Hannah McGregor, Michelle Smith

International Journal of Canadian Studies, Volume 48, 2014, pp. 67-83
(Article)

DOI: 10.1353/ijc.2014.0006

For additional information about this article
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ijc/summary/v048/48.mcgregor.html

Access provided by The University of Alberta (22 Apr 2015 18:08 GMT)

Hannah McGregor and Michelle Smith
Martha Ostenso, Periodical Culture,
and the Middlebrow
Abstract
Between 1938 and 1942, border-crossing Norwegian-Canadian author Martha
Ostenso published three short stories in Chatelaine magazine, stories that engage
in complex ways with themes of femininity, nationalism, and consumerism. In this
article, we consider how the context of Chatelaine shapes and complicates
readings of these stories by placing the stories in conversation with surrounding
material, including advertisements and editorial content. The fiction, we argue,
unsettles romantic tropes and nationalist rhetoric, and contests the correlation
between the attainment of happiness and the acceptance of class and gender
norms. In examining authorial identity, textual complexity, and print cultural
contexts, we show how middlebrow magazines are a vibrant means of understanding middle-class culture’s anxieties and aspirations.
Résumé
Entre 1938 et 1942, l’auteure canadienne-norvégienne outre-frontière Martha
Ostenso a publié trois courtes nouvelles dans la revue Chatelaine, des nouvelles
complexes qui portent sur des thèmes comme la féminité, le nationalisme et le
consumérisme. Dans le présent article, nous évaluons la façon dont Chatelaine
modèle et complique la lecture de ces nouvelles, ces dernières étant entourées
de publicités et de contenu éditorial. Nous faisons valoir que la fiction
déstabilise les demi-séries romantiques et la rhétorique nationaliste, et conteste
la corrélation entre l’atteinte du bonheur et l’acceptation des normes de classe
et de genre. À l’examen de l’identité de l’auteur, de la complexité textuelle, et
des contextes culturels de l’imprimé, nous démontrons comment les revues
grand public sont un moyen vibrant qui permet de comprendre les anxiétés et
les aspirations de la culture de la classe moyenne.
“I came here because I had to make up my mind where I belonged in this cockeyed
world. I didn’t want to stay here on the farm—now I don’t know.”
—“The Stars Over Home,” Chatelaine 1942

Text and Context: Martha Ostenso in Chatelaine
These are the words of Lige Bascombe, the main character of Martha Ostenso’s
short story “The Stars Over Home,” published in 1942 in the mainstream
Canadian women’s magazine Chatelaine. Having returned home a hero after
serving Canada in the Second World War, Lige has reached a defining moment:
does he return to the family farm, and by extension, to tradition, and the physical
´
IJCS/RIEC

48, 2014

International Journal of Canadian Studies
Revue internationale d’études canadiennes

labour of a life on the land? Or does he accept a managerial post in an office in
the city, and thus embrace the possibilities of a modern, urban lifestyle and
professionalised, intellectual labour? The question exposes the tensions
between urban and rural ways of life, between modernity and tradition, between
masculine mobility and feminine stasis that Canadians were negotiating at
midcentury. Chatelaine, aiming to be attuned to the interests of Canadian
women, published fiction that imagined these tensions. The fiction, in this
instance, was written by an author who could be framed by the magazine’s
editor as both a fellow Canadian woman and a celebrity “known around the
world for her fiction” (Sanders, editorial 1938, 2). In addition to “The Stars Over
Home,” Ostenso also published “The Years Are Shadows” (May 1938) and
“No Time for Sentiment” (July 1941) in Chatelaine. All three stories possess a
potency derived from their grounding in the contemporary problems outlined
earlier, yet none of them have received any critical attention. There is only a
relatively small body of work on Canadian periodical literature in general, and
magazines and authors that may be construed as middlebrow, in terms of
both target audience and aesthetics, have been particularly neglected. The three
Ostenso stories were recently unearthed as part of Michelle Smith’s doctoral
project on Chatelaine and Canadian Home Journal, and have since become the
inspiration for her present research on aspiration, middlebrow literature, and
periodicals.1
Ostenso’s relationship to periodical culture is vital to a renewed understanding of her place in literary history. Hannah McGregor’s research with
Editing Modernism in Canada at the University of Alberta (EMiC UA) on the
magazine serialization of Ostenso’s first novel Wild Geese (1925), through
which Ostenso earned her initial fame and for which she is still best known,
reveals that the novel was serialized simultaneously in two middlebrow
magazines: Pictorial Review, published out of New York, and Western Home
Monthly, published out of Winnipeg. Examining Ostenso’s relation to middlebrow periodical culture thus affords an opportunity to move beyond the familiar
narratives of nationality or canonicity that have shaped scholarship on her.
Her periodical publications reveal the remarkable flexibility of this diasporic
Canadian-American-Norwegian figure, as she adapts her fiction to different
print contexts. Our aim, in this article, is to advance scholarship on both Ostenso
and Chatelaine by elucidating the complex relation between authorial identity,
literary content, and print context.
Launched in March 1928 by the Maclean Publishing Company,
Chatelaine built on the success that the company’s founder, John Bayne
Maclean, had achieved first in publishing trade journals, such as Canadian
Grocer (1887), Financial Post (1907), and Farmer’s Magazine (1910), and
later in publishing consumer magazines directed at a broad and increasingly
urban audience, such as the general-interest magazine Maclean’s (1911), the

