Sherrill Grace,
"Inventing Mina Benson Hubbard: From her 1905 Expedition
across Labrador to her 2005 Centennial (and Beyond)"
(page 3 of 7)
Just trying to summarize Mina's life story and her connection with
Labrador reminds me forcibly of how invented my version is—I have left
out so much, selected what I see as important, and emphasized what
interests me. In order to prepare my edition of her book, I found it
necessary to recreate, as best I could, her time and her place, to
listen to her voice in her expedition diary and in those few letters
that survive. But I could not transform myself into an Edwardian woman,
and Mina Benson Hubbard should not be viewed exclusively—or
uncritically—through my late-20th century/early 21st-century feminist
eyes. As I have continued to discover from my work on Mina, my book on
Canadian painter Tom Thomson—called Inventing Tom Thomson—and now
through my writing of the biography of a contemporary Canadian
playwright, Making Theatre: A Life of Sharon Pollock, the very
act of narrating a life story, however scholarly and factual, is a
re-creation; it is never and cannot be an ur-text, an original, the
Truth. Moreover, when a continuous line of such narratives begins to
coalesce around a once-living, historical figure, the story becomes more
and more sedimented in layers of interpretation, more complicated by the
story-tellers' self-legitimating strategies and truth claims. And the
subject of all this narration—the person who motivated or inspired the
story in the first place—becomes larger than and other than him- or
herself. The person becomes a symbol, or a legend, or a myth, or, as I
prefer to think of it—an icon.
As I argued in Canada and the Idea of North, over time and
with a critical mass of repetition, a discourse emerges around a
particular person or event or place, which thereby becomes invested with
crucial meaning for a family, for a group of people, or even for a
nation: this one story acquires significance; it comes to stand for
something much larger than one life or one accomplishment (or death, or
sacrifice, etc). I well remember being challenged about this term
"invention" when I used it in a lecture on Tom Thomson. My audience was
from Owen Sound, Ontario, Thomson's home town; we were in the Tom
Thomson Memorial Art Gallery (where a very definite investment in his
story exists), and my listener felt the term invention sounded
pejorative. I think he felt that I was fiddling with the facts, making
up stuff, lying, and I know he believed that only one story about the
famous painter could be true. But I see nothing pejorative in the term
invention; to the contrary, I see much greater ideological,
psychological, and possibly even political power residing in the
inventing process than in a set of bare facts. What interests me is how
this process works, how I can locate and describe it (with what
scholarly tools and theoretical concepts), and what meanings a
particular iconic invention produces. In the following discussion I
describe how and why I think this woman called Mina Benson Hubbard, or
Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Jr., or Mrs. Mina Ellis (her second husband's name)
is becoming a Canadian icon through her many, and on-going, inventions.
In Canada, and in this case of Mina, there are three critical
determinants at work: first, the basic story concerns the North,
a vaguely defined, real yet mythical place of enormous symbolic and
practical value to the country, and a place very much in the public eye
in the early 21st century; second, the central figure in the story is a
woman on an expedition into a part of the north that remains foreign,
mysterious, even exotic to the great majority of Canadians; and third,
the verifiable facts of the story include a tragic death, a love story,
and a survivor story. Just summarized like this—mysterious North,
dangerous expedition, young woman, tragic death, faithful love, all set
in 1905—would make a person eager to know when the film will be made,
and it so happens that one film has already appeared and at least two
others are underway.[3]
The inventing of Mina Benson Hubbard is rapidly
becoming cultural business.
Illustration 5 This striking jacket was designed by David
Drummond for the 2004 edition of Mina's book. McGill-Queen's University
Press included all Mina's illustrations and a full, fold-out
reproduction of her map, which is glued into the binding and can be
opened out for readers to follow her trail as they read her
text.
In 2004 my new edition of Mina's A Woman's Way Through Unknown
Labrador was published and my publisher, McGill-Queen's University
Press, or rather their designer, captured and capitalized upon many of
the discursive elements I have mentioned to market the
book (see Illustration 5):
there is the romantic, mysterious, beautiful yet overpowering
northern landscape; there is the woman stepping out of her canoe, out of
another time and place, and into our 21st century sights. Before a
reader even opens the book, Mina has already been placed in a set
of concentric and overlapping paradigms that resonate for Canadians and
for others who love the North. But there is an important caveat to make
about this dust jacket image because readers/buyers are being tricked by
the woman whose arrival at Ungava appears to be captured on camera. The
photograph at the bottom of the dust jacket was staged. When Mina
actually arrived at the end of her expedition, on the mudflats of the
George River, no one was waiting with a camera. The factor, Mr Ford,
and his wife, had heard vague rumours that she might be making this
expedition, but they had no positive information—there were no
telephones, cell phones, Blackberries, or couriers in 1905, and the
interior of Labrador was just that—interior, uncharted (for white
people) territory. What's more, Mina had made excellent time and
arrived days before she could have been expected. But she knew that to
prove her arrival she would need a record of it; she also knew full well
that no man would believe a woman could possibly complete such an
expedition, unless there was visual proof of the fact, and that no white
man would take a native man's word on it. Wisely, she arranged this
photograph and the people in it so posterity could see her stepping
daintily out of her canoe, always already a lady despite her suspicious,
salacious time in the wilds.
Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
Next page
|