Metropolitan Natures: Environmental Histories of Montreal

3. Corporeal Understandings of the Industrializing Environment

51 Corporeal Understandings of the Industrializing Environment Nicolas Kenny 3 In the small town of Saint-Germain, Quebec, basking in the late-summer breeze blowing in from the St. Lawrence, and in the delicious fragrance of freshly cut hay drifting from nearby fields, a group of young people sat on the porch of their friend Édouard Leblanc’s family home, enjoying their last moments of vacation before the next day’s train would take them back to the trying realities of law school in Montreal. As they chatted, one of the students sought to convince Édouard’s sister, Marie-Louise, of the many charms of city life: heated homes, convenient tramways, theaters, luxury, department stores, fashionable attire, monuments, and other beautiful sights. What good was all of that, Marie-Louise wondered, and just at that moment a light shone brightly in the night sky. “And shooting stars, do you have those?” she exclaimed. “You have only unsightly electric lights that prevent you from seeing the moon.” As the small group contemplated the dichotomies of city and countryside, their words gave way to the silence of the night, the melancholy concert of near and distant frogs offering the only break in the ambient calm and peacefulness.1 This scene, from J. M. Alfred Mousseau’s 1908 novel Les vermoulures, casts in straightforward terms the complex relationship between the ideas of civilization and progress incarnated by the modern city and the notions of simplicity , tradition, and beauty embodied by nature and typically represented through the prism of rural life. Central to the author’s depiction of this tension 52 - Nicolas Kenny is the emphasis he places on the characters’ personal, sensorial experience of their respective environments, evidenced in the tension between the comforts and delights of modern conveniences and culture, and the reassuring tranquility of cool breezes and soft moonlight. For the characters in the novel, both city and countryside are constituted as lived realities in relation to the distinct stimulations and atmospheres they evoke. Concentrating on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time when the smokestacks and steam engines of industrialization were transforming the visual, auditory, and olfactory landscape of cities, this chapter seeks to participate in this volume’s examination of how individuals give meaning to their milieus by examining the way bodily and sensory encounters informed Montrealers’ engagement with their environment, both natural and built. Grounded in the specific experience of Montreal, this analysis draws upon a broader historiography that examines the body as a site on which social, cultural, and environmental processes play out.2 Mousseau’s fictional prose is representative of discourses about the turnof -the-century city found in municipal records, hygienic investigations, and more qualitative sources such as booster pamphlets, travel guides, and business directories, through which politicians, bureaucrats, reformers, industrialists , and intellectuals articulated their relationship to their surroundings. Enthused by both the beautiful sceneries and economic opportunities nature offered the city, these groups also grappled with the fact that Montreal’s modernization was possible only through a profound reconfiguration of its territory. These commentators belonged to Montreal’s middle and merchant classes, many of them to the wealthy anglophone minority at its economic helm. Whether they pursued profit, social reform, or cultural production, all held a stake in Montreal’s expansion and in building it up as Canada’s flagship of modernity. They focused on natural elements within the city, particularly its distinct topography and climate, to define Montreal’s specificity as a modern industrial metropolis. As this chapter argues, the body played a fundamental role in mediating their relationship to this environment. The Canadian Metropolis The following verse, penned in 1887 by the poet William Douw Lighthall , is representative of the language of imperial grandeur and self-esteem in which Montreal’s economic, political, and cultural elite couched their perception of the city: Reign on, majestic Ville Marie! Spread wide thine ample robes of state; Corporeal Understandings of the Industrializing Environment - 53 The heralds cry that thou art great, And proud are thy young sons of thee.3 By dressing the city’s French colonial name in regal finery and filial pride, Lighthall, also a lawyer and future mayor of Westmount, Montreal’s wealthiest suburb, evoked the dominant, and oft-cited, historical narrative of progress and triumph according to which, as some of his fellow authors put it, the city evolved “from an Indian hamlet on the banks of...