68

Martha Ostenso, Periodical Culture, and the Middlebrow

home decor magazine Canadian Homes and Gardens (1924), and the highsociety magazine Mayfair (1927). The appearance of Chatelaine in 1928 was an
unabashed attempt to tap into the expanding market of female readers who
belonged to Canada’s emerging urban middle class—or who aspired to be a part
of it. As such, Chatelaine’s readers were constructed as consumers while
Canada’s society made a transition from a predominantly rural, agrarian culture
to an urban, industrial one during the interwar period. To address Canadian
women in this manner positioned them as part of Canada’s first “professional
managerial class,” to use Richard Ohmann’s phrase (118). This class, Ohmann
argues in his work on American mass-market periodicals, possessed disposable
income and a desire for consumer goods as well as tasteful entertainment and
types of knowledge that would advance their economic and social standing.
Magazines became intermediaries between advertisers and readers, juxtaposing
advice to readers with the promotion of goods. In the May 1938 issue, for
example, fashion writer Carolyn Damon’s piece promised women “a wealth of
ideas for achieving summer smartness with two dresses and a little sound home
planning” (19). Sketches of slender women either dressed for an evening out or
poised with a bag over one arm as if ready for a day of shopping framed the
article, which was embedded in advertisements for soup and household cleanser
that instructed women on being better mothers through the use of certain goods,
and advertisements for bread and face cream that pressured women to maintain
slender figures and flawless complexions. Read together, the article and
advertisements sketched out the parameters of the feminine ideal imagined
by Chatelaine: the expert homemaker and the fashionable consumer. Both roles
required continuous self-education, and the magazine positioned itself as a
source of advice across the whole spectrum of feminine activities.
In this sense, Canadian and American periodicals had much in common. In
order to distinguish themselves from their American competitors in the magazine
marketplace, publications like Chatelaine (as well as Maclean’s and other
mainstream periodicals like National Home Monthly) yoked their identity to
nationhood. Whether it took the form of presenting Canadian authorship,
exploring Canadian politics, or surveying Canadian regional distinctions, the
discourse of Canadian identity was always prominent in the magazines. While it
is important to keep in mind that Canada’s literary landscape and publishing
industry were markedly different from those of the US, the nature of the
mainstream magazine during this period, with its mixture of advertisements and
cultural content, transcends national borders.
Periodicals such as Chatelaine were thus uniquely positioned to cater to
Canada’s emerging middle class, and they contributed significantly to the
construction of that class’s identity—an identity that was inherently tied to
the question of upward mobility. A reading of the advertisements published in
the same issues as Ostenso’s stories illuminates the production of this identity.

69

International Journal of Canadian Studies
Revue internationale d’études canadiennes

A Canadian Pacific advertisement that accompanied “The Years Are
Shadows,” for instance, encouraged readers to set “Sail on a Stately Duchess”
(52). Complete with private baths, sport decks, glass-enclosed observation
rooms, lounges, and delicious meals, the names of the cruise ships—Duchess of
Atholl, Duchess of Bedford, Duchess of Richmond, Duchess of York—spoke
to that most defined of class boundaries, the English aristocratic ranks, and
suggested that readers could cross over into this otherwise exclusive world by
purchasing passage on one of their ships. Periodical culture, especially that
constituted by mainstream magazines and the fiction they circulated, is central
to understanding this aspirant middle class as it came to stand in as a normative
Canadian identity.
By 1938, the year in which the first of the three Ostenso stories appears,
Chatelaine was celebrating its first 10 years in print. While it had undergone a
change in editorship in 1930, as Anne Elizabeth Wilson left and Byrne Hope
Sanders began her 23-year tenure, the editorial attitude toward fiction was
consistently defined by a twin attention to publishing Canadian authors and
ensuring their fiction adhered to the conventions of the romance genre. This
adherence by no means resulted in simplistic fiction. The May 1938 issue
provides a microcosm of the range and scope of Chatelaine’s fiction. In
this issue, London (Ontario) author Amy Campbell Thorburn published her
first short story in a Canadian periodical. “Relations and That : : : ” shifts from
a young boy’s precociously observant school composition on his family to a
young man’s decision to pursue a poetess instead of a debutante, balancing a
portrait of middle-class domestic sociability with a romanticization of writing
itself as an antidote to the superficiality of modern life in a way that both
endorses and transcends the normative middle-class values advertised on
surrounding pages. The domestic theme is carried through in Darragh Aldrich’s
“Parents Should Take Interest,” about a wealthy but emotionally distant single
father struggling to care for his young daughter. Minnesota-based Aldrich,
like many authors of the day, published novels as well as magazine short
stories and had links to the film industry. The Montreal setting of the story
suggests the border-crossing nature of the middlebrow publishing scene as well
as Chatelaine’s dedication to Canadian content, while the story’s movement
from domestic instability back toward the balance of the family unit implies
both the challenges to domesticity posed by modernity and the possibility of
overcoming those challenges.
The issue also features an instalment in the serialization of Reita Lambert’s
“Make-Believe Gypsy,” a novel less overtly domestic in nature but still
explicitly concerned with problems of shifting contemporary gender roles. It
is the story of preacher’s daughter Marta, a young woman whose success as a
fortune teller at a New York City night club leads to challenges, including her
immersion in city life and her capacity to out-earn her romantic interests.

