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.

Several researchers have studied Sime and the New Woman figure, including Sandra

Campbell, Lindsay McMaster, and Lorraine McMullen; however, their research focuses on literature written by women, not men.

The exploitation of the New Woman figure in romances written by men has not been interrogated fully; but to provide a starting point for such an interrogation, I will look at research by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar into the power relations of men wielding a pen as a “metaphorical penis” (Gilbert and Gubar 3) and perpetuating power relations of society in literature. If men exploiting authorial power is pervasive in literary texts, then the political implications of men writing about feminism—in this case first wave feminism—are important to study. In The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman

Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), Gilbert and Gubar equate power in the text with power in society, meaning we ought to research how this

3 Duncan named her narrator S.J.D. even though the character differs from the author. 4 “Immanence” and “transcendence” are terms from Simone de Beauvoir’s existentialist background and feminist analysis in The Second Sex (1953) which will be discussed in detail presently.

6 power is manifested in literature. The idea of man as father of the text means that narratives arising from this relationship must be interrogated with an awareness of the power exploited by literary patriarchs.

Though many of these writers use the metaphor of literary paternity in

different ways and for different purposes, all seem overwhelmingly to

agree that a literary text is not only speech quite literally embodied, but

also power mysteriously made manifest, made flesh. In patriarchal

Western culture, therefore, the text’s author is a father, a progenitor, a

procreator, an aesthetic patriarch whose pen is an instrument of generative

power like his penis. More, his pen’s power, like his penis’s power, is not

just the ability to generate life but the power to create a posterity to which

he lays claim. (Gilbert and Gubar 6)

The patriarchal text has the potential to pass judgement detrimental to women’s agency: such judgement occurs when authors construct women’s situations and set up women so that they fail. Gilbert and Gubar criticize the patriarchal pen and the situation in which it leaves women authors: “Lacking the pen/penis which would enable them similarly to refute one fiction by another, women in patriarchal societies have historically been reduced to mere properties, to characters and images imprisoned in male texts, as Anne

Elliot and Anne Finch observe, by male expectations and designs” (12). Furthermore

“patriarchy and its texts subordinate and imprison women” (13). Thus, the curtailing of women’s agency within portrayals of the New Woman is insidious because in such texts women can become mere properties of the “fiercely patriarchal structure of Western

7 society” (13). There is potential in the male-generated texts for authors to reinforce assumptions about gender roles that underpin patriarchy.

Of course, male authored texts do not automatically reinforce patriarchy, nor do female authored texts rebel against it, as Toril Moi suggests. The fault in Gilbert and

Gubar’s argument is that gender binaries are reinforced and the nature versus nurture debate about whether femininity is inborn or inculcated is not addressed (Moi 65). Of more concern in this study is how those with a dominant position in society rope woman back into heteronormativity and how potentially rebellious women are treated within the text.

One would expect that, over the course of a century of writing about the New

Woman and the Halifax disaster, authors would explore alternate ways to portray this time of radical change instead of repeating narratives which contain women. Though the selection of books and movies which depict this time is finite, the repetition within the narratives is curious. Why choose the romance at all to depict the explosion? Donna

Smyth suggests that the sequence by which the events of the disaster are told in fiction about the explosion becomes comic rather than tragic:

A second common principle of these accounts is the tension between the

individual and the collective experience: within the collective comic

structure are numerous individual tragedies of loss and grief as well as

some grotesque and potentially comic stories of clothes being blown off.

(Smyth 101)

Romance is a form of comedy, as the ending always concludes favourably for its protagonists. On its own, the Halifax explosion is not romantic; we can only narrate the

8 events in a specific way, or as Hayden White suggests, through emplotment that provides a story with a particular plot structure (White 7). But for some reason, the disaster has been the subject of four romances in the last 90 years, not to mention several other novels like Jim Lotz’s spy adventure The Sixth of December (1981), which also ends with a romantic betrothal. More recently, authors have used the explosion on a smaller scale to add interest to their fictional works without resorting to covering the disaster in detail. In

1997, Elizabeth de Freitas opened her literary novel Keel Kissing Bottom with a description of the event. John Irving adds a subplot about a movie depicting the disaster in Until I Find You (2006). Ami McKay’s midwife novel The Birth House (2006) includes a passage about midwifery in the wake of the explosion. Anita Shreve’s A

Wedding in December (2005) takes a meta-fictional approach: within the main narrative, a character writes a novella about the explosion. There is also a spate of non-fiction literature springing from the event, including Janet Kitz’s Shattered City: The Halifax

Explosion and the Road to Recovery (1990) from which the CBC movie takes its name.

The movie spun Kitz’s facts into a romantic narrative, as well as a spy tale. All of these works exploit the explosion in small amounts, but four full treatments of the disaster have curiously taken the form of the romance, exploited the New Woman, and contained this characterization of the New Woman at a time when she was supposedly free.

As a result of the First World War, and gains made by feminists in the late

Victorian period, women exercised their increased potential in the public sphere in the

1910s. They participated in non-traditional professions in centres like Halifax which were essential to the war effort. Halifax was a depot for soldiers leaving and returning to

Canada in converted passenger liners like the Titanic ’s sister the Olympic . The city’s

9 population mushroomed. As in other Canadian centres, men quickly enlisted to fight for the British empire when war broke in 1914, while women stoked the home fires— whether that meant purchasing victory bonds or assembling munitions in factories or driving streetcars. As women’s roles altered, so too did public perception of them. They were capable of doing something previously unavailable to middle and upper-middle class women: paid employment outside of the home (lower-class women have often worked and most upper-class women did not enter the labour force even during the war.)

To use de Beauvoir’s terminology, women at this time were capable of transcendence.

War often becomes a time of transition, and this can be seen in Halifax. Since its founding in 1749 it has remained an important port, albeit a quiet one between 1906, when the British army left, and the outset of war. Supplies and men entered the Halifax peninsula by train and ship before embarking for the western front. Convoys often anchored in Bedford Basin, the enclosed bottom of the hourglass shaped harbour that tapers at the Narrows before opening to the larger part of the harbour and the open sea.

By 1917, shipping losses from U-boat attacks and military defeats on the front meant cargo slipped in and out of port with frantic speed and little concern for civilian safety except for a strict blackout rule meant to thwart U-boat or zeppelin attacks. On

December 6, speed and lax safety measures contributed to a collision between a Belgium

Relief vessel and a French liner laden with munitions, its decks stacked with barrels of high-octane fuel. Such a potentially hazardous cargo should never have neared the densely populated area built on the edges of the hourglass. When the French Mont Blanc detonated shortly before 9:05 a.m., the blast and its after effects—a tidal wave and fires

10 —levelled approximately one-third of the city while killing about 2,000 people and injuring another 9,000 out of a pre-war population of 50,000 (Raddall “Warden” 254).

While the Halifax explosion has not generated the flurry of fiction as have more well-known disasters such as the sinking of the Titanic , the torpedoing of the Lusitania , or the burning of the Hindenburg , numerous writers—often with connections to the

Maritimes—have attempted fictionalizing the event. Many aspects of the situation lend themselves to moving fiction: the discrepancy between classes living in the north and south ends of the city; the careless fashion in which the port and military officials handled volatile cargo; the heroes who achieved major feats to rescue survivors; the

German hysteria which made people hallucinate zeppelins pummelling the city with bombs. The disaster spawned works including novels for children, academic interpretations of scientific aspects of the blast, and several adult books best categorized as romances exploiting the figure of the New Woman.

The first romance is the relatively rare and unknown novella called A Romance of the Halifax Disaster (1918) by Bell. After the explosion, Bell assisted in the medical rescue. His experience in hospital wards allowed him to write of the physical trauma suffered by Haligonians. Rather than focusing on medical professionals, though, Bell positions his narrative as a romance between a young volunteer and an injured soldier.

Vera Warrington and Tom Welsford enter the narrative while floating and flirting on the

St. Lawrence River. Years later, Vera is engaged to the wealthy William Lawson, for she has not heard from Tom. Shortly before the explosion, Tom returns to Halifax for orthopaedic surgery for a war wound and is still in hospital when the disaster occurs. As a volunteer with the Voluntary Aid Division, Vera darts to the hospital only in time to

11 witness Will’s death and her liberation from the marriage which was to occur later that day. Now free, Vera finds Tom in a hospital bed and accepts his proposal: the last line of the book belongs to Vera, agreeing to marriage. Haligonian publisher Gerald Weir released the small novella which is today relegated to rare book collections and archival holdings; original copies are worth several hundred dollars apiece. Much of the interest surrounding this book likely arises from the rare photographs which appear on every other page, as well as a detailed list of the dead and a fold out map, which are included at the end of the novella.

Though Bell’s novella is an obscure and little-known interpretation of the disaster

(despite a later reprint), Hugh MacLennan’s historical novel about the explosion became a canonical Canadian novel—now institutionalized in the New Canadian Library.

MacLennan published Barometer Rising during the Second World War. Since then, the novel has become a regular in Canadian Literature classes. It has also been adapted for stage by artistic director Richard Ouzounian for the 1987-88 season at Neptune Theatre in Halifax. While much criticism of the novel focuses on the nationalist current coursing throughout it, other critics like David Creelman have noticed the novel’s romantic bent.

MacLennan balances a number of plots and subplots in the crisply organized novel. The love story between Penelope Wain and her first cousin Neil Macrae occupies a smaller part of the novel than Neil’s journey to clear his name from dishonour following a failed military skirmish. Neil returns to Halifax a few days before December 6 in order to claim justice from Penny’s father—complicit in dishonouring Neil’s name—and to find his love. Penny’s is the “new” woman of MacLennan’s tale: she is a naval architect at the

Wain shipyards, where government orders are filled for new ships which will be used in

12 the war. Though men assess her for her sexuality, they also admit that her engineering prowess is beneficial to the company, as they bear an “unconscious resentment as they relaized she was as good as themselves” (145). 1 Penny is also a “new” woman in that she has borne a child out of wedlock, and has Jean adopted by relatives so that she can remain in contact with the baby, even though such a situation would have scandalized a family of her standing.

Penny’s portrait, is, on the surface, flattering, yet much of the narrative focuses on her physical beauty rather than her intelligence. She becomes the quintessential romance heroine who has been waiting for Neil—her Odysseus, to exploit MacLennan’s allusion

—to return, even though she believes Neil dead and she is seeing a middle-aged surgeon.

Penny is working at the shipyards when the explosion injures her. Neil and the surgeon

—Angus Murray—save her from the worksite and protect her until she can convalesce from a potentially blinding eye injury. Though Penny begins the novel as a “new” woman and a harbinger of change, the novel’s conclusion finds her walking hand-in-hand with Neil back to domesticity.

Journalist and television anchor Robert MacNeil read MacLennan’s novel as a young boy; it inspired his own retelling of the explosion in Burden of Desire, a mass market book published by Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing. The “new” women populating this more recent version of the disaster are not as outwardly progressive as

Penny seems to be at the opening of Barometer Rising . However, heroines Julia

Montgomery Robertson and Margery Tobin Wentworth attempt to escape traditional gender roles.

13 The novel opens with Julia missing her husband Charles Robertson, who has spent the majority of their marriage on the western front. Physical desire tears Julia apart; as a result, she expresses her candid longings in a diary that, after the explosion, falls into the hands of a lusty Anglican minister, Peter Wentworth. Early in the plot, Julia is relatively unaffected by the explosion. Living in the conventional south end among the upper class, she is protected from the gruesome effects of the disaster. Rather, her trial comes in the form of her husband’s death and the subsequent media attention which also brings Peter into her life. Peter has already met Julia through her diary, which he accidentally receives when Julia’s servant donates old coats in which the diary is hastily hidden on the morning of the explosion. Peter has already read the journal with a hungry longing for the woman who relishes in her sexuality; coming into contact with the physical woman causes him to consider adultery. However, Peter is not the only man in

Julia’s life. Julia’s servant Molly has a granddaughter who loses her mother, brother, and an eye in the explosion, and the stranger caring for her—Stewart MacPherson, a friend of

Peter’s and a local psychology professor who has an intense interest in Freud—meets with Julia when he reunites Betty with Molly. Shortly thereafter, Peter gives Stewart the diary so that he might discern who the mysterious author is and return the journal to its owner. Stewart is also titillated by the author, whom he knows is Julia because he travels among the south end elite. Like Peter, Stewart entertains fantasies about the blonde diarist even though she is unaware they have read her journal without permission.

Margery Wentworth is Julia’s sexual opposite. Painted as a frigid wife who makes love with the passion of a patient under anaesthesia, Margery is unhappy with domestic life. Though born to an upper middle class household, Margery marries Peter

14 Wentworth, who is almost as poor as the proverbial church mouse. No servant helps

Margery care for her household and two whining offspring. Drowning in depression,

Margery hates life enough to attempt committing suicide. Though she is mostly depicted as a frigid woman, Margery grew up with sexual fantasies, mostly revolving around her husband Peter (who is as interested in his member as his name implies) and, ironically,

Charles Robertson, Julia’s would-be husband. Margery’s desire for Charles suggests he married the wrong woman, for he is as conservative as Margery while Peter is aroused by things which seem incongruous with his religious background and self-righteous piety.

MacNeil’s novel achieved bestseller status, likely because of his already prominent position in American media. A co-anchor for the MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour,

MacNeil was familiar to the book-buying public. His novel was published in hardcover and mass market paperback, and was later reissued in 1998 with a new design. Some rumours of a sequel to the novel and a film based on the book can be found on the internet, though neither one has come to fruition. MacNeil attempted writing the novel because he wanted to explore the ideologies which collided with traditional thinking at the time of the First World War, though the novel details the disaster with as much non- fiction description as Barometer Rising. In “Creating Fiction Out of Fact” (1994)

MacNeil describes the way in which the explosion came to dominate his First World War novel:

So, I imagine this [conservative yet cosmopolitan] atmosphere weighing

on the mind of a young woman, somewhat but not radically liberated for

her time and class, living in comfortable circumstances in the South End . .

. To produce the tension that drives the story, the diary needs to be lost

15 and found by a person who will be shocked, then tantalized, then obsessed

with the young woman . . . . But how plausibly to get her diary into the

wrong hands? It was then that I remembered the explosion. (MacNeil

124-25)

Yet despite MacNeil’s attempt to make women’s desires important, Julia’s point of view is only seen by readers through the passive reading of her diary and through Peter’s and

Stewart’s eyes. Despite the novel’s popularity, though, MacNeil’s book has not reached canonical status like MacLennan’s did, perhaps because MacLennan was published in the

New Canadian Library. Yet Burden of Desire records the period faithfully even though it is not as daring as MacLennan’s when it appeared in the 1940s. Burden of Desire became a Canadian bestseller and a Doubleday Book Club Canada Selection, with favourable reviews from American media like The New York Times Book Review ,

Publishers Weekly , and USA Today , as well as Canadian media such as The Globe and

Mail and the Toronto Sun .

The final of the four romances is a two-part film entitled Shattered City. The film borrows its name from the Janet Kitz non-fiction book which is perhaps one of the most definitive accounts of the explosion. Despite exploiting the title of a strong non-fiction work, though, the film Shattered City is a historical melodrama which pays homage to the

1997 movie Titanic , as it begins with the remembrance of the disaster by an aged woman.

Because Shattered City was produced in 2003, it was able to take advantage of computer technology and special effects which allowed the movie to be produced on a budget of

$10.4 million (Rodenhiser)—a lot for a CBC movie, but little in comparison to similar

Hollywood disaster movies such as Titanic or Pearl Harbor . CBC promoted the movie

16 as a representation of the disaster and aired it in close proximity to the documentary City of Ruins. The movie takes various liberties with documented facts surrounding the disaster, the war, and society at the time. Aside from historical tweaking, though, the movie sets the explosion against a backdrop of contemporary issues including the New

Woman, the threat of Bolshevism, unions, abortions, and post-traumatic stress disorder— shellshock as it was then called.

The film delves into the characters of numerous women, beginning with the opening scenes which feature an aged Connie Collins playing with string. The Collins family of 1917 is comprised of its soft-spoken mother Millicent, the somewhat grumpy patriarch Patrick, and their children: lawyer and soldier Charlie, printer and socialist

Beatrix, young war booster Courtney, and clever peacemaker Connie. Charlie returns home from a disastrous campaign overseas which killed many of the men under his command; only Connie knows that he is prone to panic attacks because of it.

The family is not an unhappy one, but young Beatrix attempts to gain her freedom from tradition. Beatrix is employed at a printing company on the waterfront, ostensibly in the Richmond district. In her spare time, she dates a man named Ernst whom she believes is a Protestant Dutchman, but who is actually a German soldier exploiting her while he plans a terrorist attack on the harbour’s military installations. When not engaging in this risqué relationship, oblivious Beatrix is cajoling her friends to unionize because she believes in socialism. Though being a Bolshevik in the 1910s is on a par with being a Communist in the 1950s, Beatrix supports the idea of distributing wealth evenly. On the morning of the explosion, Beatrix, like her fellow coworkers, watches the burning ship float near shore. The movie does not make it clear how she recognizes

17 Ernst on the burning ship, but moments before the detonation, she screams his name.

This suggests that the Mont Blanc must be visible from the printing company. When the explosion occurs, Beatrix is injured at her work site, though not fatally so. Mostly only a few scratches and disorientation limit her, and though she does not require treatment, she visits the overflowing hospital wards to seek help, where she meets her family.

