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Wall, The Nurture of
Nature
Loo, States of Nature
Sandlos, Hunters at
the Margin
Nelles, The Politics
of Development
Evenden, Fish Versus
Power
The five
monographs that I read this week fall under a broad theme of environmental
history, showing tensions of modern and anti-modern actions and ideologies and
their social, economic, cultural, and political interactions. Sharon Wall’s The Nurture of Nature is a study of the
articulation and search for meaning
in modernity through the anti-modern leisure pursuit of children’s summer camps
in Ontario. Echoing previous work on American summer camps—notably that of
Leslie Paris—Wall argues that Ontario’s summer camps had an ambivalent
relationship to modernity, with anti-modern nostalgia implicated in a modern regulatory
project of child development. Wall’s monograph considers in particular detail
the gendered and class implications of children’s camps, as well as their
positioning in a colonial society and relationship to the natural environment. Wall
begins by situating children’s camps as an urban response to the spatial transformations
involved in modernity. Proponents of camps valued them as anti-modern pursuits,
highlighting isolation from urban demands, pollution, and culture. This
isolation also made camps a laboratory for studying child development, as Wall
explains further in a later chapter. The very presence of camps, of course,
undermined their claims to rejecting modernity; all summer camps influenced
their landscapes, to varying degrees, making the land less natural.
Wall’s next
point of analysis is the class dimension of children’s camps, in chapters
considering elite private camps, then charitable “fresh air” camps. At private
camps, Wall argues, children moved in an extension of their urban social spheres;
camps often allied themselves with elite clubs and boarding schools, reflecting
the class divisions in broader society and isolating children from
non-privileged children and youth. These camps reflected the class backgrounds
of the registered children through high fees, high-quality food and
accommodation—despite an image of “roughing it” in the wilderness—and
programming such as music lessons and golf that would enable children to
succeed as leaders in an elite culture. This stands in stark contrast to the
fresh air camps that Wall analyzes in her following chapter, which is largely a
case study of the Bolton camp, located a short distance from Toronto. Unlike
more northern camps which highlighted summer-long recreation in “pristine”
wilderness environments, fresh air camps were premised on an assumption that
working-class children needed merely fresh air and brief respite from an urban
environment to improve their health. Programming at such camps was simple and
regimented, reflecting their low operating costs and a goal of teaching
children and youth basic employment skills and good habits, such as hard work,
through arts and crafts.
Economically in
between the private and fresh air camps, “agency” summer camps, run by programs
such as Scouts and the YMCA, served middle-class children. Unfortunately,
Wall’s monograph lacks a chapter dedicated to the workings and class formations
in this type of summer camp. Wall ultimately highlights children’s camps as
highly class stratified, furthering the values of upper- and middle-class
society through programming for children of all income groups. This study
could, however, offer a deeper analysis of other divisions among summer camps.
While she analyzes some private Jewish summer camps, her consideration of this
fairly large portion of the post-war camp sector is fairly limited. Peculiarly,
Wall offers no consideration of therapeutic camps for children with special
needs, such as the Easter Seal Society camps that opened in the late 1940s. As
such, religion and disability are limited as categories of analysis in her
work.
Wall does offer
a substantial analysis of the therapeutic potential of private and fresh air
camps, analyzing these as part of a modern experiment in child psychology,
mental hygiene, and progressive education. For psychologists, camps offered a
valuable controlled environment to study children. They also attempted to
implement some therapeutic programming, particularly working to combat children’s
shyness through fostering independence and encouraging play. At fresh air
camps, social workers had an opportunity to interact with and observe children
over an intensive period, to determine their social, emotional, and medical
needs; this observation did not, however, generally result in long-term interventions
for the children, as fresh air camp sessions were typically short. Following
the Second World War, some camps served as an informal experiment for the
progressive education movement, implementing less regimented and more holistic
programming; notably, programming at fresh air camps continued to emphasize
regimentation and adult control over children.
Wall explains
how, in addition to class, residential camps reflected and reinforced
twentieth-century ideas about gender and sexuality. The vast majority of camps
were single-sex, with ideals of masculinity and femininity underpinning camp
programming. For boys, this was often in response to fears of “modern” crises
in masculinity. These camps ultimately emphasized modern rather than
anti-modern gender relations, as places for the development of youth culture
whether in co-educational or single-sex environments. One peculiar element of
Wall’s chapter on gender and sexuality is her assertion that all-male spaces in
boys camps distanced boys from “feminine” civilization; the gendering of
civilization as feminine in this context contrasts to the more typical binary
assignment of civilization as a male quality, an anomaly that Wall does not
address.
Wall’s
penultimate chapter analyzes the appropriation of “Indian” cultures at camps
for children of various class backgrounds, a supposedly educational element of
programming that was intended to highlight traditional, anti-modern values and
foster connections to the natural world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the “Indian”
cultures portrayed in this camp programming were sometimes fabricated, building
campers’ Canadian identities through a spiritual connection to the land based
on legends that were crafted by camp directors. Wall notes that, in most cases,
such programming did not consider the marginalized position of Aboriginal
peoples in Canada at the time, and were silent as to their own location on
Aboriginal land.
Wall
accomplished her research through an analysis of various camp ephemera,
including brochures, scrapbooks, and administrative records. She supplemented
this with oral histories, which are concerningly poorly balanced; the majority
of these oral histories come from transcripts in the Ontario Camping
Association archives, and feature the voices of campers and staff at private
camps. The brief quotations that Wall provides from these interviews portray
nostalgic reminiscences of camp experiences; it is unlikely that such
experiences were necessarily typical or representative of Ontario summer camps,
as they are the memories of long-term campers, rather than those who did not
return annually and who may have been less positive about their camping
experiences.
The remaining
four monographs are more focused on the environment, conservation, and natural
resources. Of these, Tina Loo’s work stands out as a national rather than
regional study. Loo’s intentionally broad analysis uses wildlife conservation
as a way to study “shifting and conflicting attitudes toward the natural world”
in the twentieth century. Loo articulates three main arguments: that change
over time in wildlife conservation became structured and scientific rather than
fragmented and local in the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth
century; that private actors, despite often being blamed for environmental
decline, were actually key proponents of environmentalism; and that
conservation was strongly sentimental, with human values and constructions
being as important as science. Oddly, these arguments are somewhat different
from the three arguments identified by Graeme Wynn in his foreword to Loo’s
work; Wynn’s argues that Loo argues that state intervention to conserve
wildlife was effective, marginalizing local views of the environment, and
highlights the role of environmentalism in the colonization of rural Canada.
While Wynn’s impressions are not necessarily incorrect—Loo does argue these
points, albeit somewhat secondarily—it is concerning that his summary does not
reflect the points that Loo so explicitly states.
Loo describes
the organization of her work as following both a chronological and thematic
structure; my impression is that it is more thematic than it is chronological.
She begins by considering the legal regime for wildlife regulation, untangling
its ideological influences of Progressivism and anti-modernism. According to
Loo, the Progressivist aim, as shown through bureaucracies, was the sustainable
exploitation through the “scientific management” of resources. Recreational
pursuits showed anti-modernist goals, with encounters with wildlife serving as
opportunities for natural healing and a return to “primitivity.” Loo’s second
chapter considers initiatives to prevent the privatization of wildlife as a
resource, which disguised their true aim of restricting access to only privileged
groups among the “public.” This resulted in a pattern of legislation and
resistance, with Aboriginal peoples arguing against Euro-Canadian assumptions
that local peoples did not know how to conserve resources, and protesting the
devaluation of Indigenous environmental knowledge. In these first two chapters,
Loo lays out the ideological framework for the environmental movement—and, to
an extent, the theoretical foundations of her own work—then emphasizes the
tremendous social and economic implications of the environmental policies she analyzes.
Loo’s subsequent
chapters offer case studies of Jack Miner, an influential figure in interwar
conservation work, then the Hudson’s Bay Company. Miner, a private individual
who held sway over public opinion, made emotional and religious appeals in his
conservation work with geese, showing the importance of sentiment for
environmental discussions. The Hudson’s Bay Company engaged in conservation
work before the involvement of the government, seeing conservation as a social
issue and thus involving local—often Aboriginal—people. To the Hudson’s Bay
Company, wildlife was an economic resource, necessitating sustainable policies
to achieve both rehabilitation and resource exploitation. Through these case
studies, Loo shows the diversity of views and approaches to wildlife
conservation that informed twentieth-century public opinion and policy.
Loo then turns
to government wildlife conservation in postwar Canada, considering the actions
of the Canadian Wildlife Service in forming national parks and manipulating
herds of wild grazing animals; her consideration of wildlife as part of local
settler agriculture and as a means of controlling Aboriginal peoples is echoed and
significantly expanded upon by Sandlos. In her next chapter, Loo complicates
her own analysis of grazing animals by considering the treatment of predators,
with practices influenced by a variety of scientific, emotional, and economic
motives. Loo argues that the concern about predators reflected both a
taxonomical division of wildlife into “good” and “bad” animals, and a common
view that nature needed human intervention—an idea of human supremacy that also
resonates through Carl Berger’s lectures. Such human sentiments were, according
to Loo, often more influential over policy than was science, with human fears
of particular predators leading to aggressive killings, while other predators
were revered, almost religiously. In some cases, Loo implies that Aboriginal
peoples were treated as just another part of the ecosystem, to be
sentimentalized and manipulated.
Loo’s last
chapter considers the collaborations between private individuals, non-profit
organizations, and the federal government, showing how diverse initiatives cast
wildlife as an economic resource in need of management; this was particularly
evident in the case of Ducks Unlimited Canada, which worked to conserve
Canadian wetlands for the benefit of American waterfowl hunting. In this
chapter, Loo argues that individuals and organizations that were marginalized
by government conservation efforts such as game restrictions actually performed
very important conservation efforts in their attempts to preserve their ways of
life or economic wellbeing.
John Sandlos
expands significantly on Loo’s work, detailing federal government attempts to
control Aboriginal peoples in the Northwest Territories under the guise of
wildlife conservation. Although his analysis occasionally reads like a
conspiracy theory, and perhaps overstates the social control element in
wildlife conservation, he certainly illustrates how wildlife conservation was
not a neutral process. Sandlos’s text has a somewhat unusual organization,
considering in turn the policies pertaining to bison, muskoxen, and caribou. This
makes his work repetitive at times, and understates the connections between
these facets of conservation. At several points, Sandlos illustrates the
tensions between anti-modern and modern forces; for example, he argues that wildlife
conservation proponents disputed popular images of Aboriginal peoples living in
harmony with nature; these conservationists claimed that such a stereotype
reflected pre-contact lifestyles, and not the practices of Aboriginal peoples
who had been “tainted” by modernity. Strikingly, despite this apparent concern
about the consequences of modernity, government officials implemented policies
that imposed modernity on Aboriginal peoples through sedentary rather than
nomadic lifestyles and wage labour or agriculture rather than hunting.
Sandlos’s argument that conservation initiatives resulted in control and
oppression of Aboriginal peoples is undermined, however, by his assertion that
this imposition of power was a deliberate
imposition of power over Aboriginal communities; while the pragmatic,
commercial goals of conservation are clear from the evidence he presents, he
does not clearly support his argument that the imposition of power was a goal
of conservation, rather than a side-effect that the government encouraged.
Of potential
concern, none of these three monographs offer a particularly explicit
definition of modernity. Wall identifies modernity as a spatial organization,
perhaps a component of urbanization. Loo and Sandlos potentially equate modernity
with science. In highlighting the tensions between modernity and
anti-modernity, showing how summer camps and environmentalists attempted to
negotiate in modern and anti-modern constructed spheres, these three historians
perhaps illustrate, collectively, how slippery ideas of modernity can be, for
agents in the twentieth century as well as for historians. The modernity that
emerges in these works is symbolic, an accumulation of science, policies,
order, and control, rather than an absolutely defined concept. The idea of an
anti-modern is similarly represented through symbols, such as wildlife,
Aboriginal peoples, natural “northern” spaces, and leisure. The two are defined
in relation to one another, without either ever being specifically pinned down.
This week’s
final two works consider interactions between the natural and political worlds.
In The Politics of Development, H.V.
Nelles outlines the involvement of
the Ontario provincial government in late nineteenth and early twentieth
century staples industries, arguing that the province’s business-oriented
strategy to development resulted in the Ontario government becoming essentially
a business client. Nelles presents twelve chapters, both thematic and
chronological, to analyze the role of the Ontario government in mining,
forestry, and hydroelectricity. These three “new” staples industries
experienced variations in Ontario’s “manufacturing condition” development
strategy, which reproduced many elements of the federal National Policy on a
provincial level and valued industrialization based on a northern resource
base. The provincial government, according to Nelles, aggressively supported
staples industries and the manufacturing industries that emerged from them, by
promoting investments, granted access to resources, and creating infrastructure
such as railways that would serve the needs of entrepreneurs. To varying
degrees, the Ontario government controlled these industries; it owned the
hydroelectric industry and strictly regulated forestry through conservation
policies, while it had more limited power over mining operations.
Nelles
particularly outlines how the intersection between politics and business
reshaped and potentially undermined principles of responsible government.
Involvement with staples resource industries became a test of ministerial
accountability, where politicians were forced to balance their business roles
as shareholders with their responsibility to constitutional process. This test
of ministerial judgment was often less than satisfactory, as the government
privileged business interests. Businesses based on staples industries could
thus “use the state to stabilize, extend, and legitimize their economic power”
(427). This was particularly evident, Nelles argues, during the Depression, when
industrialists gained at the expense of other social groups, eroding the social
sense of responsible government.
Nelles’s
foreword to the second Carleton Library edition of his work addresses the limitations
of his work, aside, of course, from its length. Given its publication in 1974,
this monograph does not engage with elements of new social history or
environmental history; consideration of racial, class, and gender inequalities,
or lived experiences, are absent from his work. Nelles also analyzes natural
resources more as resources than as nature, focusing on their economic and
political rather than social and cultural implications. While his prefatory
remarks are useful, I would have preferred to see an abridged and updated Politics of Development, rather than a
reprint, perhaps integrating these social issues into Nelles’s political
economics analysis.
Matthew Evenden
draws on Nelles’s concept of the “politics of development” in his monograph, Fish Versus Power. This study considers
the unique position of British Columbia’s Fraser River, as a large river in a
populated area without damming on its main branch. The lack of damming, Evenden
argues, is a result of a complex interaction between the hydroelectric and
fisheries industries, shaped by transnational environmental, political, and
economic concerns; scientific debates and interventions; and the province’s
physical geography. Evenden’s work largely focuses on the economic and
political connections in the environmental history of the Fraser River, although
he does draw in some social and cultural elements—not, I would argue,
particularly successfully. He does, however, illustrate the clear links between
environmental history and the history of science.
Evenden opens
his monograph with a discussion of rockslides at Hells Gate in 1913, triggered
by railway construction, that had a dramatic impact on salmon spawning. The
blockage in the river prompted scientific debate about the nature of salmon
spawning, and attempts to aid the fish in swimming up the Fraser to reach their
spawning streams. Unlike the conservation efforts outlined by Loo and Sandlos,
work to move the fish considered limited Coast Salish knowledge of the area,
combining Indigenous methods of manipulating the fish with Euro-Canadian scientific
authority. In this section, Evenden brings in his first sliver of incomplete
cultural analysis, suggesting that narratives in discovery showed scientists’
attempts to make meaning from their work, and that the rockslides caused
changes in the cultural meaning of Hells Gate. However, he provides no examples
of such narratives, or evidence of a changing cultural meaning. Despite their
use of Coast Salish knowledge of Hells Gate, scientists echoed what we have
already seen to be a common twentieth century concern of Aboriginal
mismanagement of resources, restricting Coast Salish fishing that they believed
would undermine efforts to rescue the fish. This had a long-term impact of fish
shortages, increasing economic dependence on government aid.
Evenden then turns to the issue of tributary
damming, a project that would be easier from an engineering perspective and
less harmful to fish. He argues that the engineering complexity of damming the
Fraser River, in addition to conflicts with the fisheries, prompted alternative
sites for dams, such as Coquitlam River, which was dammed in 1903. He notes
that this dam caused conflict with Coast Salish people who fished in the area,
but that their concerns were secondary to those of the Euro-Canadian fishery
and cannery industry on the main branch of the Fraser. This debate, as with
Hells Gate, involved significant scientific inquiry, part of what Evenden calls
“hydraulic imperialism” (79-80). Evenden returns to Hells Gate in his third
chapter, showing how scientists made meaning at Hells Gate in their attempts to
study the salmon and build fishways—essentially, detours for fish around debris
blocking the river. In this context, fishways were a domestication of the
landscape, enabling industry to lay claim on the river.
