Let's be civil: the ambivalences of civility in novels by L.M. Montgomery, Sara Jeannette Duncan, and Nellie McClung

This thesis demonstrates that early twentieth-century Canadian novels by women authors normalize civility as a set of characteristics exclusive to white subjects. Daniel Coleman's and Sunera Thobani's respective works on the construction of Canada's national identity reveal that compassion, politeness, and caring for others are the characteristics used to limit that identity to white English Canadian subjects. Coleman's literary study, however, underrepresents the significant role of women authors and their women characters in the normalization of whiteness as a necessary component of the civil subject. Expanding on Coleman and Thobani, this thesis examines five novels written by women–L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables (1908) and Rilla of Ingleside (1919), Sara Jeannette Duncan's The Imperialist (1904) and Cousin Cinderella (1908), and Nellie McClung's Painted Fires (1925). These novels represent women characters as crucial to standardising a model of civility that excludes non-white and non-British subjects from Canada. Chapter One lays a theoretical framework to understand the literary project of civility. Chapter Two examines women's role as caretakers in insular communities limited to white subjects in Montgomery's novels. Further, Chapter Three analyzes the role women play in the trans-national relationship between Canada and Britainin Duncan's novels. Finally, Chapter Four demonstrates that McClung's novel contrasts Montgomery's and Duncan's models of civility by characterizing a white non-British woman as the guardian of Canadian civility. Ultimately, this thesis establishes that popular early twentieth-century women authors problematically normalize a construct of civility in the Canadian national consciousness that grants implicit privileges to white subjects.