Becoming Modern in Toronto: The Industrial Exhibition and the Shaping of a Late Victorian Culture - Review

Journal of Social History, Summer, 1999 by Robert W. Rydell

By Keith Walden (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. xx plus 430pp.).

It is no secret that the Victorians loved to make exhibits of themselves and people defined as "others." But, for all that we know about this exhibitionary culture, there is still much to learn about specific exhibitionary forms and how they functioned in specific national contexts. In the course of his examination of the Toronto Industrial Exhibition from its origins in 1879 to its evolution, in 1903, into the Canadian National Exhibition, Keith Walden has captured the cultural significance of an exhibitionary institution - the industrial exhibition - that, until now, has not received the attention it deserves.

Walden opens his book with a useful survey of the historiography of fairs and exhibitions and provides a balanced assessment of prevailing theoretical paradigms that scholars have deployed in their efforts to understand these spectacles of modernity. Walden's own interpretation is a hybrid of Victor Turner's concept of liminality, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White's arguments about transgression, and Antonio Gramsci's ideas about hegemony. Not everyone will be persuaded by this mixing and matching (Foucault gets surprisingly short shrift), but Walden's negotiation of theory and history is immensely insightful and provides an important addition to the literature of exhibitions and modernity.

Where many scholars emphasize "visuality" as the crux of the exhibition experience, Walden insists on motion. Nothing stands still in Walden's account. Fairgoers rarely stand still; displays, like the fair itself, change annually. This subtle shift in emphasis from sight to movement enables Walden to make a good argument that, by placing fairgoers "betwixt and between ordinary time and space" (p. 337), the Toronto fair helped define the meaning of modernity for middle-class Canadians.

The structure of Walden's argument as revealed in his chapter headings bears notice. This is not an institutional history narrowly conceived. Rather Walden is interested in issues of order, freedom, confidence, display, identity, space, entertainment, carnival, and modernity - and not only as revealed on the fairgrounds. His examination of Toronto police records takes him into the vibrant popular culture that existed off the fairgrounds and framed the expectations and concerns of fairgoers and exposition authorities alike. The latter, for instance, anticipated an increase in criminal activity and increased police surveillance of cheap hotels, brothels, and pawn shops. Members of the dangerous lower orders were subject to removal or arrest, thus enhancing the vision of social harmony projected by the exhibition. The potential for subversion, Walden rightly insists, was not only an off-site threat. By 1900, fairgoers were lured by the erotic, exotic, and absurd - by young women fluttering diaphanous petticoats over strawberry tights, by Native peoples in feathered head-dresses shouting war-whoops, by men with blackened faces wearing animal hides and bones in their hair. They were drawn by the barkers themselves: sunburned, sweating, hoarse yet eloquent, inventive, spontaneous, audacious. These were all marginal people - wanderers and mountebanks whose normal stock in trade was deformity, perversion, and sexual titillation. (p. 291)

Does this mean that these alternative values won out? Not necessarily. Exposition authorities responded to the challenges of "freaks, frauds, and floozies" (p. 291) by isolating them in a midway-like zone where they could be contained. Still, these midway concessions - so ironically named it turns out - forced the business interests that ran the fair to make much bigger concessions in terms of accommodating values hitherto associated with the restive popular and commercial urban cultures that seemed bent on challenging the hegemony of the Victorians. "Within the fair's alternating current of order and transgression," Walden writes, "establishing the meaning of one almost necessarily required the presence of the other." (p. 291)

To sum up, Becoming Modern in Toronto is one of the best studies we have of the Victorian-era exhibition as a terrain filled with complex and contested meanings. This is not to imply that Walden's analysis is not without shortcomings. More attention could have been given to the class basis of this exhibitionary culture and more could have been said about the transformation of the Toronto Industrial Exhibition into the Canadian National Exhibition. But in its richness of interpretative detail, this book sets a new benchmark for understanding the social history of exhibitions and fairs.

Robert W. Rydell

Montana State University