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When Lieutenant-Colonel Frank Mckelvey Bell Penned a Short Novella on The

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When Lieutenant-Colonel Frank Mckelvey Bell Penned a Short Novella on The INTRODUCTION When Lieutenant-Colonel Frank McKelvey Bell penned a short novella on the Halifax explosion shortly after the catastrophic event, he titled the story A Romance of the Halifax Disaster (1918). This apt and relatively uninspired title summarizes the main thrust of the story, a melodramatic piece in which Bell blends his medical experiences in the hospital wards after the disaster with a saccharine soap opera of a young volunteer and young soldier who reunite after war separates them. Bell depicts the disaster with stereotypical romance language: Vera made a faint but ineffectual effort to release her hands as the color mounted rapidly to her cheeks. Before she could prevent it he had half raised himself in bed and kissed her on the lips. He freed her hands and lying back upon the pillow sighed contentedly: “That was worth the whole disaster!” (Bell) 1 Though Bell details the betrothal of two young lovers who overcome adversity to reunite, he also illustrates indirectly the proclivity of writers of romances to cast women in stereotypical gender roles. Vera is prevented from resisting the kiss from her amorous soldier because he keeps her hands in his strong grip. While Vera celebrates her reunion with Tom, she is also “embarrassed” by his advances in the hospital ward where they meet each other for the first time in years. Even though Tom is injured, Vera is the young romance heroine who, when pleased, reveals that “a faint flush of pleasure dyed her cheeks and in the moonlight her eyes looked unusually bright” (Bell). Tom remains the strong soldier—capable of fighting in the war and eventually returning home to his 1 The novella lacks page numbers. 1 lover like Odysseus. While the blend of non-fiction about the disaster with a love story that glorifies the explosion for its romantic possibilities is disconcerting, it is also an example of a genre in which traditional gender roles are typically seen in stark relief— promoted as the norm and celebrated for the reinforcement of heteronormativity. The process of returning women to heteronormativity is neatly illustrated in four romances set in the era in which the New Woman emerged, all dealing with the same historical episode: the Halifax explosion of 1917. The explosion occurred at a period when women were agitating for voting rights and working in non-traditional jobs because of the war. Though these narratives are set almost a century apart, the longevity of the romance as an instrument of patriarchal reinforcement is illustrated to this day. The four narratives reveal how four male authors exploit the New Woman figure yet ultimately recuperate her into heteronormativity. They are a novella by Frank McKelvey Bell entitled A Romance of the Halifax Disaster (1918), Hugh MacLennan’s Barometer Rising (1941), and Robert MacNeil’s Burden of Desire (1992). The fourth work is the CBC movie Shattered City (2003), scripted by Keith Ross Leckie. All four authors occupy or occupied fairly dominant positions in society. Bell was a military physician who had achieved the position of Lieutenant-Colonel by the time of the Halifax explosion. MacLennan spent his professional career in higher learning institutions of great repute. MacNeil was a prominent news anchor in the United States by the time his novel was published. Finally, the fourth, Leckie, is a filmmaker whose work was marketed as historical drama in conjunction with the CBC, which operates at arm’s length from the Canadian government. These four narratives share commonalities, including a succinct illustration of the containment women can experience within the 2 romance genre. As well, because these works span a century, from contemporary interpretations of the disaster like that of Bell, to more recent incarnations like Shattered City , this cluster of texts illustrate the tenacity of the genre. Debate over whether the romance genre upholds patriarchy or aids feminism continues even two decades after the appearance of Janice Radway’s popular study on the reinforcement of patriarchy in romance in Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1984, 1991). More recently, Pamela Regis, in A Natural History of the Romance (2002), has countered that romances do not bind their readers or heroines to patriarchy but instead celebrate the freedom of a heroine to choose her man after numerous struggles—what Regis calls “barriers” and “ritual deaths.” Literary criticism holds many possibilities for interrogating whether the genre frees woman, as Regis suggests, or upholds patriarchy even to this day, almost a century after Bell’s romance. The contemporary romance is one of the best-selling forms of fiction—selling more than literary fiction (Regis xi). Popular books such as the romance are an important aspect of popular culture because: They help to define our sense of our selves, shaping our desires, fantasies, imagined pasts and projected futures. An understanding of such fictions— of how