Lumberjacks, Muscular Christianity, and Nation Building: Creating an Aspirational Canadian Masculinity, 1820 – 1912

In the first half of the nineteenth century, Canadian lumberjacks were viewed by Upper Canada’s urban middle class as embodying transgressive masculinity due to the lumberjack’s lack of adherence to British Protestant middle-class social norms. In the second half of the nineteenth century, public perception of loggers slowly began to change, and the public started to view lumberjacks as a new masculine ideal and symbol of a Canadian national identity. Examining Canadian literature, both fiction and non-fiction, through gender and cultural history methodologies and interdisciplinary theoretical approaches, such as intersectionality, literary cartography, literary geography, and ecospatiality, can illuminate disseminated messages about masculinity in the logging industry. These messages were intended for a public audience that was often far removed from the actual life and work of the men toiling away in remote forests. As a result, the early nineteenth century saw lumberjacks being a source of concern for the moral well-being of the budding nation of Canada, with the violence of the early years of that century spreading worry and fear about loggers when they would return to town after their work season. Through religious messaging like pamphlets and preaching, the public gained an understanding of the contributions that loggers made to the economy, leading authors to begin to write loggers as aspirational characters. Canadian literature sought to reform the logger’s image into the embodiment of muscular Christianity by praising the loggers for their rugged manliness that allowed them to reclaim the masculinity that the authors believed was being taken from men who lived in effeminizing urban centres. Further, Canadian textual materials, in combination with missionary attempts to educate and reform loggers themselves, contributed to the Canadian lumberjack’s position as a representative of the Canadian nation’s ideals of masculinity. By focusing on remote and rural gender and cultural history in the Ontario logging industry, this thesis aims to track competing narratives surrounding representations of masculinity in the logging industry between 1820 and 1912 and their relationships to how the lumberjack became a popular modern Canadiana motif and symbol of nation building.

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