| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 52

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Colin M. Coates and Cecilia Morgan, Heroines and History: Representations of Madeleine de Verchères and Laura Secord (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2001)

THE ROLE of political symbols, rituals, and lieux de mémoires in the formation of national identities has become a staple theme in the field of cultural history. A number of monographs have appeared in recent years on the "politics of commemoration" in modern Canada — by Norman Knowles, H.V. Nelles, Jonathan Vance, Jacques Mathieu, and Allen Gordon, among others — while the current spate of conference papers and journal articles on national mythologies, heroes, anniversaries, and monuments promises to transform the study of Canadian memory into an academic growth industry. Heroines and History is a valuable addition to an already distinguished body of scholarship.

The book consists of two absorbing, richly detailed case studies of female heroism and its historical representations. Colin Coates traces the rise and fall of Madeleine de Verchères — who in 1692, at the age of fourteen, successfully defended her father's fort against an Iroquois attack — as an icon of Franco-Canadian Catholic and nationalist values; while Cecilia Morgan explores the metamorphosis of Laura Secord, on the basis of her celebrated twenty-mile walk through the wilderness to warn of an impending American attack during the War of 1812, into a potent symbol of patriotic womanhood for English Canada.

In their jointly written introduction, Coates and Morgan provide a concise, yet impressively thorough and astute survey of the major scholarly approaches to the study of collective memory, and a critical overview of recent Canadian contributions to the field, within which they situate their own distinctive analytical framework. The authors reject the idea of a strict dichotomy between a supposedly real social memory, rooted in a living popular culture and shared by all the members of the community, and the abstract, incomplete reconstructions of formal historical discourse based on archival documents and other textual remains. Neither concept by itself can convey the complex, tangled origins of our sense of the past, which is the product of a continuous dialogue between history and memory. The authors resolve the conundrum by applying the composite term "historical memory" to the representations of female heroism they set out to describe and analyze. (4)

Both authors begin by carefully establishing the original historical context in which Verchères and Secord performed their heroic exploits, in order to show how the first sketchy and contradictory eyewitness accounts were embellished and manipulated by a later generation of commemorators.

The stories of Verchères and Secord remained largely unknown until they were suddenly rediscovered in the second half of the 19th century by nationalist organizations eager to exploit their usefulness as unifying symbols. In French Canada, Verchères, together with the more prominent Dollard des Ormeaux, provided the nationalist right with a powerful symbol of survivance in the face of hostile external forces, whether represented by Iroquois warriors, British imperialists, or modern American popular culture.

Morgan describes how accounts of Secord's walk were seized on by Ontario's local historical societies after Confederation and incorporated into a new founding myth for the infant Dominion, peopled by heroic Upper Canadian militiamen and intrepid Loyalist pioneers. Morgan's acute analysis of "the gendered and racial dynamics" of British-Canadian memory charts the transformation of Laura Secord into the supreme symbol of female loyalty to empire and nation. (145) Unlike the official memories of the War of 1812, dominated by the male spheres of military heroism and politics, these later pioneer narratives, according to Morgan, represented women as historical agents, contributing to the spread of British civilization in the Canadian wilderness. Despite being permeated with deeply conservative assumptions about Canada's imperial destiny and the superiority of the British race, the historical memory of Loyalism did not necessarily reflect an anti-modern nostalgia for the vanished pioneer past. The educated, middle-class members of the women's historical societies, many of whom were also active in temperance and suffrage organizations, had a vested interest in certain forms of progress. And they placed Laura Secord, the War of 1812, and the Loyalists within a teleological framework that culminated in the progressive, confident, modernizing world of late Victorian bourgeois society. At the same time, however, they marginalized the contributions of other historical actors to the nation-building process, especially Native people and the working classes, who were virtually erased from the collective memory of English Canada.

Coates situates Verchères within the woman warrior tradition epitomized by Joan of Arc, and provides an illuminating discussion of the way in which her transgression of traditional gender identities had to be minimized before she could serve as an appropriate role model for French Canadian youth; for example, by emphasizing her feminine qualities at the expense of her martial virtues, and insisting on her return to a conventional domestic role after her exploit, as a dutiful daughter, wife, and mother. But Coates also shows how Verchères, like all symbols, could lend herself to a variety of uses and causes. In the early 20th century she was appropriated by pan-Canadian nationalists anxious to create a shared historical memory capable of uniting the two founding races, and by English-speaking feminists and suffragists looking for inspiring icons of female empowerment and emancipation.

By focussing on a single object of commemoration the authors are able to consider historical memory in all of its forms, from monuments and epic poems to television dramas and commercial advertisements. Coates' detailed account of the campaign to construct an enormous, 25 foot bronze statue of Verchères in 1913 reveals the conflicting interests and meanings that are often involved in acts of public commemoration, as the pan-Canadian and Québec nationalists involved in its construction sought to claim the monument for their respective political communities. Morgan describes a similar struggle between the local, mainly female, defenders of Laura Secord's memory in the Niagara Region and male heritage bureaucrats who were more interested in the preservation of forts and battlefields.

