Resource Rhetoric in Three Canadian Novels, 1919-1945

Abstract

In this dissertation, I propose the term resource rhetoric to describe the cultural logic that renders extractivism an interminable part of Canadian identity. As Canada solidified its settler-colonial expansion in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, there was an attendant formalization of infrastructures promoting the extractivist ambitions of the state. Within those infrastructures a resource discourse—of natural resources and human resource management—was born. In Resource Rhetoric in Three Canadian Novels, 1919-1945, I examine three novels that articulate a cultural dimension to Canada’s broad attempt to adapt workers to a confluence of precarious working conditions in the first half of the twentieth century. I analyze the downplaying of class formation in these novels and link it to their use of resource rhetoric—tropes and figures that assert the primacy of the extractivist state over and against the primacy of the working-class collective.

My thesis develops by first establishing the 1919-1945 period as one marked by an unease about whether workers could truly become the “human resources” Canada’s extractivist economy needed. I explore how this uncertainty is manifested in Douglas Durkin’s 1923 novel The Magpie, an economic novel set during the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike. I then demonstrate that during the interwar period, a worker’s success in embodying the ideal Canadian “human resource” identity was measured against a racial hierarchy emerging from eugenic ideology. In my analysis of Irene Baird’s 1938 novel Waste Heritage, I consider how the “rank and sort” logic of eugenics is used to calibrate moral rectitude in the novel’s portrayal of labour strife among Canada’s Depression-era unemployed. In the second part of my thesis, I consider how human resource discourse expanded to include social reproductive labour in the period just prior to the establishment of Canada’s welfare state. I argue that Gabrielle Roy’s 1945 novel The Tin Flute makes the home a terrain for potential class struggle against the exploitation of women’s work, while at the same time positioning this work as vital for the Canadian state to function.

The rhetorical framing of workers in these novels consistently emphasizes their lack of agency and cooperation; foregrounds their interchangeability, and stresses workers’ inability to overcome their circumstances because of these factors. They articulate a deep-seated clash between the imperative that workers act as assets to Canada’s resource state, and the imperative that they might improve their lives through class formation and solidarity. While these novels are generally aligned with the resource discourse of the era, they demonstrate one fundamental failure of extractivist ideologies and resource logic: a person can never truly be a “dematerialized asset,” or a “universal Canadian worker subject.” My main claim in this thesis is that these novels show that to be a human resource is an unattainable goal.