroine of 1812 is the way in which its author adjoins feminist goals to the ideology of imperialist nationalism.1 Curzon wrote this play during the post-Confederation period, which saw renewed debate over the concept of Canadian nationhood (Berger 82). Although the drama is set in 1812, it says as much (or more) about 1870s and 80s Canada. In particular, Curzon's drama attempts to see women's concerns and values (fictionally embodied in Laura Secord) written into the emerging conception of Canadian nationhood. Nineteenth-century women were excluded from "legitimate" political power apparatuses and thus their political voices found other avenues. Through dramatic discourse, Curzon advances a woman's view of the goals and qualities of imperial nationhood. Thus, with subtle pragmatism, she inserts feminist policy within the nationalistic position she advocates.
This ideological alliance reveals the practical nature of Curzon's literary activism. How could her audience fail to acknowledge the importance of extending women's rights without also rejecting the ideals of nationhood, family values, and religious ethics she also supports? However, the effectiveness of this strategy is questionable. In the following review of Laura Secord and Other Poems, Curzon's contemporary praises the play's nationalistic and domestic values and entirely ignores its feminist content:
Another and very welcome contribution to Canadian literature and annals. We cannot have too much of that spirit of inquiry, that spirit of lively, healthy interest in national subjects, that is ever the sign of an increasing literature.
The story of Laura Secord, one of the early Canadian heroines, has been well worked into a dramatic poem of much strength by the talented authoress. The local colour is well kept in sight and there are passages of much feeling and poetic worth, leading up to a climax of real intensity. The remaining poems are on the same level and betoken sincere appreciation of nature, art and domestic subjects on the part of the writer.... Very copious historical notes and appendices at the end of the book testify to Curzon's conscientious researches, and to her efforts in providing something for her Canadian public which shall possess a lasting and tangible value. The work is prettily bound in gray and silver. (The Week, 20 October 1887)
The implications of Curzon's choice of a nationalistic female subject is lost on (and by) this reviewer. Nor has this strategy served Curzon well in terms of modernist evaluation. Carole Gerson comments that "one formative dimension in the construction of the Canadian canon has been the valorization of national themes" (47). She goes on to include Curzon in a list of women writers who wrote on such subjects and "whose contributions to the making of Canadian literature should have been self-evident in the early 1920's" (49) when the Canadian canon was being formed. However, if mentioned at all in literary studies from the 20s to the present, Curzon's work is given little more than footnote status alongside Charles Mair's Tecumseh and other dramas that treated Canadian historical subjects. Thus it would seem that the still operative modernist critical embargo on women's concerns has prompted exclusion of her work from the canon, even though it contains the requisite national theme.
Curzon was a member of several historical societies that had overtly nationalistic aims. She was dedicated to promoting interest in Canadian history and in seeing that women were written into that history prominently. She appears almost obsessed with the story of Laura Secord, about whom she gave lectures, and wrote poetry, a "memoir," a "story," extensive historical notes, as well as her most popular literary work, the drama Laura Secord, the Heroine of 1812. In the Preface to Laura Secord, Curzon writes (using the self-effacing third person) about her patriotic quest to negate claims that "Canada has no history" and to "rescue from oblivion the name of a brave woman" (94). She looks to the past to reclaim an unacknowledged but worthy female subject to validate her own selfhood and to carry forth her ideas. Curzon's project of resurrecting "the name of brave women" has much in common with the contemporary feminist literary archaeologist who "haunts the archives ... seeking evidence of the lost voices of women writers [or historical figures] and, peeling back the layers accreted, attempts to constitute that interpretive community which will give these writers [figures] renewed circulation and understanding" (Godard vi, my additions). All interpretations of history have an ideological framework. Nationalism and interest in women's issues motivate Curzon's historical work, just as an interest in feminist historiography and criticism underpin my own attempt to "rescue" Curzon's texts from modernist "oblivion."
