"Better than diamonds": sentimental strategies and middle-class culture in Canada West

Journal of Canadian Studies, Winter 1998 by Morgan, Cecilia

The press in Canada West (mid-nineteenth-century Ontario) drew upon sentimental narratives and images to discuss themes and processes that were part of middle-class cultural and social formation in this period, particularly the development of the categories "private" and "public" and corresponding attempts to identify white, bourgeois womanhood with the former (the world of home and family) and middle-class masculinity with the latter (the world of the marketplace and political arena). Sentimental ideology also provided a means of writing about those deemed to be "others" in bourgeois and imperial discourses: working-class and plebeian men and women, Native men and women, Black Canadians, men and women from non-British and Catholic countries, and sexual "deviants" involved in prostitution. The paper concludes with an exploration of how Black Canadians, in the pages of Mary Ann Shadd's Provincial Freeman, attempted to both mobilize and counter the bourgeois languages found in the mainstream press.

La presse du Canada de l'ouest (l'Ontario de la moitie du 19eme siecle) influenca les narrations sentimentales et les images culturelles et sociales en formation de la classe moyenne a cette epoque, en particulier l'elaboration de spheres "privee" associee a la feminite bourgeoise blanche (l'aire de la mison et de la famille), et "publique" ou regne la bourgeoisie masculine (le monde des affaires et de la politique). Cette ideologie sentimentale permet aussi d'envisager celles et ceux percules comme "Autres" dans le discours bourgeois et imperial: los hommes et femmes de la classe ouvriere et les plebeien/nes, les autochtones, les Canadien/nes noir/es, les immigrant/es des pays non-britanniques ou catholiques et les "deviant/es" sexuel/les du monde de la prostitution. Cependant, dans les colonnes du Provincial Freeman dc Mary Shadd, les noir/es ont essaye de se mobiliser et de contrecarrer les langages bourgeois dc la presse dominante.

On a cold winter's day in a large city, so the story goes, a little girl had a chance encounter with a beautiful rich woman in front of a jeweller's store. The child was taking slippers for "spangling" back to her mother who did piece-work in the garret where they lived; she had slipped on the ice in front of the store. She wore no shoes and her clothes were thread-bare rags. Her father, she told the lady, was dead, her baby brother was ill, and her mother bound shoes. The pair she held in her hand had to be finished by tonight or there would be no more work and, moreover, her mother had no money to buy milk for the sick baby. Her listener, upon seeing the name stamped on the shoe, flushed and then turned pale; the child's story brought tears to her eyes but she went into the store without offering her any money and as she left the store the narrator tells us that the glitter of a diamond pin could be seen. The child, in the meantime, returned home to a "small, dark room" with only a candle, a scanty fire and a little piece of bread. After hearing her prayers and folding her "tenderly to her bosom," her mother told her that the angels would always take care of her and returned to her sewing. The child dreamt of "warm stockings, and new shoes." Did her mother dream of a "bright room, and gorgeous clothing, and a table loaded with all that was good and nice ... of a pleasant cottage, and of one who had dearly loved her, and whose strong arms had kept want and trouble from her and her babes, but who could never come back?" If she did entertain such fantasies, she also put her trust in God and asked for his forgiveness.

As the mother drifted off to sleep over the fine slipper, the door opened softly and someone ("was it an angel?") entered, leaving behind soft, warm blankets draped over the girl, a blazing fire, a huge loaf, fresh milk, and, taking the unfinished slipper from the mother's hand, a bag of gold. In a "voice like music," the beneficent intruder said "Blessed thy God, who is the God of the fatherless and the widow," and departed, murmuring "Better than diamonds! Better than diamonds!" The mother awoke, saw the transformation and with "clasped hands and streaming eyes," blessed God for sending an angel. Leaving the garret, the narrator then takes the reader to a ballroom, with bright lights, music, flowers, dancing, happy faces and beautiful women in rich dresses and jewels. But only one woman truly stood out from the crowd, wearing a simple white dress with only a rose-bud on her bosom. Her voice, we are told, was "like the sweet sound of a silver lute"; she had no spangled slippers to wear but the "divine beauty of holiness had so glorified her face" that the narrator felt "she was indeed an angel of God."(f.1)

"Better than Diamonds" was by no means an unusual story in the canon of mid-Victorian sentimental fiction. The cast of characters (the pathetic yet brave widow and her family, especially the innocent child who was the catalyst for the beneficent anonymous donor's actions); the large, impersonal city, whose anonymity could allow it to be either London or New York; the themes of hard work, bad fortune (especially the absent father), maternal self-sacrifice, trust in providence and virtue rewarded through the medium of feminine benevolence were all to be found in fiction published in newspapers periodicals and popular novels. As a number of historians of middle-class formation in Britain and America have pointed out, the tropes and rhetorical strategies of sentimental fiction were more than marketing devices deployed by middle-class writers eager to capture a reading audience. Sentimentality itself was a cultural tool that helped provide the middle classes with a framework for envisioning and regulating the relations of gender, class and race within the British and American bourgeoisie. This framework helped to divorce the so-called public realm of political life from the private world of affections, masking and obscuring the relations of power and contestation that shaped and linked home, market, nation-state and imperial power.(f.2)