they are produced and circulated, organized and received—is thus central to an understanding of ourselves; of how these selves have been shaped and of how they might be changed. (Bennett and Martin vii) If something such as a romance is important to our sense of selves as women, it is necessary to take a feminist approach to see how our selves might be shaped and altered by that very culture we absorb, sometimes unconsciously. The romance lens—rose- 3 coloured and perhaps slightly blurry—informs how we see culture. The politics behind its stereotypes and the norms they perpetuate must be interrogated, especially when authors like Hugh MacLennan seemed “to have agreed with Freud that only the male can be the culture maker” (Smyth “Con-texts” 144). In Bell’s example, we see that men as well as women exploit the genre to tell their stories. Some critics have argued that romances are not capable of reflecting real-life power relationships. Regis suggests that romances are incapable of providing a plan which allows romance readers to reorder their lives—in this case, to model relationships on romance novels (13). However, Radway posits: Because the reading process always confirms for the reader that she knows how to read male behaviour correctly, it suggests that her anger is unnecessary because her spouse, like the hero, actually loves her deeply, though he may not express it as she might wish. In the end, the romance- reading process gives the reader a strategy for making her present situation more comfortable without substantive reordering of its structure rather than a comprehensive program for reorganizing her life in such a way that all needs might be met. (Radway 215) While Regis’s criticism focuses on this particular passage from Radway, it does not note that taking the time to read romances detracts from time which could be otherwise spent fostering relationships with real people, agitating for social change, or volunteering and participating in women’s groups. This time, which holds potential for social change, is instead filled with rereading similar plots which enshrine marriage. Not all reading is a vapid waste of time, though a genre which frequently promotes patriarchy and one of its 4 key aspects—heteronormativity—becomes problematic if it develops into a surrogate for real life and experience. Romance writers have has the potential to question heteronormativity through a form which has previously highlighted separation between genders and subservience to men through a traditional betrothal or marriage. Contemporary romances have even exploited progressive figures of transition times and roped them back into polarized gender roles, such as the New Woman of the late Victorian period to the 1920s. 2 Even though the romance genre holds potential for women’s containment, Canadian authors of the period used the romance to satirically question stereotypes. While Anne of Green Gables (1908) can be mistaken for the first instalment of the romance between Anne Shirley and Gilbert Blythe—especially in the aftermath of the adaptation of Montgomery’s novels into a television miniseries, which highlighted the love story (Lefebvre 151)—Lucy Maud Montgomery actually mocks the genre by illustrating the inability of Anne to recognize stock romance gestures. Similarly, Sara Jeanette Duncan’s A Social Departure: How Orthodocia and I Went Round the World by Ourselves (1890) also parodies the romance formula by mocking matrimony. Though Anne eventually marries in the series—as does the hapless Orthodocia of A Social Departure —the tone of the novels intimates that while marriage is a societal norm, it does not make the most promising prospect for a young woman. Montgomery and Duncan write from the same period in which the young New Woman emerged. While appropriating the genre’s conventions, they attempt to break free of it by showing how the New Woman was 2 Ann Heilmann separates the period into the New Woman movement and “its Edwardian relative” the suffragette movement (13). However, for the purpose of this study, I include the late Victorian, Edwardian and First World War period as a general time of change, when women face an increase in agency in cultural activities and political spheres. The New Woman is the cultural construct as discussed in historical terms while the “new” woman is the narrative construct who is not a new woman but an old woman in masquerade. 5 allowed some progression early in her life, though she eventually returned to heteronormativity. Like Anne Shirley or S.J.D., 3 feminists appear in romances while struggling to overcome gender expectations. One such figure who rose to prominence is this New Woman, who attempted to transcend norms and ultimately free herself from the “immanence” of a life comprised of marriage preparation followed by wedlock. 4 Such potentially progressive women are depicted in the realistic short stories of Jessie Georgina Sime’s Sister Woman (1919), which mulls over the New Woman’s place in society through such figures as the prostitute, kept woman, and factory worker—all women who defy traditional gender roles but cannot rise above patriarchal economics.
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