The doctor who tries to help her, Barbara Paxton, is visiting from Boston so that she and her colleagues can study war wounds in preparation for American casualties.

Her father has financed her education because she has no brothers. Despite her prominent profession, Barbara functions as the damsel in distress: Charlie Collins offers to help her pay for a purchase when a street vendor refuses her American currency. They spend courting time in the hospital wards—she as physician, he as a visitor to an injured comrade. After a war bond rally in which Charlie is publicly humiliated as a coward for refusing to support the war, Barbara tries to help him. They walk around the city and talk about their careers. The relationship seems rosy until Barbara begs Charlie to stay in

Halifax to be treated for his crippling anxiety. They argue, and separate, but the explosion returns her to Halifax as a relief worker. She uses her surgical skill to help

Courtney heal from a near-fatal wound and offers to help pregnant and unwed Beatrix.

Though Barbara works capably in many capacities, she is also merely a spectator to much of the action, including the court case in which officials attempt to find a scapegoat for the collision and explosion.

CBC has televised the movie several times since the original airing in 2003.

Shattered City won several Gemini Awards, though it also received some media criticism from those who find the inaccuracies of the film potentially misleading to anyone who

18 views the film as a historical source rather than a construct. An article by David

Rodenhiser, which appeared in the Cape Breton Post and its sister paper the Halifax

Daily News, notes how historians criticize the movie for taking too many liberties. Such liberties include the depiction of spies in Halifax, the arrest of French captain Aime Le

Medec, and Charlie Collins “taking charge after the blast,” which was unlikely given the large contingent of soldiers—5,000—in the city at the time of the disaster (Rodenhiser).

Aside from a Canadian Heritage commercial detailing the last minutes of train dispatcher

Vince Coleman, Shattered City is the first cinematic retelling of the disaster. Until

Burden of Desire or another film is made, it will remain the only fictional, cinematic interpretation.

Despite their varying structures and the ensuing differences in narrative emphasis and progression, these four romances all arrive roughly at the same ideological conclusion. The tenacity of the romantic plot in telling of the disaster and societal changes such as the advent of the New Woman brings gender politics in the romance genre into stark relief. Though the four explosion romances also differ in one aspect— the location of the disaster in the plot—all ultimately celebrate the restoration of women to traditional gender roles as part of the rescue effort. In A Romance of the Halifax

Disaster , the explosion occurs between one-third and one-half of the way through the story, which means that the first half depicts pre-explosion society while the latter details the recovery effort. In Barometer Rising, the explosion functions as a deus ex machina and happens near the novel’s close, with some room for the denouement to detail the rescue. Burden of Desire delves into the explosion after only a few pages of description of the pre-explosion status quo. Though one could argue that Julia’s diary focuses on

19 pre-explosion Halifax through journal flashbacks that slow the plot’s momentum, most of the novel focuses on what occurs to the characters after the disaster. In Shattered City , the munitions ship detonates exactly at the mid point, splitting the two-part series into before and after. Though the placement of the events varies within the narratives, the sequence remains the same: “We have the sequence of what happened: the collision, the explosion, its effects, the blizzard, the rescue and relief work, the placing of blame, the restoration of the city” (Smyth 101). The termination point of all of these narratives is the restoration of “compulsory heterosexuality.”

“Compulsory heterosexuality,” a term originally coined by Adrienne Rich in the

1983 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” becomes useful in analyzing the betrothal scheme which often concludes romance. It is one way in which women have been traditionally controlled, according to Rich. “Some of the forms by which male power manifests itself are more easily recognizable as enforcing heterosexuality on women than are others” (Rich 640). Rich suggests that the

“idealization of heterosexual romance and marriage” is a “control of consciousness” which orients women towards this patriarchal containment of desire (640). Monique

Wittig suggests that heterosexuality is not natural but a political regime “which rests on the submission and the appropriation of women” (xiii). It is political, but also economical, for women must reproduce the “system of exploitation on which heterosexuality is economically based” (6). Clearly, marriage and betrothal—which are not in and of themselves evil—are not the key to analyzing these narratives. While they provide a point from which we can analyze the containment of women’s potential within these narratives, it is important to remember that in marriage, there are “qualitative

20 differences of experience” (Rich 659). Thus it is not marriage but compulsory heterosexuality which is being critiqued in this study: the betrothal, or marriage, is one indicator of compulsory heterosexuality as being the absolute destiny for women originally constructed as progressive. Rather than marriage or betrothal being criticized in its various formations, this study will take a look at the “mutual fantasy of heterosexual love in our society” (Greer 17). What is not being criticized here is not marriage or betrothal, but the unequal marriage in which women are contained by strict gender binaries.

Simone de Beauvoir offers a cogent explanation of how marriage and betrothal can become a tool of patriarchy to perpetuate inequalities between the genders. Ideally,

“[G]enuine love ought to be founded on mutual recognition of two liberties; the lovers would then experience themselves both as self and as other: neither would give up transcendence, neither would be mutilated; together they would manifest values and aims in the world” (741). This suggests the possibility that love—and the romance’s betrothal or marriage scheme—need not be detrimental to the transcendence of individuals who are in love. Rather, at stake is the patriarchal marriage or betrothal which has been traditionally constructed—and which de Beauvoir criticizes in the chapter “The Married

Woman.” She suggests that the “tragedy of marriage is not that it fails to assure woman the promised happiness—there is no such thing as assurance in regard to happiness—but that it mutilates her; it dooms her to repetition and routine” (534). The inequality between genders within marriage means women’s unpaid labour is exploited to carry on the reproduction of society and its heteronormative aims.

21 One particular concern arises when criticizing the immanence of women and the transcendence of men in their activities: it denounces homemaking—which has traditionally been considered women’s work. De Beauvoir considers traditional homemaking drudgery of a Sisyphusian nature.

Thus woman’s work within the home gives her no autonomy; it is not

directly useful to society, it does not open out on the future, it produces

nothing. It takes on meaning and dignity only as it is linked with existent

beings who reach out beyond themselves, transcend themselves, toward

society in production and action. That is, far from freeing the matron, her

occupation makes her dependent upon husband and children; she is

justified through them; but in their lives she is only an inessential

intermediary. (510)

De Beauvoir calls attention to the dangers of immanence in repetitive tasks like cooking and cleaning, which must be repeated daily. Rather than living in a society which encourages women to achieve, a woman is “led to prefer marriage to a career because of the economic advantages held by men: she tends to look for a husband who is above her in status or who she hopes will make a quicker or greater success than she could” (481).

It is this encouragement of marriage as a means of fulfilling women and discouraging achievement in the public sphere that is being criticized in this study—not marriage itself, not homemaking itself. Susan Brownmiller raises the issue that “dual-purpose ambition”

(231) such as a career outside of the home—as well as parenting—is as valid as “a predictable retreat into a feminine tradition of dependence, [or] as a singular expression of unfeminine aspirations” (231). Rather than criticize homemaking itself, the intent of

22 this study is to look at how the construction of traditional gender roles enshrines the idea that ostensibly unfeminine aspirations such as working in the private sphere are predictably roped into this “feminine tradition of dependence” even when the original characterizations suggest these women are anything but dependent.

The central concern of this study is that these four works all make the same ideological leap: the “new” woman figure appearing in the beginning of these works is recuperated into heteronormativity by the close of the narratives. The patriarchal pen utilizes the romance genre to tell the story of the explosion and simultaneously to undercut the potential of women at this period. Interestingly enough, this occurs both in

Bell’s novel, immediately following the disaster and in Shattered City , created in the third wave of feminism. Though the narratives are complicated by ongoing tensions between progression and tradition, the four works end with heteronormativity pre- empting rebellion.

The thesis will develop how the “new” woman, despite being an exotic heroine at a period of women’s progression in cultural and professional spheres, is eventually undercut by the political narratives which contain her. The first chapter, “New Woman

Rising,” looks at how all four narratives initially invest in women’s progression. The characters have potential in cultural circles as well as professional activities—or other characteristics reminiscent of the New Woman. In de Beauvoir’s existentialist terms, the

“new” woman initially shows herself to be capable of transcendence.

Though women in these four works are depicted as progressive, they are quickly returned to a more patriarchal milieu. The second chapter, “Burden of Sexual Desire,” details how the women in these works are subject to a censoring through the male gaze.

23 An emphasis on sexuality undermines the progression which seems to be espoused in the early parts of the narratives. By applying cinematic theory on the male gaze from theorists such as Laura Mulvey, E. Ann Kaplan, and Gillian Rose, I will look at how this patriarchal gaze focuses on women’s sexuality rather than their individual personalities, containing or limiting the agency with which they seem to be invested.

The next chapter, “Shattered Women,” looks at how reward and punishment further curtail the activities of the “new” woman. Not only is progressive behaviour among “new” women ignored, it is seemingly punished. Whether they are physically injured, mentally unstable, or punished by curtailed agency, most of the progressive young women in these narratives are undermined professionally, socially, and culturally.

The explosion, in some cases the actual cause of punishment, allows for this punishment to be seen in stark relief, as it directly affects women.

The goal of such punishment is seen in the conclusion, “A Romance of

Heteronormativity,” which looks at how women are roped back into a patriarchal, heteronormative society. The lesson of these romances is that traditional gender roles still reign supreme and that any woman who does not subscribe to them is subject to punishment. Instead of detailing the transition from a world privileging strictly defined gender roles to a more progressive society, these works depict how women happily return to the private sphere. They are recuperated into heteronormative roles in which being a mother and wife is rewarded. If one analyzes the ideology espoused by these four narratives, one sees compulsory heterosexuality celebrated as the happy conclusion.

Though these works use the “new” woman, they ultimately leave little doubt that she is

24 merely an “old” woman clothed in tradition, repressed by the strict gender rules that she attempted to flout in the beginning when she found her first job or lover.

25 CHAPTER O NE : N EW W OMAN R ISING

Writers often commence novels with a thorough description of the status quo, as well as the characters as they are situated within their particular fictional world. Readers typically witness progression throughout the narrative (or in some cases, regression) from this early stage. Such a beginning is evident in Shattered City , as the quotidian life of

Haligonians in the midst of war is depicted in great detail. Barometer Rising also takes time developing the way in which Halifax has been stagnating in its colonial past. While it would be a generalization to suggest that all narratives begin with this status quo—after all, in media res is another popular way to start a narrative—historical romances often use great detail from the outset to make their narratives more realistic.

Historical romances—indeed romances in general—include description in order to enhance reader experience. Gillian Beer, one of the authorities on the genre, in The

Romance (1970) sets forth definitions of what makes a romance work. Beer analyses romances which appear from the Middle Ages onward; as a result, her research is encompassing and provides a look at the genre as it has evolved through history. One important distinction is that the romance “invokes the past or the socially remote” (Beer

2). Romance readers require distance between their world and that of the romance, because it allows social formations to seem “exotic and remote” (5). Though Beer focuses on the romance itself rather than subgenres like the historical romance, she illustrates how exoticism functions in even the non-historical romance. In her work The

Historical Romance (1993), Helen Hughes differentiates between the two even though both take on an escapist bent. The romance can be a “surrogate experience, while fantasy

26 gives an opportunity for wish-fulfilling motifs which symbolically represent the hopes and fears of the readership. The setting of historical romance provides just that necessary mingling of ‘distance’ and ‘reality’ which allows this to happen” (Hughes 1). Thus, critics of the genre—and of the historical romance subgenre—highlight the need for authors to provide protracted description so that readers can escape to this remote and exotic world. Romances aim to create an exotic world, but create is the key term, for these narratives are aesthetic constructs rather than mimetic narratives. Fictional material

—as well as cinematic script—is multilayered, symbolic, and historical. While tempting to equate fiction of the Halifax disaster with non-fiction sources which are the product of research and documentation, it is important to remember that the historical romance— like the romance—is constructed fantasy. In “The Halifax Harbour Explosion: Fact,

Fiction, and Focal Point” Judith Dudar suggests that imaginative works are as important as primary sources about the disaster: “The imaginative works are particularly valuable because factual material is preserved in them” (Dudar 113). She also suggests that

“[b]ecause the primary sources are less easily available or less appealing to readers, it is through the fictional accounts that the events of 1917 are communicated and memorialized” (113). Thus, the surrogate experience has the potential to become the experience which readers remember.

In these four works, the Halifax of 1917 provides the requisite exoticism for a romance. To many readers, Halifax is not well-known from a literary point of view, nor is the First World War period the topic of many literary works set in the city. As Robert

MacNeil writes in the foreword to Halifax: A Literary Portrait (1990), “Halifax always deserved to be written about more” (“Foreword” viii). The Halifax explosion romances

27 invoke an exotic city alive with war excitement and its concomitant scandals. It was an era particularly important for women, as women’s suffrage became an important political and social issue, especially as women during this time were allowed to vote for men while they fought overseas. Women also left the home in search of non-traditional jobs that permitted them to work in places like dockyards and munitions factories. The exotic world of this period as a setting for romance, then, is one in which many women were capable of flouting societal norms. Though this world was not as exotic to audiences of

1918, by the time of Burden of Desire (1992) and Shattered City (2003), many aspects— even clothing—became exotic because of historical distance. Yet even Bell’s novella, which was published months after the disaster, was meant for more than a domestic audience, meaning that readers outside of the city—including those in areas like Cape

Breton—would have found the book exotic as it was “some 250 miles away at the end of winding, and often muddy roads and across the waters of the Strait of Canso” (MacLeod

221).

The exotic New Woman, furthermore, provided interest when she appeared in literature of the day, as well as in contemporary literature looking back to this period.

The exotic, but relatively muted, “new” woman appearing in the four Halifax romances is historically accurate; she was not the riotous flapper of the 1920s, but more like the narrator in Sara Jeanette Duncan’s A Social Departure : understated, unusual, outspoken, but still well-bred and “feminine.” S.J.D., the narrator, speaks of matrimony with a satirical tone:

Naturally you will think of matrimony first, which casualty would have

enabled Orthodocia to go to the planet Mars alone, I believe,

28 with the full approval of all her friends and acquaintances. But matrimony

had not befallen her: she was still Orthodocia May Ruth Isabel Love of

Love Lodge, near St. Eve’s-in-the-Garden, Wigginton, Devon. (Duncan 2)

She stays relatively conservative when assessing other cultures and women’s roles.

However, because she is capable of circumnavigating the globe with only another woman, she sets herself apart from women who would not undertake such a venture without a chaperone. Though a subtle incarnation of the New Woman, she is one.

Varying stereotypes comprised the new woman figure—not all of them favourable to a still-conservative society saturated in the middle-class ideology of the

Victorians. 5 The labelling of the New Woman was unstable, for there were a

“multiplicity of agents who had an ideological stake in constructing her” (Heilmann 2).

Often, the New Woman sought employment in the public sphere. Office work, nursing, teaching, and shopkeeping were all occupations of the New Woman, though some women managed to find more radical positions, especially when war presented the opportunity to work in non-traditional jobs. Many women joined the morning march to jobs that had, at one time, been considered too manly for them. As a result, women had newfound potential in occupational activities.

The New Woman as she appeared in the late Victorian period and into the First

World War was a woman of questionable morals even if her only societal transgression was paid employment at the printing company. For middle-class women employed at

5 Halifax has been depicted as conservative by the four works, epitomized in MacLennan’s Aunt Maria. David Sutherland suggests there was optimism in the city that bespoke change and promise, though on the other side of the equation, Mariana Valverde, in discussing moral reform in English Canada at the period, notes how the middle classes were quick to reform others. As Michelle Hebert Boyd notes, “Writers of both fiction and non-fiction often oversimplify Halifax society at the time of the Explosion, stereotyping it as either a genteel, Victorian city or as a tawdry, rum-soaked seaport. The truth lies somewhere in between” (33).

29 non-traditional worksites such as the factory (lower-class women had worked there since the industrial revolution), having their own pay meant a modicum of freedom. In their off hours, New Women visited moving pictures, patronized restaurants—in short, exhibited a sense of freedom which permitted them to socialize with men away from the stern chaperoning of their elders. Wearing cosmetics, sporting skirts with rising hemlines, and clicking around in shops in shoes instead of high-laced boots, the New

Woman looked radical compared to her foremothers. Progressive women of the period appeared in public with short hair, free from long tresses requiring extensive upkeep, long hair having been the symbol of femininity for many years (Anderson and Zinsser

201). In The Nymph and the Lamp (1950), author Thomas Raddall notes this alteration in

Haligonian women: “Everybody looked queer, especially the women—skirts up to their knees and hats down over their ears. Most of them seemed to have cut off their hair … here they were, painted right enough. He thought of how in 1910 a painted woman was said to be ‘fast.’” (Raddall 8-9). As Raddall points out, painting one’s face with rouge, an act previously associated with the prostitute or the fast woman, had become a norm by the First World War.

Beyond her outward appearance, the New Woman stirred controversy about her behaviour. Those concerned with morality had a new figure to attack; the New Woman threatened to overturn society as people knew it:

A denizen of factories, city streets, and department stores, the single wage-

earning woman represented to her contemporaries everything that was

unnatural and unnerving about modern life. Those who were watching

closely could see her potential to unravel social codes and critically

30 redefine what it meant to be a woman in Canadian society. (McMaster 23-

4)

As McMaster notes, moral watchdogs concerned themselves with the freedom women experienced outside of the family. The middle class often interfered with others’ lives, as depicted in Mariana Valverde’s The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in

English Canada, 1885-1925 (1991). The potential indiscretions of these young women, especially in the brouhaha of wartime, aroused dismay from behavioural experts—such as the Halifax Herald ’s “Mrs. Humiston,” quick to instruct through the media on the dangers of flirting and its association with the white slave trade. Obviously, for moral watchdogs the New Woman was not a woman to be heralded for her sense of agency; rather, she was a figure requiring containment even though the capitalist system had her contained to work sites in which she fell under the rule of business owners rather than husbands.

However, in the beginning of the four Halifax explosion romances, the women of these narratives have the agency to accomplish things in cultural arenas or professional circles even if some employment (albeit paid) was as menial as domestic work. Though these women are potentially scandalous, they also attempt to alter society. The narratives open with the “new” woman becoming the exotic heroine, though the portrait of the first heroine is fairly muted in comparison with later interpretations.

In A Romance of the Halifax Disaster, Frank McKelvey Bell’s “new” woman,

Vera Warrington, becomes the archetypal romance heroine. She seems to occupy her time with little other than tasks of courtship, though she does show flashes of rebellion.

Such a conservative portrayal may be the result of Bell’s proximity to the period. The

31 novella opens with Vera lounging in a canoe near Montreal with her companion and no chaperone, making love—the conversational kind—to a young man named Tom

Welsford who says his goodbyes, for he is enlisting. Several years pass before Vera is seen in the narrative again. She has returned to Halifax, where she is rebelliously considering her upcoming nuptials to another man. Though she does not love the man she is to wed on the day of the explosion, she agrees, in a moment of self-sacrifice, to marry. She toasts herself: “Here’s to wedded me—the apotheosis of fools!” (Bell).

Though Vera does not represent the progressive woman completely, she has a distinct rebellious streak in a narrow life that allows few opportunities for self-actualization. She does not spend money as she pleases or associate with men forbidden by relatives; rather,

Vera lives with her mother, who would rather see her daughter wedded to wealth than pursuing means of self-support. Yet Vera is clearly unhappy with her future even though, from a conservative point of view, there is little wrong with her life’s trajectory.

Even within her narrow sphere, Vera is able to enter the public realm. Vera participates in the Voluntary Aid Division, or the VAD, a home-front diversion for women which drew on supposedly traditional strengths such as a nurturing instinct, yet allowed women to don uniforms and enter the public sphere. After the explosion, Vera slips on her uniform and dashes off to the hospital. Though the situation is grave, she is somewhat joyful that her wedding requires postponing. Even though 2,000 people perish, the explosion permits her to remain single and work in the hospital, albeit fulfilling duties typical of the angel of the house, ministering to the wounded with little thought to herself. Nursing became a common profession for women, for it provided a public job that did not stray too far from a woman’s expected strengths. Such a

32 profession allowed women to work, but was not too far removed from nurturing ideals or the “nursing instinct” (Bell) which suggests that women have an intrinsic nursing capacity. Consequently, it was an approved position for women in which they were contained by physicians and moral codes that even made them sport the vestments of the nun (Errington 72).

Though the nurse was not an entirely transgressive professional, there were “new” women working as nurses who clearly displayed unhappiness with designated roles. The nurse who cares for Tom expresses discontent with this supposedly natural vocation: she longs to be on the battlefield with men. Shortly before the explosion, Margaret fumes to

Tom: “But it must be wonderful to be there [overseas] and do things . . . . Oh! I wish I were a man! It must be great to be a real man these days!” (Bell). Unlike Vera, the young nurse expresses potentially revolutionary thoughts on the role of women in society

—and in war. She articulates disgruntlement with nursing, yet must remain in Halifax away from ostensible dangers, though as readers discover, the haphazard transportation of dangerous goods ironically kills women and children in their homes. The young nurse differs from Vera in that she does not just think about her unhappiness—she voices it.

Professions such as nursing allowed women to support themselves in a regulated environment, yet the New Woman of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century prepared to take on more unusual occupations. Penny Wain—Penny—of Hugh

MacLennan’s Barometer Rising is a more recognizable “new” woman than Vera or her nursing friend Margaret. Penny works in an unusual occupation for a woman circa 1917: ship design. Perhaps this novel occupation is employed by MacLennan because Penny is already a fallen woman who has conceived a child out of wedlock, making her character

33 “unfamiliar” as the narrative suggests (MacLennan 10). This unfamiliarity is emphasized by Penny’s Montreal education, as Montreal is positioned as the site of modernity in comparison to Halifax’s antiquated colonial character. Penny returns to Halifax as an engineering oddity who reaps little respect from family, as though her work is mere tinkering for pin money instead of an effort to design ships that may ultimately affect the outcome of war.

MacLennan notes the conflicting attitudes about women in traditionally masculine professions: he suggests how fragile women are in such professions by revealing how skilled Penny must be to maintain that job. Not only must she be adept at her work, she must also “work longer hours and be doubly careful of all that she did, for a mistake would ruin her” (MacLennan 11). While war allows Penny opportunities to exploit her engineering prowess to design a ship for the British Admiralty—furthering her acceptance into a male-dominated sphere such as the military—MacLennan stresses

Penny’s awareness of social tensions which can easily result in her ejection from such a profession. One mistake and she will be sent back to her father’s drawing room to await a man like Angus Murray who will forgive her sexual indiscretion: her illegitimate daughter Jean. Even though Penny’s work requires patient skill that allows her to transform Simon Perry’s ship miniature into a blueprint, Simon only affords Penny grudging respect: “‘Well,’ he said, ‘I can’t say you don’t know your trade, even though it ain’t natural you should’” (13). Her co-workers do give her some credit for her work.

They often smile at her “indulgently” even though her work “had a quality theirs could not equal” (145). MacLennan explores this tension between conservative assumptions about fragile women and their actual capacity to excel.

34 Relatives’ insistence that working is just a passing fancy undercuts the seriousness of Penny’s intentions—yet ultimately strengthens her fortitude. In the early part of the narrative, the novel encourages the entrance of women into male-dominated professions. When relatives converge on the Wain home for a dinner to celebrate the

Admiralty’s acceptance of Penny’s design, several of them argue about the placement of women in a male profession. Jim Fraser, Jean’s guardian and Penny’s uncle, becomes the voice which advocates for the New Woman: “Can’t you people get it into your heads that Penny’s not working at the Shipyards just for amusement? To hear you talk, a man would think her work was nothing better than knitting socks for the Red Cross. That craft of Penny’s is a revolutionary design” (27). Despite her uncle’s support, Penny’s former partner Neil is almost amused by her predilection for engineering; he assumes that her position in her father’s firm is that of a stenographer, a pink-collar profession of the time. Neil is unaware that a conflict of interest interferes with his ability to compliment her, for she is now his competition in the engineering profession. When she tells him engineering and not shorthand is her trade, he says, “‘I’ll be damned! My young Penny a ship designer!’ But he was not taking it seriously” (111). Such an attitude indicates how

Penny’s relatives and friends—bearers of moral guidance for young women—can discourage them from work, merely by their ignorance as to the importance of work that transcends traditional gender roles. Penny’s courage in the face of such criticism highlights her ability to flout societal norms. By making Neil appear foolish for assuming Penny is a stenographer, MacLennan indicates a favourable attitude towards women and work—at least this is the message conveyed early in the text.

35 Though critics tend to analyze MacLennan’s nationalist leanings—especially in comparative analysis with later works like Two Solitudes (1945)—his portrayal of women in Barometer Rising has not escaped critical attention. Some critics, offering a cursory glance at Penny at the beginning of Barometer Rising , find her to be a shining example of the New Woman. Peter Buitenhuis suggests that MacLennan’s portrayal of

Penny evidences a “new type of woman to emerge in Canada as a result of the war” (25).

Conversely, though, Buitenhuis also notes that the third-person narrative is focalized through her only in the early stages of the text; later, she is excluded from the narrative and Neil’s voice subsumes her own point of view (27-8). This transformation from a woman with a voice, to one whose thoughts are articulated through a man’s consciousness, suggests that Penny’s life is literally on the wane, as the focus through her lover deprives her of the original agency she has when she sees the world through her own eyes.

Also, critics have found that Penny’s control over her sexuality heralds her as a

New Woman. The fashion in which Penny bears a daughter outside of marriage signals her rebellious personality. Instead of having her illegitimate daughter adopted by strangers, she manages a way to see her daughter frequently, as Robin Mathews suggests.

Penny’s baby becomes “the reality of the new community even when it is oppressed and not visible . . . . Penelope Wain, moreover, is a liberated woman: she is an expert professional; she has her baby and has it adopted by accessible relations; she knows what her own struggle must be—even against her closest male friends—as a woman seeking full and just individuality” (Mathews 55). Penny’s agency is given more credence, for she “declares the legitimacy of woman as expert and professional, as fully realizable

36 human being” (Mathews 59). The way in which Penny manages to deal with a potentially scandalous situation such as a baby signals a new social order for women— and herself.

Though critics such as Mathews and Buitenhuis have found that the novel espouses the increased visibility of women in public circles, others have noted that

Penny’s agency has limits because it is curtailed by the romance tradition. David

Creelman explains that characters in a romance “rarely move beyond their prescribed functions as hero, helpless damsel, villain, helper, or opponent, and many of

MacLennan’s characters fulfill these carefully delineated roles” (41). Penny fulfills the damsel in distress function even though she “initially appears to be a rather nonconformist woman for her time” and is “well educated and articulate” (41). Creelman criticizes the conservative way in which Penny is subsumed within patriarchal society and made subservient to the men who come to dominate the narrative. Such a conversion will be discussed in more detail later.

Though characters such as Penny show initially that women are in control of their sexual lives, the sexual appetites of the New Woman were often suspect, for she frequently left the moral guidance of family. Jobs in factories meant that young women experienced more during their hours away from work, and their wages allowed them to live outside the scrutinizing gaze of those who might circumscribe their behaviour:

“Often living on their own in rooming houses or hostels, they conducted their social lives free of family structure and according more to their own preferences than to conventional standards” (McMaster 18). Any woman living some distance from her elders was

37 capable of transgressing, especially when living in the big city as opposed to the innocent country.

One woman who leaves her family for the city is Evelyn Phillips. Evelyn, the stereotypical secretary who experiences sexism from her employer Geoffrey Wain, is ridiculed for her willingness to exploit her body for pleasure and profit. She becomes the garish “new” woman who evokes repulsion rather than pity despite the patriarchal structures that impose seedy living conditions on her. Even Evelyn’s name recalls the woman who ostensibly caused the downfall of humans in the Garden of Eden. Evelyn is the daughter of a country fisherman and lives in Halifax only because Geoffrey’s patronage has “elevated her beyond the status of a domestic servant” (MacLennan 69).

Because she is Geoffrey’s mistress, Evelyn is able to survive in the city when she might otherwise face abject poverty. Ironically, even Geoffrey recognizes that she has skill beyond that of providing sexual pleasure: “The queer part of it is, my dearest Evelyn, that you’re really quite a competent secretary” (69). Such pink collar labour as secretarial work was essential to the New Woman, as she inhabited the public sphere as an assistant to a man occupying a more prestigious position, just like the nurse who deferred to the physician. However, Evelyn is not in a respectable arrangement according to the mores of the time; rather, her exploitation seems to sound the alarm at how urbanization can cause societal Armageddon—all because women were choosing work over marriage.

Evelyn occupies the peripheries, living in a plain room. Penny has digressed, but she does not become a kept woman as does Evelyn. Corrupted by the city, tainted by her employer, Evelyn is hardly seen with empathy in the narrative—as will later be discussed

38 —even though her portrait indirectly questions whether the New Woman was indeed liberated or merely marginalized more than other women.

After two waves of feminism, and in the midst of a third one, Julia Robertson becomes the heroine of Robert MacNeil’s Burden of Desire (1992); this portrait of the

“new” woman is written from the relatively enlightened late twentieth century. Part of

Julia’s allure, aside from a candid diary detailing her sexual desires, is her ability to see art in life: Julia is a painter trainer in Paris under modernist artist James Morrice, making her similar to the country woman who visits the city. Though she is somewhat bohemian, she adheres to social codes because her husband is a stuffy sort from the south end of

Halifax, and she must emulate his propriety. Like Penny in Barometer Rising , Julia is associated with Montreal, meaning they are both connected with a foreign place. Julia maintains connections to her in-laws populating the conservative peninsula of Halifax, but they hint that she is an outsider because of her desire for more risqué art like that of

Henri Matisse, whose vibrant work often depicted nudes. Only fellow free spirit Stewart

MacPherson—who has experimented with women more sexually liberated than Julia— recognizes the rebellious meaning behind Julia’s Matisse in the sitting room. It reminds her of her Parisian freedom (MacNeil 6). The painting is likely the same one Peter finds

“garishly modern” (359) because it depicts a partially nude woman. For some time, Julia has kept the Matisse in storage, though she tells Stewart that she wants to display it:

“‘I’ve had it put away. So many people don’t like it.’ She nodded toward Archie

Robertson across the hall, and whispered, ‘He thinks it’s awful’” (368). The statement conveys how Julia risks censure by publicly displaying art she has once hidden in her closet, much like her sexual desires, which have been hidden by her modesty.

39 Julia’s portrait is a much more sensitive one than that of Evelyn in Barometer

Rising . For one, MacNeil’s extensive presentation of women living in Halifax during the

1910s illustrates how women attempted to overcome the norms of repressed sexuality often equated with the period. MacNeil traces their sexual histories in a way that highlights how capable they are of instigating desire and flouting rules aimed at keeping them virgins until marriage. Julia depicts this expectation in the May 25, 1916 entry of her diary:

I know C meant nice girls don’t think about it and nice girls don’t like it.

It is generally felt, but almost never said—it doesn’t have to be—that a

nice, well-brought up woman, meaning what I think myself to be—would

naturally find sex distasteful. Mother emphasized that pain, duty,

submission are the woman’s lot. She never even hinted that I might enjoy

it, let alone long for it, as I do now. (MacNeil 113)

Julia feels desire for her absent husband, who has been stationed on the Western Front for the majority of their short marriage. Her passion for her husband is not the emotion which makes her a New Woman; rather, it is because her sexual desire is not limited to her husband that she overturns expectations. A soldier from a visiting British warship attracts her because his bathing costume clings to his body: “His bathing costume fitted him very snugly when it was wet . . . . The bulge in his wet suit seemed obvious to me . . .

. I found my eyes again glancing down at his lap and imagined that it was becoming larger” (159). Physical attraction outside of marriage marks Julia as a woman with freedom to fantasize about other men. As the novel illustrates, she is not beholden to standards which presume sex is a duty done by a submissive wife. She even recalls her

40 sexual apprenticeship with a boy in a barn (170), meaning that her desire is not limited to her short marriage and narrow social life.

Julia is not the only sexually liberated “new” woman populating the novel.

Stewart MacPherson’s women have taught him more about copulation than the boys at

Rothesay. As a professor, Stewart begins a liaison with a student who borrows his copy of Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams . She meets Stewart in his office to discuss “her libido, as charged with desire for Stewart as his for her. They began to come to this big, empty house to make love. Their unhesitant manner made it obvious that there had been a mutual intention from the start” (56). Christine is just one of Stewart’s companions who explores her sexuality through a casual affair with him. After one encounter with a woman fifteen years his senior, Madeleine, Stewart waxes poetic about his becoming more adult through sexual discovery: “All was still. He was, after all, a man. She had wanted him, he had wanted her, and it was as deliciously unburdening as in the dream” (183). Years later, Stewart labels their lovemaking artificial (201), suggesting it is nothing more than a liaison between consenting adults. It is quite similar to the relationship Stewart pursues with Anne-Lise, a German physician at the Victoria

General Hospital. Stewart notes that Anne-Lise exhibits a lack of “coquetry” and openness to modern ideas. She walks about Halifax without hat, parasol, or corset, signalling that she can flaunt her sexuality in a fashion that is more appropriate to Berlin than conventional Halifax and its collection of S-shaped women contorted by corsets.

Stewart equals it to sexual freedom: “Perhaps he divined that so rational and unaffected a twentieth-century woman would also have progressive ideas about love and sex” (202).

Unfortunately for Stewart, it means she engages in relationships with other men instead

41 of remaining monogamous with him. However, her ability to teach him suggests that

Anne-Lise is an independent woman who is able to take charge of her own sexual needs, even though MacNeil focuses more on her sexuality than her medical prowess.

