MOIRA DAY
Quite aside from its historical significance as one of the first prairie-generated series to reach national radio and as the definitive work that launched Gowan's career as a radio writer, Gowan's Building of Canada series (1937-38) raises a number of important questions about defining historicity within the context of historical dramatic writing. Where Merrill Denison, an often progressive writer of contemporary stage plays, chooses to celebrate the conventional values of male pioneer adventure, empire-building, war and military glory within the context of his seminal historical radio series, The Romance of Canada (1931), Gowan's Building represents a more complex attempt to reconcile her vision as a trained historian, concerned with the objective chronicling and analysis of the male-dominated world of wars, economy, politics and public life, with her vision as a social activist playwright committed to interpreting the human world through the focus of her socialistic, pacifistic and feminist convictions.
Building of Canada de Gowan (1937-38): Laissons de côté son importance historique en tant qu'une des premières séries historiques venant des prairies à paraître à la radio nationale et en tant que l'oeuvre définitive qui a déclenché la carrière de Gowan comme écrivaine pour la radio. Cette série soulève beaucoup de questions importantes lorsqu'il s'agit de définir l'historicité dans le contexte de l'écriture dramatique et historique. Tandis que Merrill Denison, qui écrit d'une façon souvent progressiste des pièces de théâtre contemporaines, choisit de célébrer les valeurs conventionnelles des aventures des pionniers, de la construction d'un empire, de la guerre et de la gloire militaire dans le contexte de sa série séminale pour la radio. The Romance of Canada (1931), Building de Gowan représente une tentative plus complexe de concilier sa vision d'historienne diplômée, soucieuse de raconter et d'analyser le monde mâle des guerres, de l'économie, de la politique et de la vie publique, avec sa vision d'activiste sociale tenant à interpreter le monde human à travers ses convictions socialistes, pacifistes et féministes.
'Modern living,' said Constance Reid Radway, 'has set woman free, giving us time for creative work.'1 Thus opens Elsie Park Gowan's short story about a female writer of historical fiction who blithely assures an interviewer that nothing is now beyond the feminine reach; as a modern woman she is perfectly capable of retreating to her study and communing with the muses from nine to noon everyday before switching effortlessly into her more domestic mode as mistress and mother. Predictably, such hubris meets with the fate that it deserves. After one too many days of having her story about a feisty nineteenth century Cree girl sabotaged by a string of mundane 20th century domestic disasters, Mrs. Radway finally takes drastic action:
Mrs. Radway moved quickly in her well-organized way. She brought George an extra blanket and took a bowl of warm milk down to the dog. Then from George's work bench, she picked out a heavy monkey wrench and wrapped it neatly in brown paper. She put on her coat and took the bus downtown, stepping off in front of the News-Herald Building. At 7:19 exactly, Constance Reid Radway threw the monkey wrench through the large plate glass window of the newspaper office-the very paper that had once printed her piece about how modem living has set women free. When the police came, she was doing a little war dance on the pavement.
Mrs. Radway is very happy where she is now. The doctors don't understand why she insists on wearing her blanket and having a feather in her hair. They don't understand, but they're working on it.2
While the story is a wryly ironic comment on the impossibility of 'having it all' even in the fifties, it is an even more telling comment on Gowan's essential vision of history and historical process: that a modern socially and politically enlightened woman cannot write about history in isolation from the crises and concerns of the modern world; nor can she isolate her work as a muse-that sexless seraph of the universal-from her experience and being as mother, wife, and mistress of herself. The past and present, the public and the private politic, the outer world of great deeds and words and the intimate domestic world of home and family are all part of the same human reality that needs to be encompassed and balanced in the same world vision if madness, both in the personal and the political sense, is to be avoided.
While most of Gowan's work reflects this view in one way or another, it reaches its first mature expression in her Building of Canada radio series first broadcast over CKUA in Edmonton over 1937-38, then re-broadcast over the CBC network in 1938-39.
The series was historically important for a number of reasons. The honour of introducing the historical series form to Canadian national radio may belong to Merrill Denison's seminal 1931 Romance of Canada series, but, along with the earlier New Lamps for Old series, which Gowan co-authored with Gwen Pharis Ringwood in 1936-37, Building first brought the prairie produced and written historical series to national radio as a force to be contended with. Dick Macdonald, an integral part of the CKUA production and management team over those years, recalled in a letter to Gwen Pharis Ringwood in 1979, the excitement of being 'virtually an amateur radio group' unexpectedly summoned to perform on a national, professional stage:
I made the first rainbox similar to the one used in the theatre and various other things like thunder sheets, sand tubs into which we could fire pistols loaded with blanks for gun shot. We also used H.P. Brown's developing room, which was on the same floor as the studio, just to [the] right of the stairwell. It had all kinds of running water gadgets that were great for plays which required sounds of voyageurs paddling canoes and getting caught in rapids, etc. For the Building of Canada series and New Lamps we used as many as five turntables to feed in background music ... we had a very fine Carnegie library of recordings which incidentally included all the scores for the major works ... I could almost write a whole page describing some of the effects we experimented [with] to get just the right sound-working hours after rehearsals into the wee, small hours ...
