SOURCE: "A Different Point of View: The Colonial Perspective in Sara Jeannette Duncan's Novels" and "A 'Colonial Edition'," in A Different Point of View: Sara Jeannette Duncan, McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991, pp. 3-18, 154-58.

What makes Canadian writing Canadian? This question has interested readers and writers at least since the Confederation period, when Archibald Lampman suggested that our cold climate would not only produce a distinctive, striving spirit in literature but a whole new race. Attempts to identify a "tradition" in Canadian literature have often been frustrated by the facts of our colonial heritage: Canadian writers seldom took works by other Canadians as models, and the work of those who did was often judged to be inferior to the work of those who consciously emulated foreign models. Attempts to identify a paradigm or theme common to all Canadian creative writing have been hampered by the limitations of their own methodology; such approaches have often led to superficial readings that merely demonstrate how certain works may be "plugged in" to a model.

Many Canadian writers themselves confronted the question of the "Canadianness" of Canadian writing; Sara Jeannette Duncan was one of them. Born in Brantford, Canada West, in 1861, she grew up in a booming industrial centre that was, paradoxically, at the far edge of English-speaking intellectual life. She was two generations away from the Rebellion of 1837, when citizens from the Brantford area had formed a significant part of the homespun crew that scattered across Yonge Street, confusedly attending at "the making of a nation." She was one generation away from those august gentlemen in decent broadcloth who made Confederation; that event, and the nationalist literary and political flowering it inspired, provided the context for her own work. Her novels and journalism address themselves to the "difference" that her sex and excentric nationality allowed her to feel, to the question of what it means to be a colonial, to the colonial point of view.

"Point of view" was an important concept for late nineteenth-century novelists; Henry James, in his novels and his prefaces, argues that the choice of a point of view from which to tell the story is an important technical consideration that actually determines the story itself. With his famous analogy of the "House of Fiction" he suggests that the process of writing is like looking out a window onto the world; the choice of window limits what exactly the novelist sees, and to some extent how the novelist interprets truth. As modern ideas of subjectivity and scientific research developed (from about the 1880s onwards), scholars began to explore comparative religious studies, social engineering, and the "higher criticism," and to question long-accepted ideas. English-speaking readers came to accept that while truth exists, it is not always something that can be agreed upon; it depends upon your point of view.

Applying ideas drawn from James and other modern writers to her Canadian experience, Sara Jeannette Duncan envisaged a collective colonial point of view, created by the colonials' experience of living in, and of commitment to, life on the margins of Empire. Suspicion of British and American imperialist assumptions and respect for colonial independence were her Canadian inheritance; born at the height of the British Empire, Duncan herself had witnessed many examples of inflexible British administration as well as the first flowering of American militaristic belligerence. Duncan's marriage in 1891 to Everard Cotes, an Anglo-Indian civil servant, and her subsequent experience of life in Calcutta and Simla had shown her the connections between her Canadian experience and that of other colonials, and had confirmed her view that the colonial point of view on international affairs, while often overlooked by centrist legislators, usually offered the most practical solutions to local problems. Yet as a professional journalist (for The Week the Montreal Star, and The Globe, among other newspapers), and later as a novelist, Duncan also saw herself as part of a monologic idealist tradition of literature in English that included Matthew Arnold and Thomas Carlyle. A vigorous and witty controversialist, she made no bones about her commitment to the future of the Empire and her personal identification with British history and British mission. Like many of her contemporaries, she saw the Empire as a bulwark against the destructive social effects of materialist capitalism; an effective check on U.S. militarism; and a preserve for the ideals of justice, disinterested debate, altruism, and community which were threatened by the conditions of modern life. Her work speaks to the contradiction, as common among Canadians of her day as of ours, between commitment to the ideals of our European heritage and suspicion of its imperialist motives, to the difference that is the Canadian point of view.

Duncan's view of her position as a Canadian was intimately related to her view of her role as a woman. The nationalism of the 1880s that fostered Duncan's understanding of the colonial point of view coincided with the first organized feminist movement, in favour of women's suffrage (a coincidence that has been repeated in more recent history with the revival of both feminism and nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s). Duncan's early declaration in favour of women's suffrage, like her belief in the legitimacy of Canada, again placed her on the margins of centrist ideology. As a woman, created and defined as "other" by malestream ideology, Duncan was aware that social, political, and literary conventions imposed artificial limitations on women, just as British colonial stereotypes placed artificial limits on Canadians. Moreover, her comments on the role of the heroine in the modern novel clarify her view that to write as a colonial in an international context is to write in a feminine voice. Her fellow Canadians consistently characterized their country as feminine; "Miss Canada" appeared in political cartoons and popular patriotic poetry next to England's "Mrs Britannia" and "John Bull," and the American "Cousin Jonathan" and "Uncle Sam." Canada's lack of legal power in diplomatic affairs, its creation of cultural identity through relationship with "family members"—the U.S. and England—and its emphasis on the mediating role in international politics characterize it as feminine.