70

Martha Ostenso, Periodical Culture, and the Middlebrow

Lambert, like Aldrich and Ostenso, would likely have been a familiar name to
regular magazine readers; an October 1938 article on her visit to St. Petersburg,
Florida, in The Evening Independent describes her as the “famed light fiction
author” of “five popular novels and more than 200 stories” (Reese 9). Taken
together, this mix of fiction demonstrates an interplay between generic adherence and social commentary, new and established authors, and Canadian and
international settings. While it is true that the stories concentrated on romantic
love and pursued plots that resolved happily, the plots themselves were defined
by tensions in contemporary society, populated by characters who, like Lige
Bascombe, faced difficult choices, and set against backdrops that range from
Maritime fishing villages to urban centres to prairie farmsteads. Through the
inclusion of a variety of regional settings, as well as a frequent focus on
contemporary issues, Chatelaine hailed a disparate readership as a community
of modern Canadians—a strategy that, as the sustained popularity of the
periodical suggests, was successful.
Ostenso is a particularly intriguing author to study within this context. Her
novel Wild Geese has established her as a key figure in the Canadian canon, yet
her position is a complicated one. While Wild Geese continues to be viewed as
an exemplar of realism and the psychological novel, Ostenso’s status as a writer
has been questioned for nearly as long as she has possessed it. Ostenso’s
placement in the Canadian canon resides largely in the success and popularity of
Wild Geese; critical emphasis on this novel has resulted in ongoing debates
about whether she counts as a Canadian author, a debate that may, as Faye
Hammill points out, be less important than an acknowledgment of Ostenso as a
paradigmatically border-crossing figure (“Martha Ostenso” 18). An analysis of
Ostenso’s magazine publications demonstrates the ways in which she shaped
her fiction to her audience in terms of setting, content, and style. Stories
published in the American agricultural magazine Country Gentleman, such as
“The Autumn Vineyard” (September 1934) and “Olaf—Called Ole” (February
1940), focus on rural settings and the social values of prairie farmers, while
“The Calendar” (April 1945), published in Canadian Home Journal, foregrounds explicitly Canadian content like the fur trade and the city of Winnipeg.
“Good Morning, Son” (September 1938) broaches unusually taboo subjects
such as female sexuality and divorce, appropriate to its publication in McCall’s
Magazine at a time when editor Otis Wiese was trying to shape the magazine
into a venue for serious realist fiction for women. At the same time, as a
comparison of the double serialization of Wild Geese demonstrates, textual
meaning is significantly impacted by print context. Thus even as Ostenso
arguably shaped her work to the well-established conventions of Chatelaine,
the context of the magazine itself shapes how these stories signify.
Ostenso’s Chatelaine publications exemplify concerns about middle-class
mobility, the tension between rural domesticity and urbanization, and the

71

International Journal of Canadian Studies
Revue internationale d’études canadiennes

shifting gender roles associated with the Second World War. More specifically,
each of the stories features one or more female figures strongly associated with
domesticity and stasis who become loci for the male characters figured in terms
of mobility and modernity. Such representations of women have received much
attention from feminist scholars, who have illuminated the ways in which the
magazine espoused repressive societal norms for women.2 Our awareness of
these conservative gender roles is heightened by the fact that the stories are
framed by advertisements for domestic products intended to align women’s
identities with the ideal of the well-run domestic sphere. At the same time,
however, each of Ostenso’s stories complicates gender roles in different ways,
reflecting the various cultural forces, including the Second World War, that
influenced women’s freedoms and opportunities in the 1930s and 1940s. The
construction of femininity in Ostenso’s stories for Chatelaine can thus be read
productively as an alignment of constrained gender roles with nationalism,
one that performs while subverting the links between femininity, domestic
interiority, and the nation.
“The Years Are Shadows”
The story that most overtly critiques women’s association with domestic space,
“The Years Are Shadows” (May 1938), does so through an ironic rendition of a
familiar romance plot, in which an unlikely couple—the pretty rich girl and the
rebellious poor boy—come together despite the forces of small-town prejudices
and unaccepting parents. The opening illustration depicts an embrace between
the protagonist-couple, Norma Castleton and John “Spot” Galway, the cinematic tableau preparing readers for the inevitable romantic storyline. Ostenso
plays with these generic conventions by sketching in a generically predictable
romance: Norma and Spot share one passionate night before Spot is torn away
by the war; years later he returns home, where Norma has remained faithful and
beautiful, qualities that prove redemptive to the scarred hero. These familiar
elements are, however, subtly subverted in ways that challenge the genre’s
restrictive association of women with stasis and domesticity.
In the conservative town of Redmond in which the story unfolds, social
position is clearly associated with the domestic sphere, with the size and nature
of the home, and the ways in which differently gendered subjects inhabit it,
defining that position. Within this highly structured social space, the Castletons
occupy a “mansion,” the Galways a “farm” (both words appear within quotation
marks in the story). The respectability of farming is refuted through the
description of the Galways: the father is a failed farmer marked by indolence
and a penchant for disrupting the established order of things (“he experimented
fantastically and unsuccessfully in the crossing of vegetables which would have
been better left as they were” [5]), while the mother is forced to “[take] in
washing to support the family” (5). Where the Galways suggest a disruption of
domestic stability and gendered behaviours, the Castletons embody an almost