They paid the group the huge sum of $200.00 for each of the ... plays in the two ... series. I had to draw up the pay sheets so that each player even [though they only had to] bark like a dog, or cry like a child, received a fair percentage of the money. 3
Even more significantly, the Building series marks a major watershed in the playwriting careers of Gowan and her better-known contemporary, Gwen Pharis Ringwood. While both women started out writing for the flourishing Little Theatre or community theatre movement of the early thirties, then made their radio-writing debut together in 1936 with their co-authorship of the New Lamps for Old series, Ringwood, always the stage writer, never returned to the historical radio series, while Gowan, with Building, used the form to launch a successful twenty year career in radio work, much of it consisting of series writing.
According to Gowan, the monetary benefits of writing for radio formed no small part of the medium's appeal for her. 'When I got the contract to write The Building of Canada, the idea of twenty scripts at twenty-five dollars a script was riches.'4 However, Gowan, the more overtly political and cerebral writer of the two, also found that the radio series format allowed her to experiment with her vision in a way previously frustrated by the technical and ideological limitations of a community theatre movement too prone to indulge in social hoopla and the production of escapist fluff.5She found the thirty minute format of the individual episodes well-suited to the kind of tight, concise craftsmanship she had developed while writing one-act plays for the Little Theatre movement. 6 At the same time, the tremendous fluidity in time and space permitted by radio writing, as well as the larger sweep of the series form-the cumulative effect that could be achieved by juxtaposing twenty one-act plays linked by commonalities in theme, subject matter and characterization-allowed Gowan the historian and socialist the opportunity to explore the larger processes of social and historical evolution at a level of complexity and sophistication virtually impossible in the conventional amateur theatre of the time.
On a purely technical level, Gowan's Building series marks a considerable advance not only over her own New Lamps for Old episodes, 7 but over Merrill Denison's Romance of Canada series. While this manifests itself in the individual episodes in the form of more sophisticated narrative bridges, increasingly complex soundscapes and an increasingly fluid use of time and space, including flashbacks, flashforwards and expressionistic techniques, it makes itself even more apparent in the internal organization of the series as a whole. Both Lamps and Romance were loosely organized collections of episodes featuring isolated figures and events, selected randomly from the sweep of world history in the case of Lamps and, in the case of Romance, from Canadian history. Gowan's Building, by contrast, was actually conceived of as a cohesive ten hour epic drama written in several interlinking keys, themes and movements to realize a particular historical and ideological vision. 8
Far more than just the technical craft, it is the vision itself, and the ways in which Gowan resolves the apparent contradictions inherent within it which prove most intriguing to the modern reader: how she handles the tension between her role as a trained researcher and historian-a professional concerned almost by definition with the objective chronicling and analysis of the largely male dominated world of wars, economy, politics and public life-with her role as a social activist playwright driven by passionate socialistic, pacifistic and liberal feminist convictions. If one is a socialist, how does one deal with the fact that most history deals with life as lived and recorded by the socially and politically dominant upper classes, largely relegating the proletariat to 'bit' roles, as spearholders and supporting players? If one is a pacifist, how does one deal with the fact that so much of the written record, like a good Aristotelian play, dwells on the grand, violent action and the exciting conflicts, plot machinations, peripeteias, and catastrophes of military action? If one is a feminist, how does one deal with the fact that, with a few freakish exceptions, most women, quite literally, are just not where the action is, and so remain invisible? And finally, if the present is a continuation of the same economic, political and social processes that shape the past, how can one interpret history to give validity to a socialistic, pacifistic and feminist vision that seems so completely alienated from the reality of human history as lived and recorded to date?
The question was as relevant in the thirties as it is now, and Denison and Gowan's respective treatments of the problem in their historical radio series reveals much about how even a progressive playwright can end up doing surprisingly conservative work less because of a failure of vision than a feeling that one's hands are tied by a certain kind of 'reality' and the limitations of the genre one is working within. Denison's stage plays, like Gowan's, reveal a healthy skepticism for established authority and in some instances, like Marsh Hay, a very real sensitivity to the kind of social, economic and political factors that can trap the disadvantaged, and women in particular, into unfulfilling lives. Two of his later historical radio plays celebrate the courage of Susan B. Anthony, an important American suffragette, and Mary Dyer, a Quakeress prepared to die rather than betray her pacifistic beliefs. And yet, the six published episodes, along with the summaries of the other seventeen Romance plays given in the Fink book of radio play listings,9suggests that Denison's Canadian historical series tended to celebrate the very values of male pioneer adventure, class hierarchy, empire-building, war and military glory he views with a more ironical eye elsewhere. Why?