Despite the appearance of these women in the novel, it is prudish Margery, wife of an even more prudish Anglican minister, who invests in modern ideas and puts them into practice as she strives to re-establish sexual intimacy with her husband. Early in the narrative, her passivity stimulates Peter’s libido; only after attempted suicide does

Margery change into a woman “disconcertingly greedy for sex” (475). Rather than the

“chloroformed” resistance (16) she displays in the novel’s opening, she becomes uninhibited to the point of enjoying making love with the door half-open while Peter becomes the partner most afraid of being interrupted (475). “All the physicality Peter had denied himself, or she had denied him in the years of their marriage, all the hungers she had suppressed, were suddenly indulged in a burst of mutual desire that would not be satisfied” (476). Though Margery establishes passion within the boundaries of marriage, she also escapes the mundane tasks of daily life. She even ignores her children, a factor which hampered her libido in the past, as a consequence of post-partum depression, which has never been resolved. Her transformation from a repressed wife to one who is liberated (at least within heteronormative limits) makes Margery one of the few characters who become more sexual throughout the course of the novel. She begins as a wife who is best depicted as frigid, though perhaps this frigidity is “withdrawal of a pleasure as punishment, although this is never admitted” (Greer 289). She moves from frigidity to uninhibited passion. This metamorphosis arises from jealousy over Julia’s candid diary yearnings. Though Margery never says as much, the modern ideas of Julia,

42 which Margery discovers in the diary, are the impetus for Margery’s new obsession with sexuality. “Did you like her [Julia] because she liked making love so much—more than I did? Is that why you were reading it [the diary]?” (490). However, though Margery attempts to become a New Woman, she is ultimately hindered by the burden of desire from which the novel takes its title.

Momentarily, it seems as though the newer incarnation of the Halifax romance,

Shattered City , will be more progressive than its predecessors: it introduces “new” women such as Beatrix Collins and Barbara Paxton, both progressive in some respects.

The main character’s love interest, Barbara, is a “new” woman who becomes not only a physician, but a skilled surgeon. She enters the profession because she is an only child, implying that any education meant for promising sons must instead be used for fostering her talents. She is a potential feminist. She attempts to help Charlie Collins’s post- traumatic stress disorder that results in debilitating flashbacks and panic attacks. In this relationship, Barbara and Charlie have the opportunity to be equals: she saves him from anxiety; he rescues her with his Canadian currency so she can buy something from a street vendor. She is not the typical damsel in distress of some romance novels like

Barometer Rising , in which Penny fulfills the role.

Charlie’s sister Beatrix exhibits signs of being a New Woman because of her interest in labour politics. She has Bolshevik leanings and promotes a “new world order.” She espouses wealth being redistributed to eradicate capitalism’s evils, as she tells her boyfriend: “You know the Bolshevists are right. A classless system with equal distribution of income and wealth—who’s going to argue with it?” (Leckie). Beatrix works at a printing company in the city’s industrial section, where she attempts to

43 unionize a small cadre of her friends. Also, she covers her sexual indiscretions by lying and saying she volunteers with the Imperial Order of Daughters of the Empire. It allows her the freedom to pursue sexual pleasure, as well as to criticize organizations which constrain women within approved frameworks. Her father Patrick approves of her outward duty to the British Empire: “‘Good girl—must have solidarity in these times.

We are at war. I can think of worse things to pique her interest than the IODE’” (Leckie).

When Patrick tells Beatrix to quit her “silly printing job” because she will not find a suitable husband there, Beatrix retorts, “I like it there, Dad. I have friends and I make a little money . . . maybe I don’t want a suitable husband, Dad.” Towards the film’s conclusion, she continues to be a potential renegade, one who chooses single motherhood when faced with an unplanned pregnancy. She is even brave enough to inquire about an illegal abortion. After the explosion, Beatrix draws Barbara aside:

I wanted to stop it and I know there are doctors that do that and I just was

wondering if you are one of the doctors that has done that … I believe in

the new ideas, you know, in freedom for women and socialism, but to

have a baby and no husband, I’m just . . . I’m just scared and I just want to

know, if I decided to stop it, would you do it? (Leckie)

Beatrix’s conundrum is similar to that of Penny with her daughter Jean. Both face a situation viewed as socially tragic for young women; such a disregard for social norms suggests that Beatrix, like Penny, is able to transgress and live life according to her own ideals.

Women in these four narratives share characteristics which situate them within the realm of the New Woman. Whether they are professionals like Penny—or somewhat

44 professional as Vera is in her VAD drag—or whether they are sexually liberated like

Julia or Beatrix, these characterizations are established within the beginnings of the narratives rather than the conclusions. Only Margery’s transformation from sexually suppressed homemaker to a woman actively seeking pleasure from her husband occurs close to the denouement. Most of these women exhibiting characteristics of the New

Woman change throughout their scripted lives. No matter how progressive they seem, these women will be altered by the narratives which ultimately recuperate them back into traditional gender roles, making their liberation seem futile. We have looked at how their freedom is evident in the beginnings of these narratives; now we must analyze how they are burdened and contained by the very narratives which seem to be attempting to liberate them.

45 CHAPTER T WO : B URDEN OF G ENDER

As we have seen in the previous chapter, women in these four works exhibit various characteristics of the New Woman as she negotiated her potential in occupational and cultural spheres. However, the conservative narratives effectively constrain women and take back this potential, operating through oppressive constructions that negate early attempts to transcend societal norms. Such constructions include depictions of the body in very sexualized terms, reinforcing stereotypes that position women in narrow categories. Male characters, male authors, and potentially, even male audience members, see these “new” women in varying ways which ultimately restrain women, control their sexual impulses, and appropriate them for male needs.

The main oppressive mechanism is the male gaze, which has received more attention within cinematic criticism than literary theory. E. Ann Kaplan and Laura

Mulvey have explored this issue with the aid of Freudian psychoanalysis. While

Sigmund Freud is a controversial lens through which to explore feminist issues—given that his research involved dubious and patriarchal clinical judgements of the sexual experiences of women—Freud does lend valuable insight into assessing how heteronormative desires operate. Mulvey suggests that because psychoanalysis is born from a patriarchal society, it provides a way in which to investigate how patriarchal society has structured “film form” (14). Though criticism of the male gaze is more crucial in film, Kaplan and Mulvey are relevant to literary criticism—especially when we look at narratives constructed by male authors. The power that men hold over women in regards to the gaze is essential to looking at the burden borne by women within these

46 heteronormative narratives. Cinema is just one manifestation of what Teresa de Lauretis calls “the technology of gender” (18); though Mulvey’s interpretation of the male gaze focuses solely on cinematic technique, we can also look at the romance novel as another technology of gender. As such, it constructs gender in a certain fashion, for gender is

“representation” and the “representation of gender is its construction” (De Lauretis 3).

Later she suggests that “The construction of gender goes on today through the various technologies of gender (e.g., cinema) and institutional discourses (e.g., theory) with power to control the field of social meaning and thus produce, promote, and ‘implant’ representations of gender” (18). Cinema as well as the romance offer representations of gender, which is already a representation in and of itself.

Mulvey’s 1973 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” introduces the concept of the male gaze to investigate how film—or the visual image—is “reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work within the individual subject and the social formations that have moulded him” (14). Male fantasy constructs the characters on the screen—figures through which man can “live out his fantasies and obsessions” (15).

It also constructs the way of looking—through the frame and the camera angle. As a result, the cinema offers pleasure in looking—scopophilia, a term coined by Freud— which, at extremes, can produce voyeurism, where “sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active, controlling sense, an objectified other” (17). For Mulvey, women function on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the film, and as an erotic object for the audience, or spectator (19). Thus, a woman functions as a hyper-sexualized being for the spectator of the cinema who enjoys the film through his “screen surrogate” or male character, who also views women.

47 While Mulvey’s theory hinges on framing and special organization as related to cinematic techniques, her theory also holds promise for literary theory as well. Though words are not images—and not easily conflated into the economy of the gaze—the novel functions in a similar fashion. Gillian Rose posits that psychoanalysis relies on “the details of an image for its interpretive insight” (115) and images can be verbal as well as visual. The author frames events in a certain way, even though we do not literally see this frame as we do in film—e.g. in Shattered City . However, like the writer and director of a film, the author constructs the world in which his or her narrative will unfold. In literary criticism, the male gaze can be directed from the audience, the creator of the fictive world, and the characters of that fiction. Julia in Burden of Desire is seen through the eyes of male characters, the eyes of the male characters reading her diary, as well as the male author. The diary itself adds an extra layer to this particular example, for it gives Julia an element in depicting her own feelings; however, MacNeil is the ultimate author of the diary. Despite the fact there is no visual image, we as audience or spectators see Julia through a certain point of view that frames her in a certain light and chooses to provide close-ups of certain physical features. This is also the case with

MacLennan, all but obsessed with depicting Penny’s white lock of hair.

The reason for this visual and verbal fantasy can be explained by psychoanalysis.

Though theorists such as Karen Horney challenge the Freudian notion that women lack the phallus and suffer from penis envy, Freudian psychoanalysis does provide insight into feminist issues. The Freudian notion of the castration complex becomes key to Mulvey’s position, as the fear of castration must be assuaged. Thus, something must function to pacify the male afraid of castration. Voyeurism, which distances and objectifies what is

48 gazed upon (Rose 110), is one technique of the cinema to pacify castration fears. A beautiful woman is “directed both at the hero of the film and at the male spectator,” and is so stunning that she “is turned into a reassuring object in an intimate relation to the spectator” (111). She is fetishized and made into an object which engages men’s gazes.

In the context of literary criticism, Gilbert and Gubar suggest that a man who authors texts defines women in language and “he owns them, controls them, and encloses them on the printed page” (12). The control of women on the literary stage is similar to the control mastered by the progenitor of the film.

Theorists such as Elizabeth Cowie and Kaja Silverman have challenged the idea of the “male gaze” and posited that the binary between woman as looked at and man as bearer of the look may not be so simple: “man may be image too, and … both men and women may look, but neither and never all-powerfully” (Rose 123). Though there is tension in the sexual binaries which characterize the image and the bearer of the gaze, in the case of these four works, women are often the image and male characters and authors become the bearer of the gaze through which the narrative is focalized and described.

If the male gaze arises in part because of a fear of women’s power and of castration, in these four works it is the progressive woman or the “new” woman who produces such tension because she holds power previously not granted to young women.

The male gaze sees these progressive women as transgressive. Though she originally is presented as an exotic woman heralded for her potential—such as MacLennan’s Penny, for her engineering prowess—she is curtailed by a gaze which focuses on her as a sexual being. If indeed castration anxiety must be assuaged, then such a self-motivated woman ready to challenge traditional gender roles must produce anxiety for those looking on her

49 dynamic character. Penny is seen as capable and intelligent, yet MacLennan focuses on her exterior and her sexuality. Originally, Penny is depicted as a progressive individual; yet almost simultaneously, Penny’s beauty becomes the topic of protracted description by

MacLennan.

Stereotypes about women’s bodies and their roles within society undercut the agency of women as they appear at the beginnings of the narratives. These stereotypes position women either as Eve or Madonna, or the angel of the house versus the mad woman in the attic (Gilbert and Gubar 17), meaning that women are made angelic if they behave, but are quickly demonized if they exhibit signs of rebellion against the patriarchal establishment. The New Woman appeared antithetical to Victorian ideology such as the angel in the house stereotype. Queen Victoria may have passed on in 1901, but the cult of domesticity championed in the Victorian period did not disappear. Rather, it coexisted uneasily with the New Woman populating offices and streets. The angelic mother who watched over her brood with little thought to her own needs did not disappear when Edward took the throne: rather the angel figure remained, as we shall see.

Even though Bell attempts to dispel traditional notions of women in A Romance of the Halifax Disaster , he directs the reader’s gaze to the heroine’s physical features.

Vera Warrington is often promoted as beautiful and angelic, even in the opening of the novel, as she is being wooed by Tom: “Her golden-brown hair, lit up by the moonbeams, framed her fair face in an ethereal halo” (Bell). Already, Vera appears cherubic. Her mothering nature is highlighted a few pages later, as she worries about Tom entering the war: “‘But you’re not a soldier,’ she cried, all the motherly protective instinct aroused and shining in her anxious eyes” (Bell). The next time Vera is described—not floating on

50 the St. Lawrence, but standing in her mother’s drawing room—she seems to emit the same glow: “The moist red lips, clear cut, full and sensuous were slightly parted, displaying to view teeth small and of pearly whiteness. Her gentle rounded bosom rose and fell quickly, as if vainly smothering some pent up emotion” (Bell). Such a catalogue of her features—those traditionally associated with women’s fecundity—highlights that her next job is to be wife and angelic mother. She becomes a fetishized figure.

Joseph Scanlon posits that Bell’s portrayal of women in this novel indicates a change in the way men pictured women like Vera; however, the depiction of women’s roles in society draws on Victorian ideals of the angel of the house, as depicted in

Coventry Patmore’s (in)famous poem. “Perhaps because he had seen the excellent work done by women nurses at the front, Bell, in his most memorable passage, states explicitly that war changed the role of women in society and the way men saw woman” (Scanlon

404). While it is true that Bell, as a physician working on the front, would have seen work accomplished by women who volunteered in the effort, several passages in A

Romance of the Halifax Disaster are patronizing in their celebration of the supposedly

“new” woman who arose during the war. The omniscient narrator suggests that the

“new” woman is a self-sacrificing angel ready to battle with men. First, it is noted how

Haligonian women have kept the home fires burning gloriously: “But the women of

Halifax, ever noble and self-sacrificing, measured up to the most glorious traditions of their sex. Well may the boys at the front fight for them, for their sisters, their mothers, their sweethearts and their wives—the heroic women of a noble fighting race” (Bell).

While women are heroic, they are recuperated into gendered roles in which men go to war while women keep the proverbial home fires burning. The narrative does note that

51 women have been considered inferior for “tens of centuries” because man thought woman “a fragile, loveable, but impractical creature” (Bell). According to the description, war permitted men to recognize that women are capable of more, though it wrongly uses old norms to raise women to the same pedestal popular in the Victorian period:

In the brighter light of a steadfast faith she towered above him, a new idol,

a new ideal, the woman who could work as well as play, who could fight

as well as love, who could be silent under sorrow and cheerful in the face

of tragedy.

Heroic and fearless she stands before him now pointing the way to greater

things and above her brave head shines the halo of self sacrifice. (Bell)

Despite being remoulded, the “new” woman, under the male gaze, drags around the same stereotype which had followed her through the Victorian age. This choice “encloses her in definitions of her person and her potential which, by reducing her to extreme stereotypes (angel, monster) drastically conflict with her own sense of self—that is, of her subjectivity, her autonomy, her creativity” (Gilbert and Gubar 48). Thus whether male texts enclose women in the angel or the monster stereotype, they are curtailed in terms of their potential. These four narratives reduce women to patriarchal binaries in which, as Toril Moi describes, Helene Cixous posits that “these binary oppositions are heavily imbricated in the patriarchal value system” (Moi 104).

Vera’s nurse is also seen in stereotypical terms, as she is not respected as a professional by Tom, but as someone with whom he can flirt. For most of the narrative’s

52 duration, the nurse has no name other than “the pretty nurse” or “the little nurse” as if

Bell makes her simultaneously a display and person unworthy of naming. After Tom gives her a comment as to the state of her courage, she blushes “prettily” and admonishes: “Flatterer!” (Bell). Not until the last scene do readers discover that the nurse’s name is Margaret—that is only because Vera calls her by name, finally making the nurse a subjective being rather than an unnamed character. Though Vera names her and validates her presence, the sole ambition of Margaret seems to be flirting with Tom and trying to make an impression on him (Bell). Though the novella attempts to negate stereotypes about women during war, this vision is hampered by the stereotypes through which they are described—Vera as the angelic woman, waiting for her man; and

Margaret, the pretty nurse who enjoys flirting with the soldiers.

In Barometer Rising , the old stereotypes are not as blatant even though Penny, like Vera, waits for her man to return from war even though they both believe their loves will not return. Nonetheless, though MacLennan documents the “new” woman in wartime society, the sexual stereotypes remain. Though MacLennan seems to mock how other characters see Penny, he also spends a fair amount of time depicting her beauty to counteract the possibility that her masculine profession may desexualize her. Penny’s femininity becomes the subject of protracted description which focuses on women’s reproductive role, almost fetishizing it:

There was something delicate, something extremely fragile in the

appearance of the girl alone against that angular background of motionless

machinery and silent engines. She appeared slight because the lines of her

waist were slim and her fingers and feet dainty. A second glance would

53 discover definite curves at her hips and breasts, a latent fullness the more

pleasing because it revealed itself as a surprise. (MacLennan 10)

MacLennan’s fetishization of her hair when Penny is working at a traditionally masculine profession restores her femininity, important because men often keep “their distance” when they discover her career choice. Though she works at a place which is decidedly masculine, MacLennan constructs Penny as a slight woman. Penny’s slimness indicates a more contemporary ideal of beauty than that prominent circa 1917, though her figure does not prevent curves from “surprising” any onlooker. The focus on features often associated with reproductive ability—such as hips and waist—suggests the gaze is male.