In addition to historical/nationalist aims, Curzon's promotion of Laura Secord's heroism presents a social script for other women to follow. This scripting of female behaviour includes conventionally "masculine" qualities such as bravery, duty, strength of purpose and action, as well as conventionally "feminine" attributes such as caring, family duty, and tenderness. It is significant that Curzon is described by her contemporary, Lady Edgar, muchin the same way as Laura Secord is portrayed: "Beneath a frail form and gentle bearing dwelt a brave spirit, and with many disadvantages of health and fortune she accomplished much" (3). Thus, in Laura Secord, one gets a sense of Curzon's conscious "self-fashioning" of nineteenth-century womanhood. In this play, she promotes an image of woman who can move into the public realm and yet maintain traditional "feminine" values; as such, she both subverts and reasserts conventional gender limitations.
As Anton Wagner comments, Laura Secord is an example of Curzon's literary activism (Wagner II:8). In the Preface, she claims that upon reading newspaper accounts of the "debate with regard to the pensions asked of the Government for the surviving veterans of 1812," she found that "while the heroism of the men of that date was dwelt upon with warm appreciation and much urgency to their desserts, Mrs. Secord, as being a woman, shared in nothing more tangible than an approving record" (94, my emphasis). This passage, diplomatic as it may appear, is quite "loaded." Curzon accuses the government and media of gender bias in their allotments of praise, as well as their awards of monetary compensation. Furthermore, she claims that her play attempts "[t]o set her [Laura Secord] on such a pedestal of equality; to inspire other hearts with loyal bravery such as hers" (95). It is difficult not to read the phrase "pedestal of equality," without thinking that the author was being somewhat ironic with her rhetoric. The phrase cleverly juxtaposes the image of woman as domestic or aesthetic ornament with that of woman as an important political and historical figure. Furthermore, by stating her wish to inspire "other hearts" (most likely women's hearts) with "loyal bravery," she provides a 'call to action' for women to participate in national policy. These selections from the Preface reveal how Curzon's feminist message, couched in diplomatic language and associated with other aims (such as historical interest and patriotic duty), might be missed or dismissed by contemporary critics.
Laura Secord may be read as the dramatization of a woman's journey from her traditional passive domestic realm to the active sphere of public life. However, I would argue that it is more the quest to integrate these two realms that motivates Curzon's drama. This mediation of domestic and public life has a parallel in the play's form. Laura Secord is a "closet drama," which means that it was intended to be read rather than performed. Nineteenthcentury Canadian "opera houses" (a euphemism for theatres) were home almost exclusively to touring British and American productions and there seems to have been little interest in producing "native" drama (Edwards 171-177). Not surprisingly, then, many Canadians who tried their hand at drama. wrote for print rather than for the stage. Also, given lingering attitudes regarding the "questionable" morality of the theatre, especially for "ladies,"it is doubly understandable that a "proper" woman like Curzon would be wary of the stage's public exposure. Interestingly, Curzon herself critiques restrictions on women's public access when she describes her hesitancy to address the Wentworth Historical Society, a group that had just begun to admit women: "I was one of a sex that had never been recognized as in its right place when found upon a platform, even the very modest platform of the essayist" (Wagner 11: 141)-let alone the stage!2 Thus she looked to a more "domestic" form of dramatic expression.