The answer may lie in Denison's introduction to the Romance anthology where he confesses to having a concern for 'historical veracity,' and feeling that 'in certain instances, dramatic possibilities have had to be sacrificed in the interests of historical fact.'10 Historical truth is what is contained in the written record, and what history excludes, the good historical writer must also exclude. Dyer and Anthony are acceptable subjects because their court cases are part of the public record-but how many other women reach the historical record in the same fashion? Only four of Denison's twenty-three plays a two-episode version of the Marguerite de Roberval story, and individual episodes featuring Laura Secord and Françoise La Tour-feature women as the main protagonists. And outside of Laura Secord herself, only three women characters, all of them in small, subservient roles, appear in the whole of the six play anthology.
Gowan's series, by contrast, tackles the problem with considerably more boldness, and shows a greater willingness to fictionalize in order to ultimately present what she sees as a truer version of historical reality. The big moments, the big actions and the big men may still be there in Building, but Gowan continually comes at them in a slightly ironical, off-centre fashion that jolts the listeners out of complacency and forces them to question their own perceptions of historical and contemporary reality.
Gowan sometimes accomplishes this by juxtaposing episodes to create irony. For instance, her Confederation play, 'From Sea to Sea' (XVII), which celebrates Confederation in the traditional manner as the end result of a long and arduous struggle for self-rule in Québec and Ontario, is immediately followed by her Riel Rebellion play, 'Red Star in the West' (XVIII), which sharply reminds the listener of how quickly the oppressed can become the oppressors if they succumb to self-interest and complacency.
In other places, she uses the almost Brechtian technique of suddenly juxtaposing differing historical realities in startling ways. For instance, she opens her Frontenac play, 'The Fighting Governor' (V), with a flash forward that suggests that the world as John Morel experiences it in present-day 1938, is not so different from the one experienced by his ancestor in the New France of the seventeenth century:
John: Well, they must have had a lot of fun in Canada in those days They didn't
have all this political stuff on their minds ... Fascism and communism and all that. It must have been a wild, free life.
Narrator: laughing. I'm afraid you've been reading a lot of romantic nonsense ... That was where the old fire-eater [Frontenac] did most of his fighting ... fighting a political system that was choking Canada to death. Louis XIV had a one-man government in the old world ... a Fascist state, you would all it now. And he tried to fasten the despotism on New France.
John: He couldn't get away with that! This is a free country.
Narrator: Yes, this is a free country. But that was something King Louis could not believe. Young fellows like you had none too good a time.11
More significant in terms of Gowan's craft, however, is her decision to link the events of history to the fortunes and perspectives of several families as they evolve over the course of several generations: the Couillards and Morels of Quebec, the English Grants who intermarry with the Morels, the United Empire Loyalist Steele family, and the Scottish McLeods and McKays who settle out West.
Gowan has credited Noel Coward's 1930 play, Cavalcade, as the inspiration for the idea, and for providing her with a contemporary dramatic model of how the outer world of public affairs, where the great speeches, fights and legislation go on, could be effectively balanced against the inner world of the parlour and the drawing room where families meet to argue over the impact of these larger affairs on their individual fortunes.12 However, shaped by demands of her own socio-historical vision and the radio series format, Gowan quickly makes the device uniquely her own.
Where Cavalcade only covers the historical period between 1899 and 1930 and still focuses largely on the personal human drama played out between the 'upstairs' Marryot and 'downstairs' Bridges families, Building covers over 300 years of complex political and economic development in Canada, with Gowan's considerably more complex and extended family networks becoming an important part of the structural and thematic latticework knitting the twenty-part series into a coherent whole. Significantly, her ease in dealing with increasingly complex political issues, sub-plots and jumps in time and location corresponds closely to the increasingly sophisticated development of her family systems. Where the five expository episodes showing the start of French and English settlement in Canada ('Raleigh, Prophet of Empire' [I]-'Frontenac, the Fighting Governor' [V]) are more loosely arranged and feature only the Couillard family in a single episode, the whole complex process of nation-building occupying the central part of the series between the Conquest ('The Dragon From the Sea'[VI]) and Confederation ('From Sea to Sea' [XVIII]) is intricately linked by the ongoing fortunes of the three main families, and other continuing characters like Henry Slater, the Durham-Elgin family, John A. Macdonald and James Douglas. Throughout the long and continuing saga of Canada's evolution from colony to self-determining nation, the long fight for home-rule, the reconciling of the racial tensions between French and English Canada so union can be achieved, the opening of the prairies and the securing of the Western Coast, Gowan plays shrewdly with the knowledge that what listeners might forget as an abstract idea, they are unlikely to forget as a human being holding and being affected by those ideas.
