Canadian Short Fiction: Leacock's Humour and Johnson's "A Red Girl's Reasoning"

Hook: two kinds of courage

One man is so nervous inside a bank that he accidentally withdraws every dollar he just deposited. One young woman stands in a crowded ballroom and calmly tells her new husband that his idea of a "real" marriage is wrong. Both stories were written by Canadians, about twenty years apart, and both are free to read online. One will make you laugh out loud. The other may make you angry, on the character's behalf. Today we look at how style creates those reactions, and how connections help us understand why they matter.

Stephen Leacock: My Financial Career (1910)

Stephen Leacock (1869 to 1944) was born in England and moved to a farm near Lake Simcoe, Ontario, as a boy. He became a professor of political economy at McGill University in Montréal, and also one of the most popular humour writers in the English-speaking world. His Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912) gently mocks a small Ontario town, Mariposa, modelled on Orillia. Canada's best-known prize for humour writing, the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, is named after him.

My Financial Career appeared in his first book, Literary Lapses (1910), and is in the public domain. It begins:

When I go into a bank I get rattled. The clerks rattle me; the wickets rattle me; the sight of the money rattles me; everything rattles me.

The narrator's salary has gone up to fifty dollars a month, so he decides to open an account. He asks, very mysteriously, to see the manager alone. The manager assumes he must be a private detective, then a very rich man. In fact he wants to deposit fifty-six dollars. Flustered, he then tries to withdraw six dollars for spending money, but writes the cheque for fifty-six, and is too embarrassed to correct it. So he takes all of it, and flees. Since then, he tells us, he keeps his money in cash in his trouser pocket and his savings in silver dollars in a sock.

E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake): A Red Girl's Reasoning (1893)

E. Pauline Johnson (1861 to 1913), whose Mohawk name was Tekahionwake, was born at Chiefswood, her family's home on the Six Nations of the Grand River, near Brantford, Ontario. Her father, George Johnson (Onwanonsyshon), was a Mohawk chief; her mother, Emily Howells, was born in England. Johnson performed her poems and stories in recitals across Canada, the United States and Britain. A Red Girl's Reasoning was first published in the magazine Dominion Illustrated in February 1893, and later in her collection The Moccasin Maker (1913). It is in the public domain.

A note on the title: Red was a common word for Indigenous people in the 1890s. It is now considered offensive. Johnson used the language of her readers in her title, and then used the story to challenge their assumptions.

What happens: Christie, the daughter of a Hudson's Bay Company trader and an Indigenous mother, marries Charlie McDonald, a young Englishman. Before the wedding her father, the trader Jimmy Robinson, warns Charlie: Be pretty good to her, Charlie, my boy, or she'll balk sure as shooting. At a fashionable dance in the provincial capital, guests press Christie about her parents' wedding. She answers honestly: they were married by Indigenous rites, with no priest and no magistrate. The room's reaction humiliates Charlie. Back home, he accuses her of disgracing her parents and herself, and he treats her as if she were born outside of marriage. Christie reasons back: if her parents' marriage is not real, then by the same logic neither is theirs. Her people's ceremony is as sacred as his church's. She takes off her wedding ring, throws it aside, and leaves at dawn. Months later, Charlie finds her in a small Ontario town. She refuses to return.

Charlie's brother Joe says of her early in the story: that girl has but two possibilities regarding humanity—love or hate.

Connections to the world

Rich text-to-world connections use accurate history:

• Fur-trade marriages. For generations, many fur traders married Indigenous women according to Indigenous customs, often called marriage à la façon du pays, "in the custom of the country". As churches and colonial courts gained power, some people began to treat these marriages as not "real". Christie's parents' marriage belongs to this history, and so does the prejudice she meets.
• The Indian Act and women. For about a century, the federal Indian Act took legal Indian status away from First Nations women who married men without status, while men who married women without status kept theirs. Parliament amended the law in 1985 (Bill C-31) to begin correcting this. Johnson's story raises a closely related question: who gets to decide whether a person's marriage and family are legitimate?

Contemporary short fiction by First Nations, Métis and Inuit writers

To extend your reading, look for these short story collections at your library:

• Eden Robinson (Haisla and Heiltsuk): Traplines (1996).
• Richard Van Camp (Tłı̨chǫ Dene, from Fort Smith, Northwest Territories): Angel Wing Splash Pattern (2002).
• Lee Maracle (Stó:lō, 1950 to 2021): Sojourner's Truth and Other Stories (1990).

These are under copyright, so read them in full from a library rather than from quotations here. Check with a parent first: some stories in these collections deal with mature subjects.