Curzon draws on the style of poetic drama and the genres of heroic and historical drama for Laura Secord. Having been educated in England, she was no doubt familiar with the "poetic drama" as practiced by Browning, Shelley, and Tennyson, among others. And, as an adherent of imperialist nationalism, Curzon worked within and promoted British cultural values. Allardyce Nicoll characterizes the style of British "poetic drama" as rife with "prevailing didacticism" and "patriotic orthodoxy," as well as adhering to a "Shakespearean plan" in verse form, diction and action (208-209). Nicoll's criteria apply equally well to Curzon's drama, which uses the rhetoric of "high culture" for patriotic/didactic purpose. Again, the "literary" qualities of poetic drama are what I would term the "domestic" character of her work. However, as already suggested, drama is characteristically a public discursive form. Interestingly, while the style of poetic drama enhances the "domestic" character of her work, the "lack of stage sense" that Nicoll attributes to British poetic drama (208) is not so evident in Curzon's plays. Laura Secord would have been quite easy to produce, given the type of changeable one dimensional scenery common to the period3 (Wagner 1:8). Furthermore, Curzon does seem to have had an audience, if not a theatrical one, in mind for her play. Thus, by choosing closet dramatic form for her most ambitious literary effort, Curzon negotiates the conventional opposition between women's passive domestic and men's active public spheres of expression.
The opening scene of Laura Secord places the heroine in an idyllic domestic setting, her husband and children gathered around, listening to the Quaker's story of the Loyalists' most recent military gain.4 The stage directions for this scene are quite practical in their suggestions for set, props, and physical pose:
Queenston. A fannhouse. John Penn, a Quaker, is seated on a chair tilted against the walL Mr. Secord, his arm in a sling, reclines on a couch, against the end of which a crutch is placed. Mrs. Secord, occupies a rocking-chair near the lounge ... (97)
Domestic, patriotic, religious and family values are immediately established in this tableau. The Quaker's pseudo-Shakespearean prologue sets the toneof "high culture" to which Curzon's verse aspires and which suggests that we ought to take our Canadian history quite as seriously as Shakespeare took the histories of British royalty. This scene of domestic unity is soon dispelled by the ominous presence of the American forces occupying the Secord farm. The Secord daughters express a frustration with their helplessness that borders on female self-loathing: "I wish I were a man, to fight / In such brave times as these!" says Charlotte, to which Harriet adds "Oh, if we girls were boys, or Charles a man!" (100). Their mother offers this solution: "Dear Girls, seeing we cannot fight, we'll pray" (100). Frustration at their helplessness is repressed--displaced by an assertion of fealty which is expressed in the form of a hymn: "Our King, our country, be Thy care, / Nor ever fail of childhood's prayer. / Calmly, securely, may we rest, / As on a tender father's breast" (100). With careful orthodoxy, Curzon has the Secord women submit to the "protective" patriarchal order of King, father and almighty Father.
The second scene finds the Secord home occupied by American soldiers who, as Laura complains, have come to dine on her "children's food" (102). This depiction of the invasion of the home recalls suffragist arguments in which the invasion of public policy into women's domestic realm was given as a reason for their enfranchisement. Catherine Cleverdon comments: "The homemakers of the nation would take a special interest in laws to protect their homes and families.... Some optimists even went so far as to claim that if women voted, war would be abolished" (10). Thus, there is a subtle inclusion of suffragist argument in this seemingly conventional domestic scene: "Suffragists contended that exercising the vote would train them to a higher sense of social and civic responsibility, broaden their interests, and generally make them better and useful citizens" (Cleverdon 10-11). This is precisely the role Curzon attributes to Laura Secord. Her "policy" play shows a woman using a public role to exercise civic duty.
Curzon's Victorian feminist "policy" appears strongly imbued with middle class, colonial ideologies when considered from a contemporary materialist feminist perspective. Curzon is exemplary of nineteenth-century suffragists, who were primarily from the white bourgeoisie, intent on promoting their own interests (Bacchi 21-22). At this point, I would like to negotiate between Curzon's and my own historical and ideological contexts in order to point out that, while Curzon was clearly interested in promoting the interests of some women, her conception of social reform is informed by classist and racist attitudes. For instance, in the second scene, the play's weighty tone is interrupted for the "comic" relief of the black slaves Pete and Flo who, as Murray Edwards points out, appear like "fugitives from the minstrel show"5(121). The stereotypical depiction and common language of "ethnic" characters is in sharp contrast to the heroic depiction and high language Curzon gives to her Caucasian characters, American and Canadian, male and female, alike.6 This anglocentric prejudice is later reinforced in the caricatured depiction and dialects of the French Canadian maid Babette and the Indian character Mishe-mo-qua. The "high" characters' treatment of these "lower types" is also significant: Pete is chastised by Mrs. Secord for his "cowardice" and childlike "tricks" (101-2) and Mishe-mo-qua is given a plug of tobacco for his service (135). While these characters are all "loyal" to the British cause, they are portrayed as subordinate and opportunistic. In Curzon's dramatic world, bravery, loyalty, patriotism and all other "high" ethical values belong to the Loyalists.7 Thus, while Curzon attempts to render a more active and respected role for women, she does not challenge the hierarchical order and moral orthodoxy of the dominant class, of which she is a member and with which she has a vested economic interest. This is, after all, the audience of her "bread and butter"journalism as well as her dramatic work.