72

Martha Ostenso, Periodical Culture, and the Middlebrow

parodic excess of domesticity. Norma is effectively trapped by a mother
fanatically obsessed with their family’s superiority to the rest of the town,
with only hand-picked friends allowed “into the rear garden for lemonade and
cucumber sandwiches,” and none of them into the interior of the house, “the
blinds of which : : : were always drawn almost to the sills” (6). A figure of
pathetic stability, Norma is “stiffly alone” and “joyless” (6), while Spot is
characterized by his aspirations; the school principal “was often heard to say
that if he had the money he would send the Galway boy to college, because he
was eating his heart out to go and had not the means” (7), but “the smug town” of
Redmond (37) derides such longings.
The story, once Spot and Norma’s unsuitability has been established,
proceeds as expected, yet the narrative tone constantly problematizes its generic
tropes. While Spot—now known as John—makes his fortune in Montreal,
Norma stays at home, imprisoned by “her mother’s vague and tyrannical
invalidism” (75); the two are not reunited for 20 years. Before this reunion can
take place, however, two things must first occur: Spot’s fantasies of aspiration
are destroyed, and Norma is finally freed from her domestic prison by the death
of her mother. Both take place in rapid succession. In the same sentence readers
learn of John’s financial ruin and his parents’ death in the automobile that he
gifted them, the “resplendent plum-colored car” that had signified the Galways’
upward mobility and disrupted the status quo of Redmond (75). If John’s
financial ruin and return home suggest the triumph of Redmond’s status quo,
Norma’s decision “to turn the Castleton estate into a tourist camp and the
‘mansion’ into a boardinghouse” (76) offers the possibility of change through
her escape from multiple prisons: her social position, the house itself, and of
course two decades of waiting. In the story’s final scenes, however, it is not
Norma’s freedom that is emphasized but her beauty, unchangeability, and
passivity. The narrator observes “that the twenty years had never touched her,
that she had been living all the time back there in a moonlit charivari night when
she was seventeen,” and the extent of her agency lies in her capacity to stop
John’s desperation-driven suicide with her face: “she leaned toward him, her
hands on his arms, her exquisite head tilted slightly backward, and the rosy last
dusk made an ineffable beauty of her eyes, her mouth,” in response to which
John’s “self-destruction : : : seemed to lift from him like a tangible pall” (76).
Norma thus resembles what Maureen Honey, in her study of feminist periodical
fiction of the 1920s, calls the “sentimental heroine,” characterized by delicacy
and domesticity.
Honey opposes the sentimental heroine to the New Woman, who is
associated with “the nondomestic world” and with the qualities of physical
health and activity (91). This more useful and productive model of womanhood
is suggested through the figure of Bessie Westhope, the narrator who observes
and comments on the action of the story, and with whom the readers of

73

International Journal of Canadian Studies
Revue internationale d’études canadiennes

Chatelaine are invited to identify. Bessie controls the often-ironic narrative,
pursues a career in nursing, and leaves Redmond. It is Bessie to whom Norma
spins her “legend : : : about herself and Spot Galway” in which they are secretly
engaged (75), and it is Bessie who is witness to the couple’s reunion, during
which John initially fails to recognize Norma at all (76). Through Bessie’s
perspective, readers are invited to feel pity rather than admiration for Norma’s
patient waiting, and relief when that pathos can be transformed into the
celebration of the final wedding scene. If Bessie’s narrative voice, full of
dramatic irony and fascinated voyeurism, encourages readerly identification
with the active female force, one that leaves behind the domestic sphere in
favour of career-based agency, that association is further complicated by the
advertisements that accompany the story. These advertisements by turns
endorse a Norma-like image of femininity as aesthetic stasis and a Bessie-like
valuation of energetic usefulness, though generally still in the space of the
home. An ad for Ipana toothpaste, for example, draws on the sentimental
language of feminine beauty: “Like a song in your heart, her loveliness warms
you, holds you enthralled. ‘Such fresh, young charm!’ you say, ‘this is the
beauty of youth and the Springtime!’ But when she smiles, that devastating,
dismal, shocking smile, how quickly the illusion fades! How swiftly you and
the world turn away!” (1). The ideal of femininity as aesthetically pure, locked
in an eternal springtime, contrasts with an equal emphasis on domestic
management: Fels-Naptha Soap admonishes new brides to get their whites
whiter (27) while the detailed chart of the “Meals of the Month” feature
structures the reader’s time in terms of her responsibility to provide three square
meals a day with minimal repetition (Hucks 64). Even the mobile college girl
that Bessie is depicted to be appears in advertisements as the “enlightened”
woman “Lead[ing] the Way in discovering TAMPAX” (53). The ambivalence
of gender roles within the pages of this story speaks more broadly to the
context of Chatelaine in the 1930s and 1940s as a discursive space in which
the complexity of women’s roles in a changing society was being actively
worked out.
“No Time for Sentiment”
“No Time for Sentiment,” published in July 1941, picks up on the role of
women as the Second World War breaks out, situating the wartime demands
placed on women in terms of a gap between traditional expectations and modern
possibilities. To illustrate this, Ostenso structures the central conflict as one that
occurs between two generations. The older generation, represented by Matt and
Sadie Hubbell, took part in the First World War; now, the time has come for the
younger generation, represented by their son, Ted, and his girlfriend, Lucy
Evans, to defend Canada again. Matt Hubbell, however, does not think much of
the younger generation, and has been hurt by his son’s failure to realize, or even
pursue, Matt’s aspirations for him. All of this is related by Sadie Hubbell. From

