Isabella Valancy Crawford's long narrative poem Hugh and Ion was not published in her lifetime, and has not been dated with much certainty. This important piece of Crawford's work has considerable relevance, however, to English-Canadian discourses and ideologies of the mid-1880s, and thus needs to be situated with some specificity within its cultural context. Robert Alan Burns has recently shown how the poem engages with reports of the trial of Louis Riel, headline news in the summer and fall of 1885. In the Toronto papers, Riel's trial shared front-page coverage with another putatively imperial crisis -- journalist W.T. Stead's scandalous "expose" of the "white slave trade" in London. Stead's week-long account of child prositution at the centre of the British Empire set a wave of purity reform activity in motion in England and throughout the colonies, not least in English Canada, where the potential of the new Dominion as a site for the expansion of England was being sorely tested by the effects of the Second North West Rebellion upon the settlement of the "Last Best West." By aligning Crawford's poem with this well-known "scandal" of 1885 and its implications for Canadian expansion, it is possible not only to put a date to the text, but to see in a new light Crawford's own politics of Empire, imperial feminism and purity reform.
Decorator Industries Inc. designs, manufactures, and sells a wide variety of interior furnishings, primarily draperies, curtains, shades, blinds, bedspreads, valance boards, comforters, pillows, and cushions. The company sells these products to original equipment manufacturers of recreational vehicles and manufactured housing and to the hospitality industry, including hotels and motels, either through distributors or directly to customers. The company's plants are located in Haleyville and Red Bay, Alabama; Lakewood, Florida; Elkhart and Goshen, Indiana; Bossier City, Louisiana; Salisbury, North Carolina; Bloomsburg and Berwick, Pennsylvania; and Abbotsford, Wisconsin.light the locks Of Saxon yellow fell on Saxon brows And the stern humour of the Saxon stood Built of finn flint within his steadfast sou.... (565-68) (my emphasis)In a new product introduction that seems predestined for mass market success, retailers warmly responded to the Magic Valance (patent pending) by Ex-Cell Home Fashions. This innovation allows consumers to quickly and conveniently change their window looks by a three-step installation of a pre-pleated, cut-to-size-, adhesive-backed fashion valance. The Magic Valance comes in a wide variety of patterns with a retail target price of $15.Crawford is not usually regarded as a "maternal" feminist of the kind Wayne Roberts sees emerging in Toronto between 1877 and 1914, but Hugh and Ion shows her drawing upon what Lucy Bland, Anna Davin and Mariana Valverde have all shown to be "maternal" feminism's imperialist vocabulary of purity and gendered culpability for the degenerating state of the Empire. The poem, therefore, is not only, as Clever points out, "significant in that it expands ... Crawford's published canon, [and] the range and resonance of her work" (ix): it also expands our understanding of Crawford as a woman writer who addressed the same kinds of social problems that were then being confronted by the growing sphere of women's organizations. It thus enlarges our understanding of late-nineteenth-century imperialist feminism in English Canada as it produced a discourse of the nature and importance of women's work in the "civilizing mission" of the British Empire. It does this by representing the politics of expansion and what J.A. Hobson would argue in 1902 were the economic motivations of imperialism within a framework that would have been familiar to contemporary readers in Toronto, as in London, England and throughout the Empire: the questions of imperial purity and the exploitation of women that were raised in 1885 by W.T. Stead's notorious piece of "muckraking" journalism, "The Maiden Tribute of Modem Babylon." In July 1885 in the London paper the Pall Mall Gazette (4, 6, 7, 8 and 10 July), Stead published what were regarded throughout the Empire as "Sensational Revelations" (Toronto Telegram, 13 July 1885 2) of "Vice in London" (Toronto Mail, 11 July 1885 1). Stead's series of articles purported to expose corruption in London, the "heart" of the imperial organism, and thus to reveal a pervasive crisis of degeneracy and disease in the Anglo-Saxon race, even as it was spreading across the globe in the period of the most intense and rapid territorial expansion of the British Empire.(f.1)In November 1993, Williams Bassett, Decorator's 56-year-old president and chief executive officer, was named to the additional post of chairman of the company's board of directors. Bassett, who succeeded Earl Rappaport, continued the strategy of building the company through acquisitions. In 1995, the company purchased Paragon Interiors, a producer of draperies and bedspreads for the manufactured housing and recreational vehicle markets located in Goshen, Indiana. The company subsequently established Paragon as a division to design and manufacture draperies, valance boards, bedspreads, and mini-blinds for the recreation vehicle and manufactured housing industry. The company believed the acquisition would provide new growth opportunities in the Indiana market, which comprised almost 60 percent of total U.S. production of all motor homes, travel trailers, and conversion vans. Decorator's strategic moves caught the attention of Business Week, which in 1995 listed the company as one of the top small companies in America. In addition, the company was named in a September 1996 Barron's article on small cap stocks entitled "Sifting Gems," and in Forbes Magazine as one of the 200 best small companies in America in 1996.
Such hybrids as Hugh are not unusual in nineteenth- or even in early-twentieth-century English-Canadian literature. John Richardson's Wacousta (1832) is a story constructed around a protagonist who appears to be an aboriginal warrior but is really a vengeful Scot in exile, and Howard O'Hagan's Tay John (1939) is, like Riel in so many representations, a composite messiah who internally unites disparate ethnicities: Tay John is both Shuswap and "wondrous fair with hair, and shining" (43). The emphasis on Hugh's Saxon "heritage," when it is aligned with Burns's argument for the protagonist's construction in the image of Riel, must thus draw our attention to Crawford's negotiation of what are conflicting ideologies of the Canadian North West in this narrative. Hugh's "ambition," that is, may echo that of Riel; but his "Saxon" idealism is also framed in a discourse which configured colonization and expansion as an imperial enterprise, something Riel was seen to threaten.
Author: Devereux, Cecily
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