Evenden’s next
consideration is of heavy industry and its social, political, and economic
implications. First, he considers the postwar demand for electricity, for which
state involvement rested on considerable public support. His following chapter
focuses on the aluminum industry, showing local and international iterations of
a goal of modernization and competition, shaped by the Cold War context.
Evenden argues that the politics of development joined and transformed local
and international concerns. In the case of aluminum, there was significant
conflict with the fishing industry, as aluminum required hydroelectric dams.
This placed the government in a complex role, as mediator, decision-maker, and
beneficiary, when interacting with industrial interests.
In his sixth
chapter, Evenden finally reaches the crux of the “fish versus power” debate.
This debate, he argues, was not strictly industrial, although it was dominated
by industry. It provided an impetus for coalitions between otherwise disparate
bodies, as fish and power each drew supporters from across social divisions and
political lines. Notably, the debate paid little attention to the impact on
native fisheries, and did not consider native perspectives. Rather than focusing
on nature, opponents argued in terms of resources and their economic potential,
as well as the symbolic links of fish with tradition and identity, and
electricity as progress. Evenden argues that, unlike modern environmental
debates, “fish versus power” was utilitarian rather than romantic; it is
possible, although he does not consider this, that such impressions may be a
result of considering Euro-Canadian perspectives exclusively. Ultimately, the
length of this debate resulted in dams in the Columbia and Peace rivers in
British Columbia’s north and interior, postponing further development on the
Fraser. The fish versus power debate, Evenden argues in his final chapter, was
influential for science, with the debate and science shaping one another. The
debate gave authority and privileged access to biological knowledge, building a
division between experts and amateurs, and requiring approval by scientists for
further development. This also shows how a new institutional framework emerged
for a bidirectional relationship between politics and science.
The arguments in
these works are quite salient for contemporary economic and environmental
debates. For example, Sandlos outlines how the federal government regulated
large game, condemning Aboriginal people’s subsistence hunting, yet encouraging
Euro-Canadian recreational hunting in some areas. One can see a more recent
echo in current debates about carbon emissions in developing countries, and the
desire from industrialized nations—who had themselves benefitted from
unrestricted carbon emissions while industrializing—to restrict emissions
elsewhere. This is, of course, not to say that global warming is a conspiracy
to economically benefit privileged nations; neither, I suspect, was
conservation purely a ploy to further marginalize Aboriginal peoples, although
its rhetoric was evidently used to that effect. Nelles’s work also has some
frightening contemporary echoes in the corporate bailouts from federal and
provincial governments that have aided large industries, without corresponding
social welfare initiatives to support individuals and families who are
unconnected to these industries. While the Ontario government of the early
twentieth century, according to Nelles, was at one with business interests from
staples industries, the current government similarly privileges the
manufacturing industry. If it were shorter, present members of provincial
parliament could do well to read this monograph.
 |
| This reading response was cheered on by geese. They had little to say about antimodernism. |
Carl Berger, Science,
God, and Nature
Karen Dubinsky, The
Second Greatest Disappointment
Patricia Jasen, Wild
Things
Broadly, this
week’s texts consider concepts of construction and the landscape in Canada
since the nineteenth century. Carl Berger’s series of lectures shows how
natural history was an important component to the extension and diversification
of science in nineteenth-century Canada, illustrating the interconnectedness of
science, aesthetics, and religion. Patricia Jasen’s study of tourism in Ontario
shows Euro-Canadians’ search for meanings of wilderness, arguing that the key
theme in nineteenth-century Ontario tourism is the tension and interplay
between notions of civilization and wildness, produced and recast for
political, social, and economic purposes.[1]
Karen Dubinsky’s work is more multifaceted, weaving together analyses of
tourism and sexuality by studying honeymooning at Niagara Falls. Her work
considers the shifting cultural meanings of Niagara Falls and tourism more
broadly by examining tourist scripts and deviations from norms in tourism,
carefully intertwining the study of tourism with the study of honeymoons and
hegemonic heterosexuality. Dubinsky’s consideration of landscape and tourism
expands on Jasen’s analyses of Niagara Falls, while Jasen’s argument that
tourism furthered expansionism echoes Berger’s assertion that the organization
of science locally, nationally, and internationally resembled the political
structures of provincialism and centralization.[2]
Berger’s Science, God, and Nature is the only one
of these three texts to consider the role of religion in interpretations of the
natural world. His three lectures parallel his title, and chronologically
consider the emergence, activities, and decline of natural history in Canada.