At the same time, if Gowan's families allow her to deal with the grand public patterns more effectively, the same families are also constantly providing an ironic perspective on them. As Gowan said in a 1991 interview:
Public events impinge on private lives ... and very often I felt there was a military something or another where there wasn't a need for it.13
The fact that the little people are not in the public record does not mean that they have ceased to exist in a meaningful way, nor that their actions, reactions and sufferings should form no part of how one evaluates the worth of public actions. Where Denison's heroes are judged to be great men solely on the strength of their physical courage and effectiveness as explorers, soldiers and leaders of men in the public realm, Gowan as strongly evaluates the greatness of her Frontenac and Montcalm by their ability to deal intelligently and sensitively with the cast of women, children and working men that she as a dramatist places around them. As an historian, she also highlights the worth of such lords as Selkirk, Durham and Elgin by making pointed reference to their recorded writings and actions favoring the reformation of society to improve the lot of the common people.
Where the series' ironic edge more clearly manifests itself, though, is in the contrast between the conventional interpretation of the great events as promoted by the public record, and the way the latter are experienced by the little people. Are events like the Fall of Québec and the Québec Act good things? To the extent that without them there would be no Québec, no United Empire Loyalists coming up to form Ontario, and hence no Canada as we know it, Gowan, the historian would have to say 'yes.' At the same time, Gowan the socialist and pacifist asks with equal force whether eight-year old Louise Morel who loses her uncle-guardian and her inheritance would regard the Conquest as a good thing? Would the Steele family, terrorized by a Massachusetts Revolutionary mob and forced to flee penniless to Canada, appreciate the Québec Act?
Similarly, it is impossible to hear young Susan Steele's fiery defense of armed revolt in the 'Patriots of '37' (XII) without the listener's mind returning to the experience of her great-grandmother and namesake who lost so much because of a similar revolutionary war. In a similar fashion, Charlie O'Connor, her pro-patriot fiancé, and her loyalist brother, David, find their heated political rhetoric in the Steele's safe, secure drawing room rudely shattered by the reality of serving under the leadership of Bond-Head and Mackenzie, respectively. Confronted by what war really means in terms of military inefficiency and bungling by the leaders and the destruction of good people and their homes and families on both sides, David quietly breaks military discipline and lets Charles slip through his fingers as a prisoner, then returns as quickly as he can to his farming. Whatever the glories of the military, one cannot help but agree with the immense good sense of Louise's young son Philip, ('Grenville's Sword' [IX]) who resists his English father's insistence that he pursue the family's traditional military calling, with the plea:
I mean ... I want to be part of the government. It's much more interesting than killing people. Don't you think it's an honorable career, father-I mean to pass good laws and make people happy?14
By the time Lord Durham ('Radical Jack' [XIII]) interviews 82-year-old Louise Morel Grant in Québec, then Susan Steele and her father, James, in Kingston, in order to get down to the real cause of the 1837 rebellions, he is no longer dealing with an abstract problem of Canadian sovereignity, but a sequence of political, military and economic forces that have hurt and disrupted the lives of ordinary people on both the French and English sides for generations. The chiming of the same clock that we first heard in the Steeles' Massachusetts kitchen in 1777 (the day the Revolutionary mob destroyed their old life forever) and the soft playing of the same piano we first heard at Susan's birthday party in 1837 (the last happy day she had with the now-exiled Charlie and her family before the Rebellion disrupted their household) form a poignant human subtext to the more measured discussion of the issues of union and self-rule that Durham and James are conducting in the Steele parlour in 1838.
In addition to adding a covert socialistic and pacifistic dimension to the series, a third consequence of the strong family presence, as Gowan explained in 1991, is that it gave her an opportunity to put 'plenty of women in the plays ... and usually women who had minds of their own.'15 While Gowan, like Denison, sometimes fastened on large female figures like Lady LaTour, she was much better at finding and employing the female presence in history in places where few male historical writers would think to look for it, let alone think of exploiting it. For instance, noting that Lord Elgin's wife in 'The Figurehead' (XVI) was, in fact, Durham's daughter, Gowan strongly pushes the idea of Canadian self-government descending from Durham through the female line. Gowan's Lady Elgin is portrayed as a courageous woman who is her husband's partner in every sense of the word, and a shrewd advisor to him on state matters. Her courage in standing by her husband in the face of an ugly mob incident at the house in Montreal is also reinforced in the play by a small biographical detail that again caught Gowan's eye:
I was reading in the Encyclopedia ... on Lord Elgin, and it said 'Victor so-and-so Elgin bom so-and-so in the spring of 1849'-and that was the spring when the riots happened. So she was pregnant when this mob was howling in the streets. I mean here he was pursuing a policy which was bringing down upon their house the fury of this mob. And she was pregnant.16
Baby Victor appears in the scene immediately following the mob incident, with a pointed comment about his nativity date:
Baldwin: Canadian democracy is the same age as your son, my Lord, dating from last April.
