The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada 1885–1925 (review)

The reissue of The Age of Light, Soap and Water with a new introduction presents an opportunity to revisit an influential and engaging analysis of the language of the social purity movement, its promulgators and their institutions, and the role of all in the production of Canadian nationalism in turn-of-the-twentieth-century English Canada. Many of us first encountered the book in graduate school. Its critical deconstructionist effect gripped a cohort of doctoral candidates who both swirled in the methodological difficulties of the 'linguistic turn,' and coped white-knuckled with the irrevocable challenges of literary post-structuralism to the stolid world of historiography. In spite of the volatile and frequently vitriolic debates over historiography (and teleology and deontology), it is invigorating to hope, but difficult to evaluate sincerely, that fine studies such as Mariana Valverde's have benefited historical inquiry.

To begin affirmatively, by drawing our attention to the 'the rhetorical "excess"' of English-Canadian moral reformers, Valverde teaches us to consider how 'overblown' discourse and symbolism demonstrated 'the historically specific way[s]' they 'were connected to social practices' (34). For example, in the chapter titled 'The Work of Allegories,' Valverde argues that the social purity movement employed tropes, especially of 'light' – candlelight, sunlight, searchlight – to evoke Protestant values and virtues and to make them both prying and beacon-like tools of reform. Later, in 'The City as Moral Problem,' Valverde's perusal of primary reform literature reveals these same tropes and signifiers in housing critiques: Toronto's medical officer of health, Charles Hastings, reported insufficient lighting as an attribute of 'slum' housing, one of a number of design flaws that were 'a danger to public morals.' In ascribing 'moral deviance to physical objects' (133), reformers reified reform tropes in their assessments of the physical city, something Valverde anticipates in the preface: 'This is not to suggest that verbal signs and pictures create certain social relations; it is rather to demonstrate that practical social relations are always mediated and articulated through linguistic and non-linguistic signifying practices' (xi).

Useful as such discourse analysis is to 'critique,' the search for signifying practices tends to concentrate the traditional historian's vexation over the historiographical use of the 'tools of literary theory' (x). And while the merits of literary post-structuralism in historical analysis abound, so do its demerits. For example, even as Valverde deconstructs the 'rhetorical tropes' (x) animating social purity reformers, deconstruction is a relentlessly reflexive and ironic mode of analysis (deconstruction, we now know, deconstructs all texts and authors, remorselessly). Given this, what should we make of Valverde's accusatory assessment of Pall Mall Gazette muckraker, and white slavery activist, W.T. Stead: '[His] journalistic gaze having penetrated the bewildered girl, Stead turned around and walked out of the room' (91)? Or of her analysis of Lord's Day Alliance ideologue, the Rev. John G. Shearer, whose Sabbatarian brutishness evoked this moralizing editorial: 'Shearer comes closer than any other figure . . . to the stereotype of moral reformer keen on prohibiting pleasures and uninterested in people's welfare' (54)? Or this interpretation of Methodist Church director S.D. Chown's putative masturbatory preconception of immigrants: 'The nation's blood is here unconsciously linked [by Chown] to the semen individual men and boys constantly were admonished not to "dribble away"' (106)? Perhaps Chown waxed Freudian. Perhaps Shearer hated people. Perhaps Stead journalistically and visually raped the pitiable Eliza Armstrong. The 'historical truth' of Valverde's assertions is surely not the critical theoretical point. Rather, it is that her own moralizing and psychoanalyzing intimates a dependency on tropic, rhetorical truth-telling that demands deconstructing, urges suspicion and perhaps patent dismissal. So goes the 'freeplay' of texts and signifiers in a literary poststructuralist world.

This bit of postmodern cleverness, however, deliberately misses the point – of not only what is an insightful book, but also one that deftly [End Page 142...