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Slow Violence and Dirty Mourning

The longevity of Sheldon Currie's 1977 short story "The Glace Bay Miner's Museum"--adapted to radio and stage play (by Wendy Lill), film (Margaret's Museum, directed by Mort Ransen), and novel (by Sheldon Currie) (1)--lies with narrator Margaret's grotesque response to coal mining deaths: she claims and preserves with formaldehyde selected body parts of her husband, brother, and grandfather to display as museum exhibits. Margaret's narration and her museum, I suggest here, are forms of "dirty mourning." Margaret's dissection of the bodies is "dirty" because it transgresses social taboos, just like her "dirty" thoughts and "dirty" body--the runny nose and sexual activity that earn her the labels "snot face" and "snot nosed whore" from her peers (Currie 8). Snotty and slutty, Margaret's body is grotesque in the way Bakhtin defines it--open, degraded, porous, and pleasurable, with exaggerated orifices and leaking fluids (317-18), a symbolic inversion of the closed, symmetrical classical body. This carnivalesque dimension of Currie's story is situated within another iconography of dirt: the trope of the dirty miner's face and the social ritual of cleaning the bodies of the dead. These remind us of the social, symbolic, affective, and physical work involved in sustaining a way of life. In the case of "The Glace Bay Miner's Museum" explicitly addressed to "you" (Currie 22), the reader as museum visitor and regional tourist, the way of life sustained through the "dirty" work of coal mining is mostly located elsewhere, in the modern conveniences powered by a fossil-fuel economy. Literary critics Patricia Yaeger, Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, Stephanie LeMenager, and Sheena Wilson are crafting a new cultural criticism focused on the relationship between energy systems and cultural practices--a line of inquiry that insists on re-imagining the role of criticism in the context of global climate change. Sheldon Currie's depiction of dirt as a social relation, linking individuals to place, to work, to family, to community, and to national economy, and hence open to acts of resistance and re-organization, is a useful beginning. Cleaning the bodies of the injured and dead is a ritual practice that recurs in Currie's mining stories, often as part of a coming-of-age experience in which sons and daughters come to terms with the actual or eventual loss of their parents through bodily intimacy. In The Company Store, Ian is shaped by his father's pit accident and his intimate washing of his father's body--naked with erect penis--at the hospital afterwards. He takes on familial responsibilities for a neighbour, Madeline, after helping her wash her husband, whom he found dead in the sewer. In the story "The Glace Bay Miner's Museum," Neil courts Margaret by writing a song elegizing her eldest brother Charlie Dave, dead in the pits at age sixteen, alongside her father. The song becomes the rite of passage that enables Margaret to agree to marry. In Glace Bay the novel, Margaret's first impulse on seeing the bodies of her father and brother is to ask to clean their faces: "I pulled the sheet down off their faces. Their faces were black with coal dust and didn't look like anything was wrong with them except they were dirty" (38). Although Margaret is comforted by the help of a nun in this task, the narrative troubles how the ritual normalizes their deaths: "she talked to me and made it all seem normal, the two of us standing over a dead face and cleaning the dirt off of it" (39). The dirty miner's face is a trope used extensively in the novel and the film Margaret's Museum, appearing at times of trauma or to signify solidarity, such as when Peggy, daughter of the mine manager, re-emerges from hiding in the coal bin from her father, her face "all over black," showing her allegiance with Ian, Neil, and Margaret (Currie, Glace Bay 85). Angus's blackened face amidst the clean miners at the mine washhouse--which hosts the only showers in the community--is used in both the film and the source text for the scene, The Company Store, to indicate a hopeless emasculation, with Angus in debt to the company store regardless of how much he works; to be clean would have indicated some degree of freedom from the company. …