Elgin: Three weeks older, to be exact weeks I am not likely to forget.17
Far more interesting, however, are the ways in which Gowan brings the common woman into visibility. If women like Louise Morel and the young Susan Steele become important through lines of perception in the central section of the Building series it is at least in part because Gowan continually writes scenes that centre the action in the private domestic world of the parlor room, the kitchen, the salon and the drawing room-the very places where women are most visible and most apt to wield power. Denison's Romance, by contrast, is quite literally set in a man's world. With the notable exception of 'Laura Secord,' one looks in vain for a single significant domestic scene among the plethora of wilderness camps, ships, military headquarters and state and council rooms that contain the action in Denison's six published scripts.
Similarly, while Denison never really questions the conventional historical record and tends to deal with the giants of history as he finds them, Gowan, always more interested in diaries and oral history and the ways in which the question of perspective-who is telling the story-alters the recording of fact,18 again often uses a female perspective to give public affairs the slightly ironical, off-centre view of the outsider.
As a consequence, even when Denison and Gowan deal with the same historical event, their approaches are widely different. Denison's 'Radisson' play, for instance, is set in the English court as the adventurer recounts, via flashbacks, his splendid deeds of cunning, trickery and physical courage against his native and French adversaries in Canada. Gowan's play, tellingly titled 'He Was No Gentlemen' (IV), sets all but one of its scenes in the Kirkes' house in London, and focuses on the response of Radisson's English wife, Mary Kirke, to his adventures; seen through her eyes, the romantic adventurer she allies herself with as a lovestruck girl progressively reveals himself to the maturing woman as a shallow, faithless cad whose cavalier attitude towards his family mirrors his larger lack of loyalty towards his masters in public life. In short, the bold male adventurer of Denison's play begins to look disconcertingly like a precocious but immature adolescent in Gowan's.
Another notable contrast occurs in Gowan and Denison's plays about Montcalm. Where Denison's play focuses on the military chessgame waged between Wolfe and Montcalm and the tragic way in which Montcalm's game is constantly being sabotaged from within by the notoriously corrupt, and extravagant administration of Intendant François Bigot, Gowan tells her story largely from the perspective of Julie Morel, the young, pleasure-loving wife of Major René Morel, and her eight-year-old niece, Louise, whose memory we will be following through until 1838. While the play still focuses on the public realm of military and economic bungling through the discussion of the men, the human and social concerns of the colony, barely mentioned in Denison, are revealed through the moral awakening of Julie. The latter's love of frivolity and desire to rise into the Intendant's charmed circle with its endless round of extravagant parties, banquets and balls is given a rude shock when a young man, ironically a descendant of the Episode II ('On This Rock') Couillards we saw escaping to the New World to escape the tyranny of the Old, violently interrupts Bigot's party to accuse him of starving his mother to death with his man-made famine. Julie intercedes, and her questioning of the young man in the privacy of her home shortly afterwards, awakens her to the full horror of the extent to which Bigot's pomp and splendor is based on an oppression of the common people. The Battle of the Plains of Abraham interrupts her determination to do something to rectify the injustice-but even now, Gowan's play refuses to shift to the battleground. As with 'The Price of Loyalty' (VIII), where the play follows the adventures of Steele women contending with exile rather than those of their men fighting as soldiers, the play instead follows Julie's and Louise's courageous move to the convent to nurse the wounded despite the danger of shellfire, Julie's grief upon hearing of René's death, and her stoical return to duty to nurse the dying Montcalm. Again, in Denison's 'Montcalm' valor is measured according to the generals' ability to play their military and administrative games well: in Gowan, valor is measured more by the courage of women in containing the human damage caused by their men and their stupid public games.
Another case of the historical perspective being altered significantly by the feminine perspective is presented by Gowan's treatment of the Riel Rebellion ('Red Star in the West' [XVIII]). In an initial draft of the play, the story is told largely through the eyes of one of the young male settlers, Robert McKay. In the final draft, the throughline has been shifted to the perspective of his future mother-in-law, Jean McLeod. Not only do Jean and her daughter, Margot, spring more into the foreground by this rewrite, but history changes too. Fully three of the six scenes are set in the women's cottage, giving the women's world of the play close to equal time with the men's world of the Rebellion proper.