74

Martha Ostenso, Periodical Culture, and the Middlebrow

Sadie’s perspective, Ostenso delineates the conflict between tradition and
modernity, with aspiration underwriting this conflict. Ostenso also shows,
through the figure of Sadie, that women possess the power to articulate social
problems, though they themselves can do little to resolve them. From the
editorial’s gloss of this story as “worth reading for the added understanding it
may bring on the young people you see about you” (Sanders, editorial 1941, 1),
it is clearly Sadie’s perspective with which readers are encouraged to identify.
The story begins with Sadie listening for the sound of Ted’s car horn as he
arrives at his parents’ farmhouse with his friends from the city. Ted works as a
“soda jerk,” a job that is a point of contention between him and his father:
Sadie wondered if Ted had ever glimpsed what a blow it had been to Matt
when he took such a job after graduating from high school. Matt—who
had expected his only son to strive for something higher than he himself
had ever hoped to reach. Matt—who had slaved and sacrificed here on
the farm so that Ted might get through his high school and go on to
college to become a doctor or a lawyer or something important! But did
Ted want to go on to college? No. He had managed to get through high
school by the skin of his teeth, and he was through with books. (10–11)
Ted’s choices are a disappointment to his parents, who wish for him to
pursue professions that are the domain of successful white, middle-class men.
The fact that they are not particular about whether he becomes a doctor or
lawyer throws into relief the underlying desire of such aspirations, suggesting
that the work that one does is less significant than the position it grants one on
the social scale. The surrounding articles and stories play on these aspirations.
“Don’t Be a Dub!” exclaims the article appearing before “No Time for
Sentiment,” as it exhorts young people to learn the profoundly middle-class
sports of tennis and golf (Young 8–9). The short story that follows, “Fathers Are
Born,” features a full-page illustration of a man dressed in the professional garb
of suit and tie helping his children into what appears to be a Studebaker—an
accoutrement that contrasts with Ted’s battered car—for a Saturday excursion
(Scott 15). Perhaps the poem “Beacon,” embedded in the text of a third story
from the July 1941 issue, summarizes the demands of aspiration most clearly.
The poem describes a woman in a comfortable house knitting garments for
charity, and concludes, “Pity speeds her fingers, and peace has found/Its own
small echo in the soothing sound/Of clicking needles; while this room of light/
has fed the torch of courage for many a death-dark night!” (Havard 19). It is key
that the men and women figured in Chatelaine are never those in need; rather,
they are always the ones able to help through their own secure socio-economic
position and their impulses toward self-improvement, including charitable acts.
Within this context, the demands on Ted and his girlfriend, Lucy, are legible:

75

International Journal of Canadian Studies
Revue internationale d’études canadiennes

they are meant to move up the social scale, and help others upon achieving a
greater degree of affluence.
Ted’s lifestyle is characterized as frivolous, consisting of dance crazes and
“running around in that loose-jointed contraption he called a jalopy, with Lucy
Evans always beside him in the front seat” (11). Sadie describes Lucy as “no
worse than other girls you met every day in town. Or on the neighbouring
farms, for that matter. Permanents, lipstick, nail polish, and pert little ways,
heads cocked for dance music” (11). Intriguingly, this version of Lucy is
consistent with the model of femininity promoted in Chatelaine’s fashion
features and advertisements for beauty products. An advertisement for “Your
Own ‘Personalized’ Beauty Scrapbook” meant to “accompany Chatelaine’s
series of beauty lessons” (Chatelaine Beauty Scrapbook) appeared beneath the
concluding paragraphs of the story, and nearby pages promote beauty products
such as Woodbury face cream, which promised buyers “peach-bloom
freshness” (18). The previous issue of Chatelaine (June 1941) made this link
between youthful feminine beauty and the latest products even more explicit,
devoting its beauty pages to “Your Manicure and Pedicure” (26–27) and
including a full-page colour advertisement for “lollipop and butterscotch,” two
new shades of nail polish manufactured by Cutex (4). The other advertisements
that frame the story, however, are less glamorous, and include ads for laundry
detergent, toasters, and toilet bowl cleaners. All of these were geared toward
women in Sadie’s role as domestic managers, the role that Lucy Evans is
prepared to adopt as the story closes. The early 1940s saw a transition in what
Chatelaine asked of women, as the magazine began calling for austerity in the
form of rationing. While it did not surrender its emphasis on consumerism in
general, or on beauty and fashion in particular, it did exhort young women to
contribute to the war effort by joining the Canadian Women’s Army Corps,
knitting clothes for soldiers, or working in war-related industries.
Lucy and Ted eventually do fall in line with the demands of the Second
World War. The story ends with Ted’s departure for military training, but not
before he proves his worth to his father. A log falls on Matt while he is working
to prepare the farm for winter, pinning him so that he cannot move. Ted rescues
his wounded father by shifting the heavy log and then carrying him the long
distance to his “jalopy” and rushing him to the doctor in town. The doctor
assures Ted and Sadie, after many tests, that Matt will make a full recovery,
thanks to his son. Matt subsequently takes his son aside and says only, “I guess
you’ll do, Ted. You’ll be able to tote your load” (46). Through this stereotypically terse masculine response, Ted and Matt achieve the understanding for
which Sadie has been wishing.
Lucy, too, shows her worth. Just before the accident, Lucy tells Sadie that
she and Ted are engaged, but aren’t going to get married right away because

76

Martha Ostenso, Periodical Culture, and the Middlebrow

“‘we’d be sure to have a baby first thing, and what on earth would we do with it?
I have to keep on working at the office, and save every cent for furniture and
stuff!’ Sadie wasn’t sure she had heard right. Could this be the frivolous little
Lucy who never thought of anything but the newest dance step, the newest
shade of lipstick?” (46). Lucy also copes with Matt’s accident, staying “pale but
controlled,” and, afterwards, Ted tells Sadie that Lucy wants to live “on a farm
after we’re married. Can you beat that? Thinks it’s the only place to bring up
kids” (46). Ted and Lucy accept the respective gender roles of soldier and
woman-who-waits, ensuring continuity between their parents’ generation and
theirs. Nonetheless, there is something alarming, rather than reassuring, in the
achievement of this continuity. Sadie refuses to engage with the fact that her
only son is about to join the front lines of a war, thinking to herself only that “in
another five days their big son would be on his way to the training camp. They
would see very little of him now for the next few months. After that—well, who
could tell anything about that?” (10). Sadie is the narrator of the story because
she is the one aware of how everyone feels, yet her own anxieties go
unexpressed and remain unacknowledged by others. The traditional role of
women, then, is not only to wait at home and maintain the domestic sphere, but
also to wait silently while one’s only child risks death in order to sustain the
society under attack.
“The Stars Over Home”
“The Stars Over Home” expands on the tension between the urban and the rural
that is part of the backdrop for both “The Years Are Shadows” and “No Time for
Sentiment.” Published in October 1942, the short story begins with the trope of
the soldier’s return home from his war service, following Lige Bascombe’s train
as it travels from east to west. He is coming home a hero, his right arm severely
damaged by wounds he suffered from helping to sink an enemy submarine. His
injury is visible but not completely debilitating, and his narratorial voice
indicates that he is psychologically stable. He has been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for actions that he dismisses as “what any of the fellows
would have done if they’d been in the same lucky spot” (5). He articulates his
experiences without signs of trauma and, indeed, most of his thoughts focus on
the best way in which to resume his old life in Sun Rock. Through Lige, Ostenso
creates an image of masculinity that was idealized during the war: the brave yet
modest young man who is not afraid of self-sacrifice or hard work, and who
proves physically and psychologically resilient. This was the stereotype of the
soldier, set out routinely in advertisements, fiction, and illustrations. In another
short story that appeared in the October 1942 issue, “A Color for a Lady” by
Naomi Campbell White, a stalwart young soldier has only to smile, his eyes
“crinkly and fringed with thick lashes” (40), to make the heroine Elizabeth’s
heart beat faster. Canadian Women’s Army Corps advertisements, while
directed at women, tended to feature the male soldier in some respect, with

77

International Journal of Canadian Studies
Revue internationale d’études canadiennes

one such advertisement from Chatelaine showing a young woman seated in a
chair, a photograph of a lantern-jawed man in uniform on the table beside her
and a letter, presumably from him, in her hand. The ad copy summed up the
qualities of the returning soldier, and what he would want in his future wife:
“Are you the girl he left behind?” the ad copy asked. If so, then joining CWAC
was “your chance to show him that you are made of the same kind of stuff—that
you, too, have a sense of obligation and duty” (inside back cover, March 1944).
Lige’s joining up, as we discover, is not necessarily motivated by
obligation and duty. Rather, it is prompted by the treatment he has received
from his childhood sweetheart, Lileas Danby. As his train traverses the
Canadian nation—a narrative touch that recalls again Ostenso’s capacity for
strategic nationalism—“the old feeling of humiliation returned to plague him
every mile that brought him closer to home” (6). His humiliation is grounded in
Lileas’s rejection of him because, as he puts it, “a farmer’s son couldn’t rate with
the college boys who tore into Sun Rock on Saturday night to play the slot
machines and dance with the pretty Sun Rock girls. Especially Lileas Danby,
whose father just about owned the town” (6). While Lige and Lileas have been
close for years, their relationship crumbles after Lileas is sent away to finishing
school. She comes home for Christmas and, upon seeing her, Lige supposes that
it was only natural that she should use the latest college slang, wear the
latest clothes, and speak of certain McGill-Varsity touchdowns as if she
had made them herself. But in the same breath that she assured Lige that
he was the “handsomest brute on earth,” she also hinted critically that he
could be “smooth” if he’d make up his mind to go to college next year and
get away from his straw stacks. Make up his mind! As if that was all there
was to it. (6)
His family does not have the money for college, and they need his help with the
farm, yet Lileas’s new-found snobbery dictates that Lige should put himself first
and join the competitive, professional world of the emergent urban middle
class.
Lileas herself goes to college, and attracts a string of admirers, but she
remains determined to change Lige. She suggests that he sell his land and
routinely reminds him “that he should be doing something more important than
running a farm” (6). She even arranges for her father to offer Lige a job, but Lige
rejects the offer, arguing, “I’ve got my job here. Besides, if I ever do make a
change, I’d rather make it myself. I don’t fancy having a woman handle it for
me. You mean all right, but look—I’m not in your class the way I am. What
kind of a heel would I be if I let you wangle a soft job for me with your old man?”
(67). This passage highlights the class disparity between them and illustrates
the gap between urban modernity and rural tradition. Lige takes pride in his

78

Martha Ostenso, Periodical Culture, and the Middlebrow

masculinity, refusing to let a woman help him climb the social ladder and
rejecting the very idea of a “soft job.” Despite this altercation, Lige remains
convinced that “after all they had been to one another” Lileas will remain loyal
to him and “wait for another year or two until he could build a house for her on
his own land” (7). Instead, she snubs him in front of her other suitors: “Lileas
picked a cigarette out of her silver case, lighted it and said to the bright young
people at her table, ‘Funny, but this cigarette smells like straw!’” (7). Lileas’s
true nature is defined by middle-class aspiration, and Ostenso’s characterization
of her suggests that such aspiration is underwritten by shallow cruelty, as Lileas
prizes status over character and materiality over love. Her character contrasts
with the images of women during the war, whom Chatelaine depicted as
heavily invested in war work. The article “Home Front,” which appeared on the
opening pages of the issue, advised women on rationing and advocated the
purchase of war savings certificates and the salvaging of such things as old car
tires to be made into rubber boots for soldiers (2–3). These ideals of restraint and
inelegant hard work were situated between advertisements for mouthwash and
face powder, reminding us that women were expected to keep up appearances
while demonstrating their patriotism.
Humiliated by Lileas’s jibe, Lige takes the midnight train to the city, and
joins the Navy in the morning. The shame that motivates Lige to enlist inverts
the standard of national pride and unsettles the easy correlation between women
and the nation. According to Gill Plain,
The equation of women with peace and creativity is as old as the
association of women with a domestic sphere detached from the politics
of public life. Society has long constructed women in opposition to war.
Woman has been appropriated as a symbol of peace and domesticity, a
repository of the values that must be left at home in the heat of battle, and
she has constituted the object of battle—a prized possession that must be
protected—the struggle for which personalizes war aims that are otherwise abstract and distant. In times of war, an abstract notion of woman
symbolizes the nation under threat. (ix)
Ostenso resists constructing Lileas as someone worth fighting for, and
instead construes Lige’s entry into the military as an escape from the limitations
of his current life—limitations he would have readily accepted, if not for
Lileas’s taunts. He is therefore shocked by the hero’s welcome he receives upon
his return from three years of service. The whole town appears to be waiting for
him on the train platform, and the band is playing “For He’s a Jolly Good
Fellow.” Lileas and her father force him into a car for the parade through town
and throw a party in his honour, after which Mr. Danby offers Lige a job. When
Lileas encourages Lige to take it, he resists the urge to remark sarcastically “and
you go with the job, don’t you, Lileas?” (24).

79

International Journal of Canadian Studies
Revue internationale d’études canadiennes

When Lige finally returns home with his parents, they find that the house
has been lit up and decorated for his arrival by Thora, the young “farmerette”
who has joined the Bascombe household. Her absence from the town celebration separates her out from town life and its machinations, and Lige’s mother
remarks that Thora is “worth at least twenty of your Lileas” (25). Thora is
clearly a foil to Lileas: where Lileas is fair and fragile, Thora is dark-haired and,
though tall and slender, still capable of back-breaking farm labour. Thora also
quit college to become a farmerette; whereas Lileas tries to persuade Lige that
he has now done his “share” and ought to forget about the war (25), Thora has
committed to contributing to the war effort for the duration. Thora, then,
represents an idealized vision of home and nation that are worthy of defence.
The contrast between these women recalls the opposition of Norma and Bessie
in “The Years Are Shadows,” but whereas Norma’s stasis and Bessie’s mobility
mapped (albeit unstably) against the domestic and the urban, Lileas and Thora
further complicate these associations through linking the active and useful
Thora to home and country while the beautiful but vapid Lileas stands in for a
threatening mobility that quite literally drives Lige away to war. Much like the
fashionable Lucy’s unexpected desire to raise her children on a farm, these
young women complicate simplistic gendered identities while ultimately
promoting traditional values. Lige may not have signed up for patriotic reasons,
but he returns to a family home that includes a woman who recuperates his
actions into patriotic ideology.
Unable to sleep that night, Lige goes out for a walk across his land, with
“the smell of the fields, sombrely rich with wheat and oat and barley and rye and
corn—with food beginning, food for nations that must live against the powers
of hell—this fragrance swept over the senses of Lige Bascombe so that he had to
close his eyes for a moment, wondering who he was now, wondering what he
had become” (25). He finds the answer swiftly, as he discovers Thora sitting
nearby, alone and distraught. She tells Lige that she received word earlier that
night that her brother has been killed in the war, disappointing her dream of
owning a farm with him upon his return. Lige is astonished at the stoicism and
self-sufficiency evident in her ability to concentrate on welcoming Lige home,
despite her own loss. Thora’s longing for the farming life coincides within his
new feelings for his land, and the story ends here, as “Lige stared up at the
starlight, and then at the girl, Thora, and found that he could not see her very
clearly” (29). While he, overcome with emotion, may not be able to see Thora
clearly, the reader can. The alternative to Lileas, she represents growth and
tradition. It is his masculine prerogative—and responsibility—to choose
between these two sets of values (the urban, individualistic, and materialistic,
versus the rural, communal, and frugal), thus defining the future of society.
Intriguingly, Ostenso does not conclude the story with a definitive choice on
Lige’s part. The reader knows that he ought to choose Thora, but whether he

80

Martha Ostenso, Periodical Culture, and the Middlebrow

does so remains a mystery, generating a sense of unease about the postwar
future and its relation to urbanity and aspiration.
Conclusion: Mobility and Modernity
“The Years Are Shadows,” “No Time for Sentiment,” and “The Stars Over
Home” all engage with questions of work and mobility, commitment to family
and to home, and the shift away from a traditional, agrarian way of life into
something less clearly defined, but certainly more modern, consumer-driven,
and urban: in short, mobility and modernity are at stake in the choices made by
Ostenso’s characters. As Victoria Kuttainen’s article in this special issue
demonstrates, modernity and aspiration are closely linked, and magazines are
a key medium for developing a nuanced understanding of both middlebrow
culture and the interwar period. Such issues stemmed from the emergence of a
professional, urban middle class in Canada, and the anxieties they provoked
were heightened by the outbreak of the Second World War, which aligned the
performance of traditional gender roles with duty to the nation. Middlebrow
magazine fiction often reproduced these gendered expectations and, on the
surface, Ostenso’s stories appear to do so. Beneath the surface, however,
narrators unsettle romantic tropes and nationalist rhetoric, and plots contest the
easy correlation between the attainment of happiness and the acceptance of class
and gender norms. The complexities of individual choice and the opportunities
and restrictions of Canada at midcentury are intrinsic to the work that Ostenso
published in Chatelaine, communicating, then, both the questions faced by
contemporary readers and the potential of magazine fiction in enabling current
scholarship to understand such questions.
Our reading of Ostenso’s Chatelaine publications proposes a dialectic
between text and context. The tensions in these stories generate similar tensions
in surrounding material, inviting a rereading of the metanarratives of gender,
nation, and class propagated by advertisements and columns. The complication
of Ostenso’s literary historical construction as a Canadian novelist who wrote a
single novel of worth, alongside a renewed interest in the short fiction published
in Chatelaine, enables an approach to reading magazines that places authorial
identity, textual complexity, and print cultural contexts into conversation. As a
result, an image of middlebrow magazines as a vibrant microcosm of middle
class culture’s anxieties and aspirations emerges—a microcosm deserving of
further study.
Notes
1.