Mrs. Secord overhears the American plan to attack Beaver Dam and, in the following scene, convinces her husband to allow her to deliver a warning to the Loyalist camp. Here, she reassures the audience (like everyone she meets en route), that her husband would have undertaken this mission had he been able. Paradoxically, this self-effacing attitude could be seen as the author's attempt to aggrandize Laura's courageous act. It is also an example of how Curzon continually acknowledges the conventional "female role" even while she subverts it.
The conflict regarding the nature of women's "duty" is introduced as Laura must decide between duty to her family and to the state. Laura's argument is that the two cannot be separated; by protecting her nation she is protecting her family. Here again women's concerns are associated with nationalistic ones. This scene is also interesting in its attempt to redefine the nature of "bravery" to include women's domestic role. Laura argues that she was as brave in allowing her husband to go to war, and to find herself vulnerable to "outrage" (a euphemism for rape), as she is to take a more active part in the war herself:
Said I one word
To keep you back? and yet my risk was greater
Then than now-a woman left with children
On a frontier farm, where yelling savages,
Urged on, or led, by renegades, might bum,
And kill, and outrage with impunity
Under the name of war. (105)
Laura implores her husband to use the same criteria for letting her go, as she did for him. She then reinforces her conception of "equality" by usingbiblical authority to urge James not to think of her as his "wife," but as a "neighbour." This scene provides an example of the kind of "orthodox" challenge that Canadian women mounted in order to advance social change. Here, Laura wins herself an active, public role in the War. The scene directions, which take Laura from home to porch to field and forest and finally to the military encampment, literally dramatize her movement from domestic to public spheres.
Anton Wagner alleges that Laura Secord portrays "[t]he reversal of active male and passive female roles" (Wagner II:93). He cites Mrs. Secord's response to her husband's trepidation as evidence: "Then you will taste a woman's common lot / In times of strait, while I essay man's role / Of fierce activity. We will compare / When I return" (107). However, Curzon is very clear to show that neither man nor woman has lost their "essential" gender qualities and that they will indeed return to their "proper spheres," with their understanding of each other's capabilities having evolved, but with their respective functions not having been seriously threatened. Thus, Curzon's strategy is more complicated than simple role reversal. She expands the female sphere into the active, public domain of the masculine, while she refuses to rescind the domestic realm where women conventionally exert influence. She transgresses gender assumptions by showing a woman with great physical stamina, and then undercuts this subversive tack by re-emphasizing Laura's "feminine frailty." This doubled, somewhat contradictory strategy is highly pragmatic, since it allows the playwright to extend women's roles without alienating her audience or relinquishing women's traditional avenues of expression and management.
The redefinition of bravery is one of the play's ongoing concerns. Ibis issue first arises in the Preface, where Curzon states that "[t]o save from the sword is surely as great a deed as to save with the sword" (95). The theme resurfaces in the first scene of Act II when the Sergeant and Widow Secord trade tales of female heroism. These tales, like the play itself, construct a kind of female hagiography. Acts of kindness, family and spousal duty, nursing, and even cooking are included in a new definition of bravery that includes women. And in typical style, Curzon is careful to have a male character present to hear and endorse the reasoning she sets forth. Curzon's argument incorporates elements of sermon, another form of public address unavailable to nineteenth-century women. In this scene, for instance, she uses anecdotes and authorities to support her conception of female bravery and has Laura appeal to her "Guide in Heaven" (115) to reinforce her valour. Thus both male and religious authority are employed to reinforce feminist argument.