Coates argues that Verchères' popularity as a symbol of French Canada peaked in the 1920s — a period of rapid and unsettling social and economic changes — and then steadily declined, citing as evidence the dwindling number of visitors to her statue, an increasing willingness to question aspects of the original narrative, and the irreverence of later references to her exploits. And he describes how her loss of iconic status was accelerated by professional historians, who set out to debunk the conventional image of Verchères as a chaste, virtuous, French-Canadian version of Joan of Arc by revealing her subsequent career as a litigious, morally ambivalent virago, perpetually at odds with her neighbours and the local clergy. Unfortunately, Coates seems to lose interest in Verchères after the 1920s, providing a sketchy, disappointing survey of the use and abuse of her memory in the succeeding decades. His few scattered examples of latter-day representations, such as a magazine photograph of a lusty young woman being chased by a licentious priest, undoubtedly demonstrate her loss of status as a symbol of traditional French-Canadian values. This is unsurprising in view of the rapid secularization of Québec society after World War II. What Coates perceives as evidence of her decline in popularity, however, could perhaps be used to support a very different argument — that the image of Verchères could be successfully adapted to the needs of a modern secularized Québec. The illustration of a poster for the oui side in the 1980 referendum campaign, which prominently displays an image of Verchères as a woman warrior, clutching her musket and rallying her fellow citizens to the separatist banner, seems to point towards this conclusion. Even the more parodic treatments of her memory arguably demonstrate the "multivocal" nature of her appeal for French-Canadians. A fuller account of Vercheres' fate as a national symbol in the new Québec would include some discussion of the part played by Québec's educational system in interpreting and transmitting her story to generations of impressionable schoolchildren. Surprisingly, however, Coates completely ignores the role of schools and textbooks as vehicles of historical memory.

Morgan, by contrast, devotes a long perceptive chapter to the representation of Secord in Ontario school textbooks, readers, and examination papers from the 1880s to the present, in which she exposes the racial, class, and gender biases that for much of this period continued to exclude Aboriginal people, autonomous women, and labour struggles from officially approved narratives of nation-building. She is also able to point to examples of effective resistance from Native organizations, trade unions, and other groups, which in the 1970s began to demand a more inclusive curriculum. Morgan goes on to survey other forms of commemoration that were used to popularize Secord's memory in more recent decades, including monuments, historical pageants, radio and televison plays, heritage tourism, and, of course, candy boxes; describing, for example, how the Laura Secord Candy Company sought to exploit the images of quaintness, tradition, and purity associated with her memory.

In a combined epilogue, the authors set out to "decentre" these dominant narratives of European heroism and endangered Canadian womanhood by attempting to recover the authentic motives and perspectives of the Aboriginal Other. In the case of Verchères, Coates has to rely on indirect evidence about contemporary Iroquois methods of warfare to challenge conventional representations of inherently cruel, marauding savages; whereas Morgan can draw upon the work of revisionist Native historians who in recent years have played a major role in reconstructing the experiences of the Mohawk people as rational, active historical agents during the War of 1812.

Heroines and History tends to focus on the ideas, activities, and motivations of the middle-class elites responsible for the construction and dissemination of historical memory. The authors frequently assert the popularity of Verchères and Secord as public icons without providing much evidence — apart from some references to attendance figures at historic sites and an isolated public opinion poll — of what ordinary Canadians actually thought about them. But it would be unfair to castigate Morgan and Coates for dealing inadequately with the issue of reception, which remains the Achilles heel of cultural approaches to history. It is notoriously difficult to determine how or even whether the inherently ambiguous symbols and cultural messages generated by élites are received and understood by their intended audience.

Coates and Morgan draw upon an impressively wide range of recent works on memory, political ritual, and commemoration. Their complex and challenging arguments are solidly based on a varied and extensive array of primary sources, including sound recordings and films, and presented in a fluent, readable prose that masks a lightly worn theoretical sophistication. The text is enlivened by a generous selection of evocative illustrations, and marred by a scattering of minor typographical errors.

Coates and Morgan are both concerned with the "varied and multiple uses to which the same historical narrative may be put as it shifts locations and context." (232) They do not, however, address this crucial issue with the same degree of thoroughness, comprehensiveness, and insight. Coates' uneven contribution to their joint project is full of stimulating arguments and insights that cannot, however, wholly compensate for its gaps and omissions. It therefore suffers from the unavoidable comparison with Morgan's exemplary study of history, memory, and the interplay of gender, race and nationality in Loyalist Ontario.


Robert Cupido Mount Allison University

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