However, the male gaze does not just look upon a beautiful woman, but a beautiful woman who works in a male profession. Simon Perry’s assessment of her curves emphasizes how Penny feeds a fantasy of male desire despite—or perhaps because of— her unusual occupation. After Simon surveys her figure, he says, “‘You got a figure ought to fill any man’s eyes, even though it’s on the lean side.’ She knew that if Simon were twenty years younger he would be attempting to take liberties with her now and decided not to answer” (13). Ironically, Simon takes liberties in the very blatant appraisal of her figure, even though he sees her in the office daily. Instead of treating Penny with professional respect, Simon takes on a voyeuristic role in appropriating Penny’s body as a source of pleasure for his sexual needs. Penny is unaware of her body, for she later startles herself when she looks at her reflection:

She had lost weight during the past six months! If she looked to others as

fragile as she now appeared to herself, it was no wonder they never

believed her capable of the sort of work she did. Automatically her hand

54 went to her hair to try to hide some of the white lock, though she knew it

was impossible to conceal it entirely. (19-20)

Penny’s internalization of Simon’s gaze means that she finds her own body inadequate.

Even though the design aspect of her profession hardly requires brawn, she questions whether she is too fragile to work. Through the male gaze, Penny sees that her body is imperfect and ill-suited to her vocation.

Simon is not the only male character in Barometer Rising to associate Penny’s curves with sexual pleasure. Rather than seeing her figure through a woman’s perspective, we see Angus Murray’s discerning gaze scrutinizing Penny’s figure in a similar fashion. This time Penny is unaware Angus is evaluating her:

Penny was staring into the fire, and her abstraction made it easier for him

to observe her with the detachment he desired. To appraise women, to

study their figures and estimate how the planes and curves of their bodies

would balance when revealed, had always seemed to him a delightful

manner of passing the time. It pleased him particularly to consider shy or

diffident girls in this way, for he believed that any sensitive woman had

enormous potentialities of pleasure within herself, and the prospects of

awakening them never failed to stir his imagination. (32)

Angus waits until Penny’s attention drifts elsewhere before he reviews her figure, similar to the way in which Simon does at the shipyards, making both cases examples of Freud’s scopophilia and borderline voyeurism. Here the male gaze appropriates curves as a

“delightful manner of passing the time” (32). It does not give Penny agency beyond that of her physical appearance, which stimulates the male gaze. MacLennan does not return

55 to Penny’s point of view to speak about her own desires in regards to Angus’s body; rather, she is a recipient of the male gaze rather than gazing on a man herself. Instead of assuming that women have sexual appetites of their own, Angus presumes their sexuality lies dormant and that it is up to a man such as himself to bring this dormant sexuality into being through his own sexual prowess.

Barometer Rising also fetishizes the white lock of hair appearing at her temple.

Though she fancies herself a “plain, average girl of twenty-nine” (10), whiteness strikes

“from the left side of her forehead along the temple and over her ear” (10). Rather than continuing with more description, the narrative stalls at her hair: “It set her apart from other women and arrested men’s attention by its obscure appeal to their sensuality, though it seldom succeeded in making her thoroughly attractive to them” (10). Angus, already infatuated with Penny, finds the lock thoroughly attractive: “his eyes blinked through moisture so that all he could think of was the poignancy of that slim lock of white hair lacing the brown of her head” (34). Penny likens the lock to an “increased sense of her vulnerability” (20) though Neil finds that the white lock is merely what “that scrubby brown head” of hers always needed (121). MacLennan develops Penny, her curves, and her white lock in a pattern that sees her exterior become more important than her interior: her intellect, personality, and rebellious streak. David Leahy finds that though the “narrative occasionally defends her against sexist biases . . . it also consistently objectifies her” (158). She is always seen through the eyes of men—the characters and the pen of MacLennan. Though MacLennan’s construction of Penny is tempered by his portrayal of Aunt Maria, MacLennan’s sexualization of Penny suggests

56 that conservative stereotypes still linger in depictions of even potentially rebellious characters such as Penny.

Evelyn is another woman in Barometer Rising whose exterior is more important than the interior; she is seen through the male gaze, only the view through which she is seen is that of Geoffrey Wain. Geoffrey epitomizes the aristocracy which exploits war to produce colossal profits; not only does he exploit the wartime economy for personal gain, he also exploits one of his employees for personal pleasure. He justifies her status as a kept woman because without his patronage, she would be little more than a domestic servant—even the narrative justifies her status as a kept woman because it is better than being a maid. When readers see Evelyn, she is literally being gazed at by her master, as he surveys her body “as it emerged behind the veil of smoke he had blown in her direction, his eyes passing coolly along the curve of her thighs to the contour of her upper arms, exceptionally plump in so slight a girl” (67). Shortly thereafter, he “swung her into the air as though she were a child” (67). Subsequently the narrative is focalized through

Evelyn’s perspective, as she reflects on her relationship. Ambivalent about Geoffrey’s domination, Evelyn seems to simultaneously dislike and relish her time with her employer. At the time, we see her thoughts on her role as kept woman:

Under the pressure of his stroking hands her face grew set and

concentrated, and though her expression seemed to indicate pain, it was

evident that the pain was at least as welcome to one part of her mind as it

was repulsive to another. Hers was the satisfaction of knowing that with

so small a body she could tame this man of wealth and position and

physical strength, but she was the humiliated because he was always the

57 one to choose the occasion. Whenever he made love to her he seemed to

be studying the effect he produced, and she knew that the basis of his

desire lay in the fact that her perfectly formed body was as diminutive as a

miniature, that it was easy to hurt, and that he could goad it into the

convulsions of a pleasure she could rarely control. (68)

Not only is Evelyn a kept woman, stuck in a position by mere economics and circumstance, but Geoffrey also uses his domineering position to please and repulse her simultaneously—any protest from her only fuels his endeavours. He seems to take sadistic pleasure in literally manhandling her, because there is little opportunity for her to evade him. Even when Geoffrey seems at his most complimentary about Evelyn— applauding her shrewd business sense and discretion in keeping their transaction private

—he responds only by giving her money to attend a movie. While Evelyn may appear shrewd, she is also capitulating to his power in order to survive during the war without being a domestic servant, or returning to the small village where her family is poor.

Geoffrey changes his perception of Evelyn in the morning light so that he can continue enjoying Evelyn’s body without considering her an autonomous being. On the day of the explosion, we see how tenuous Geoffrey’s respect for her is, as he looks at her in the proverbial morning light and is repulsed by her appearance and breath. “Her slightness which last night had appeared so provocative now seemed a defect” (147). While

Geoffrey intimates that Evelyn is necessary to him, he also decides to avoid spending nights with her and instead to enjoy her “for a few minutes without losing prestige in his own eyes” (147). MacLennan notes how hypocritical Geoffrey’s assessment in the morning light is, for he is unaware that his own breath is revolting. MacLennan attempts

58 to award Evelyn with some agency and astuteness regarding her constrained circumstances, though Geoffrey continues to control the situation. Despite her awareness of the sexist politics operating in her relationship with Geoffrey, Evelyn does not have enough agency to break from the relationship. Like Penny, she is slight, fragile, and delicate.

Though about fifty years have passed since the publication of Barometer Rising ,

MacNeil, as does MacLennan, attempts to break free of stereotypical portrayals of women, yet largely positions women as the object of the male gaze. Unlike MacLennan,

MacNeil does not invest his “new” women with the capacity to become capable in a profession; rather, they function as beautiful women, for the most part. Julia is seen through the male gaze, only this time, men see her mostly through her diary. MacNeil’s focus on Julia’s beauty suggests that she is seen through her exterior much like

MacLennan’s Penny. Blond, slim, beautiful, she epitomizes the contemporary body ideal dressed in period clothing and widow’s weeds, a Barbie sporting tea gowns. Such an idealization may be ahistorical, as the body celebrated for much of the Victorian and

Edwardian periods—with the exception of the Gibson girl—was decidedly plump and curvy, as Bell and MacLennan highlight. Only after the war and the 1920s, when a boyish shape rose to prominence, did the hourglass figure disappear. Susan Brownmiller notes how the “fairy princess” often bears stereotypical traits:

Who can imagine a fairy princess with hair that is anything but long and

blonde, with eyes that are anything but blue, in clothes that are anything

but a filmy drape of gossamer and gauze? The fairy princess remains one

of the most powerful symbols of femininity the Western world has ever

59 devised, and falling short of her role model women are all feminine failure

to some degree. (67)

The fairy princess—Julia—functions as an eternal ideal. In a quotation which appears on the first page of the 1993 paperback version, Publishers Weekly applauds MacNeil for

Julia, because he “creates the kind of woman who will always set men dreaming.”

MacNeil himself actively encourages readers to see Julia in terms of her slim appearance:

Anyone seeing her striding vigorously up South Park Street and across

Spring Garden Road would have noted the energy in her slim figure, her

legs thrusting impatiently against the long skirts of her dress and coat.

Any passerby who met the gray eyes in the pale face framed by golden

hair would have thought, What a beautiful woman. (MacNeil 5)

Though there is a decreased emphasis on a figure associated with reproduction, Julia does conform to a more Hollywood vision of beauty—e.g. one familiar to 1992. She may appear to be different from Vera, but the male gaze still sees the woman in relation to a familiar stereotype—this stereotype just happens to be a contemporary one fostered by a thin body ideal rather than a buxom product of the pre-World War I period. Like Penny and Evelyn, Julia is depicted as fragile in contrast to the strong male.

The jacket blurb from Publishers Weekly illustrates how Julia functions as a woman who fulfills men’s fantasies, but this literally happens when Peter Wentworth and

Stewart MacPherson begin seeing Julia as a sexual being. Peter is the first voyeur to peek into her fantasies when he discovers her notebook accidentally shoved in a donated coat. After perusing the first entries, Peter is “breathing rapidly” and almost paranoid someone might be watching him read (110). Though he attempts to eject what he

60 considers smut out of his pure religious conscience, he cannot forget her desires, even when he tries to sleep: “Peter lay there, his mind filled with swelling curiosity about the author of the diary. She wanted her husband to put her nipples in his mouth” (111). As he delves deeper into her thoughts, he becomes “hypnotized by her. Everything about her stimulated him. Several explicit passages had aroused him” (121-22). Ironically, Peter gazes at Julia without actually seeing her body; yet there is a voyeuristic aspect to his reading. When Peter eventually relinquishes the diary to Stewart, Stewart identifies the author. Though he has no reason to continue reading himself, he reads every word. Julia manages to prick the imagination of these two men who are unhappy with their love lives.

However, their gaze is not satiated by words scribbled on paper—both of them attach great importance to meeting her and actually talking to her. Both Stewart and

Peter remember her desires when they meet her for the first time. They are so obvious,

Julia can see their lust:

Each time she glanced up, she found him [Peter] staring so intently that it

made her uncomfortable, but she was drawn to glance back to see if he

was still staring. He was. He did not have the soft, indulged look of

churchmen. He looked hard and urgent, even desperate. (274)

While Julia finds Peter attractive, his persistent staring makes her uneasy. His thoughts concern not the melancholy which settles over the south end after her husband dies in battle, but “her breasts, the shape of her knees beneath her skirt” (278). As Evelyn felt under Geoffrey’s gaze—both attracted and repulsed—Julia too is unnerved by Peter’s direct gaze and oscillates between “attraction and aversion” (359). When she mentions

61 someone named in the diary, she feels as though everyone in the room is staring at her, from Peter to her father-in-law (372). Scopophilia, or “sexual pleasure in looking,” presumes the victim of the male gaze enjoys being the recipient of it (Kaplan 14). Laura

Mulvey suggests that cinema “satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking” (17); it also applies to men reading Julia’s diary. As a result, a woman such as Julia in Burden of

Desire ought to be excited by voyeurs like Peter and Stewart seeing her journal.

However, this is not true, for Julia is made uncomfortable by the blatant staring that seems to expose her emotions for male pleasure.

Peter also exploits knowledge obtained from her diary, as well as a propitious meeting with Julia on the train to Halifax, to seduce her. After a stimulating conversation in the dining car, Julia invites Peter into her personal compartment where he buries his face against her thighs. Though “the power of her desire was frightening to her” (515), it is Peter who instigates their physical relationship, albeit after gentle flirting from Julia.

Just as they are about to have intercourse, Peter accidentally confesses to reading her diary. After she kicks him out of her compartment, she scrubs her skin with the fervour of Lady Macbeth: “She ran water in the basin and washed her face and hands to get the feeling of him off her skin. Despite the washing, she felt unclean, violated” (520).

Knowledge gleaned from the diary makes Julia feel as though Peter takes advantage of her because he knows her sexual secrets. Though Julia originally responds to Peter, she remembers how uncomfortable his gaze made her feel: “He had been spying on her through her diary, like a peeping Tom . . . . He was like a jackal sniffing around, waiting to pounce and tear—and he had pounced” (521). The male gaze changes from visual appropriation to physical contact, becoming powerful and intimidating, distressing Julia.

62 Whereas MacNeil suggests that Peter’s direct attempt to seduce Julia because he is turned on by her sexual fantasies is abhorrent, MacNeil does not vilify Stewart for a similar seduction attempt. After Peter uses the diary to gain access to Julia’s body, it is important to note how Stewart essentially accomplishes the same objective, although with slightly different motives. Throughout the narrative, Stewart is made the hero while

Peter’s passion makes him a threat. Peter’s insensitivity to Margery’s mental illness also makes him an unsympathetic character. However, though Stewart is made less repulsive, and Peter is made out to be the peeping Tom who treats Julia like a “prostitute” (524),

Stewart also appropriates knowledge derived from the diary to gain access to Julia’s needs and desires. Rather than hiding the fact he has read her most intimate confessions,

Stewart reveals to Julia that he read the diary. Though Julia eventually comes to realize she respects Stewart for having told her about his transgression, it remains important to remember that Stewart rationalized the reading of her thoughts under the guise of studying them for psychological interests only. Peter actually admits that he is reading the diary as a peeping Tom whereas Stewart’s rationale is too clinical: “He was so accustomed to case histories of female neurotics and psychotics that this was like a case history in normality, something the professional literature almost never covered, except by inference of the abnormal” (266). Though Peter is made out to be a man who exploits the diary to seduce Julia, he is self-conscious about how he is voyaging into her desires:

“‘It distresses me a little,’ Peter went on, ‘to compound the violation of her privacy, so to speak, but I have no way of knowing who the woman is, so I can’t simply return it’”

(265). Stewart’s excuse is that reading the normal desires of a woman is license for peering into the journal. Like Peter, he gains insights into the sexual fantasies and

63 feelings of Julia, which transform the way he feels about her, and ultimately lead to a seduction that is more successful than Peter’s passionate attempt. MacNeil seems to construct Stewart’s clinical desire to read the journal, and classify the woman behind the pen, as more appropriate than Peter’s blatant voyeurism. MacNeil does not ultimately critique the male gaze—just the terms on which it is used. Though self-conscious of gender politics, MacNeil ultimately invests in the male gaze and exploits it to illustrate women characters.

In the case of Margery, MacNeil conflates the clinical and sexual into the male gaze, as did Freud. The male gaze involves a disturbing ambiguity between the male gaze and sexual classification of behaviour by male clinicians. Yet MacNeil does not seem aware of the need to recognize that both are part of the male gaze. Stewart classifies Julia’s desire as normal, while Margery, the proverbial black sheep of the novel, finds her behaviour diagnosed as unusual under a microscope used both by Peter and Stewart. Lethargy and depression weigh down Margery, most likely a case of unresolved post-partum depression. Margery dislikes motherhood and homemaking, though she is tied to such duties because her husband is an impoverished minister. When

Margery is first introduced, her misery is seen through Peter’s eyes; he reflects on the diapers he has had to wash since the children were born, and though he ministers to

Margery’s needs, and those of the children, he also detests the way household chores fall on his shoulders because domestic routine makes her frantic. Yet the helplessness which angers him also arouses him: “Her lack of energy, her passiveness also excited him” (16).

Margery’s inability to do housework and other duties typical of the angel of the house often falls under scrutiny. Even her father notices her lack of domesticity, as he suggests

64 hiring a maid paid from his own ample pockets in order to make Margery conform once more: “If it takes it, you get two maids. You get some of the drudgery off that girl, and we’ll see if that doesn’t brighten her up,’” says her father to Peter (151). Margaret

Creighton, in discussing Peter’s future with Dean Creighton, suggests that Peter does

“half the housework. His hands look as red as a washerwoman’s” (195). Instead of suggesting that Peter do half the housework in a fair sharing of homemaking, other characters look at Margery as though she is a failure because she detests domesticity.

She cannot even feed son Michael in the post-natal period because she is too

“emotionally spent” (228). Rarely does MacNeil note that Margery’s drudgery is not the only reason she is so unhappy with her life: there is little fulfillment in scrubbing diapers in a house where the smell never vanishes (15). MacNeil focuses on why this is so abhorrent to Peter rather than Margery.