The accounts of female heroism are dense and lengthy. They are followed by "comic" relief in the "company of lads"' rendition of "Yankee Doodle." This is an example of how Curzon's literary drama retains a sense of theatricality. This "comic" scene also reveals, quite purposefully and critically, how boys are early conditioned to war. Paradoxically, it also reinforces pronationalist and anti-American sentiment. Throughout the play, there is an ongoing conflict between pacifism and patriotism. The view promoted by the text is that pacifism is a fine ideal except when sovereignty is threatened. This conception is suggested initially, in Act I, in the character of the Quaker. It is also carried forth in Laura's "feminine" avowals of her abhorrence and fear of violence, even though she is compelled to become involved in the War.
Mrs. Secord leaves the temporary domestic asylum of the Widow Secord's home and continues her trek. She finds herself in a beautiful garden-like glade where she waxes eloquent on the delights of nature and the land that the troops are fighting for, in "ancient honour of their British blood" (120). While this formulation may seem inconsistent to the modem reader, Curzon had no difficulty equating Canadian nationalism with British imperialism. Indeed, Laura Secord is an example of the literary aggrandizement of the Loyalist tradition prevalent in the decades that followed Confederation and which, as Carl Berger comments, "was to provide the most potent elixir to Canadian imperialism" (78). Berger provides this context:
Though the makers of Confederation were unquestionably imbued with an allegiance to the Crown and an unbounded admiration of the British system of government, and though they thought of federal union of the North American colonies as in no way implying a weakening of the connection, the very achievement of Confederation stimulated a debate on the future of the new nationality which was to lead to what many regarded as strange and alien conclusions. (82)
Curzon was among those Canadians, not of Loyalist descent, who nonetheless adopted and promoted Loyalist history and mythology as a means of reasserting imperialistic values.8 The brand of nationalism promoted in Laura Secord alleges "that the maintenance of historical ties to Britain offers the only firm basis for a genuine nationalism, because the links are not simply to Britain, but to the entire traditions of western civility" (Berger 31). This ideological formulation opposed American democracy and its perceived qualities of disorderliness, lawlessness and brutality. Furthermore, it is possible that the values and protections offered by "western civility" held particular appeal for women.
Dennis Duffy has examined reconstructions of Loyalist history in postConfederation literature, and many of the topoi he identifies are manifest in Curzon's drama. Duffy contends that "[t]he form of Loyalist myth suggestsa Christian typos of suffering (the Revolution), redemption (the acquisition of Canada) and ultimate vindication (success in 1812, material growth), all in the service of a covenant (fealty to the crown and British institutions brings national survival under imperial aegis)" (92). He notes that "endurance and survival [were] viewed not as passive and inert states, but instead as proofs that the covenant still held" (9). Certainly, endurance is a quality which Curzon attributes to her Loyalist heroine in vast quantity. Another common topos of Loyalist literature is the vision of Upper Canada as a garden, or new Eden (Duffy 29). In Act Two, Scene Two, Curzon sets Laura in a "beautiful glade" (119). There she meets a snake, which she associates with Satan and the threat of American invasion into the Canadian Eden:
Vile reptile!
Base as vile, and cowardly as base;
A straight descendant thou of him, methinks,
Man's ancient foe, or else his paraphrase.
Is there no Eden that thou enviest not?
No purity thou would'st not smirch with gall?
No rest thou would'st not break with agony?
