"Even in this Canada of ours" : suffering, sympathy, and social justice in late-Victorian Canadian social reform discourse

Social historians have identified in late nineteenth-century English Canada a passion for social reform, largely initiated and organized by white, middle-class, Protestant Canadians, and designed to teach Canadian society greater compassion, equality, and humanity. Responding to the changes wrought in a rapidly industrializing, expanding nation, social reformers hoped to alleviate the suffering caused by social hierarchies, particularly the physical distress of the working poor and the stifling confinement of middle-class women. During this same period, a developing nationalist discourse insisted that Canada, for reasons of its youth, political institutions, climate, and racial composition, was already far in advance of other nations in its superior tolerance, egalitarianism, and sympathy for the weak. The tensions, accommodations, and contradictions resulting from the intersection of nationalist and reform discourses is the focus of my study. Although the social concerns of this period have been the subject of a number of recent sociological and historical studies, very little attention has been paid to social criticism in English-Canadian literary texts. To remedy such neglect, this study examines the social problem novel in the context of a broad range of non-literary texts, such as addresses to the Royal Society, social reform essays, political editorials, and reports to reform organizations. I analyze how these texts together produce, contest, or defend an ideal of Canada as a classless, just, and harmonious New World nation. To examine this problematic and productive conjunction of nationalism and social criticism, I give close attention to three novels that form the centre-piece of my study: Agnes Machar's Roland Graeme. Knight (1892), Joanna Wood's The Untempered Wind (1894), and Amelia Fytche's Kerchiefs to Hunt Souls (1895). Reading these three novels as representative in their discursive strategies, I conclude that the social problem text took on the task of generating compassion among the educated and influential middle classes for the socially marginal in Canadian society: the poor, the intemperate, the fallen, and the transgressive. In these texts, compassion depends on the representation of undeserved, decorous suffering. Through such representations, these novels are engaged in two processes of definition. They define appropriate objects of philanthropic intervention at the same time as they define the nature and the boundaries of the sympathetic Canadian community. Social problem literature constructs ideal figures deserving hitherto-denied inclusion in this community, but invariably these narratives also identify and expel those who fall outside the community's bounds. Thus, social problem discourses reveal some of the fundamental cultural debates of the period and give us insight into the creation and consolidation of a hegemonic humanist ethic that continues to dominate representations of Canada and social justice today.

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