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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849–1871 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001) |
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AS THE EIGHTEENTH BOOK in the University of Toronto Press' very successful gender history series, Adele Perry's attractively presented monograph provides us with a glimpse into the lives of some of the odd "assortment" of individuals who "made" British Columbia during the years from 1849 to 1871. Drawing on a wide array of primary sources from newspapers and letters to diaries and government reports, and informed by an international post-colonial, feminist, gendered, and Marxist analysis, Perry ably demonstrates how British Columbia as a "colonial project" failed to live up to imperial expectations. The author's efforts are enhanced by her use of poetry and excellent photographic evidence. Placing race, gender, and class at the centre of her discussion, Perry shows just how the dream of a White, orderly, and respectable imperial outpost was shattered by the reality of the colony's rough and ready nature. At the heart of this imagined community was Whiteness. Taking here lead from scholars who have probed the fluidity of racialized boundaries, Perry demonstrates how colonization and immigration worked in tandem in an attempt to create a White colony, while at the same time deliberately marginalizing the majority of the population, the Aboriginal peoples. |
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There was more than met the eye in colonial British Columbia, and there was certainly more than tea and crumpets. Perry has turned up some remarkable characters who defied the orderly establishment of Victorian propriety. John Butts, the town crier and bell ringer who was charged with participating in same-sex relationships and later deemed a rogue and vagabond, comes to mind, as does the notorious cross-dresser Fanny Clarke, and the once respectable Mills sisters who ran into the streets of Victoria sans clothing. Each one of these individuals is carefully scrutinized from the perspectives of gender, class, and race; Perry's organizing tools. |
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Starting with a detailed description of the homosocial culture of White bachelors in the backwoods, Perry then moves on to consider mixed-race marriages and official attempts to regulate them, and ends with immigration schemes to transport White women from England to the colony. The bachelor's behaviour was shaped by the rough hard work of gold mining, and the concomitant desire to enjoy their leisure time by drinking, dancing, and occasionally brawling. Forced to run households and do the chores, and sometimes dance together and have intimate relations, manhood took on new dimensions in the backwoods. According to Perry, some men yearned to meet women and start families, while others were on the lam, and still others were comfortable, confirmed bachelors. As one miner of the latter ilk noted, "generally gold diggers are not marrying men. They work, spend their money in drink, and work again." (30) This persistent working-class bachelor culture gave rise to White middle-class angst. So too, especially after 1860, did relationships between settler men and Aboriginal women. |
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The solutions to both of these "problems" — as some politicians, missionaries and journalists would have described them — varied. Perry notes that for White men the efforts were aimed at the promotion of "a model of bourgeois, metropolitan, manhood." (79) Men were encouraged to join temperance societies and mechanics institutes. Religious missions to White men were established. And, through marriage laws, the pass system, and urban spatial segregation, especially in Victoria, reformers harnessed the full strength of the legal system to divide Aboriginal people from White British Columbians. But, as Perry makes very clear, these efforts failed miserably. British Columbia was most certainly not destined to become a White middle-class man's province. Efforts to remake working-class men into bourgeois gentlemen, or to end mixed race relations belied a brutal ignorance of the true meaning of colonization, that is cultural hybridity. Influenced by the work of Anne Laura Stoler, Perry argues that because "white and Aboriginal people shared ties, homes, children, and labour," they "challenged colonialism's foundational fiction," that there was a clear boundary between each. (123) There was not. And that, according to Perry, was precisely what reformers refused to come to terms with. |
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All else having failed there was still one last hope for the redemption of this wayward colony: White women could save its reputation. They, claims Perry, were the "imperial panacea." (4) White women could tidy up the bachelors and place them on the matrimonial path, relieve the problem of "redundant women" in England while supplying much needed labour in the colony and disrupt mixed-race relations. Great expectations, indeed. Emigration schemes were set afoot and excited crowds greeted upon arrival the women who were willing to leave their countries for promising opportunities abroad. Like the other plans, however, this too, claims Perry, was fraught with disappointment. First off, it became quite clear, based on the popular reaction to middle-class female immigration, that as one writer put it "bluestockings" were not wanted. More desirable were working-class women who could "rough it." Another argued that domestic servants were needed. The immigration societies were sometimes forced to respond to these criticisms and alter their plans. The Female Middle-Class Emigration Society sent pauper children instead. And, while the movement of women and children provided a moment when, as Antoinette Burton has conceptualized it, "Home" and "Away" were temporarily transcended in a unified cause, the outcome was not anticipated. Instead of middle-class women redeemers, many of the newcomers were independent working-class women who were not concerned with sorting out the unruly bachelors, or disrupting the racially pluralized tradition. |
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The "Home" and "Away" relationship is undoubtedly an important dimension in understanding how the colony was shaped by newcomers, one that could be further probed. What else did those in England who were interested in the "outer edge of empire" have to say about it? Did they care to learn of the day-to-day goings-on in Victoria? Were they concerned about mixed-race marriages in London? |
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That small quibble aside, it strikes me that the strength of this monograph, which started as a dissertation at York University's History Department, is Perry's ability to weave together the popular discourse on racial categorization. Whiteness itself became contested. Were White men who partnered Aboriginal women White or Aboriginal themselves? And, how could middle-class men be placed within the same racial category as the working-class roughnecks in the bush? It is at these junctures, where class and race were conflated, that Perry rigorously highlights the tenuous and fleeting racial categories of late 19th-century British Columbia. |
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Myra Rutherdale
University of British Columbia
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