Aye, Eve, our mother-tongue avenges thee,
For there is nothing mean, or base, or vile,
That is not comprehended in the,name
Of SNAKE! (120)
In this passage, Eve is equated with the Loyalists who were expelled from their first garden by the American democratic forces who now threaten the new Canadian garden. It is also significant that Laura seeks to avenge the name of the woman blamed for the Christian fall, by placing the blame squarely on the snake and not on the woman. Thus, although certainly working within the topos of Loyalist mythology, Curzon inserts a vindication of women alongside her imperialist message. In addition, by "ferninizing" the Loyalists she provides a conception of imperial nationhood that comprehends the importance of women's roles and values.
After leaving the glade, Laura encounters many "fearful" sights: dark woods, bats, wolves and "savages." Laura's stock "feminine" weakness is shown constantly battling her "masculine" sense of mission. Curzon describes Laura's physical peril in a manner which emphasizes the conception of "feminine frailty" while at the same time she shows Laura overcoming this prescriptive behaviour.9 The text signals rhetorical outbursts of tears whenever its heroine encounters a new obstacle or remembers her family. These moments of weakness punctuate, and so emphasize, Laura's strength of purpose. Conversely, they also reassure the audience that Laura is still "womanly" despite the fact that she effectively performs a conventionally "masculine" role. With evident theatricality, the playwright describes Mrs. Secord's "torn and dishevelled clothing" (123) as she crawls over tree trunks and pulls herself up a ridge. While this scene shows Loyalist perseverance and endurance, it also portrays a woman overcoming, even while it admits, the prescribed physical and psychological limitations of the "weaker sex."
Murray Edwards comments that "Laura Secord as an example to be followed becomes wearisome; her constant display of heroism palls" (122). He argues that Curzon's drama fails to be active and suspenseful enough, especially when one knows the story already. Again, Edwards' modernist evaluative criteria fail to comprehend the reasons behind this continual display of endurance and heroism. Curzon is not so much interested in the plot of her drama as in the arguments and mythology it allows her to put forth. While she is careful to have her heroine follow the stock linear heroic journey, in accordance with her understanding of the historical details of Mrs. Secord's march, this journey is guided more by the head than the legs. Laura Secord is a didactic drama, which combines imperialist and feminist purpose, and which is meant to persuade and instruct, far more than to entertain. As such, it privileges thought over action-mythmaking over storytelling.
While Murray Edwards faults Curzon's dramatic sense from modernist theatrical standards, I am interested in discussing the problematics of her thought in relation to, and in contrast with, contemporary feminist criticism. For this, I draw again on the parallel between form and ideology. Denis Salter argues that by adopting colonial forms, Canadian dramatists, like Sarah Anne Curzon, reify conventional, conservative, and insular attitudes that disseminate, and so maintain, the power of the élite and impose "a supposedly all-encompassing, normative, and homogeneous set of moral/artistic values which [is] protected from scrutiny" (90). He reminds us to ask the question "whose nation is being represented" (73) when considering nationalistic literature. Salter's point regarding nationalism could also be extended to include a feminist critique. Evidently, the conceptions of nationhood and womanhood represented in Laura Secord are those of a privileged élite. Furthermore, by employing the conventions of heroic drama, and by simply inserting a woman into this pattern, Curzon essentially reifies dominant patriarchal structures that privilege linear form, the goal of "success," and triumph of the "right." Although her play is unique in that it places a woman in the role of the active protagonist, it does not disrupt the conventional "masculine" social patterns inscribed within this literary form. Indeed, Curzon's career as writer and activist shows a professed interest in the slow evolution of women's roles within existing power structures, rather than in radical reform. Again, how much of this is stratagem-the need to address the powerbrokers in a form they approve of in order to alter their ideas-and how much is Curzon's own élitism is difficult to determine. A combination of these factors seems most likely. Indeed, it is conceivable that Curzon chose the "masculine" form of heroic drama rather than the more "feminine" historical romance, not only because it suited her subject matter, but also in order to be taken seriously and to extend her message to a male, as well as a female, readership. The following review of her work shows both the effectiveness and limitations of her strategy:
Mrs. Curzon has a virility of style and a security of touch that indicate at the same time a clear and robust mind.... Perhaps she may be best described as one who has the intellect of a man wedded to the heart of a woman. (Cited in Wagner II, 10)
This patronizing pronouncement clearly denigrates the 'feminine' content and concerns of her drama in favour of its 'masculine' literary attributes. Nonetheless, it shows that Curzon did win respect through her literary endeavour. The fact that her political and literary efforts did contribute to an enlargement of women's rights compels me to recognize the efficacy of her strategy. However, it is important to acknowledge that she also continued to support dominant power structures through her application of 61itist, white, anglocentric "high culture." Literary texts provide a cultural script that reveals the political, social and ethical apparatuses of the time; at the same time, they have the power to subvert, challenge or re-consolidate those apparatuses. Although Curzon's play does provide some challenge, it does not seriously undermine the status quo.
Of all the ideologies manifest in nineteenth-century poetic dramas like Laura Secord, overt nationalism (and its spinoff, anti-Americanism) is the most decried by modernist critics. In their studies of early Canadian drama, Michael Tait and Murray Edwards appear to have been looking for the beginnings of a Canadian nationalist and naturalist tradition which their current (that is 1960s) national theatre could draw upon. Clearly they did not find this in nineteenth-century drama and so their repudiation of it becomes a means of promoting their own dramatic standards and ideals. As in other nineteenth-century plays, the imperialist bent of Laura Secord provides a conception of nationalism which is incompatible with the late modernist Canadian ideal of a pluralistic, liberal, regionally inclusive national identity. Like these critics, Curzon plainly believed that literature plays an important role in cultural sovereignty; but her view of sovereignty is antithetical to the late modernist variety. Put in historical context, however, it is not surprising that her drama is excessively patriotic on behalf of both Canada and Britain, especially given the continuing "threat" of cultural, political and economic annexation to the United States and the corresponding efforts to develop a sense of post-Confederation nationhood that comprehended the values of British order (Story 22-23). This is one reason why Canadians chose British dramatic forms for their models (and besides, one might ask, what would be the likely alternatives?) and perhaps also why they were conservative, rather than radical, in their artistic, as well as political, evolution. I say this not by way of apology, but to provide an understanding (rather than an evaluation) of how historical situation influences dramatic formulations.
The play's nationalistic tone continues in Act Three, as attention shifts to the Loyalist encampment where the soldiers recount tales of their victories and losses. The inclusion of popular songs, ballads, and stories about the heroes of 1812, such as "the lion-hearted Brock" (129), reveals Curzon's interest in recording Canadian history for posterity and also provides further example of the conscious construction of a Loyalist hagiography. Both of these impulses serve a particular nationalistic purpose. Both reveal how nation and nationalism are discursive formations which were very much in the formative process during the post-Confederation period.
Gender is another discursive configuration which is formed and reformed throughout the play. Laura's story ends as she delivers her message, faints, and is carried off after copious thanks on the part of the Loyalist soldiers. The swoon is a characteristic "feminine" gesture in plays of this period. In this drama, it marks Laura's return to the realm of feminine passivity and silence. Thus, gender limitations are reinscribed after they have first been transgressed. For most of the play, Laura Secord is given a stage (albeit literary) on which to speak and act and she is then carried off that stage, appropriately enough, by male figures. Although this gesture may appear somewhat anticlimactic and disappointing to the contemporary feminist critic, it may be viewed as a practical ploy, since Curzon could only benefit by having male authority validate her message. The final scenes of Laura Secord feature Fitzgibbon and his forces as they dupe the enemy and win the day. The play's final line has the ultimate authority, the victorious military male, validating Laura Secord's heroism, giving "thanks to a brave woman's glorious deed" (139). Interestingly, "history" has validated Curzon's final tactic. Murray Edwards questions the historical veracity of Laura Secord's role in the War of 1812, citing W. Stewart Wallace's contention that Mrs. Secord's testimony was "at variance with the facts" (122). However, the Canadian Encyclopedia has reinstated Mrs. Secord as "heroine of the war of 1812" on the basis of three accounts by Fitzgibbon (1972). Curzon's pragmatic strategy of appeal to male authority appears to be necessary still!