Jean, the maternal spirit of this world, may be sympathetic to the Metis cause and feel Riel is right to stand up to the Eastern encroachers who have been treating the settlers like cattle-but she has a longer personal and communal memory that puts this immediate conflict into perspective. She is a stoic descendent of a whole line of Scottish crofters first seen in the Selkirk play ('The Silver Chief' [X]) and then the 'Seven Oaks' episode (XI), who have seen their healthy desire to be fertile and reproduce, both in terms of their families and their farming, disrupted first by the economic Empire-building of the Scottish lairds in the Old Country, then of the Hudson's Bay and Northwest companies in the New. As a result, she has scant patience with either the old racial and religious enemities Thomas Scott, Riel's implacable Orangeman enemy from Ontario, is trying to perpetuate, or with the growing dictatorial and military aspirations of Riel himself. Whatever their intentions, the end results of their stupid childish posturing and fighting is that the farming gets neglected, families are disrupted, nuptials delayed, and the whole network of goodwill created by family helping family in a free and cooperative fashion regardless of race, ethnicity or gender, is disintegrating.Jean's exasperated maternal feeling for both young men surfaces in Scene 3, when Scott, having hurt himself escaping from Riel's custody, arrives in Jean's cottage to have the wound dressed-yet another case of women trying to repair the damage done by stupid male violence:
Scott: You're a pretty girl, Margot McLeod, when your eyes flash and your cheeks are flaming red. But you don't understand a man's world! Do you think white men will sit down tamely and let a breed rule the roost? Do you think we ... AAAHHH! Blast it, woman, you did that on purpose!
Jean: Hold steady then, and don't provoke me with your boasting and your blethers [ ... ] The Lord made all men in his Image, white and red. There's times I think the white have no cause to be proud. Well there's your arm dressed. Try not to move it more than you can help.
Margot: Please think of what we've said. Don't let your friends drive Riel to violence. Scott: I'll help my friends send Louis to the hot place! Good night, Mrs. Mac ... and thank you.
Jean: Good night, lad. Heaven send you wisdom.
Scott: laughing Petticoat government! Good-night. (He goes)
Jean: Poor laddie. If he had the brains to match his strength and courage ... he would be a man.19
Jean obviously feels that a similar lack of brains and compassion lies at the heart of Riel's tragedy as well as Scott's. Looking back over the subsequent execution of Scott at Riel's hands and the latter's flight into exile upon the retributive arrival of the Canadian troops, it is clear that she deeply mourns not only the larger plight of the colony itself, but the escalating cycle of personal violence and irrationality that has led one promising young man to murder the other, bringing needless destruction upon both themselves and their people. Summing up Riel's career in the final moments of the play, Jean comments:
Jean: He did one cruel, stupid thing [Scot's murder] that blinds us to the good he did afore it. [sighing] Eh well ... I pray we have no dictators on the Red River ... or anywhere else in the country ... from this day forth.20
To sum up, through incorporating a strong family prescence into her Building series and constantly focusing on the view of public figures and events as seen through the eyes of the common man, child, and most significantly, woman, Gowan creates an ironic, off-centre interpretation of historical reality that not only justifies her socialistic, pacifistic and feminist vision of the past but of the present as well.
That Gowan's vision of history, in fact, acknowledges that continuum in a way that Denison's doesn't is evident in the chronologies of their respective series. Where none of Denison's episodes go beyond 1897 ('The Last Stand of Almighty Voice') and he chooses to end the series on a celebratory note with Confederation in 1867, Gowan chooses to end her series in more contemporary times with 'Saddle and Plough' (XIX) being set in turn-of-the century Alberta, and the twentieth and final episode, significantly entitled 'No More Heroes,' moving the action up to the audience's own time of 1938.
The wisdom of doing so in a historical series was apparently a bone of contention between Gowan and Marryat, and the terms of that disagreement again reflect the difficulty of adequately defining the proper parameters and purposes of historical drama. According to Gowan,21 Marryat objected to the strongly fictional nature of the final episodes on the grounds that this put them seriously at odds with the more serious political and historical tone of the previous eighteen episodes. ('Saddle and Plough' was a Breeches from Bond Street type comedy about the conflict between rancher and farmer in pioneer Alberta, while 'No More Heroes' worked more in the mode of popular romance/adventure.) She felt that if it was impossible to move the series into the present time without creating obvious inconsistencies in approach, subject matter and style, then perhaps the action was better left at a more manageable distance in the past. Gowan disagreed. While she felt the changes in style were necessitated by the fact that it became progressively more difficult to sustain the same kind of overt political and social analysis into the present without becoming a propaganda writer for one faction or the other on contentious contemporary issues, she felt the unorthodox approach did not disqualify the final episodes as historical drama within the context of the series. Even 'No More Heroes' was still based on written and oral research, with some of its characters and incidents being loosely based on the northern experiences of Gordon Latham, an actor who had worked in Gowan's earlier CCF dramas. 22
Even more to the point, it is clear that Gowan has subtly brought the series' throughlines of historical and cultural analysis into the present under the cover of the romantic fiction. Leit-motifs from other episodes of the past continue to form a strong sub-text to the actions of the present. For instance, echoes of 'Raleigh: Prophet of Empire,' the first episode, are worked into the name of the mine camp-El Dorado. Thus the end returns to the beginning. But there is a moving forward even as history repeats itself, and yet a new Canadian frontier-the radium mines of the northland-opens even as the old ones close. The descendants of the Old French, English, Scottish and American families are here, but they are having to integrate themselves with yet a new wave of immigration-the Ukrainians, Poles, and Swedes represented by the character of Pete Swonek-and re-learn the old lessons of interdependence, adventure, co-operation and trust. The women's issue is also very much present in the play's mention of one of the men bringing a picture of Madame Marie Sklovdovska Curie with him-a not so subtle reminder that a woman's genius, and a Polish woman at that, is responsible for the settlement existing at all and the good radium will bring the world. And the pioneer woman of today?-an intrepid young newspaper woman, Louise Ross, from Toronto, willing to dare the masculine world of mines, snow and hardship to get her story.
