The Invasion of the Home Front: Revisiting, Rewriting, and Replaying the First World War in Contemporary Canadian Plays Marissa
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The Invasion of the Home Front: Revisiting, Rewriting, and Replaying the First World War in Contemporary Canadian Plays Marissa McHugh Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a doctoral degree in English Department of English Faculty of Arts University of Ottawa © Marissa McHugh, Ottawa, Canada, 2013 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………...iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………..v INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………….1 The Great War in the Canadian Popular Imagination…………………………….1 Critiques of Canada’s Great War Mythology……………………………………..9 The Death of Living Memory and the Preoccupation with the War Past………..14 Contemporary Canadian Plays About the Great War……………………………23 CHAPTER ONE – Kevin Kerr’s Unity (1918): The Influenza Outbreak and the Uncanny Germ(an)s at Home....……………………………………………………….33 The “Spanish” Influenza……………………………………………...………….35 Disease, Militaristic Imagining, and the Fear of “ContamiNation”…..…………39 Unsettling the Representation of the Home Front as an Agrarian Refuge………45 Unity (1918)……………………………………………………………………...47 CHAPTER TWO – “Be a good soldier again”: Guy Vanderhaeghe’s Dancock’s Dance, Militarized Masculinity, and the War in the “Asylum”……………………..69 “Healthy” Masculinity and the Great War……………………………………….71 Dancock’s Dance………………………………………………………………...79 • Martial Masculinity in the “Asylum”: Veterans…………………………79 • Martial Masculinity in the “Asylum”: Civilians…………………………91 • The War in the “Asylum”: “War Fever” and the “Spanish” Influenza.….96 CHAPTER THREE – “Put anything into print and it’s true”: Trina Davies’ Shatter, the Halifax Explosion, and the Dissemination of Information……………………..105 Halifax in Wartime……………………………………………………………..109 The Circulation of Information in the Aftermath of the Halifax Explosion……114 Shatter…………………………………………………………………………..121 CHAPTER FOUR – “They were Canadiens”: Reframing the War in Québec, Printemps 1918…………………………………………………………………………146 Remembering Quebec’s Experience of the First World War..…………………148 Reframing and Representing the War in Quebec………………………………157 Québec, Printemps 1918………………………………………………………..167 • The Representation of Quebecers………………………………...….…168 • The Representation of English Canadians…………………………...…176 CHAPTER FIVE – Wendy Lill’s The Fighting Days: The Warring Factions of the Women’s Movement…………………………………………………………………..184 Unity and Discord in the Canadian Suffrage Movement: 1890-1918…...……..185 The Traditional Representation of Women and War………………….….…….190 The “Great Army of Women” and the Aggressive Feminist Pacifists…………192 The Fighting Days……………………………………………………………...197 • The First Act: 1900-1914………………………………………………197 • The Second Act: 1916-1917……………………………………………206 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………..223 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………237 iv ABSTRACT The history of the Great War has been dominated by accounts that view the War as an international conflict between nations and soldiers that contributed to the consolidation of Canadian cultural and political independence and identity. In many cases, the War has assumed a foundational—even mythic—status as integral to the building of a mature state and people. Since the 1970s, however, there has been an efflorescence of Canadian plays that have problematized traditional representations of the War. Many of these plays are set on the home front and explore the ways in which the War, in the form of disease, disaster, and intra-communal in-fighting and suspicion, invaded Canadian home space. What they suggest is that the War was not simply launched against an external enemy but that the War invaded Canadian communities and households. This dissertation examines five of these plays: Kevin Kerr’s Unity (1918), Guy Vanderhaeghe’s Dancock’s Dance, Trina Davies’ Shatter, Jean Provencher and Gilles Lachance’s Québec, Printemps 1918, and Wendy Lill’s The Fighting Days, all of which were written and published after 1970. Ultimately, it demonstrates that these plays, by relocating the War to Canadian terrain, undertake an important and radical critique; they suggest that the understanding of the War should not be restricted to overseas conflicts or Canadian national self-definition but that it should be expanded to encompass a diversity of people and experiences in domestic and international settings. At the same time, this thesis recognizes these plays as part of an emergent, bourgeoning Canadian dramatic genre, one which attests to Canadians’ continued preoccupation with the War past. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It is my pleasure to acknowledge and thank the many people who have contributed to this dissertation. My time at the University of Ottawa has been rich and rewarding, and I am thankful to have had the opportunity to study in the English Department. I would like to express my gratitude to the administration staff for their assistance at various stages of my studies. I would also like to thank Professor Irena R. Makaryk for her mentoring, encouragement, and kindness. My work with her has enabled me to grow as an academic and a person. For her insight and expertise, I owe a debt of gratitude to my thesis supervisor Professor Cynthia Sugars. She has enabled me to develop and refine my ideas, and, without her continued patience, enthusiasm, and guidance, this dissertation would not have come to completion. I am also extremely grateful to my friends and family for their untiring support. My university friends have been extremely generous with their time, and I have had a fruitful student experience because of them. Thank you to Tania Aguila-Way for her unwavering confidence; to Jordan Berard for his steadfastness and humour; and to Sue Bowness for her optimism. I would also like to thank Carmela Coccimiglio and Bonnie Hughes, as well as the other members of the “thesis club,” for sharing in my times of struggle and achievement. To my parents, I extend a heartfelt expression of appreciation. They have long prioritized my education, and I remain in awe of their selflessness and patience. My husband has also been unflagging in his support. My personal and academic development is much the result of his faith, fortitude, enthusiasm, and positivity. In closing, I would like to thank my examiners, Dr. Jerry Wasserman, Dr. Janice Fiamengo, Dr. David Staines, and Dr. Irena Makaryk, for their valuable feedback. INTRODUCTION Within twenty years the veterans will have gone to their last roll call–then they can bury forever, with the spiders and stale tobacco, everything regarding the Great War. It will then be of no interest to the existing generations. –Will R. Bird, Preface, The Communication Trench I) The Great War in the Canadian Popular Imagination Canadians have long embraced the Great War as an international conflict between nations and soldiers, which led to the establishment of Canadian cultural and political independence and identity. This traditional remembering of the War as Canada’s coming of age, a time when Canada shifted from colony to nation, has been pervasive since the War’s end. As many Canadian war historians attest, the Great War’s association with Canadian national development has dominated Canada’s memory of the War and has remained the preferred means of understanding and assessing the War. In Propaganda and Censorship During Canada’s Great War, Jeffrey A. Keshen points to the enduring quality of this association, noting that “[t]here . persists the picture of soldiers who, through their extraordinary bravery, won the hardest and most important battles— particularly Second Ypres and Vimy Ridge—and thus emerged a singular and heroic force in transforming Canada from colony to nation” (xvii). In Death so Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War, Jonathan F. Vance adds to this assumption, noting that the representation of the Great War “as a nation-building experience of signal importance” has been pervasive since “the earliest days of war.” He also argues that “Canada’s progress from colony to nation by way of Flanders, an interpretation born in the early days of war, has become the standard method of judging the impact of 1914- 1918” (10). 2 Certainly, many Canadian historians represent the Great War as seminal to Canada’s national development. In Building the Canadian Nation, George W. Brown suggests that Canada’s participation in the Great War enabled “further advances on the road to nationhood” and earned Canada “recogni[tion] by Britain as a partner” (503). Considering that Building the Canadian Nation was a high-school textbook for over ten years and “sold about 600,000 copies” (Igartua 110), it is likely that Brown’s representation would have reached many Canadians, contributing to the accumulating mythos of the Great War in the Canadian imaginary.1 Not surprisingly, these opinions were reiterated and expanded as the War became increasingly constituted as a founding moment in the nation’s collective memory. Canadian historian Pierre Berton, for example, represents the First World War as “a searing experience and also a turning point” that enabled Canada’s maturity. Berton argues that “Canada entered the war as a colony, emerged as a nation” and “grew up as a result of that war” (Foreword 8). Writer and journalist Sandra Gwyn also points to the War as a key point in Canadian history (Tapestry of War). She argues that “it is the Great War that marks the real birth of Canada” (xvii). What she also suggests is that Canada’s significant contributions to the War effort enabled this “birth”: