Literature in English, North America Commons^™

Excavating The Expendable Working Classes In "The Imperialist", Teresa Hubel

Teresa Hubel

You can’t get much more middle class than Sara Jeanette Duncan’s turn-of-the-century novel The Imperialist. Its middle-classness calls out from virtually every page and through almost every narrative technique the novelist employs from her choice of theme—the debate over imperial federation, conducted some hundred years ago primarily in elite political circles—to her setting—the social world of the commercial classes who live in a prosperous southern Ontario town (which she names Elgin but which most critics suspect is Duncans own hometown of Brantford in very thin disguise)—and finally to her protagonists, the Murchisons, whose middle-class values are proudly paraded at every …