In Laura Secord, The Heroine of 1812 Curzon portrays a female figure who negotiates the domestic realm and the public sphere of action, and who integrates the values and concerns of "womanhood" with those of "nationhood."Her characterization of Laura Secord provides a paradigm of a woman who, when politically empowered, exercises civic responsibility. Indeed, I would argue that Laura Secord serves as a kind of prototype for suffrage argument as well as for the imperialist cause. This scripting of womanhood is not altogether unproblematical. Curzon's text vacillates between adherence to colonial patriarchal ideology and the desire to give women a voice in policyrnaking, between stretching--even transgressing-gender limitations and reasserting them. The counterposing messages and techniques found within Curzon's drama are evidence of the complexities of nineteenth-century feminist practice. Analysis of Laura Secord reveals how Curzon worked within the boundaries and conventions of her time and, at the same time, manipulated those limitations in order to advance the role of women in the emerging Canadian nation.
NOTES
1 I use the term "feminist" here in the broad sense of a person who supports and actively works towards securing women's equal rights with men. Of course, the concept of "equality" is not a constant and my own concept of gender equality is quite different from that proposed by nineteenth-century activists like Curzon.
Similarly, the term "nationalist" is not a fixed concept, it varies from left to right on the political
spectrum and its characteristics alter with historical circumstances. The brand of "nationalism" supported by Curzon's work is conservative and
imperialistic; it privileges the Caucasian race, the middle and ruling classes, and British ideals.
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2 Feminist theatre critics argue that because drama is a public activity, women have been largely
excluded from this form of literary expression (Case 6-7).
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3 Even the appearance of the cow, bats and fireflies would have been possible to stage, given
the late nineteenth-century predilection for sensational theatrical effects.
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4 The Canadian Encyclopedia gives this synopsis of the War of 1812: On 18 June 1812, at the height of the Napoleonic conflict ... the US declared war on
Great Britain and struck at the only British possession on the continent: Canada. Most of the
battles that followed took place along the international border. The war ended in
stalemate.... Yet Canada owes its present shape to negotiations that grew out of the peace,
while the war itself-or the myths created by the war-gave Canadians their first sense of
community. (2274)
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5 This vignette reveals the influence of American stage shows on Curzon's "purist" British drama. One can locate elements of minstrelsy (Pete and Flo), vaudeville (the
"company of lads"' song routines), and melodrama (Mrs. Secord's swoons) throughout the play.
See Garff Wilson's Three Hundred Years of American Drama and Theatre for a discussion of
theatrical conventions in nineteenth-century American drama.
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6 In Tecumseh, by contrast, Charles Mair provides "comic" caricatures of the invading Yankees
(the characters Twang, Slaugh, and Gerkin, for instance) and has his Indian hero, Tecumseh,
speak in pseudo-Shakespearian verse.
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7Dennis Duffy notes that the conflation of "loyalty" with "Loyalism" is common in nineteenth-century literary reworkings of Loyalist history (33).
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8 Curzon delivered several published speeches (such as "Canada in Memoriam, 1812-14, Our
National Monuments," and "The Battle of Queenston Heights") and wrote historical accounts
(including "The Story of Laura Secord" and "The Seventy Fourth Anniversary of the Battle of
Lundy's Lane") that aggrandized the Loyalist "heroes" of the War of 1812.
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9 Wendy Mitchinson outlines the prevalent nineteenth-century conception of "feminine frailty" in her
study The Nature of Their Bodies: Women and Their Doctors in Victorian Canada.
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