The Transgressive Stage: The Culture of Public Entertainment in Late Victorian Toronto,” argues that public entertainment was one of the most important sites for the negotiation of identities in late Victorian Toronto. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, where theatre is strictly highbrow, it is difficult to appreciate the centrality of public entertainment to everyday life in the nineteenth century. Simply put, the Victorian imagination was populated by melodrama and minstrelsy, Shakespeare and circuses. Studying the responses to these entertainments, greatly expands our understanding of Victorian culture. The central argument of this dissertation is that public entertainment spilled over the threshold of the playhouse and circus tent to influence the wider world. In so doing, it radically altered the urban streetscape, interacted with political ideology, promoted trends in consumption, as well as exposed audiences to new intellectual currents about art and beauty. Specifically, this study examines the moral panic surrounding indecent theatrical advertisements; the use by political playwrights of tropes from public entertainment as a vehicle for political satire; the role of the stage in providing an outlet for Toronto’s racial curiosity; the centrality of commercial amusements in defining the boundaries of gender; and, finally, the importance of the theatre— particularly through the Aesthetic Movement—in attempts to control the city’s working class. When Torontonians took in a play, they were also exposing themselves to one of the most significant transnational forces of the nineteenth century. British and American shows, which made up the bulk of what was on offer in the city, brought with them British and American perspectives. The latest plays from London and New York made their way to the city within iii months, and sometimes weeks, of their first production. These entertainments introduced audiences to the latest thoughts, fashion, slang and trends. They also confronted playgoers with issues that might, on the surface seem foreign and irrelevant. Nevertheless, they quickly adapted to the environment north of the border. Public entertainment in Toronto came to embody a hybridized culture with a promiscuous co-mingling of high and low and of British and American influences.

The Transgressive Stage: The Culture of Public Entertainment in Late Victorian Toronto

During the 1870s and 1880s, when cartoonists working for Britain’s most popular satirical magazine, Punch , wanted to represent Canada visually, they drew on centuries’ old artistic conventions that depicted America, and, later, British North America, as a woman and an “Indian.” During the same period, in Canada’s most popular satirical magazine, Grip , normative portrayals of the embodied nation were unambiguously white. The visual trope of an indigenized, feminized body was enlisted instead to represent Manitoba and the North-West Territories. This imagery disavowed British depictions of Canada as a racialized and colonized subject and relocated the identity of the colonial Other onto the Prairie West. In other words, Grip ’s images constituted a representational politics that involved both “looking back” at Empire and directing the imperial gaze onto others.
	 Resume: Dans les annees 1870 et 1880, quand les caricaturistes travaillant pour Punch , le magazine satirique le plus populaire de Grande-Bretagne, voulaient representer visuellement le Canada, ils s’inspiraient de conventions artistiques seculaires, lesquelles depeignaient l’Amerique et, par la suite, l’Amerique du Nord britannique, sous les traits d’une femme et d’une « Indienne ». A la meme epoque, dans Grip , le magazine satirique le plus populaire du Canada, la norme consistait a representer la nation sous les traits d’une Blanche, sans equivoque. C’est plutot pour representer le Manitoba et les Territoires du Nord-Ouest que l’on avait recours a l’indigenisation de concert avec la feminisation du corps. Cette imagerie desavouait les representations britanniques du Canada comme un sujet racialise et colonise, et deplacait l’identite de l’Autre colonial vers les plaines de l’Ouest. Autrement dit, les images de Grip constituaient une politique de la representation qui impliquait a la fois un regard sur l’Empire et la projection du regard imperial sur d’autres.

Caricaturing Colonial Space: Indigenized, Feminized Bodies and Anglo-Canadian Identity, 1873–94

J. W. Bengough of Toronto began an “Independent Political and Satirical Journal” called Grip in 1873. A grab-bag of commentary, cartoons, and satire, Grip was virtually required reading for the Canadian elite, including politicians, scholars, business leaders, and journalists. Today Bengough is regarded largely as a reformer. Yet his commitment to progressive causes did not deter him from publishing antisemitic, anti-Catholic, and other racist views. An analysis of Bengough’s antisemitic words and images demonstrates how, through Grip, antisemitism gained respectability in late-nineteenth-century Canada.

J. W. Bengough de Toronto a lance une « revue politique independante et satirique » intitulee Grip en 1873. Pot-pourri d’opinions de bandes dessinees et de satire, Grip etait de lecture pratiquement incontournable pour l’elite canadienne, politiciens, lettres, chefs d'entreprise et journalistes compris. Aujourd'hui, Bengough est generalement considere comme un reformateur. Pourtant, son engagement envers les causes progressistes ne l’a pas dissuade de publier des opinions antisemites, anticatholiques et a d’autres penchants racistes. L’analyse des ecrits et des images de Bengough demontre comment, par l'entremise de Grip, l’antisemitisme a gagne en respectabilite au Canada a la fin du XIXe siecle.

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Grip Magazine and “the Other”: The Genteel Antisemitism of J. W. Bengough

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Grip Magazine and “the Other”: The Genteel Antisemitism of J. W. Bengough