Nor is the battle against hierarchical oppression yet won. Jack 'Red' Morel, a troublemaker who has been involved in strikes in Vancouver, asserts that he is indeed a true descendant of Jacques Morel, the courier de bois and first Morel of the series:
Red: My folks were French, you know, way back. My grandpa told me how one of them long ago ran off into the wilderness [ ... ] They couldn't hitch him to a plow and make him a serf because he wanted freedom. That's my heritage, Louise ... to love freedom and fight for it if I have to. It's in the blood.
Louise: Some people think ... that all our battles are over. And if you tell them ... there's still injustice and slavery in Canada ... they call you a Bolshevik and think they've settled the argument.
Red: 'Things as they are must remain as they are to the end of time.' As if there weren't rebels and fighters and pioneers in every generation.
Louise: Like us, Red.23
As the play and the series closes on the last Morel contemplating the final frontier of air and northern rock, and the possibility of romance with the tough, feisty Louise, the point is eloquently made that perhaps there really is no more need for heroes, because history is and always has been more about common men and women working together to achieve equality and justice in the social, political and economic world we all inhabit, than about the safely distanced icons of the textbooks.
NOTES
Special thanks to Steve Olson for allowing me access to his invaluable 21 May 1991 interview with Elsie Park Gowan.
1 Gowan, Elsie Park. 'The Freedom of Mrs. Radway' The Hungry Spirit: Selected Plays and Prose edited by Moira Day (Edmonton: NeWest Press 1992) p 313
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2 Ibid p 316-317
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3 Letter, Dick Macdonald to Gwen Pharis Ringwood, 1979. Gwen Pharis Ringwood Papers, University of Calgary.Gowan fondly remembers Macdonald, an English ex-patriate, as playing 'all the Englishmen. He was Lord Durham and all the English aristocrats ... and governors. He had a beautiful voice and a very nice English accent. Very authentic.' She also recalls that local francophone Gerry Bard played most of the Frenchmen. She herself starred as Lady LaTour in 'Kings in Acadia' (III), though she was generally too busy writing to also act in the series. (Gowan-Olson interview)
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4 Elsie Park Gowan. Interview with Steve Olson. 21 May 1991
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5 Elsie Park Gowan. Interview with Moira Day. 10 January 1985
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6 Most of Gowan's playwriting for the Little Theatre and associated amateur groups occurred between 1930 and
1938. In terms of a playwriting model, she credits Percival Wilde's The Craftsmanship of the One-Act Play as
being the most 'lucid and clear guide' on the subject Strong desire ... must motivate the whole thing- and
strong opposition ... I always write a scenario. I say, Scene 1. Who is there? So-and-so, and so-and-so. What
is the point? Scene 2. Who is there? How does this advance the story? How does this reveal the conflict? How
does this build character? Every line in the play should build character, advance the plot or develop the setting
... If it doesn't do one of those things- chuck it out. Unless it's very funny! (Gowan-Day interview, 16 August
1991)Also see her article 'A Playwright Looks At The One-Act Play'
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7Looking back over the Lamps series, Gowan concedes that it took a while for her radio writing to move
imaginatively beyond the confines of the box set, and that her narrative bridges in particular were a weakness
in her early radio writing: When I read those plays, they make my hair curl ... I cheerfully had him [Erasmus]
go from Holland to England to Switzerland, without bothering to put in any narration. In those days ... if he
met Henry VIII, obviously he was in England. Or you would have someone say 'In the four years you've been
in Switzerland . . .' Nowadays you would simply have a narrator, and there would be no fuss and bother.
(Gowan-Olson interview)
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8 Gowan, a 1930 Honours History graduate from the University of Alberta, credits the Canadian History
course she took from Professor A. L. Burt as providing the larger historical infrastructure for the series. She
outlined the individual episodes about a week in advance, and took advantage of the rebroadcasting of the
series over CBC to improve characterization, coherence and clarity both within the individual plays and across
the series as a whole. (Elsie Park Gowan. Telephone conversation with Moira Day, 21 May 1992.) Notable
changes occur between the first and second drafts of 'Under One Flag' (VII) and 'Red Star in the West'
(XVIII)
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9 Information on Denison's Romance of Canada series is based on the six scripts published in the collection
Henry Hudson and Other Plays, as well as the summaries of the remaining episodes listed in Howard Fink's
Canadian National Theatre on the Air 1925-1961
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10 Merrill Denison, Henry Hudson and Other Plays: Six Plays for the Microphone from the 'Romance of
Canada' Series of Radio Broadcasts (Toronto: Ryerson Press 1931) ix
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11 'Frontenac, The Fighting Governor' (V), The Building of Canada, Elsie Park Gowan Papers, University of
Alberta Archives.