His first lecture, “Science,” details the role of the metropolitan centre in
initiating scientific efforts, describing the parallels in natural history
pursuits between Britain and Canada. According to Berger, natural history in
Canada was a broad and accessible activity, with religious and colonial
motivations. Despite the connections between Canadian naturalists and British
institutions, and the American influences on the field, Canadian naturalists
felt a self-conscious patriotism in their work.[3]
Subsequently, in “God,” Berger shows how naturalists blended scientific goals
with aesthetic and religious appreciation of the natural world, seeing nature
as a “product of divine activity;” this made natural history a natural
theology, and evangelical rather than simply practical. Scientific study was
thus an “act of worship” and a moral discipline that enabled men to learn about
God. In his final lecture, “Nature,” Berger outlines the impact of Darwin’s
theories of evolution on natural history. According to Berger, Darwinism
destroyed the link between science and faith that was central to natural
history. This had a contested reception in Canada and an ambiguous legacy,
resulting in a higher status of the sciences and greater specialization and
segmentation between scientific disciplines.[4]
Patricia Jasen’s
monograph, Wild Things, considers
tourism in Ontario between 1790 and 1914, an era of imperial expansion and
concern for racial health. Her work progresses chronologically, but chapters
are divided thematically and geographically. Jasen’s main themes of analysis
are the role of imagination in tourism and tourism in colonization, and the
class and gender implications of these processes. Her introduction powerfully
demonstrates the symbolism of Ontario’s wilderness for tourism and as a means
of measuring the progress of civilization. She introduces Mary Louise Pratt’s
concept of the contact zone, which she uses throughout her text to
conceptualize the interactions between tourists and Native peoples. Jasen highlights
the racial underpinnings of tourism, situating native peoples as a relic from
the past in European imaginings of their own civilization, and presenting the
wilderness as a matter of perception rather than reality. Jasen’s first main
chapter focuses on Niagara, which she presents as a prototype and embodiment of
romantic tourism. Niagara, for the tourists who visited it, was symbolic of New
World subliminality, danger, and mystery, structured through romantic values.
This symbolism developed an air of irony as Niagara Falls became more
commercial and less wild through more tourist involvement. Jasen next studies
tourism along the St. Lawrence river, showing how it became a panoramic
landscape rather than a wilderness, and a moving destination that connected
other experiences for tourists.
The strength of
Jasen’s work lies in her analyses of more northern regions of Ontario;
analyzing the Lake Superior area as a space of wilderness, symbolic of
primitive life in a primordial world, Jasen shows how Native presence became
central to tourist experiences.[5]
This is where Jasen begins to make significant use of Pratt’s concept of
contact zones, pointing out that Ojibwe peoples living around Lake Superior had
some extent of agency, acknowledging that this is not always immediately clear
in her selected primary sources. Newspapers portrayed the Lake Superior area as
a frontier, and the press and travel writings presented Ojibwe peoples in
generic, vague, and idyllic terms, without consideration of colonial conflict;
in these sources, encounters between Ojibwe peoples and tourists were
voyeuristic and brief. Unlike the Niagara and St. Lawrence areas, the
subliminality of the Lake Superior region was not compromised by tourist
traffic, making it a symbolic space indicating the movement from the past to
the future.
Jasen’s
penultimate chapter moves southward, considering the role of rest cures in
tourism, particularly in the Muskoka area. Rest cures show the connection
between tourism and ideas of racial health, positioning holidays as a means of
recovering from the ill effects of civilization by enabling upper middle class
and elite Torontonians to seek their inner wildness. Tourist literature in the
late nineteenth century presented the Muskoka area, unlike Niagara, to have the
potential to soothe through its purity and serenity. The end of this chapter
briefly considers tourism closer to Toronto, particularly on the Toronto
islands, where tourists segregated themselves according to class, enabling the
working classes to experience some elements of rejuvenation in a natural area
without impeding on upper class sociable relaxation.