The voice of colonial India, Duncan's adult home, was also feminine: popularly conceived of as the "bride of the Anglo-Saxon race," India was traditionally the passive field upon which the potent imperialist exercised his racial superiority. But here again Duncan's allegiances did not follow the imperial norm: her race identified her with the imperialist, yet her colonial orientation and her idealism made her sympathetic to the Indian movement for independence and to what she perceived as the contemplative, religious "oriental mind."

Like her nationalism, Duncan's feminism was also ambivalent: despite her allegiance to the colonial feminine, she was married and committed to living within patriarchal society. In her writing, she joined in the discourse of power and submission that was the essence of popular romantic fiction. As a woman and a colonial, she was [in the words of Rachel Blau DuPlessis in Writing Beyond the Ending, 1985] "neither wholly 'subcultural' nor, certainly, wholly maincultural, but negotiate[d] difference and sameness, marginality and inclusion in a constant dialogue." In the overt political content and in the narrative strategies of her novels, Duncan presents a view from the margin of Anglo-American ideology, writing against the developing aesthetic and ideological traditions of imperialist patriarchy while fully implicated in them.

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf characterized the "double consciousness" of living both inside and outside British culture as typical of women, yet her description also captures the emotional relationship of the Canadian of British descent to England. Like Woolf, Duncan and her colonial characters confronted a civilization that assumed their loyalty without offering a significant return, that demanded their sacrifice without acknowledging their interests. Like Woolf, Duncan may have been "surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilisation, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical." The double consciousness of being female and Canadian yet middle class and British, an inheritor of British civilization yet alien from it, made Duncan "(ambiguously) nonhegemonic"—non-hegemonic by virtue of her opposition to the dominant culture, but only ambiguously so, because by definition no one can be outside hegemony. Duncan could not be a whole-hearted nationalist because she was an imperialist, could not be an unqualified feminist because she finally accepted patriarchally imposed definitions of the female. Like most colonials, she struggled to integrate what she knew by virtue of her colonial experience with what she accepted of the discourse that defined her as object.

Duncan's subtle opposition to the status quo of British and American intellectual life in itself constituted her art as political, for both writer and reader. Although Duncan did not commit herself to a political program, much less to a specific political party, her insistence that the colonial point of view must be respected in international affairs as well as in sexual politics often offends modern readers trained to view such commitment as "rhetoric." Nevertheless, modern critics of Duncan's work have generally resisted the view that her novels primarily address political issues. The reason for this resistance may lie partly in the prevailing definition of the political novel. In his critical biography of Duncan, Novelist of Empire, Thomas Tausky adopts a definition of the political novel that follows the liberal distinction between form and content by focusing on the perceived political affiliation of the characters. Tausky points out that only one of Duncan's novels clearly fits his definition, although by slightly loosening his criteria he discusses three novels in his chapter on Duncan's politics. But even the wider framework excludes His Royal Happiness, despite its clear criticism of American democracy and its idealization of Canada. Nor can it include The Simple Adventures of a Memsabib, which challenges the patriarchal emphasis on heterosexual romantic love as the fulfilment of a woman's life. In Redney, her book on Duncan, Marian Fowler assumes a similar distinction between art and politics: she interprets Duncan's preoccupation with political themes in The Consort as a sign of her personal frustration and waning creative powers. Fowler opposes genuine motivation, which she identifies with passion, to politics: "Redney is using politics instead of passion to whip the muse … now she merely shuffles through the old ritual dance." Fowler's use of the novels as evidence of personal dissatisfaction bordering on neurosis allows her to downplay the political content of Duncan's work to the point that she sees the focus of The Imperialist as simple nostalgia, "a long, lyrical love letter, addressed to Redney's family, to her home town, to her country."

A more useful perspective on Duncan's novels is gained by placing them in the context of late-nineteenth-century English fiction by women. Many late-nineteenth-century women took to the novel as a platform for the dissemination of ideas about society, since almost all other intellectual occupations were closed to them. For the female intellectual or reformer, the novel was a natural medium for ideas. [According to Vineta Colby in The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century, 1970], "as she and her contemporaries were fully aware, the novel was a medium for the expression of ideas about the society in which man lives. The vital issues of the day … were also the issues of much of the fiction of her age … No serious intellectual or practical issue, from the place of God in the universe to the effects on society of the development of cotton-weaving machines, eluded the nineteenthcentury novelist… [she] had a sense of mission, a categorical imperative to observe, to write, and to influence readers." Like her contemporaries in Britain and the U.S., Duncan saw no contradiction between art and ideology, and unabashedly saw her art as that of "dramatizing" an effective "leading idea," as a medium for intellectual debate.

Moreover, in her novels, both the form and the content constitute political statement. Like those feminist writers who "write against the tradition," Duncan deliberately and self-consciously challenged the expected conventions of the romance novel in order to express her sense of the artificial limitations that the romance script imposes upon women in both narrative and society. Such challenges to convention (in both the aesthetic and the social senses of the word) announce her refusal to fit in to predetermined social and political categories. Such challenges to narrative conventions (and, by implication, social and ideological ones) are more readily found in authors who are doubly marginalized—by both their gender and their ethnic or national allegiances—and are [according to DuPlessis] "practices available to those groups—nations, subcultures, races, emergent social practices (gays?)—which wish to criticize, to differentiate from, to overturn the dominant forms of knowing and understanding." The doubly marginalized narrator, made aware of "outsiderness" because both female and Canadian, is still joined to the ideological centre by her class, her education, and her race; "in marginalised dialogue with the orders she may also affirm." Duncan worked from within the system by continuing to acknowledge the traditional norm as norm, yet asserting a different point of view.

The identification of Duncan as a doubly marginalized writer presupposes her allegiance to her sex and her nationality, but the idea that Duncan was consciously Canadian and a self-aware woman has traditionally been problematic for critics of her work. Duncan was born in Canada and began her career as a journalist contributing to the Toronto Globe, the Washington Post, the Montreal Star, and The Week. Her first book, A Social Departure, is a semifictional account of her trip around the world with fellow journalist Lily Lewis. Many of the foreign reviewers did not even notice that the narrator of the book was a Canadian; Duncan allowed Canada to fade into the back-ground as her fictionalized persona left the CPR for a ship that took her to Japan, Southeast Asia, and India. Of the nineteen signed books that follow A Social Departure, sixteen make only token references to Canada, concentrating instead on life in London, New York, and Calcutta. Duncan's early years seem, at first glance, to have had very little impact upon her work.

The general critical response to Duncan's work has been governed by the fact of her international career. In 1893, Lampman was the first to congratulate "Miss Sara Jeannette Duncan" on having escaped the "small prospect of advancement" in her native country in favour of the greener fields of Europe. (Lampman seems to have been unaware that Duncan had actually gone to India, a questionable career move.) Claude Bissell places her firmly in the "cosmopolitan" tradition in his introduction to The Imperialist, and Lionel Stevenson remarks in Appraisals of Canadian Literature that Duncan "does not set out to interpret Canada either to her own inhabitants or to outsiders." For these critics, the exclusion of most of Duncan's work from consideration as Canadian is based on a definition that prescribes a Canadian setting or significant Canadian characters. Tausky follows that definition when he remarks that "students of Canadian literature have little cause to love" Everard Cotes, the Anglo-Indian civil servant who married Duncan and introduced her to India and England; in his view, if Duncan had remained in Canada her work might have been "100% Canadian content," and so automatically of interest.

Judged by the criteria of setting or national identification of the characters, the works of Henry James would have scant claim to a place in American literature, and Joseph Conrad would arguably be undeserving of British notice. The cases for considering James as American and Conrad as British are based on viewpoint, literary influence, and philosophical background. If Canadian writing were considered similarly, as part of a canon of writing interesting in itself, to Canadians if to no one else, Duncan's work should not be included or excluded on the grounds of setting or character alone. Duncan's attitude to Canada, her sense of the rightness of Canadian habits and customs, her willingness to see Canadian personality as the norm or even the ideal, and the relation of her ideas to those of major Canadian thinkers are the real indicators of whether Duncan is a Canadian writer. Canadian criticism has perhaps suffered from the same marginality that Duncan revealed in her explorations of point of view; as part of a colonized minority ourselves, Canadian critics have only recently seen the possibility and the value of relating Duncan's work to that of her contemporaries in ways which suggest that it was part of a developing intellectual tradition.

Duncan's technique of employing a detached, ironic narrator further confuses attempts to identify her national allegiance. The narrator of The Imperialist (the only novel set in Canada) speaks in a superior and almost scientifically detached voice. This prompted Northrop Frye to quote a passage from the novel [in The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination, 1971] as a classic example of the author who refuses to advocate any position or to ally herself with any tradition: "Here is a voice of genuine detachment, sympathetic but not defensive either of the group or of herself, concerned primarily to understand and to make the reader see." While for Frye ironic detachment from nationality is a sign of a mature writer, for other critics Duncan's irony is merely confusing. Michael Peterman remarks that Duncan's seeming lack of national orientation has in effect excluded her from consideration by American, British, or Canadian critics: "Much of the instability of her reputation today grows out of the fact that, because of her flexibility and cosmopolitan ease, she seemed in her time a homeless writer, one who could write trenchantly of India's political difficulties, of life in Parisian garrets, of social comedy in London and New York, but one who never clearly identified herself with a national literary tradition… the 'delightful' manner in which she made use of the international theme, had the effect of denationalising her."

Moreover, because modernism privileges cynical irony as a mode of seeing the real, for many critics Duncan's irony seems to be merely objective realism. The realism she drew from writers such as William Dean Howells and James thus contributes to the impression that her work is detached from, rather than politically engaged with, the issues of colony and empire. (Some critics have also implied that her interest in work of Howells and James made her fiction more American than Canadian). But Duncan's attitudes to realism and irony must be placed in the context of the intellectual dualism of the real and the ideal and the accompanying oppositions of democracy and authority, realism and romance, that dogged the nineteenth-century intellectual. Duncan, like many colonial writers, used irony as a technique to disguise her critique of the ideology of the centre. She relied on the reader to decipher the "parallax," the point of view from which her ironic statements would make sense, turning away from the chaotic implications of "romantic irony" towards the ultimate meaning that idealist philosophy seemed to promise. Duncan's irony is not de-nationalizing, nor is it simply objective realism (though it may seem so to a modern reader), and confusion about these elements disappears when her ironic technique and her theory of realism are closely examined.

As A. B. McKillop, Leslie Armour, and Elizabeth Trott have argued, the characteristically Canadian response to the dualism of the ideal and the real was to try to reconcile the two. Duncan reconciled the perceived opposition of the real and the ideal through the popular version of idealism, derived from Carlyle and Arnold, which eventually came to dominate Canadian intellectual life and which persisted in Canada long after the rest of the Englishspeaking world had gone on to modernist materialism. Canadian intellectuals saw the material world as an embodiment of transcendent values whose significance could be brought out in realist fiction through careful selection of detail. While Duncan admired the realism of the Americans Howells and James, her own aim was quite different from what she saw as theirs: Duncan felt that Howells glorified life for the sake of its material commonplaces, while she went beyond the commonplace to show the representative significance of realistic details.

The idealism that underlies Duncan's novelistic method also provides a focus for addressing social issues such as the independence of the colonies, the institution of democratic government, universal education, and female suffrage. The version of idealism that became known through Carlyle's writings is essentially a framework that makes sense out of the chaotic revolutions of the nineteenth century: such change is not to be feared but rather welcomed as part of a general movement toward a predetermined and definitively good end. Social change is to be undertaken, with the ultimate ends of justice, peace, and equality in view, by changing institutions within a seemingly stable framework. British idealism, however, tended to focus on abstract ends rather than means, and so "turned right" with the more conservative politics of Carlyle and F. H. Bradley, while Canadian idealism remained essentially a reformist philosophy which held that the real and the ideal existed equally. The struggle to make the real conform to the ideal through the secularization of religious thought gave thinkers such as G. M. Grant, Agnes Maule Machar, and John Watson the inspiration to propose ameliorations of the materialist capitalism that they confronted. [According to McKillop, the] "reorientation of the Canadian academic community towards idealism," which took place at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, quickly became a popular reorientation as well, as thinkers such as Machar, Watson, and Paxton Young became influential through their numerous publications and involvement in the training of Presbyterian clergy and the formation of the United Church.

The legitimacy of the individual which the reconciliation of realism and idealism suggested to Canadians provided a philosophical basis for Canadian autonomy within the wider community suggested by the Imperial Union movement. Imperial union, based on the idealist conception of diverse physical manifestations of a universal truth, would allow for a peaceful federation of contending nationalities and a wider union of the human race, but would still allow for the individuality of the various member countries. For Canadians such as Duncan, a united empire would reconcile the two important needs of political man: the need for self-government and the need to look up to an ideal example. With these two principles firmly in view, individual nations could move to material prosperity witout giving up the human goals of charity, political stability, and universal education. Duncan applied the standard she derived from her Canadian experience and from the Canadian view of empire in her descriptions of the social and physical conditions of the U.S. Canada, England, and India, and attempted to show how the fullest development of individuality could be achieved through recognition of the highest good.

Duncan's interest in and support of the Imperial Federation movement is another factor that lends support to the idea that she thought of herself as a particularly Canadian citizen of Empire. Robert Grant Haliburton calls the United Empire Loyalists the first imperial federationists, on the grounds that they suffered and died for the ideal of the unity of the race even while they were betrayed by British policy. Carl Berger suspects that the claim that Canadians originated imperial federation was a myth, created by the nationalist stream of the Imperial Federation movement to increase their sense of moral superiority to both Britain and the U.S. on the other hand, George Parkin, one of the most influential Canadian imperialists, stated categorically that "Imperial Federation is of Colonial—not of English—origin." (One is tempted to add that, as the most famous spokesman for the movement, he should know.)

The "popular idealist" philosophy so influential in Canadian conceptions of a united empire also suggested a rationalization for the movement towards self development for women. The ideal of womanhood, including her "moral superiority" to men and her ability to create and maintain peaceful relations among family members, was traditionally embodied in the role of homemaker and bearer of children. Duncan, however, influenced by the "maternal feminists" (who advocated the extension of women's maternal role into social policy) and the ideology of the "new woman," portrayed the ideal as embodied in a new generation of women pursuing their best impulses in a felt vocation for higher education and professions. The ideal remained the same, but its embodiment changed.

While Duncan's idealism and her support for the federation of the British Empire suggest her agreement with her contemporaries on the composition of the Canadian point of view, the particular form in which she represented the eventual union of the Empire shows the influence of her feminism. She rejected the idea that male-dominated systems of trade and government are sufficient to create peaceful relations between the countries of the Empire, and used the metaphors of family alliances between parent and child, husband and wife, to illustrate the bonds of "sentiment" which must exist between nations in order to promote peace and prosperity. The male characters in Duncan's books attempt to unite the Empire using the tools of trade and diplomacy, but the female characters actually unite the Empire with the tangible ties of marriage and children. Women traditionally have a special duty in the family to promote affection and understanding among the members, and this duty becomes a public one as women fulfill a special role in the Empire, creating the affectionate ties that are the most important part of diplomatic alliances and bind countries to support each others' interests.

The preservation of affectionate ties between races, classes, and nations, as between individuals, is the moral constant in Duncan's portrayal of political rivalries, one that recent feminist scholarship has identified as constitutive of feminine psychology as created in the nuclear family. Nancy Chodorow's description of the daughter's creation of identity through relationship with others, rather than through separation and independence, suggestively recalls Duncan's portrayal of a kind of colonial self-government that unites the values of independence from and connection to England. Carol Gilligan's corollary research into women's moral decisions suggests that women consistently choose to maintain relationships rather than to pursue abstract concepts of good and evil. Duncan's characterization of the nations of the Empire as "one race" who cannot and must not be separated by abstractions "of so little consequence as a form of government" similarly seems to connect to Gilligan's ideas about characteristically feminine traits as produced in the nuclear family. Thus Duncan's ideas about women, about the Empire, and about nationhood seem to reflect her feminism and her femininity.

Duncan often used the metaphor of marriage to symbolize alliances between countries, but she also portrayed actual international marriages that gave women power as intercultural interpreters and bearers of family wealth. Creating India as "the bride of the Anglo-Saxon race" was a cliche of orientalist discourse, but Duncan wrote against the stereotype by showing that the alliance with British law would bring the Eastern bride not protected passivity but independence, education, and relief from abuse. The Canadian bride, such as Advena Murchison in The Imperialist or Mary Trent in Cousin Cinderells, gains power through her ability to bestow the dowry that represents her nation: wealth, a field for action, and the possibility of a new social harmony. The American bride in Duncan's later books brings the healing of the schism between Britain and the U.S. and the possibility of fruitful alliance in time of war. In Duncan's books, as the narrator states in The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib, "Feminine connections … [are] the only sort which are really binding" between nations.

Duncan's political views were often those of a small-c conservative, but her belief in social reform and women's suffrage and her attacks on colonialism and entrenched privilege belie a simple identification with any one party. George Lukacs points out [in The Historical Novel, 1962] that movements that oppose bourgeois democracy on the basis of a communitarian ideal often blur party lines: "The opposition movements … always run the danger of swinging over from a left to a right-wing criticism of bourgeois democracy, i.e. from dissatisfaction with bourgeois democracy to opposition to democracy in general. If one, for instance, follows the careers of… important writers like Bernard Shaw, one sees… zigzag movements of this kind from one extreme to the other." During Duncan's lifetime, political lines in Britain and Canada were extremely fluid. Both Benjamin Disraeli and Joseph Chamberlain began their careers as Radicals and ended as Tories; Disraeli and Herbert Henry Asquith both considered forming governments of efficiency or reconciliation that would do away with party lines. Carlyle's ideas were variously associated with the right and the left, and the Fabians flirted with eugenics and fascism as well as with democratic socialism. In Canada, the Canada First movement began by opposing all party divisions as inefficient and petty; it ended by forming its own party. The Liberal Party of Canada seesawed between support for commercial union and imperial federation. Duncan is often called a conservative, but during her lifetime she remained friends with John Willison, editor of a Liberal paper. She admired and quoted John Stuart Mill and Arnold; she upheld the free market system but also supported relief payments to the poor. The political philosophy she espoused eventually became the basis of the CCF.

Duncan's political stance might more constructively be defined within that elusive (and largely extinct) Canadian ideology, red toryism. The red tory believes in a natural social hierarchy similar to the one described in The Imperialist and the maintenance of that hierarchy in a flexible way in the interests of preserving order. The red tory also believes, generally, in progress and social reform, but with the limit that man is probably not perfectable. Increases in personal freedom are not necessarily progressive (as Duncan maintained when she argued that the aim of the movement for women's rights is not freedom in itself); progress, for the red tory, consists in restraining the more vicious human traits to prevent the victimization of the weak—in practical terms, state legislation to restrain capitalism. The red tory thus shares with the socialist a belief in the necessity of state intervention based on a collectivist view of the social good, the view that Pamela Pargeter comes to when she campaigns on behalf of the Labour Party in The Consort. In Canada, red tories and their socialist allies have historically been the basis of the nationalist movement; red tory nationalists have generally fought modern liberal capitalism (the descendant of Mill's utilitarianism), and so have fought Canada's incorporation into the U.S. economic empire.

Red toryism, or "tory radicalism," has been a major factor in the intellectual history of Canada. Gad Horowitz accounts for the differences between Canadian and us culture by the "touch of toryism" that survived the homogenizing influence of North American liberalism. He believes that the dominant liberal ideology in Canada is "considerably mitigated by a tory presence initially and a socialist presence subsequently." He agrees that the two are fundamentally connected by a "corporate-organiccollectivist" view of society, which is the result of the "non-Liberal British elements" that have entered "into English-Canadian society together with American liberal elements at the foundations." Of course it would be an exaggeration to claim self-conscious political radicalism for nineteenth-century Canadian conservatives. But certainly the "pink toryism" that Robin Mathews claims for Susanna Duncan, Moodie was the ideology of minority. moved Lik meritocracy. a significant She Moodie "supported to-^e ward the breakdown of class as it was defined in Europe. She rejected individualism and—in a not fully articulated way—capitalist exploitation." Like Moodie, Duncan may be called a pink tory: "pro-British in culture, proCanadian in aspirations for the future, socially committed to community and responsibility and, therefore, fearful of individualist, republican 'democracy.'"

The pink tory was often an imperialist. Support for the strengthening of ties between the self-governing nations of the British Empire was one strategy for combatting materialism and deterioration of social bonds. The Empire was supposed to be held together by ideals that transcended the profit motive, and to be motivated by the desire to do good works by bringing the benefit of British civilization to the "lesser breeds without the law." While acknowledging that the Empire was originally an instrument for money-making, Canadian imperialists saw the future of the Empire in the preservation of the ideals embodied in British history. G.M. Grant declared that the mission of man was "to think great thoughts, to do great things, to promote great ideals," and to overcome "the vulgar and insolent materialism of thought and life, which is eating into the heart of our people." To this end, Canadian imperialists took Carlyle's suggestion to 'work thou in welldoing,' infusing the concept of secular work with religious enthusiasm. Support for the Empire seemed to provide the ideals and the opportunity for work (in the governing of dependencies and the building of new nations), as well as an economic mechanism for resisting the dominating influence of the quintessential materialists, the Americans.

The pink tory, if she was a woman, was also often a suffragist, for the majority of the members of the Canadian suffrage movement were politically conservative reformers, not revolutionaries. The radical call for the vote, which was founded in the belief in the essential equality of women, was rejected by the majority of the maternal feminist suffragists. They called for the vote as a first step toward necessary social reforms, such as temperance laws, legislation to give mothers equal custody of their children, and welfare and unemployment relief, that would "clean house" for the nation.

One of the earliest women journalists to call for the ballot (in her Globe columns of 1885), Duncan agreed that most women would prefer to marry and have children, and she consistently depicted female characters in her novels who are "formed" for marriage. Yet she argued for the goal of women's financial and moral independence from men and for freedom of choice for women who felt the drive toward higher education and professions. Asserting that women had grown strong enough to bear the responsibility of the ballot, she demanded that they be treated as adults, with both the duties and responsibilities of citizens. She argued that women are as individual as men in their aptitudes and capabilities, and that their different callings and vocations must be respected. Chafing against the artificial legal strictures placed on women made her aware of the literary restrictions: those which created the passive heroine, the love story, the flirt, and always, always, a marriage at the end. Her ability to question stereotypes in life broadened to include a questioning of much received opinion.…

In all her work, Duncan wrote from a different point of view, one that consciously differed from the received wisdom of the imperial centre yet included it as norm; she wrote as a colonial both committed to and different from the empire that created her.

The novels of Sara Jeannette Duncan question and challenge the view from the centre of Empire. They present a critique of the totalizing systems of materialism, bourgeois democracy, imperialism, and patriarchy by delineating the colonial point of view—the view from the margin, both part of and outside the central ideology. That point of view is informed by the idealism that many Canadian intellectuals saw as an antidote to the increasingly materialist view of both fiction and politics current in the U.S. and Britain, and by the feminist advocacy that resisted the colonizing ideology of the patriarchal centre by expanding limited definitions of woman and of femininity.

Duncan's political views had their genesis in the idealism expressed by British and Canadian political and social writers of the last half of the nineteenth century. Matthew Arnold and, through him, Thomas Carlyle were the most important for Duncan. Through them and their Canadian interpreters, Duncan saw traditional society in Canada, England, the U.S., and India as threatened by the new values of materialism, scepticism, and political anarchy; in opposition to those values she saw idealism, heroism, and Arnoldian culture. While she depicts the forces of materialism as strong, her novels always imply the constant evolution of society towards the end predicted by Carlyle, when all humanity will see justice and the face of God.

The most important basic belief conveyed to Duncan through her reading was a kind of popular idealism that pervaded Canadian intellectual life in the late nineteenth century. This popular version of the idealism of Carlyle and Arnold included a belief in transcendent and immutable values (which may or may not be identified with a christian God). These values might be approximated in human life by those with the gift of divining them (Carlyle's heroes) or through study of British history and its evolution towards the ideal. These values denied the claims of materialistic science to ultimate knowledge, kept alive the religious impulse through study of literature and religious traditions, and made fully human life (of whatever race or culture) the ultimate test of all technological innovation.

In Canada, idealism was the major philosophical tradition touching all levels of intellectual life in the last few decades of the nineteenth century. Carlylean ideas dominated education at all levels; Arnold's works must have been familiar to educated readers of The Week, as Duncan could use his terms "philistines" and "culture" in her columns with no accompanying explanation. In addition, John Watson arrived in Canada in 1872, and his views dominated Canadian academic philosophy by the mid-1880s. His interpretation of Kantian idealism influenced Duncan's Presbyterian church and was the focus of debate in magazines such as The Canadian Monthly and National Review. Duncan's journalism and novels show the influence of all these streams of thought. Moreover, she shared the major idea common to Canadian idealists: support for a continued link between Canada and England as a bulwark against the rampant materialism and anarchic democracy that seemed to threaten from the south.

The idealism of Duncan's novels is distinctly unfashionable today. It is responsible, some say, for the repeated claim in the mid-twentieth century that Canada is still a "Victorian" society, out of step with the intellectual and artistic world; the part played by idealism in the justification of imperialist war and the arms race has made idealism and its trappings objects of well-earned revulsion. Yet Duncan's work implies that to abandon mutually agreed upon definitions of justice, truth, and compassion, to abandon the possibility of community, is to leave us open to the grossest violations of elementary human freedoms; the struggle for justice can be waged only by communities united by those common abstractions. While we may deplore Duncan's elitism, her racism, and her class consciousness, we may applaud and subscribe to her vision of a community united in its attempt to realize "justice and freedom and that sort of thing" in real life, through negotiation, affection, and sensitivity to other cultures.

The critique of democracy, and especially republican democracy, that is evident in Duncan's work comes directly from her idealism. Duncan depicts human beings as a complex of self-interest and self-transcendence; personal selfishness and common good constantly war in the characters she depicts. In her novels, simply giving the vote to more people does not necessarily ensure better government, because government is to be judged by a higher standard, not by the advantages it awards to interest groups. The issue of democracy is directly connected to social reform. The increasing triumph of materialist capitalism, which treats human beings as commodities, over traditional aristocratic responsibility for the poor made social reform a necessity for Britain; yet, in The Consort, giving the poor the vote, through which they could exact "revenge" upon the rich, seems to do little to ameliorate their problems. For Duncan, a meritocracy (which Carlyle defends in Past and Present) drawn from an independent, educated population is the solution that the colonies of Canada and Australia offer the British working poor.

The depiction of nationality in the novels is inevitably connected with Duncan's belief in the essential unity of English-speaking peoples, which she characterizes as the "Anglo-Saxon race." Although Canada, the United States, Britain, and India are unique nationalities formed by different histories and different physical and social conditions, they are linked by the common ideals of their British heritage and by ties of familial "sentiment." While the novels look forward to a re-unification of England and her colonies and former colonies, unique nationalities are not devalued in a drive for uniformity; the personal initiative of Americans, the traditions of Britons, the flexibility of Canadians, and the contemplative nationalism of Indians—all are legitimate points of view from which a prospective union would draw strength.

Canada is idealized in the novels for its ability to meld respect for British ideals with a unique North American belief in personal freedom. In The Imperialist, the citizens of Elgin, Ontario, are able to follow their "man of vision" toward an ideal future; while Lorne Murchison is defeated by corruption and self-interest, the ideal he represents persists in the history of the nation. This persistence of the British ideal in Canadian culture is even clearer in Mary Trent of Cousin Cinderella and Arthur Youghall of His Royal HappinesW, both characters find their personal freedom and their vocation in helping to revitalize Britain's own sense of mission and strengthen her ties to the colonies.

The burgeoning nationalism of the "Canada First" era in Canadian political life, like the nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s, ran parallel to the beginnings of feminist organization and feminist action. While Duncan would not have called herself a feminist, her work disputed patriarchally imposed definitions of women's role and advocated importing the "feminine" values of affection, sentiment, negotiation, and connection into political life. She challenges the limited roles allowed to women by both social and literary convention in A Social Departure and, in her early journalism, encourages women to discard useless feminine weakness and to cultivate firmness of purpose. She redefines the traditional sentimental heroine in Vernon's Aunt The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib, "A Mother in India," and other works, creating a protagonist who moves beyond the conventional narrative of love story and happy ending. She argues for giving women a role in political life through the ballot, as well as demonstrating in Cousin Cinderella, The Consort, and The Burnt Offering how women can participate in inter-cultural debates and, through marriage, choose to be actors in public life.

Duncan's novels show the relationship between countries to be a familial one, in which the feminine virtues of negotiation, connection, and affection are the most important in maintaining peace and harmony. In The Burnt Offering, India asks for "affection" from her British rulers; the enthusiasm of Lorne Murchison's "heart" favours closer ties within the Empire. Women themselves had a part to play in the international politics of empire: Helen Browne, Rani Janaki, Mary Trent, and other Duncan heroines offer a tangible way to promote love and sympathy among the countries of the Empire when they marry. In the idealist sense, these heroines find both personal identity and an important way to serve the best interest of the community in the fulfillment of their love.

Indian nationality is a melding of British and Indian elements in Duncan's novels. Duncan accepted the common justifications for the British rule of force in India: the good of the people, the benefits of education, and democratic reforms. Her Indian novels depict the future of India as a marriage between the best of India and England, formed through affection and compatible gifts. The novels focus on the workings of the Imperial Idea of social reform: they contrast the gradual reforms of "culture," based on knowledge of the social situation and on general flexibility of mind as well as acquaintance with ideals, to the "Morrison's Pill" approach of attempting to enforce compliance with a single idea. The novels reveal Western education, dominated by science and scepticism, as a mixed blessing for a culture already closer to its God than the British.

The Indian novels also depict racial difference. Duncan's fictional method of creating "types," as well as the discourse of racism and orientalism, lead to her depiction of Indians as incapable of self-government. While she often displays her cultural ethnocentricity and regularly makes use of the negative stereotypes of Indians, she refuses to accept such stereotypes as final; her definitions of "others" are always open to redefinition and to possible alliance.

Duncan's novels are, finally, "colonial editions," which reproduce the aesthetic and political controversies common to the English-speaking world of her time from a Canadian and a female point of view. Her rejection of materialism in art and in its political forms of republican democracy, individualism, and the rule of "selfishness" reflects the general dominance of idealism in Canadian philosophy and literature long after the materialism and "psychologism" of modernism dominated elsewhere in the Englishspeaking world. She locates the centre of that materialism in the United States, which she depicts as losing its commitment to ideals in the War of Independence; her Americans provide a link between the cautionary tales of Thomas Chandler Haliburton and the plutocrats of Stephen Leacock. Duncan's Britons are less benign than Leacock's "Remarkable Uncle," because they retain enough power over Canadian foreign affairs for their ignorance to be threatening; yet, like the community-building Britons of John Richardson and Susanna Moodie, Duncan's Britons retain their status as inheritors of British values and still remain open to the influence of ideals. Canadians, as inheritors of both North American freedom and the cultural products of British evolution, are Duncan's ideal people. Common sense to the contrary, Canadians have responded to Lorne Murchison's call to community with other Canadians and within the Empire by reaffirming the country's "dominion status" and continuing to see the Commonwealth as an important forum for negotiation and for the achievement of social justice.