Michelle Smith and Faye Hammill’s current research for the project “Magazines,
Travel, and Middlebrow Culture in Canada, 1925–60,” has unearthed two further
stories: “The Calendar” (Canadian Home Journal April 1945) and “The Storm”
(Maclean’s 1925). While most, if not all, of Ostenso’s American magazine
publications are documented in Joan Buckley’s 1976 dissertation on Ostenso’s

81

International Journal of Canadian Studies
Revue internationale d’études canadiennes

2.

novels, there remains a distinct possibility that more short stories remain undocumented in other Canadian or international periodicals.
See Vipond 12; Korinek 229; and Strong-Boag 145.

Works Cited
Aldrich, Darragh. “Parents Should Take Interest.” Chatelaine May 1938: 10–11. Print.
Alexander, Jean. “Your Manicure and Pedicure.” Chatelaine June 1941: 28–29. Print.
Buckley, Joan Naglestad. “Martha Ostenso: A Critical Study of Her Novels.” Diss. U of
Iowa, 1976. Print.
Canadian Pacific. Advertisement. Chatelaine May 1938: 52. Print.
Canadian Women’s Army Corps. Advertisement. Chatelaine Mar. 1944: inside back
cover. Print.
Chatelaine Beauty Scrapbook. Advertisement. Chatelaine July 1941: 46. Print.
Cutex. Advertisement. Chatelaine June 1941: 4. Print.
Damon, Carolyn. “How to Build Your Own Wardrobe.” Chatelaine May 1938: 19–20.
Print.
Des Rivières, Carole Gerson, and Denis Saint-Jacques. “Women’s Magazines in
Canada: The Success of Chatelaine.” History of the Book in Canada Volume 3,
1918–1980. Ed. Carole Gerson and Jacques Michon. Toronto: U of Toronto P,
2007. 249–51. Print.
Fels-Naptha Soap. Advertisement. Chatelaine May 1938: 27. Print.
Hammill, Faye. “Martha Ostenso, Literary History, and the Scandinavian Diaspora.”
Canadian Literature 196 (2008): 17–31. Print.
———. “The Sensations of the 1920s: Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese and Mazo de la
Roche’s Jalna.” Studies in Canadian Literature 28.2 (2007): 74–97. Print.
Hammill, Faye, and Michelle Smith. Magazines, Travel and Middlebrow Culture in
Canada 1926–1960. U of Strathclyde, 2011. Web. 16 Sept. 2012.
Havard, Pauline. “Beacon.” Chatelaine July 1941: 19. Print.
“Home Front.” Chatelaine Oct. 1942: 2–3. Print.
Honey, Maureen. “Feminist New Woman Fiction in Periodicals of the 1920s.”
Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American Women Writers of the 1920s. Ed. Lisa
Botshon and Meredith Goldsmith. Boston: Northeastern UP, 2003. 87–109. Print.
Hucks, M. Frances. “Meals of the Month: Thirty-One Menus for May.” Chatelaine May
1938: 64. Print.
Ipana Toothpaste. Advertisement. Chatelaine May 1938: 1. Print.
Korinek, Valerie. Roughing It in the Suburbs: Reading Chatelaine Magazine in the
Fifties and Sixties. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2000.
Lambert, Reita. “Make-Believe Gypsy.” Chatelaine May 1938: 14–15. Print.
McGregor, Hannah, and EMiC UA. “Martha Ostenso, Middlebrow Magazines and
Digital Remediation.” Editing Modernism in Canada at the University of Alberta.
EMiC UA, n.d. Web. 16 Apr. 2013.
Ohmann, Richard. Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the
Century. London: Verso, 1996.
Ostenso, Martha. “The Storm.” Maclean’s 15 Apr. 1925: 17–18, 69. Print.
———. “The Autumn Vineyard.” Country Gentleman Sept. 1934: 8–9, 67–69. Print.
———. “The Years Are Shadows.” Chatelaine May 1938: 5–7, 27, 37, 75–76. Print.
———. “Good Morning, Son.” McCall’s Magazine Sept. 1938: 12–14, 81–83. Print.

82

Martha Ostenso, Periodical Culture, and the Middlebrow
———. “Olaf—Called Ole.” Country Gentleman: Feb. 1940: 16–17, 36–38. Print.
———. “No Time for Sentiment.” Chatelaine July 1941: 10–11, 43–44, 46. Print.
———. “The Stars Over Home.” Chatelaine Oct. 1942: 5–7, 24–25, 28. Print.
———. “The Calendar.” Canadian Home Journal Apr. 1954: 12–13, 61, 63–64, 72.
Print.
Plain, Gill. Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power, and Resistance.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1996. Print.
Reese, Thomas Bruce. “Famous Author Here as Guest of Mother.” Evening Independent
15 Oct. 1938: 9. Web. 17 Apr. 2013.
Sanders, Byrne Hope. Editorial. Chatelaine Mar. 1938: 2. Print.
———. Editorial. Chatelaine July 1941: 1. Print.
Scott, John. Illustration. “Fathers Are Born,” by Helen Bullard Rydell. Chatelaine July
1941: 15. Print.
Strong-Boag, Veronica. The New Day Recalled: Lives of Girls and Women in English
Canada, 1919–1939. Markham, ON: Penguin, 1988. Print.
Tampax. Advertisement. Chatelaine May 1938: 53. Print.
Thorburn, Amy Campbell. “Relations and That …” Chatelaine May 1938: 8–9. Print.
Vipond, Mary. “The Image of Women in Canadian Mass Circulation Magazines in the
1920s.” Modernist Studies 1.3 (1974–75): 5–13. Print.
White, Naomi John. “A Color for a Lady.” Chatelaine Oct. 1942: 10–11. Print.
Young, Scott. “Don’t Be a Dub!” Chatelaine July 1941: 8–9. Print.

83