Jasen’s final
chapter on the relationships between tourists and Ojibwe guides makes further
use of the contact zone, arguing that the relationship between white tourists
and their guides became a way for tourists to consider ideas of primitivity and
civilization in their writing, showing the ambiguity and contested meanings of
these concepts. Once again, Jasen’s choice of sources means that the guides
have a limited voice. Although she suggests the potential for using oral
history to learn their perspectives, there is evidence that these guides found
their work to be economically viable and were able to maintain dignity and
control even in their unequal working relationships. Nonetheless, these guides
were marginalized as mere images for the tourists; while they were praised as
useful for tourists’ survival, they were more prominent as an alluring image of
the wilderness. Jasen ultimately concludes that there was little change in the
aesthetics of tourism through the nineteenth century. More broadly, she argues
that the tourist industry paralleled national growth, resource exploitation and
immigration; tourists asserted their rights to presence in the contact zone and
reproduced racial and class prejudices that aided the expansionist cause.[6]
Karen Dubinsky,
in The Second Greatest Disappointment,
studies tourism at Niagara Falls, focusing on heterosexuality as expressed
through honeymooning. She describes the honeymoon as a “public declaration of
heterosexual citizenship” and Niagara Falls as a “theme park of
heterosexuality,” setting the stage for chronologically ordered yet
thematically meaningful chapters that interweave themes of sexuality and
tourism. Following her introduction, Dubinsky begins the body of her analysis
by exploring the imaginary geography that made Niagara the first honeymoon site
in the world, studied through advice manuals and semi-fictionalized sexual
memoirs. Dubinsky indicates the sexual symbolism of Niagara Falls as a place of
both pleasure and terror, and as an icon of femininity; the imagery in memoirs
and poetry describing Niagara Falls showed it as quite sexualized. Next,
Dubinsky considers the racialization of tourist experiences, using Pratt’s
theory of contact zones to emphasize the unequal relationships and interactions
that enabled white Europeans to know and claim the falls through their writings
as tourists. In these writings, Niagara Falls and the Native peoples who lived
nearby held images of both tameness and wildness, making it alternately desirable
and disappointing in tourist narratives.
Economic and
class issues are a pervasive theme through Dubinsky’s work. Dubinsky’s fourth
chapter considers the conflict between entrepreneurs and local authorities
concerning ownership of the areas surrounding the falls. This conflict
illuminated ethnic and racial stereotypes held by residents of the Niagara
area, and by the historians who have subsequently studied this conflict. In writing
about claims for the land surrounding the Falls, Dubinsky’s analysis would
benefit from more closely considering Aboriginal claims to the land, on both
sides of the Niagara river and the Canada-US border. Describing the efforts of
the Niagara Parks Commission to regulate the behaviour of entrepreneurs and
visitors to Niagara Falls, Dubinsky argues that visiting Niagara Falls “was a social act, embedded in human
relationships.” Heavy industry became another element of the social and
physical landscape; the “industrial sublime” became part of the attraction for
tourists, integrating industrial activity with tourism and reconciling
otherwise incompatible economic sectors. Industries remained central to
Niagara’s economic, social, and political life outside of tourism; the Shredded
Wheat company, for example, acted as a business, tourist destination, and venue
for social and community activities.[7]
The economy is also central to Dubinsky’s next chapter, which analyzes the
impact of 1920s and 1930s economic changes on Niagara tourism. Economic
fluctuations in these decades necessitated inventive marketing strategies to
appeal to tourist values. Illuminating the falls at night, for instance, was an
example of the technical sublime and a means of encouraging overnight stays in
the area. These fluctuations also exacerbated conflicts between tourism
entrepreneurs, widening the racial, ethnic, and class divisions in the service
industry.
Dubinsky’s
remaining chapters consider sexuality in more detail. She outlines, for
example, how journalists and travel writers used Niagara Falls to see into
private lives as sexuality became more visible and more obviously sexual.
