Canadian social mythologies in Sara Jeannette Duncan’s The Imperialist

Canadian social mythologies in Sara Jeannette Duncan's The Imperialist CLARA THOMAS Sara Jeannette Duncan had been living away from Canada for thirteen years when she wrote The Imperialist. During that time she had travelled widely, stopping in India to work as a journalist in Calcutta, and there marrying Everard Cotes, curator of the British museum. In 1902, from Simla, she wrote to John Willison, editor of the Globe in Toronto: I have taken it upon myself to write a Canadian novel with a political motif, and I am rather anxious that none of you shall be ashamed of it. I feel a little helpless so far from my material and I write to ask if you will very kindly send me a little. I want a week's issue of the Globe, preferably numbers dealing editorially with the question ofImperial Federation and I want, if they are to be had in pamphlet form, all Sir W. Laurier 's speeches on the subject, or any of the others that may be useful. It is asking a good deal of a busy man to look up this sort of thing, I know, but I trust your interest in the results will excuse me. I am trying very hard to make it my best book, and the ground is practically unbroken ....I The Imperialist was published in 1904. Its "political motif'' is contained in the story of Lorne Murchison, a rising young lawyer and politician of Elgin. Lorne's idealistic commitment to the dream of Empire federation obscures for him the realities of Ontario party politics and he loses his candidacy after a burst of imperialist oratory that dismays his leaders and alienates the solid farmer voters of Fox County. Parallel to this "politics of politics" theme, Duncan set a "politics of love" motif, concerning the love of Lorne for 38 Dora Milburn, a superficial, self-centred flirt, and of his sister Advena for Hugh Finlay, a Scotch Presbyterian minister and immigrant to Elgin, and a man of ideals and ethics as lofty on a personal as are Lorne's on an international scale. Providing both background and dynamic for these plot-lines is the town of Elgin, the commercial centre of Fox County. From Simla Duncan looked back at the Ontario town as she remembered it. Elgin certainly has some of the lineaments of Brantford, her home town, and the Murchison family may well have their roots in Duncan's own family. But her creation of town and people transcends particularity to move into the area of social mythology, those beliefs and legends which cohere in the history of a place and a people to establish what Northrop Frye calls ''the area of serious belief....essentially a statement of a desire to attach oneself to, or live in or among, a specific kind of community.''2 The basic fabric of The Imperialist is an interweaving of two of our powerful and pervasive mythologies -"the Small Town," and "The Hero and Nation-Builder (Scotch).'' Duncan's distance and detachment from Canada must certainly have given point and wit to The Imperialist's best passages. Likewise its best and one of its few external and climatic descriptions may well have originated in a cooling memory of Ontario from a Simla veranda in the hills, with the Indian plains shimmering in a heathaze below. They slipped out presently into a crisp white winter night. The snow was banked on both sides of the street. Spreading garden fir trees huddled together weighted down with it; ragged icicles hung from the eaves or lay in long broken fingers on the trodden paths. The snow snapped and tore under their feet; there was a glorious moon that observed every tattered weed sticking up through the whiteness and etched it with its shadow. The town lay under the moon almost dramatic , almost mysterious, so withdrawn it was out of the cold, so turned in upon its own soul, the fireplace. It might have stood, in the snow and the silence, for Revue d'etudes canadiennes a shell and a symbol of the humanity within, for angels or other strangers to mark with curiosity. Mr. and Mrs. Murchison were...