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“Working” in the West: The Canadian Prairies as Playground in Late-Victorian Literature

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canadian literature, specifically fiction about the Canadian West, frequently had multiple national origins and audiences. Some fiction by Canadian authors was published solely in Canada; a good percentage was also published in the United States; and some novels, particularly by popular writers like Ralph Connor, were published in Toronto, New York, and London. During the same period, a number of British novelists were also writing stories about the Canadian West, published first in London for British readers and, if successful, subsequently in New York or Toronto. For Canadian and British-born novelists alike, the prairies and foothills of the West (though frequently portrayed with very little accuracy or detail) served as an ideal setting for adventure and romance. While the entire corpus of turn-of-the-century novels written about the West has generally been considered part of Canadian literature, regardless of an author's origin, the ideological and mythologica l functions of the West in this literature often vary significantly depending on a given author's nationality. The purpose of this essay is to draw a line of distinction between fictions of the Canadian West produced by Canadian and British writers and, by analyzing constructions of work and masculinity in these texts, to show that British novelists utilized the West to address particular British cultural anxieties quite removed from the concerns of Canadian writers. More specifically, I will argue that while Canadian-born authors like Ralph Connor and Robert J.C. Stead attempted to fashion a masculinity of work suited to civilizing the Western territories, British writers engaged in a cultural redefinition of the "gentleman," a redefinition designed to celebrate the masculine and genteel virtues of emigrant manual labor at a time when British gentlemen faced professional unemployment at home. Late-Victorian novels like John Mackie's The Heart of the Prairie (1899) and James Morton's Polson's Probation (1897) insist that gentility cannot be sacrificed by working in the West, and that only by working with his hands can a British boy achieve manhood and become a gentleman. These British texts purport to ennoble manual labor and thus appear to concur with Connor's steadfast Christian manliness. However, because the British narratives so rarely depict work and replace it with a West filled with adventure and sport, what emerges from these texts is less a sense of genteel, working manhood than a state of perpetual adolescence which handicapped actual British emigrants with false expectations. II will begin by discussing briefly the masculine mythos in the novels of Ralph Connor before proceeding to the major focus of the essay, British fictions of the Canadian West. In Ralph Connor's fiction, the ideal man is invariably a Westerner. J. Lee Thompson and John Thompson have shown that, for Connor, a man's full potential can only be realized in the West, just as Canada's national destiny will only come to fruition in the "stern but redemptive environment" of the West. (1) In novels like The Sky Pilot, The Man from Glengarry, The Foreigner, and Corporal Cameron, Connor symbolizes the making of a nation in the making of a man, and thus settles on a readily identifiable model of manhood as the exemplar of Canadianness. Like the British authors discussed below, Connor too is invested in the ideal of the gentleman who works hard, but with an eye toward how that ideal defines a Canadian. For Connor, the true Canadian is Anglicized, in that he adapts English habits of orderliness along with a Protestant outlook, but without the Englishman's sense of class hierarchy. Kalman Kalmar, the hero of The Foreigner (1909), successfully sheds his Eastern European traditions and becomes a "go od Canadian"--Canadian enough to marry the Scottish heroine Marjorie Menzies. Connor felt that if Canada was to achieve cultural greatness, however, the West must not only assimilate "foreign" cultural identities, it must also call forth a new breed of Anglo-Saxon man, a breed significantly different from the men found in many British novels about Canada. …