The novel contrasts Margery as an out-of-commission homemaker with the young girl who was the centre of fantasies for both Peter and Stewart. Though she is wan and lifeless when the novel begins, Margery was belle of the ball in her younger years, as the wife of Peter’s superior tells her husband: “She’s a charming little thing in her way, very pretty, but ever since they’ve been married, as far as I can see, she just mopes around, looking listless and limp” and “She was a gay enough thing, at parties and balls before they were married” (195). As a teenager, Stewart actually dreams a sexual fantasy of

Margery even though at the time he thinks “She was not the sort of girl to think such thoughts about, certainly not anything like entering her sexually” (90). Now that she is depressed, Stewart compares Margery to a rag doll, with a bent-over appearance that makes her look folded and collapsed. “Margery had very wide-set eyes framed by dark

65 curly hair, giving her the unreachable, ethereal look that had attracted Stewart as an adolescent. But the same look could quickly turn haunted; the wide mouth, which smiled so easily at dances, could turn down and look haggard” (256). Though Stewart experiences a sexual life that friends find “odd” (242), he suggests that it is Margery who is experiencing “some sexual dislocation” which explains the aetiology of her depression.

Stewart even encourages Peter to take her to a psychoanalyst, though the suggestion is overturned because everyone wants her to merely snap from her funk without help, despite their judgements on her behaviour.

Not only is Margery contrasted with herself as a teenager: she is contrasted to

Julia. Julia longs to have her nipples kissed; even when she is not depressed, Margery is never “eager” for sex (111). Instead of questioning that Margery does not have the energy for relations because of her depression and household expectations, she is castigated for not doing her fair share; Julia’s wealth allows her to do whatever she wants. Arguably, though, Margery does enjoy sex; merely the repercussions of intercourse worry her. Margery actually attempts to acquire birth control, but her old- fashioned physician tells her that birth control is illegal, and if she wants to plan her family, abstinence is the most “foolproof” way of preventing pregnancy. After her despairing experience with a male-centric medical system, Margery is ashamed of her desires: “Margery blushed and went away, cowed by his stern manner and his masculine authority” (254). Ironically, though the male characters think that Margery is unhappy with sex—especially Peter, who finds her passive resistance to intercourse attractive and infuriating—Margery actually experiences desire much the same as the other characters.

In fact, Margery was attracted to Julia Robertson’s husband, and when she recalls a night

66 at the beach, she does not recall her feelings for Peter so much as her physical attraction to Charles Robertson:

Margery had been looking at his hand on the tiller. It rested there,

hardened by working the boat, the nails broken in places. Low-angled sun

shone on the reddish-blond hair, no more than a down, running up the

tanned arm under his rolled-up sleeve. Huddling on the cockpit seat,

pulling her skirt down to keep her ankles warm, she had the strongest

desire to lean forward the few inches that separated them and put her lips

on the back of his hand. The feeling made her swallow and shudder.

(289)

Quite possibly, the origins of Margery’s depression go further than her marriage to Peter.

Rather, it seems as though Peter came in second place to the attraction she felt to Charles and the physical “electricity” (291) she experienced due to Charles’s physical features.

MacNeil only provides brief looks at Margery alone—usually she is focalized through

Peter or Stewart, meaning that MacNeil rarely interrogates her dormant fantasies.

After her suicide attempt, Margery transforms into a “new” woman through her performance of lighting a cigarette (544), taking charge of her sexuality, and redefining motherhood on her own terms (538). However, the men in the novel do not judge her as a positive model of womanhood even though her desire has become more prominent. As a result, we see she is a sexual woman merely contained within a patriarchal society.

Even when she becomes more sexual, Margery’s insistence at undertaking intercourse in potentially visible locations makes Peter uncomfortable. Though Peter finds her metamorphosis disturbing, it is quite possible that Margery is merely acting according to

67 her desires, which have been repressed for years under old mores. Peter finds their lovemaking akin to pure fornication: “Like two dogs pumping away in the street. What devil had loosed that desire in her?” (479). Ironically, though, Margery merely fulfills desires that differ little from those exhibited by Julia. When her desires are satiated,

Margery begins to look better, as though sex and her narcissistic routine which involves no homemaking have allowed her to return to her youthful sensuality. Of course, it is just as possible that it is not the recollection of Charles that has spurred Margery to discover her sexual side, but the reading of the diary which so titillated Peter. Even though

Margery’s fantasy about Charles is perfectly understandable, MacNeil makes it seem like a sign of her mental disintegration.

Though Stewart is a supposedly enlightened academic, he also judges his amorous flings harshly: he often utilizes Freudian terminology in depicting his relationships with

Christine, Madeleine, and Anne-Lise. Stewart finds that Berlin physician Anne-Lise had

“residual penis envy” (214). Stewart describes how her envy takes the form of wanting vaginal and oral sex: “she had a strong oral orientation as well as genital” (214). Yet on the same page, Stewart contradicts his assertion that she has penis envy, as she is more than content to masturbate: “She had no guilt about masturbation; indeed, she thought it a perfectly reasonable substitution for a partner, often preferable, and she showed him how she did it” (214). Though Stewart is stimulated by her desires, simultaneously, he is often repulsed, finding her “too desperate, too primitive.” After she sates his initial desire, he criticizes Anne-Lise because of what he sees as her faults:

He noticed that she was not as beautiful as he had thought, merely quite

pretty. Her front teeth were a little uneven—a trifle. The skin around her

68 nose, he now noticed, had larger pores than the rest and when she was too

hot, perspiration appeared there instantly. It gave him a faint disgust. She

sat naked on the bed to clip her toenails. He had found that charmingly

uninhibited; he had never seen a woman at her toilet. Now he found it

crude. She grew more casual with him, not minding what he saw her do,

asking him to wait while she washed her hair in front of him. She was, to

his inexperienced and fastidious mind, more matter-of-fact than he found

comfortable about her menstrual cycle. (213)

Not only does Stewart criticize Anne-Lise’s exhibitionism, he also applies psychological terminology like “neurotic” (214) to her habits after the fact, suggesting that he sees her at the time, as well as in his reminiscences, in a patriarchal light. Stewart also criticizes his older lover, Madeleine, and affixes guilt he feels about the affair to her: “It was a sin to make love outside marriage. But since both activities were expected of a young man, the sinfulness must lie with the woman who urged him” (183). When Stewart’s passion is finally sated, and he has blamed Madeleine for their affair, he finds her age repulsive to his sexual desires:

It was a hot evening, and she wore a dress that left her shoulders naked.

While the unaccustomed display of flesh attracted him, he observed when

they kissed that there were many small wrinkles in her neck. The

artificiality of their lovemaking left him impatient for something freer,

more complete. (201)

Without taking a moment to realize the hypocrisy of his analysis, Stewart categorizes their lovemaking as artificial even though he has as little invested in copulation as does

69 Madeleine. In fact, MacNeil fails to note that Stewart’s liaison with Anne-Lise smacks of a similar artificiality, and when the performance does not please Stewart—e.g. when

Anne-Lise clips her toenails—he prefers to end the affair and blame it on the neuroticism of the woman instead of his own insatiable need to become as popular as Peter was with women. Yet MacNeil suppresses this possibility by siding with Stewart most of the time

(aside from calling him fussy) and positioning him as the romance hero who ultimately wins Julia.

The novel attempts to explore the perceived differences between men and women’s desire. Hypocritical and judgmental about their women companions, Peter and

Stewart experience sexual desires which are not dissimilar to those of Julia, Margery, or

Stewart’s trio. Though by times Peter and Stewart question whether their desires are normal or unnatural, they more often than not pass judgement on their sexual partners.

The main thread of the narrative details Julia’s sexual fantasies as written in her diary and interpreted by Stewart and Peter. Though Julia actively records her desires, her thoughts are seen through Peter’s and Stewart’s readings of her fantasies and how they situate them with their own judgement. The novel actually ends with Julia worrying about how

Stewart views her carnally—or, to put it another way, how he categorizes her behaviour:

“By telling her he was in love with her and asking her to marry him and then saying he had read the diary, Stewart was letting her know that there was nothing in the diary for her to be ashamed of. He had read it all, all the things she thought embarrassing, and they didn’t disturb him” (558). Stewart’s love life could possibly leave him open to scrutiny such as that from a friend: “Lucy says that he leads a ‘naughty life’—ladies of a not very nice kind, a lot of trips to Europe—and you know what that implies! I think she

70 really means—in fact she said—he’s a black sheep and won’t settle down with any of the nice little South End ewes bleating their heads off for him” (242). Yet except for this brief moment in which Julia is telling Charles—by letter—of Stewart, he escapes censure even though his tastes for voracious lovers have almost gotten him into scrapes. Rather, it is the women seen through male gazes who occupy most of the narrative. The novel begins with Julia’s experience as she wakes up alone, her lover overseas. Despite this brief focalization through Julia’s point of view, the novel mostly focuses on the women as seen through the men. Though the title suggests desire burdens the characters in the novel, the burden falls mostly on the women.

In Shattered City , sexuality is, as in Burden of Desire , examined more frankly than in earlier narratives. Beatrix Collins is the black sheep of the family despite her parents’ obliviousness to her dalliance with a German spy, or the man she believes is

Dutch, not Deutsch. Her sexuality is seen through a patriarchal lens, and more often than not, it is through the German spy himself that her sexuality is analyzed. When Ernst is developing photographs taken with her on the Halifax waterfront, he reveals to his fellow spy that Beatrix is merely a cover for his work: “She’s a stupid cow. Nothing in her head but silly politics.” When his compatriot asks if she is capable in bed, Ernst replies,

“Lousy. We must make these sacrifices for Germany” (Leckie). His brief moment in attempting to save the city by climbing aboard the burning Mont Blanc to sink the ship and wet the explosives may indicate a change of heart, but Beatrix is not redeemed for her lousy ignorance. Throughout the movie, Leckie paints Beatrix as an ineffective political organizer; though Ernst is not a character for whom we have a lot of sympathy,

Beatrix’s pathetic existence does not evoke sympathy either. Rather, the movie depicts

71 her as a “stupid cow” who does not achieve her union dreams; rather, her “silly politics” disappears and she becomes an unwed mother. While MacLennan gives Evelyn the ability to grasp the politics of her situation, Beatrix is not allowed any such intelligence; instead, she remains ignorant to how she is being used.

While Beatrix is portrayed as the oblivious damsel in distress, Barbara is not seen through a flattering light either, despite her prominent profession. Originally, she seems to be the “new” woman who has entered a male-dominated profession and excelled by being a successful surgeon—much like Penny in Barometer Rising . However, when

Charlie and Barbara walk around Halifax on the night before the explosion, discussing their lives and drinking from a flask, Barbara reveals that her love life has been dismal because of her unusual profession. “I don’t have a boyfriend. When you’re a woman at

Boston Medical College, boys tend to find you a bit odd” (Leckie). Charlie seems to accept this explanation with a nod of his head. Though he does not judge her, he does judge his former girlfriend, who married someone else after he went to war: “She got bored and married a banker. She never did have much of an attention span” (Leckie).

Women in this movie, as seen through patriarchal eyes, are usually not given flattering portraits. Though the gaze does not become as powerful in Shattered City as it does in

Burden of Desire , women are still judged for their actions—especially the hapless

Beatrix, who never gains her dream of starting a union and is seen through the eyes of the

German menace.

Kaplan suggests that the male gaze is more powerful than any look given by women, as a man’s gaze “carries with it the power of action and of possession which is lacking in the female gaze. Women receive and return a gaze, but cannot act upon it”

72 (31). For example, Julia is unable to replicate the gaze which Peter gives her—an uncomfortable stare that almost undresses her in the drawing room. Similarly, Penny is unable to return the stare with which Simon assesses the curves of her body. Kaplan admits that the eroticization is not problematic, as male and female eroticism constructs desire in western culture (31), but genders are not equal in western culture. Even if a woman commandeers the gaze for her own use, she becomes masculine: “She nearly always loses her traditionally feminine characteristics in so doing—not those of attractiveness, but rather of kindness, humaneness, motherliness. She is now often cold, driving, ambitious, manipulating, just like the men whose position she has usurped” (29).

Evelyn is not an object of sympathy in Barometer Rising , for she has made sex a way of earning money while exercising her desire. Women like Anne-Lise who are able to objectify men and use their assertiveness to pleasure themselves and men, do not become ideal, but monstrous figures with large sweaty pores—antithetical to someone like Julia, who couches her desires within a safe heterosexual norm that responds to male wishes.

Because Anne-Lise takes what she desires, she becomes cold and driving, just like

Madeleine, who enjoys the “artificial” lovemaking she has with Stewart. When Margery remembers gazing on Charles Robertson, she begins a journey to her monstrous mental episode. Attempting to negotiate how she cares for her children makes her cold too:

“Margery attempted to orient herself in her bewilderment . . . . She seemed to remember just what she wanted to” (475). This means that she does not remember her children even though MacNeil suggests she might remember her parenting if she so desired.

Though Margery attempts to exploit her passion, her treatment of her family—basically forgetting them so she can pursue pleasure—does not allow her to become healthier;

73 rather, she is on her way to a future mental health breakdown. Even when women exploit the gaze, they are unable to replicate the power held by men who use the same look.

These women who cannot fulfill their own desires or instigate a similar relationship with the male—the original spectator—suffer under the burden of circumscribed desire.

74 CHAPTER T HREE : S HATTERED W OMEN

The women in these works who are seen by the male gaze suffer shattered physical and mental health as the narratives continue. In these novels, not only are women enclosed within a patriarchal code that sees them in a certain light, the transgressive among them receive punishment that chastises them for their rebellion— punishment that takes the form of illness or injury. Reward and punishment are often part of plots which feature archetypal characters, such as the romance. Villains receive their comeuppance, and those who are pure of heart achieve their goals. The Romance

Writers of America (RWA), which promotes itself as the “Voice of Romantic Fiction,” suggests that the idea of reward and punishment is essential to the romance novel as a genre.

Romance novels are based on the idea of an innate emotional justice—the

notion that good people in the world are rewarded and evil people are

punished. In a romance, the lovers who risk and struggle for each other

and their relationship are rewarded with emotional justice and

unconditional love. (RWA)

The RWA advocates on the behalf of its nearly 10,000 members and can say with some authority that romance novels of the contemporary kind suggest that reward and punishment, meted out to appropriate characters, are a key element of the genre. As

Renee Rubin writes in How to Write a Romance and Get It Published (1989), “Beyond the pleasure of vicarious experience is the glow of satisfaction that comes when evil is vanquished and virtue triumphs. I hesitate to use the word, but readers want a moral”

75 (Rubin 172). If there is a moral in the four narratives of this study, however, it is that women ought to stay in their prescribed roles. These morals, though, are often patriarchal morals, in which women who subscribe to traditionally accepted stereotypes of gender are rewarded, and those who refuse to adhere to patriarchal norms are punished. The moral economy of these four romances of the Halifax explosion presents an important opportunity to look at how punishment—such as suffering in the aftermath of disaster—is meted out according to behaviour—e.g. those who invest in “new” woman ideas and those who stay in the domestic sphere and display little rebellion. Though the narratives do not implicitly state that punishment is the goal of such suffering, these four narratives imply through their conspicuous repetition that these women are punished by distress and suffering—whether physical or mental—while the men remain capable and in fact heal from previous wounds.

Though the requirement that romances display a moral originates in a guide on how to publish pulp romance fiction, one could argue it differs little from Gillian Beer’s scholarly research on the romance. Some romance authors might balk at the idea that romance is equated with escapism, yet Beer suggests that “the finest romances are always much preoccupied with psychic responsibilities. Because romance shows us the ideal, it is implicitly instructive as well as escapist” (9). The instructive aspect of romances highlights how morally good people are rewarded, while those who do not subscribe to dominant codes are reprimanded. In these works, the dominant code is that of patriarchy; it is the transgressive New Woman who is punished. The fantasy is that women remain in traditional roles, even including invalidism.

76 In A Romance of the Halifax Disaster , the economy of reward and punishment is not as apparent as in the later works. At first, it seems as though men are punished for allowing women to be subjugated under patriarchy. Vera’s betrothed dies from explosion-related injuries; his death releases her from the matrimonial contract which otherwise would have been signed on the day of the explosion. Yet his death also punishes Vera for her subversive thoughts. He does not expire on some street. Instead,

Vera, while nursing, sees his suffering first-hand and relates it to her own rebellious feelings, as if the punishment of seeing him die is retribution for her dislike of the man.

“‘Will you forgive me, please?’ she sobbed. ‘Forgive me for all the harsh thoughts I have had—only because you were kind enough and generous enough to want a wilful and unlovable girl for your wife’” (Bell). Vera’s awareness about her “wilful” personality is not something she relishes, but becomes something for which she must apologize. After he dies, she stumbles home: “And Vera, with pallid cheeks and trembling steps, her heart strained with pent-up emotion, left the ward, dragging her weary steps homeward” (Bell).

Her melancholy stems not just from the painful passing of her betrothed; part of her despair originates in the fact she is unable to love him as society expects. “A conflict of emotions choked her, and a wave of remorse swept over her as she remembered her terrible wish of the day before. ‘It’s a judgment on me,’ she thought with a bitter self accusation. ‘I’m a wicked, wicked girl!’” (Bell). Feelings over their final meeting do not just arise from his death, but because it seems to be punishment for “harsh” thoughts conceived in subversion.

