Heroines and History: Representations of Madeleine de Vercheres and Laura Secord (review)

In culturally specific ways, both Madeleine de Vercheres and Laura Secord have provided powerful symbols of courage and nationalism to French-Canadian and Anglo-Celtic Canadian society. Memorialized in the public record, monuments, and many other types of popular culture in Quebec and Ontario because of the dramatic nature of their stories, both came to represent values far larger than personal circumstance by virtue of their gender, race, and ethnicity. In this carefully researched and closely argued book, Colin M. Coates and Cecilia Morgan demonstrate that in choosing two flesh-and-blood historical actors for commemoration, Canada breaks with a long Western tradition in which archetypes are normally utilized to illustrate important national values. Their book explores how these 'real women' have been used to shape the grand Canadian narrative, how the women (in the case of Vercheres) or their namesakes (in the form of the Laura Secord candy company among other examples) contributed to the construction of this narrative, and perhaps most interesting of all, who was omitted from this narrative (Canada's First Nations peoples), and how we might investigate the Aboriginal perspective on these two icons.

Any coauthored book is likely to bear the marks of different investigative tools employed, differing patterns of expression, and subjects which appear to be more similar than they turn out to be. To some degree, this is the case with this study. And yet, there has clearly been a real effort to consider each woman within the specifics of her time, place, and stage of nation-building, as well as to consider the suggestive common processes at work in French and English Canada over two centuries. Beginning with a very useful introduction, the authors survey the recent historiography on historical memory, contesting John Bodnar's distinction between an American 'authentic vernacular' and a 'manipulative official one' in the twentieth century. They argue, and then demonstrate through both the Vercheres and Secord examples, that while the Canadian state had an obvious role in shaping public commemorations, it did so through the intervention and mediation of other agencies, including educational textbooks and readers, prominent individuals, and very importantly in the case of Secord, voluntary organizations such as local historical societies, groups often headed by women in the period between 1880 and 1920. At the same time, they show that the considerable popular cultural expressions around both women, including plays, poems, novels, pageants, and even a feature film, are not so much 'oppositional' to official memories generated by the nation-state, but 'dialogical,' with 'official memory informing its "vernacular" cousin - and vice versa - so that the lines between the two are almost completely blurred and, at times, mutually reinforcing.'

In the epilogue, the authors explore the 'Iroquois presence' in these narratives, and especially the disappearance from the story of the Aboriginal group in question once their resistance (in attacking the fort held by Vercheres) or their presumed fierceness (in blocking Secord's route to warn Fitzgibbon) had been accounted for: the authors argue that First Nations' motives or actions in both narratives have been misunderstood and diminished, and that their role has been to symbolize all potential enemies, 'absent, yet present ... necessary but excluded.' This representation too has been gendered, with the construction of the heroic woman dependent on an assumption of 'unthinking Aboriginal cruelty.' In the popular understanding of First Nations' implication in these narratives, Native 'people' were understood to be Native men, and were always pictured as such, while the heroines were represented as Euro-Canadian women. In addition to its many other virtues, then, this study offers powerful examples of the complex ways in which Canadian nation-building has been both gendered and racialized over time.