Redressing the Past: The Politics of Early English-Canadian Women's Drama, 1880-1920 (review)

Part biography, part social history, and part literary analysis, Kym Bird's study of early English-Canadian women's drama begins a project of recovering largely neglected female Canadian playwrights and their work, and situating that work within traditionally male-dominated Canadian drama history. Specifically, Bird takes up the plays of Sarah Anne Curzon, Kate Simpson Hayes, and Clara Rothwell Anderson as well as mock parliaments, and views these pieces through the lenses of the liberal and domestic feminism that characterized the woman movement, 1880-1920. Beyond liberal and domestic feminism, Bird's project effectively reads and troubles women's drama through a series of binaries: masculine/feminine, public sphere/private sphere, Social Purity/Social Gospel, and stage drama/closet drama, to name only a few.

The first chapter offers what little biography of Sarah Anne Curzon is available and concentrates on Curzon's Laura Secord and The Sweet Girl Graduate. Bird identifies Curzon as "one of the earliest and most energetic nineteenth-century women's rights educators and activists in Canada" (20), a liberal feminist who championed equal rights for women but also maintained domestic feminist views that purported that women, based on their moral superiority, could serve their country by embracing their duties as mothers in the home. Consistently addressing intersections of motherhood and nation-building, Bird reads Curzon's defense of Imperial Federation, a movement geared toward achieving imperial unity by establishing "closer economic and military ties to the British Empire and acquiring influence over imperial policy" (22), as "a vision of a nation-as-family that is characterized by the feminine and draws its strength from the fierce protectiveness of the mother for her children" (24). Curzon's plays afford Bird an opportunity to expand upon the gendered nature of closet drama as it reflects nineteenth-century constructions of public/masculine and private/feminine spheres; Bird contends that Curzon transported her work "from the raucous playhouse, with its masculine associations, into the privacy of the feminine drawing room" (33). Within this context, Bird examines Laura Secord, a closet drama,and its engagement with the recuperation of Canadian history and advancement of liberal feminism. Laura Secord dramatizes the true story of a mother-hero who warns Loyalist troops of an impending American attack during the War of 1812; Bird considers Laura Secord the "first self-consciously feminist dramatic text written in nineteenth-century Canada" (3). Through her deft manipulation of the masculine/feminine binary, Bird successfully argues that Laura Secord "reconfigures nationalism and heroism as feminine constructs that represent the moral and rational influence of maternity on the culture of the country" (47). Similarly, Bird reads The Sweet Girl Graduate, a tale of a young woman who disguises herself as a man in order to attend university, as a closet drama that advocates for revision of gender codes while simultaneously reinscribing a maternal imperative (the central character believes that an education will make her a better mother).

The plays of both Kate Simpson Hayes and Clara Rothwell Anderson are more biographically situated than those of Sarah Anne Curzon. Even more intriguing than her study of Hayes's plays is Bird's even-handed navigation of the playwright's personal and professional politics. A proponent of Social Purity, Hayes (writing under her journalistic pseudonym Mary Markwell) espoused "marriage and motherhood as women's highest calling" (101) but left her husband, conducted a relatively public relationship with another man without marrying him, and then denied that the two children she had with him out of wedlock were her own. Bird organizes her biographical and literary analysis of Hayes's life and plays into three categories: "gender formation, racial organization, and the dialectic of class construction" (104), concentrating on the Christianity and nationalism that characterized the Social Purity movement. Bird's investigation of two of Hayes's plays, Slumberland Shadows (a children's fairytale play) and The Anvil (a problem...