Vera is not the only woman who suffers in the aftermath of the explosion; the disaster also renders Margaret to a position of weakness. Though the “pretty nurse”

77 ministers to Tom’s needs while he recuperates in an unnamed hospital after surgery to remove bone from his leg, the explosion injures her. Even prior to the concussion,

Margaret demonstrates a naïveté about the fire in the north end. Though she remains ignorant as to the nature of the cloud, Tom’s authoritative voice informs her it is not an ordinary fire cloud (Bell). It takes several moments for the explosion to reach the south end; this delay reflects the fact that the explosion did not reach all parts of the city simultaneously. Rather, the explosion moved across the peninsula at varying speeds: the south end, where this hospital is likely located, received the effects of the detonation later, meaning that Tom and Margaret see the explosion before they feel its effects.

When the explosion finally rocks the hospital, the windows explode around them. Flying glass injures Margaret, as she “fell prone and lay there white and stunned. Blood oozed from a small cut in her forehead” (Bell). Though Tom is recovering from surgery and is rendered immobile by a leg cast, he administers aid to the nurse, the new damsel-in- distress. The man saves the situation even though the nurse ought to be protecting him.

This reversal strikes Margaret: she is startled to see her patient upright, and the “nursing instinct” causes her to chastise Tom until he returns to bed. Despite this, Tom maintains the voice of authority over Margaret, telling her that, in an act of war, Germans likely detonated munitions at the magazine. Though events will prove Tom wrong—Germans had nothing directly to do with the disaster—Bell does not tell readers that the naïve soldier is in error.

The treatment of Vera and Margaret in A Romance of the Halifax Disaster is restrained in comparison with the shattering of women in the three narratives that come after it. Barometer Rising is the worst offender, as Penny is struck with a severe eye

78 injury at her workplace rather than the cuts and scrapes suffered by Margaret. Ironically,

Penny would have survived without a scratch had she stayed behind the big oak door of her father’s home; the south end escapes catastrophic damage as if further rebuking

Penny for straying from the hearth. Not only is Penny rescued from her workplace by men, but men must save her from the blindness which could destroy her career and disable her permanently. When Neil finally remembers Penny, both Neil and Angus rush to the shipyards to extricate her from the rubble. Not only is Penny injured, but also the hyper-masculinised pair—each man vying for her affection—become heroes afters they forcibly remove her from her workplace. They carry her home, the site of imprisonment, as symbolized in the oak door: “Her family had shut her in from the world when she was young; it had shut her out from itself when she had ceased being a child” (85). Rendered ineffectual—not even able to aid others—Penny lies on an old couch, listening to others work around her; she cannot even retain consciousness, as she drifts in and out of blackness.

Only a surgery performed by Angus Murray can repair her sight. As the Wain house becomes a temporary hospital, and women perform nursing work such as rolling bandages, men engage in more active work that befits traditional gender roles rather than challenging them; this contrasts with the illnesses and injuries which strike the rebelling women. Angus acts as surgeon in the impromptu operating theatre, and strict boundaries are drawn between him and the nurse when he castigates himself for worrying what a nurse will think of his skills. Meanwhile, Neil runs around the city performing active service for anyone requiring help; we see him heading a caravan of “five trucks and two wagons” (MacLennan 179) while Penny remains unconscious. Though she will heal in

79 just a matter of weeks—just barely in time for the narrative’s conclusion—she is unable to participate in rescue efforts. Penny is not fatally injured, yet the result of not having the surgery is potential blindness. The novel’s end does not indicate whether the operation is a total success and she will return to drafting ships. The destruction of her workplace, the injury to her eye, and the loss of her daughter’s guardians mean that she will likely remain out of the workforce. Because her father also dies, one might assume the Wain business will fold altogether instead of rising from the ashes like the proverbial phoenix. As a result, Penny has no profession waiting for her. Conversely, Angus, recuperating from an injury that brought his surgical prowess into question, proves himself capable of surgery again, assuring him of employment in the explosion’s aftermath, even if it is not explicitly mentioned.

Because Penny is injured at work, her family accuses her of being culpable for her own shattered health. Aunt Maria’s assessment indicates that Penny is to blame for her injury, as she left the hearth for the workplace. “‘Poor child! We might have known a thing like this would happen to her—working in a place no woman ever ought to have been” (MacLennan 173). That women like Alec’s wife were imprisoned within their own homes after the explosion does not occur to Maria; the workplace is the site of Penny’s fall. Aunt Maria is the traditional voice which does not promote women leaving the home for alternate employment: rather, she is a bulwark of old-fashioned thinking. Yet though MacLennan attempts to construct her as a character for whom we should have little sympathy, her view is underscored by the fact that Penny is actually injured at her workplace while it is not mentioned that Angus and Neil are not punished for being in the wrong part of town. Whether we view her opinion with scepticism or dismay, the family

80 is displeased with Penny’s professional aspirations and believes the injury which brings her home is deserved. However, Angus and Neil—both of whom are in the north end when it is destroyed—remain mobile and capable of heroic action. Though they go to a place they do not belong, they are unscathed, while Penny’s injuries are the result of her transgression. Though Maria is supposedly ultra-conservative, there is little in the narrative to counteract this assessment. The text accords with the post-war assumption that women’s increased mobility and potential was an anomaly of war, not an indicator of improvement in women’s lives.

In contrast to Penny, neither Angus or Neil are injured during the explosion; rather, they overcome war injuries during the rescue effort which suggest a healing has occurred rather than suffering. Neil returns to Halifax, limping from a thigh wound received in battle and “easing his left leg carefully” along the Citadel when he looks at a panoramic of the city (5). Aside from the physical burden, he also suffers from what seems to be post-traumatic stress disorder, in that the noises of a boisterous city jangled his nerves and set him trembling (7). Later, after the explosion, he is not injured despite being in the north end of the city, where the majority of the injuries were received by citizens. Yet as he attempts to rescue victims, he has an epiphany: “Then suddenly he felt all right. It was as though the prospect of shock had torn at his nerves all these months and now he found his nerves better than he had hoped” (161). While it would seem reasonable that another traumatic event would worsen his anxiety, the narrative constructs the disaster as a tonic for his “jangled nerves” much like it does for Shattered

City’s Charlie Collins, as we shall discover presently.

81 Like Neil, Angus Murray has been injured in war. His profession is in question as well, for as a surgeon, his livelihood relies on his arm and hand being in perfect condition. When the novel opens, his “right hand was splinted and swathed in bandages and a sling of black silk hung from his shoulder like a bandoleer” (25). Though his colleagues recommend he amputate his arm after shrapnel strikes him, Angus fights to keep his hand. By the close of the novel, Murray is trying to heave timbers free (160).

Once the Wain house becomes a temporary hospital, Murray becomes instrumental in operating on injured casualties. Despite pain, Angus is able to save Penny’s “prolapsed iris” with his hand, which seems to have miraculously healed around the same time the explosion occurs. He performs eleven operations, meaning he has “done better than even his incurable personal optimism had fancied possible” (205). While Penny is punished with injury, Angus, like Neil and Charlie, overcome previous injury to rescue the damsel in distress. This suggests that the narratives are constructed to punish the progressive women with suffering while male characters rise above disaster.

The “new” woman who migrates to the city to work for a living, Evelyn, discovers that her body generates more revenue than her stenography skills—and is ultimately punished for profiting from her body. Though she supports herself by remaining Geoffrey’s mistress, she receives no reprieve in the end: like Geoffrey, Evelyn perishes in the explosion. Not only does she lose her life, she also loses her dignity; Neil finds her in a state of undress which indicates what she was doing when the disaster struck:

As his hands plunged forward for balance they touched something soft and

smooth and cold. He flashed on the torch again and saw that it was a

82 girl’s body, entirely naked and exposed. It looked pathetically frail,

stretched there in this senseless confusion, but the sight of it was more

incongruous than shocking. (MacLennan 202)

Not only is Evelyn literally exposed, but also her sexual indiscretions have been displayed for anyone to see. Geoffrey is not depicted as frail, or naked; instead, Evelyn is portrayed as the weak victim. While her frailty could indicate that she is the faultless innocent, the words also disempower her even in death. Evelyn is punished for her sexual transgressions by her demise. While in this particular case the punishment is not meted out according to gender—Geoffrey dies as well—Evelyn does not stand a chance of even retaining dignity after death. On the morning of the explosion, when Geoffrey is surveying her emaciated form, lying naked on her bed, he decides “a night like the one past would never occur again. Evelyn stood for disorder, for the state of the mind which is prepared to let everything take its course, and she spoiled his dreams of greatness”

(147). As the offender who is utilizing her sexual proficiency to maintain Geoffrey as her master, Evelyn must either renounce her ways or be punished for them. In this case, she is penalized with death. Geoffrey is punished for his association with the old colonial order, though clearly, “new” women like Evelyn do not escape a similar fate. Those, like

Penny, who ascribe to new ideals which are basically old traditions, as is evident from the ongoing allusion to The Odyssey , are those who stand tall at the end of the narrative.

Perhaps a new world rises from the ashes like a phoenix, but it maintains the gender binary of the old order.

Where Evelyn dies for her transgressions and Penny suffers physical injury,

Margery of Burden of Desires faces intense madness instead. In the early part of her

83 marriage, Margery is unhappy, worn down by the result of desire: children and domesticity. Listless and all but bedridden, Margery suffers through depression which manages to arouse Peter. She is mostly asexual, perhaps taking part in the cult of female invalidism that “[p]ervaded upper- and upper-middle-class female culture” in the

Victorian period and early twentieth century (Ehrenreich and English 17) and further separated genders. However, invalidism in women only works if family resources permit a homemaker to lounge about fostering that invalidism; Margery’s household runs on meagre finances from Peter’s ministering. He offers a life to which she is unaccustomed.

Her wearing of silk stockings instead of more practical cotton ones indicates she is a belle without a ball to attend; the drudgery of homemaking in a poor household further stifles her. Ironically—and without knowing it—she subscribes to the “aesthetic cult of ladylike fragility and delicate beauty—no doubt associated with the moral cult of the angel- woman” (Gilbert and Gubar 25). But this stereotype does not help her—it hinders her because she is expected to run her household.

Though the explosion leaves Margery unscathed, she resorts to a form of self- punishment for her inability to run a house: suicide. In The Female Eunuch (1970) in a chapter entitled “Misery,” Germaine Greer suggests that “Female revolt takes curious and tortuous forms, and the greatest toll is exacted by the woman upon herself” (280).

Margery attempts to gas herself with the stove. When the gas lines open after the explosion, she plots her escape from her unhappy homemaking with, ironically, an appliance used for cooking. She plugs the kitchen so no gas can escape—and no oxygen can enter—then turns on the stove. Readers can view this situation two ways. A reader may pity her and suggest that birth control may have improved her lot, as well as some

84 meaningful work which could have satisfied her. As de Beauvoir suggests, suicide is a way out to the “woman who has reached the end of her resistance” (678). Another interpretation of Margery is that she seems to be a grotesque example of womanhood: she seems to detest her children and avoids caring for them and her husband. Not only does she fail at mothering, for which she must punish herself, the very act of punishment makes her liable to criticism that she is neglecting her children by depriving them of a living mother.

After Margery’s self-punishment ruins her memory and increases her sexual appetite, Margery is further punished by what seems to be a deteriorating mental state.

Margery is not fulfilled by the “new” woman persona she adopts after the explosion and her suicide attempt. Rather than drawing power from her new role—one in which she is free to discover things beyond motherhood (which she has conveniently forgotten) she is punished once more by a fragility which portends her next breakdown. Stewart notes her excessive vulnerability when she offers tea to Peter and him: “The more sprightly her conversation sounded, the more fragile, the more disposable she seemed. Holding their anger, both men stared at her as a performer who might fall” (MacNeil 547). Though the narrative ends before Margery falls again, clearly she is not a person who has found happiness either as a homemaker, angel of the house, or “new” woman. MacNeil is reportedly writing a sequel to the 1992 novel which may further detail Margery’s journey, but this novel suggests that she will remain forever unhappy with any of the roles offered to her—if she manages to survive at all.

Margery’s grotesque parody of the New Woman and its dismal success in providing new opportunities for her highlight how the patriarchal society depicts

85 transgressive women in derogatory terms. The feminist was pathologized as a potential mad woman, as Ann Heilmann suggests in New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-

Wave Feminism (2000): “While feminists were associated with the discourses of madness and violence, their male opponents became the voice of reason” (26). Thus Margery is associated with madness while Stewart and Peter represent reason—especially Stewart, engrossed in psychoanalysis. The progressive woman as a mentally unstable individual is not a new idea, as Gilbert and Gubar prove.

If the woman was not the angel of the house, she was a monstrous figure requiring containment to the attic—or, in Margery’s case, to the bedroom. Though Margery is not literally placed in the attic like Bertha Rochester of Jane Eyre , she is segregated from society because of her domestic duties and depression. Often she goes to bed and makes

Peter do the domestic work, meaning that though she does not inhabit the attic, she lives in similar isolation. Though Margery’s life seems like punishment, Gilbert and Gubar seem to suggest that the figure of the monstrous female actually represents rebellion:

Indeed, if we return to the literary definitions of “authority” with which

we begin this discussion, we will see that the monster-woman, threatening

to replace her angelic sister, embodies intransigent female autonomy and

thus represents both the author’s power to allay “his” anxieties by calling

their source bad names (witch, bitch, fiend, monster) and, simultaneously,

the mysterious power of the character who refuses to stay in her textually

ordained “place” and thus generates a story that “gets away” from its

author. (28)

86 In the narrative, however, the potential freedom of Margery from domesticity—death— through her self-punishment must be contained. Instead of dying, Margery is brought back to life by the male-dominated medical perspective, as well as her mother-in-law

Dorothy Wentworth, who is the only character who understands Margery’s desperation without demonizing her. Unable to escape, Margery is punished by remaining in her life.

Though she manages to avoid some of the work she detests, her mental state remains fragile, ready to break at a moment’s notice. For Margery, freedom equals madness—at least as seen through the eyes of the patriarchal society which keeps her in the metaphorical attic.

In Shattered City , punishment and reward are not so simple as physical or mental injury. Overall, the majority of men, as epitomized in brooding male characters like

Charlie Collins, enjoy better fates than the women, with the exception being the Collins patriarch and Beatrix’s German spy. However, the men—as in the other three works— take over disaster relief, either under the auspices of the army or the medical establishment. While women are portrayed as ailing or hysterical, men offer solid shoulders to them.

As is the case with Neil Macrae in Barometer Rising , Charlie Collins’s psyche is decimated by war. Though Neil limps around Halifax with physiological and psychological battle scars, he is not the only one: Charlie bears wounds as well, though they are all mental, in the manifestation of what seems to be post-traumatic stress disorder. When the movie begins, Charlie is barely functional, shattered by memories of a failed attack on the enemy which slaughtered his men. Even exploding Christmas bulbs prompt a panic attack. However, the explosion changes Charlie. Stress does not make

87 Charlie inert; rather, it mobilizes him into a military man who marshals resources to provide assistance wherever he goes. His transformation occurs when he quails prior to entering his father’s collapsed store to rescue him. War tears him apart, but a civilian disaster propels him into action. Rather than being injured by the blast, Charlie is healed.

He gives orders as soldiers sort through rubble; this is similar to Neil Macrae, who is rejuvenated at the same moment 2,000 people die.

However, though men find opportunities to regain lost confidence by helping fellow citizens, women are not so lucky. Rather, they are punished for leaving the house and exploring opportunities outside traditional gender roles. Though Beatrix begins as a

“new” woman, by the movie’s conclusion, Beatrix becomes a woman with trials and tribulations that will demand fortitude if she is to be able to care for an illegitimate baby.

While she prepares to care for the child, it is clear she is not enthralled with the prospect of playing a role stigmatized by society. Despite her progressive views on women, the prospect of being an unmarried mother means she will face a life comprised of social censure and financial difficulties. Beatrix’s thoughts of ending the pregnancy are met with a counterargument from Barbara, functioning as a product of the medical system.

As well, her mother negates the option of terminating the pregnancy because she says, “A life’s a life, isn’t it, dear?” Beatrix is prevented from doing anything entirely revolutionary by opinions that suggest motherhood is viable even if it is unplanned. She is the only woman in the movie who flouts societal rules, yet even she must finish the movie within the paradigm of motherhood and a return to the family which will contain her.

88 These four narratives use other perceived gender differences to contain and punish women. Fainting—or to put it more theatrically, swooning—is just one technique to evoke gender differentiation between men and women in the aftermath of trauma that renders them incapable of action. Even a sociological study of the disaster enforced gender binaries, as in this example from Samuel Henry Prince: “There was one awful moment when hearts sank, and breaths were held. Then women cried aloud, and men looked dumbly into each other’s eyes, and awaited the crack of doom” (Prince 27).

Immediately following the blast, after she has been fallen at her workplace like Penny in

Barometer Rising , Beatrix awakens to find a man helping her don a coat and lace up a mismatched shoe to replace one lost in the blast: “‘My God girl, are you all right?’”

(Leckie). Beatrix is mute and unable to communicate, let alone save herself from shock and exposure; it is up to the fisherman to aid her, even though she is capable enough to outwit her family and agitate for social change. Women other than Beatrix also display a gendered grief: one woman, trapped in her home, waits for a soldier to pull her from her window. Another scene reveals a hysterical woman howling outside her broken home, where bodies lie helter-skelter. These scenes in which women become the damsel-in- distress contrast with the scenes of valour in which men are seen commanding resources

—or worse, expending great amounts of energy in keeping their emotions in check. Even

Charlie squeezes out only a few tears. His compatriot is quick to reassure him of his masculinity, though: “It’s all right, sir. I had some tears myself” (Leckie). Aside from a brief moment of crying, Charlie shakes off the despair and continues with the rescue.