During the 1940s and 1950s, heterosexuality became a potential concern, needing
to be distinguished from homosexuality, and, particularly in the United States,
was a matter of public health and scientific, national duty. With this
visibility, working-class and gay couples began to imitate honeymooning,
previously the purview of middle-class, white, heterosexual couples. This was
partially a response to marketing of the honeymoon, often through gimmicks and
tricks, and partially a result of Niagara’s position as a simultaneously exotic
and affordable destination, patriotically close to home. Niagara became
symbolic of the tourism boom in postwar Canada, and highlighted the cross-border
rivalry between Canada and the USA, as a national rather than merely commercial
concern. While Niagara Falls was boosted in popularity through media
visibility, such as in a 1952 film on Niagara honeymoons, it was increasingly
criticized as tacky and corrupt, losing its allure for the elite and becoming a
working-class bawdy destination that juxtaposed natural grandeur with
commercial sleaze.
Returning
explicitly to the honeymoon, Dubinsky outlines how it became still more
obviously sexual, to the extent that “Niagara” became a euphemism for talking
about sex. Sex was central to the imaginary geography of Niagara Falls in the
late twentieth century, integrated into local commercial ventures, with
entrepreneurs showing awareness of sexuality as performed.[8] Dubinsky
concludes by discussing the decline of Niagara Falls as a tourist destination,
particularly for honeymoons, speculating on a possibility for it to become a
gay and lesbian tourist destination for honeymoons as heterosexual couples go
elsewhere.
There are conceptual
links worth probing that connect these three works, or pairs within this group
of three. While gender is present throughout Dubinsky’s analysis, it is less so
in Berger’s and Jasen’s works. Women’s participation in science and tourism is thus
a more exceptional element that each historian considers. Berger describes
Catharine Parr Traill’s work on botany as a rare example of women’s
participation in nineteenth-century natural history in Canada. Parr Traill
blended scientific and literary ideas and expressions by examining her own
emotional responses to nature.[9]
Berger does not particularly consider the gendered elements of this work, but
does mention that this was a somewhat socially acceptable pursuit for a woman
of her class. The experiences of women as naturalists more generally do not
figure much in Berger’s work. Jasen considers women’s experiences somewhat more
broadly, noting that while women certainly participated as tourists, their
voices in travel writings were often overshadowed by those of men. However,
some women indicated being somewhat less constrained while travelling on rest
cures than in their urban lives, using tourism as a way to temporarily redefine
their identities.[10]
Anxieties over
industrialization figure prominently in Dubinsky’s and Jasen’s monographs.
Jasen shows how concerns over the impact of civilization on indigenous peoples,
the landscape, and white urban society was important to the formation of the
tourist industry. Dubinsky considers the economic implications of
industrialization on the tourist industry. Collectively, both historians show
how the tourist industry used social concerns to their advantage.
Interestingly, this did not occur with the natural history that Berger
analyzes; major changes to science could not be incorporated into main
paradigms of knowledge. Of course, science and tourism are not really
comparable in this sense, but the connections between science and tourism would
be an intriguing subject for further analysis.
Portrayals of
native peoples are also a potential point of comparison. Berger describes how
naturalists studied native peoples alongside plants, as specimens at risk of
extinction.[11]
Similar tropes appear in Jasen’s work, where native guides were images of the
wilderness, primitivity, and decline.[12]
Dubinsky also indicates how tourists saw native peoples as part of the natural
landscape, and symbolic of the wilderness.[13]
One potential absence in the work of all three historians is considering
whether these images were part of the aesthetics that all three describe, as
Berger links nature and science with appreciations of aesthetics, and Jasen and
Dubinsky both analyze the aesthetic representations of natural landscapes.
[1] Jasen, 28.
[2] Jasen, 152; Berger, 23.
[3] Berger, 3-5, 10, 11, 22-23.
[4] Berger, 32, 33, 46, 53, 76.
[5] Jasen, 4, 14, 16, 17, 19, 29,
30, 54, 56, 78-79, 80.
[6] Jasen, 91, 95, 98-99, 105, 124,
127, 133, 136-137, 140, 134, 150, 152.
[7] Dubinsky, 1, 3, 25-28, 41-45,
59-60, 63, 87, 95, 105, 106, 112-114.
[8] Dubinsky, 124, 150, 155, 160-162,
173-175, 178-179, 198-208, 224, 227, 235.
[9] Berger, 35-36.
[10] Jasen, 152.
[11] Berger, 41.
[12] Jasen, 134.
[13] Dubinsky, 61
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