The Torontonians (review)

An international bestseller upon its 1960 release, Phyllis Brett Young’s The Torontonians did not have the shelf life of other novels of its era: Hugh McLennan’s The Watch That Ends the Night, Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, and Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel. W.H. New does not rate her a mention in his comprehensive A History of Canadian Literature.

What happened? It is perhaps easy to dismiss The Torontonians as a topic novel, tethered to its time and thereby rendered dated for contemporary audiences. Young’s protagonist, Karen Whitney, bemoans her materialistic existence and existential boredom as a forty-year-old housewife (to use a word appropriate to the time). Her solution to her problems, she thinks, is to revert to a simpler way of life. And it is her unawareness of her potential as an independent woman that has likely condemned the novel to both public and academic oblivion. Unlike Laurence’s Hagar Shipley or Richler’s Duddy, Karen is not a trailblazer. And when set against the emerging radical social milieu of the turbulent 1960s, The Torontonians looks like a throwback.

The 2007 reissue of the novel (by McGill academics Nathalie Cooke and Suzanne Morton) is fortunate, as Young’s novel deserves its revival. Both an incisive critique and social document, The Torontonians examines the middle-class discontent of the late 1950s that would later give rise to the social unrest of the next decade. While it is seductive to want to read Karen’s discontent as simply the manifestation of those who have enough wealth to be able to reflect upon their ennui, the depiction of the imposition of leisure on a class of women who have been reduced to button-pushing and choosing the right carpets is trenchant and fascinating. The almost visceral geography of Toronto and the formative undercurrents of a nascent Canadian nationalism lend an immediacy to attendant class and social issues not readily apparent in other mainstream Canadian literary endeavours.

Karen’s friends and neighbours, though educated, busy themselves so as not to notice the superficiality of their lives. This lack of awareness of how materialism dictates their roles as mothers and wives Karen sees as almost criminal. In sharp contrast to the mores of the 1950s in Canada, Karen’s friends openly have affairs, which no one really condemns. Thinking that what she needs to vanquish her suicidal thoughts is a move to a smaller town, Karen comes to realize that an honest resolution lies in becoming more involved in the city’s burgeoning immigrant quarters downtown, and that a move out of the suburbs will facilitate that. The novel’s homage to ‘new Canadians’ is an eye-opener, as it presages 1969’s wide-ranging Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, which later (in 1971) acknowledged Canada’s cultural pluralism in legal terms.

That feminist self-awareness might somehow be part of that solution does not garner even the slightest mention. Karen and her friends are quite happy that their husbands work, and they deeply respect the divide between the gendered domains of the private home and the public spheres of business. It is tempting, then, to reject Young as naive; yet Karen lives in an insular era whose discourses do not really favour emancipation of various sorts. The neighbourhood and Karen’s own upbringing proscribe it. Young, lacking the lexicon that would in the then-near future lead to greater understandings of female oppression, resolves Karen’s dilemma through a grasp of the importance of civic duty. On its own terms, then, the novel is a tempered success in its rendering of a geographic and social stratum that is not again literarily depicted until Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, in 1988.