Barbara Paxton becomes one of the few adult women able to avoid punishment throughout the course of the film while maintaining a rebellious position. Before and

89 after the explosion, Barbara remains a character neither wholly subservient to men nor entirely capable of independence. It is difficult to ascertain whether she is free of social conventions or as much a slave to them as other women characters. Often, Barbara must defer to other male, medical authorities, and is frequently shown just checking patients’ pulses or analyzing their faces worriedly. In the aftermath of the disaster, she operates on

Courtney to remove the stake from his chest, saving his life. On a progressive note,

Barbara becomes the Angus Murray of the novel: her surgical skills save someone from death. She is one of the few to escape both physical and mental anguish, and actually provide relief in an active capacity. However, in the aftermath of the explosion, with the city desperate to find someone to blame for the tragedy, women are relegated to the background and men take over the prosecution aimed at assigning responsibility for the explosion. Like the other women of the movie, she often looks on while men sort out difficult decisions, as occurs within the dark Spring Garden Road courthouse. Women are mere spectators while male authority figures place blame for the disaster. Barbara, after performing Courtney’s surgery, becomes a background figure once more, watching

Charlie act as defence lawyer for pilot Francis Mackey.

Whether women are progressive or solidly entrenched in typical gender paradigms that privilege women as homemakers as opposed to individuals, they are portrayed as weak in comparison to men, often through the form of illness or injury.

Millicent Collins remains in the domestic sphere, toiling over her beloved teacups, when she is struck down by the explosion. Windows shatter over Millicent, blinding her.

Because her vision is extinguished, she must rely on men to help her. Her son becomes not only her hero but her vision too. He leads her around and she becomes subservient to

90 him, as her husband is out of commission and her son wears the uniform of authority.

For the most part, Millicent does not subscribe to the ideals of the “new” woman, with the exception of her acceptance of Beatrix’s pregnancy. However, she is not punished because of her progressiveness; only after her physical tribulations does she ignore societal conventions and find optimism in her future grandchild. Her widowed state— widowhood being one of the few times women are often freed from norms—is not likely to continue a long time, as the appearance of a shy Mr. Cleese suggests the romance plot will begin afresh. Released from one betrothal, she is ready to begin a new one.

Punishment and reward, the moral economy of these narratives, is part of the relegation of women to subordinate roles. In A Romance of the Halifax Disaster , Vera is struck by guilt and grief of the loss of her betrothed while Margaret is struck down by the explosion. In Barometer Rising , Penny is injured at her workplace, rendering her incapable of participating in the rescue effort. Margery punishes herself in Burden of

Desire because she is inept as wife and mother. And in Shattered City , Beatrix is contained despite displaying a keen interest in politics and social reform. If there is a moral in these tales, it is that women who remain in their delineated roles do not suffer as does the woman who works outside the home among her other transgressions. While the men remain capable of participating in the relief effort, the women who were once active and progressive are struck by illness or injury that punishes the rebellious among them.

Such punishment sends a disciplinary message that women who stray from strict gender roles and become “new” women are bound to find unhappiness. However, it is not fate doling out these particular punishments; it is the narrative constructions which imply that

91 progressive women are bound to receive their comeuppance unless they conform to heteronormativity.

92 CONCLUSION : A R OMANCE OF H ETERONORMATIVITY

The professional “new” women in these four narratives who foray into professional and cultural spheres that allow the possibility of transcendence are undermined by authors who sexualize these women through the male gaze. These authors also construct punishment—either physical or mental—to discipline women and bring them back into the heteronormative fold, through conspicuous disciplinary patterns that harm women and heal men. These constructions ultimately suggest that these four examples of the romance genre have been used to promote heteronormativity.

The critical battle as to whether the romance genre is antithetical to feminist aims is likely to continue, though this study has not aimed to crucify the genre itself, but to critique the means by which it can be deployed to reaffirm patriarchal gender roles with particular romances. One would like to believe that the resulting betrothals are a reward for the women who have been punished. However, it is just as possible that heroes who actively engage in rescues or journeys are rewarded with the beautiful heroine as in the close of any action movie—or even in the spy thriller by Jim Lotz, The Sixth of

December (1981), when Jack Dobney secures the betrothal of nurse Beth Macdonald after the explosion and a high-speed pursuit of escaping German spies. Though not a romance, the novel is another patriarchal interpretation of the disaster, which illustrates how the betrothal in the romance in particular can function as a reward for men and not women.

The betrothal scheme which concludes romances becomes problematic if it continues to be the norm and glorifies compulsory heterosexuality. Pamela Regis

93 suggests betrothal or marriage rewards the gumption of the heroine following her ritual death, which takes the place of actual danger (Regis 15) which in the cases of these four narratives is the explosion that injures them or makes them ill. This ritual death occurs in the beginning, middle, or conclusion of these plots and during this time, readers see this moment where “no happy resolution of the narrative seems possible. The heroine herself is threatened, either directly or indirectly, actually or symbolically. Her escape from ritual death involves an overthrow of a most fundamental sort” (Regis 15). However,

Regis fails to note that ritual death is often allayed by the intervention of the hero. Thus, the heroine’s freedom in choosing this heteronormativity for herself is limited, for she rises above death—real and symbolic—through a man’s assistance. Instead of becoming a powerful figure, she becomes the damsel in distress—a stock character of the romance, as Creelman suggests. Margaret is helped off the floor by Tom. Penny’s sight is saved by Angus. Julia’s sexual despair is healed by Stewart. Beatrix is helped by a fisherman.

This intervention transforms the betrothal into a reward for the men who help women through their ritual deaths. Tom proposes to Vera. Neil takes Penny and walks hand-in- hand towards their new life of domesticity. Stewart tells Julia her sexual desires are normal and asks her to telephone him. Charlie brings Barbara home to celebrate

Christmas. Though ritual death presents an opportunity for women to exercise their ability to overcome a threat, it also—in these four works—presents an opportunity for men to act as hero and save the damsel.

Punishment and suffering experienced by the heroines prior to their betrothal conclusions illustrate the potential shortcomings of a rosy interpretation of the romance as conceived by Regis. If men help women overcome their ritual deaths—to the point of

94 actually rescuing their physical bodies—it means betrothal is not a reward for women but for the men who rescue them. The woman does not take the man—the man takes the woman: “[t]he girl seems absolutely passive; she is married, given in marriage by her parents. Boys get married, they take a wife” (De Beauvoir 479). As we see, women do not always take advantage of freedom to choose the man of their fantasies; in many ways, the men have already chosen them. While there is an element of agency in the fact these women do acquiesce to the advances of their prospective suitors, there is little tension in the way in which women take on their roles as a traditional woman. In Vera’s case, her choosing of Tom over William seems to signal her freedom; however, only the plot’s intervention in killing her betrothed allows her to exercise her liberty. Because Tom chooses her, and not Margaret, he maintains control of the situation. In Barometer

Rising , Neil—limping and listless—returns to Halifax to clear his name and find his lover. Creelman suggests Neil’s Odyssean journey is the dominant feature of the narrative (45). As Creelman illustrates, Penny is not the character journeying to self- discovery; she becomes the passive partner waiting for her love to return home (41). She is a reward for Neil. It seems as though her dabbling in engineering is but a modern example of Penelope’s mythic weaving. 6 If Neil is indeed Odysseus, he returns to find his Penelope waiting and ready to return to the subordinate position espoused by Aunt

Maria.

The conclusion of Burden of Desire looks similar to that of Barometer Rising .

Despite Julia’s central role in the narrative, the novel depicts the competition between

Peter and Stewart as to who will win the heart—and body—of the young woman who is

6 In Homer’s The Odyssey , Penelope remains the “symbol of the virtuous and industrious wife” (Fantham 104) by discouraging suitors who attempt to woo her while she waits for Odysseus to return. To preserve herself and the family, she engages in weaving.

95 so sexually explicit in her diary. Peter, despite being a minister, was once an athletic man popular with women. On the other hand, Stewart is a rumpled professor who was bullied and sexually abused in private school and had to win his way with brains, not brawn.

Both vie for the affections of Julia who is at the “height of her female reproductive power,” to use terminology from romance author Chris Peirson (87). The battle between

Peter and Stewart concludes with Stewart winning Julia even though both men have violated her privacy. The man has secured the woman he wishes to have.

Shattered City provides the final example of a man being rewarded with a woman.

Charlie fights internal demons in the movie’s main thread. Despite being labelled a coward for protesting public opinion at a war bond rally, Charlie maintains a public stance against the conflict. Not only does he maintain the moral high ground in a city fervent with naïve patriotism, he also helps numerous people after the explosion. For this, he is rewarded with Barbara, who understands his tremors, which mark him as a sensitive man. Clearly she is not the main character whom the movie follows, for she only appears on-screen when Charlie stands in the frame. With the exception of Beatrix and Barbara’s discussion on abortion and pregnancy, Barbara remains only in scenes with

Charlie, suggesting that she is not a main character. Through flashbacks to the front, we are privy to Charlie’s point of view but Barbara remains more elusive. At the end of the movie, despite her work in surgery, she is not seen in a professional capacity but as a woman in the domestic sphere, smiling over hearth and home. She dons the halo of the angel in the house. Though she wants to help finish the war, her descendant explains that she becomes a mother, with no word as to her other achievements. Charlie secures her services as a wife and mother in reward for his service to country and city in their

96 respective hours of need. It seems as though Barbara has been languishing in the medical establishment while waiting for the right man to marry her. Medicine becomes her weaving.

As we can see, Regis’s proposition that the heroine overcomes barriers and chooses her own life does not seem validated by the way in which Barbara is betrothed to

Charlie. Despite her wish to help win the war, audience members do not see her fight.

Though Regis limits the romance to a story about a heroine—meaning these hero-centric tales are not perfect examples of the genre, according to her—tension arises in the endings nonetheless, because the genre is being used by male authors for a specific gain.

The main characters of these four narratives are for the most part men, but this does not mean that Regis’s definition about ritual death is not valid. Rather, when we view the conclusion from the vantage point of the man, it reveals that women do not hold many choices following ritual death. Though Penny has the option of marrying Angus, there is little else for her to do once her workplace is demolished. Julia must choose between two men who have violated her privacy; she only has the choice of establishing who seems most contrite. Barbara has few suitors; her romance with Charlie seems to not indicate a choice on her part so much as a settling for one of the few men who have shown interest.

This differs from the reward as Regis defines it, as a woman has:

two great liberations: She overcomes the barrier and is freed from all

encumbrances to her union with the hero. She cheats ritual death,

symbolically or actually, and is freed to live. Her freedom is a large part

of what readers celebrate at the end of the romance. Her choice to marry

the hero is just one manifestation of her freedom. The state of freedom is

97 the opposite of the bondage that feminists claim is the result of reading

romance novels—both for heroine and reader . . . heroines are not

extinguished, they are freed. (Regis 15-6)

Freedom to choose a mate is limited within these four works. Regis suggests that heroines have the power to choose who appeals to them, but this power seems negligible given the containment of women within these four works. Within these examples, the reward scheme privileges men, not women.

The two earlier narratives on the Halifax explosion might be allowed a little leeway in their conservative portrayals of women. Written in 1918 and 1941 respectively, A Romance of the Halifax Disaster and Barometer Rising appeared at times when women’s temporary wartime mobility was revoked after the conflict; therefore, their reliance on heteronormativity is less surprising. However, the later two narratives are written within the third wave of feminism. Burden of Desire was published when third-wave feminism was gaining prominence among women of colour and lesbians who were attempting a forge a new feminism that was not limited to the white, middle-class feminism of the second wave. Shattered City was produced in 2003, when terms like compulsory heterosexuality and heteronormativity were acceptable terms for depicting patriarchal Western society. Yet Burden of Desire and Shattered City display the same reliance on heteronormativity to conclude their narratives as the earlier two works.

Janice Radway’s alarm at how romances celebrate patriarchy was in its second edition by the time MacNeil’s novel was published.

Despite the varying publication dates of these four narratives, there remains a similar ideology in the narratives that shows how popular culture can retain vestiges of

98 Victorian thought. One explanation for this recurrence within these Halifax explosion romances may be the authors’ attempts to recreate society circa 1917 in the provincial world of Halifax. Yet Sophia Almon Hensley, who was born in Nova Scotia, had sounded the alarm about unequal marriages in Woman and the Race in 1907. Though

Hensley’s ideas were conservative and borderline eugenics—fairly typical of early suffragette writing, according to Janice Fiamengo in her essay “A Legacy of

Ambivalence: Responses to Nellie McClung”—Hensley’s work is not all negative. She suggests that women are similar to men except they have been inculcated with different ideas: “Differences of training have of necessity produced different results, and the differing ideals held up before the mind’s eye of the boy and the girl could not but operate as they have done” (Hart 59). 7 The example of Hensley suggests that contemporary Nova Scotians were questioning stereotypical gender roles which polarized constructed gender roles and made women subservient to men.

Through this investigation into this cluster of romances, one can see that the genre lends itself to recuperating women into a patriarchal society which espouses compulsory heterosexuality. Radway contends that romance narratives can potentially glorify patriarchy and reinforce heteronormativity rather than celebrating women’s freedom to choose their men, as suggested by Regis. Though Regis argues that the romance is a tale about a woman, not a man, we can see from past romances that this is not always the case. In A Knight’s Tale from The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer focalizes the story mostly through Arcite and Palamon, not Emilye. Even a contemporary romance such as Nicholas Sparks’s The Notebook (1996) is told primarily through the point of view of Noah, as his perspective begins and ends the story, and the heroine suffers from

7 Hensley published the work under the pseudonym Gordon Hart.

99 Alzheimer’s disease. These narratives are no less romantic than heroine-centred tales such as Pamela and Pride and Prejudice, the latter of which Regis studies in depth. The

Romance Writers of America define a romance more simply: “Two basic elements comprise every romance novel: a central love story and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending” (RWA). Regis’s interpretation is just one attempt to define a well- used genre. When we move away from a heroine-centred tale, we see narratives and films privileging a hero and his reward. While one could suggest that Julia is rewarded with Stewart, the main battle occurs between Peter and Stewart, the Palamon and Arcite fighting for the fair Julia they have seen through her diary. Neil wins Penny from the alcoholic surgeon who has been trying to woo her. Charlie wins Barbara after overcoming his anxiety. And Vera reunites with Tom. These scenarios can hardly be considered sites of pure victory for women attempting to find what Simone de Beauvoir calls genuine love alongside transcendental activities, those which allow women to rise above their daily immanence which is a toil not unlike that of Sisyphus (504).

Complicating the genre with alternate possibilities means that heteronormativity and stereotypical gender roles need not be the norm.

A more encouraging example of a New Woman exists in Amy McKay’s The

Birth House : Dora Rare, a young midwife, travels to Halifax to help deliver premature babies which arrive early as a result of the trauma their mothers suffer in the explosion.

The explosion occupies a tiny portion of The Birth House ; much more of it details Dora’s transformation into a New Woman as the result of time spent in Boston. The conclusion focuses on a community of women attempting to offer birthing services outside of the medical establishment. Instead of Shattered City ’s Barbara, working within allopathic

100 medicine, Dora espouses a more woman-centred medicine that draws on women’s healing with the earth. Though associating women and fecundity with the earth is not entirely unproblematic from a feminist point of view, The Birth House offers a step away from the historical romance which privileges heteronormativity.

Women’s movements have left their mark on the romance genre. Today, the romance genre comprises more than bodice rippers; rather, contemporary romances detail the courtship of heroines who are lawyers, doctors, and bodyguards. Julianne MacLean’s

Harlequin Silhouette Desire Sleeping with the Playboy (2003) details a young woman who actually falls in love with the man she is bound to protect. The man becomes the damsel-in-distress, overturning gender binaries which usually put women in the subservient position. However, even this particular example of the romance by a Nova

Scotian scribe draws on gender binaries and heteronormativity: “Her eyes glimmered with desire. She pulled off her shirt to reveal a red, lace teddy. ‘I want you to carry me to your bedroom, so I can thank you for bringing out the woman in me’” (MacLean 186).

Binary divisions between genders continue even in the popular romance today, including in the work of such contemporary novelists as Deborah Hale, who writes for Harlequin.

The romance genre itself is not inherently nefarious for women. It has been with us for centuries and will continue to play a role in Western literature. There is no reason to destroy a genre which has brought memorable stories to many audiences. However, these four texts shed light on why feminists sound the alarm at the genre’s enforcement of heteronormativity. If we follow the RWA’s definition that a romance is a love story with a generally optimistic ending, we can open up the possibilities to narratives that do not contain women’s agency and potential, but allow patriarchal mechanisms to be

101 explored. Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain (1997, 2005) illustrates the genre can even detail the passionate relationship of two men. If we break free from narratives which position a damsel in distress with a strapping hero ready to help her overcome her ritual death and barriers, we become free to explore romance outside of patriarchal structures which limit what women can be.

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