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12 Elsie Park Gowan. Interview with Moira Day. 16 August 1991.
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13 Ibid.
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14 'Grenville's Sword' (IX), The Building of Canada, Elsie Park Gowan Papers, University of Alberta Archives.
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15 Gowan-Day interview. 16 August 1991.
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16 Gowan-Day interview. 16 August 1991.
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17 'The Figurehead' (XVI), The Building of Canada, Elsie Park Gowan Papers, University of Alberta Archives.
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18 Gowan's research into both her historical and social issue dramatic writing often led her into oral sources as
well as the standard written documents. In doing the Edmonton pageant ['Who Builds a City' fp: Edmonton: 8
October 1954], 1 had a lot of interesting talks with oldtimers in Edmonton ... I remember Colonel and Mrs.
Jameson ... talking about Inauguration Day [1905] when Edmonton became the capital of Alberta. And Mrs.
Jameson said, 'And the mounties rode up from the flats and played a polo game at so-and-so's-' And the
Colonel said 'Nothing of the kind! The mounties did no such thing.' 'But my dear, I remember it.' 'No, no, no -'
A real wingding family argument! You see, they remembered it in different ways. And that's true of nearly
everything ... That's just human nature. (Gowan-Day Interview, 16 August 1991) Also see her article, 'History
Into Theatre.'
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19 'Red Star In The West' (XVIII)' The Building of Canada, Elsie Park Gowan Papers, University of Alberta
Archives.
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20 Ibid.
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21 Gowan-Day Interview, 16 August 1991
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22 Gowan-Day telephone conversation, 21 May 1992.
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23 'No More Heroes,' Building of Canada. Elsie Park Gowan Papers, University of Alberta Archives.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
PRIMARY SOURCES
Coward, Noel. Cavalcade. London: Heinemann, 1932.
Denison, Merrill. Henry Hudson and Other Plays: Six Plays for the Microphone from the 'Romance of Canada' Series of Radio Broadcasts (Toronto: Ryerson Press 1931)
Denison, Merrill. Haven of the Spirit: A Play in One-Act (New York: Dramatists Play Service 1939)
Denison, Merrill. The U.S. vs. Susan B. Anthony, A Play in One-Act (New York:Dramatists Play Service 1941)
Gowan, Elsie Park. The Building of Canada. Elsie Park Gowan Papers. University of Alberta Archives.
*'Raleigh, Prophet of Empire' (I), 'On This Rock' (II), *'Kings in Acadia' (III),'He Was No Gentleman' (IV), 'Frontenac, the Fighting Governor' (V), 'The Dragon From The Sea' (VI), 'Under
One Flag' (VII), 'The Price of Loyalty' (VIII), 'Grenville's Sword' (IX), 'The Silver Chief' (X), 'Seven Oaks'
(XI), 'The Patriots of '37' (XII), 'Radical Jack' (XIII), 'The Eagle of Oregon' (XIV), 'The Argonauts' (XV), 'The
Figurehead' (XVI), 'From Sea to Sea' (XVII), 'Red Star In The West' (XVIII), *'Saddle and Plough' (XIX), 'No
More Heroes' (XX)
* Missing from collection
Gowan, Elsie Park. The Hungry Spirit: Selected Plays and Prose edited by Moira Day (Edmonton: NeWest Press 1992)
SECONDARY SOURCES
Books and Articles
Fink, Howard. Canadian National Theatre on the Air 1925-1961. CBC-CRBC-CNR Radio Drama in English, A Descriptive Bibliography and Union List (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1983)
Gowan, Elsie Park. 'History Into Theatre' Canadian Author and Bookman Vol.51, No. I (Fall 1975)
Gowan, Elsie Park. 'A Playwright Looks At The One-Act Play.' Alberta English Teacher (June1963)
Wagner, Anton. 'Elsie Park Gowan: Distinctively Canadian.' Theatre History in Canada Vol. 8, No. I (Spring 1987)
Thesis
Olson, Steve. 'The Function Of Radio Drama: An Alberta Perspective' M.A. University of Alberta, Fall 1991
Interviews
Gowan, Elsie Park. Interviews with Moira Day: 10 January 1985; 28 July 1991; 16 August 1991
Gowan, Elsie Park. Interview with Steve Olson. 21 May 1991.
Gowan, Elsie Park. Telephone conversation with Moira Day. 21 May, 1992.