Performing Authenticity in the Fin de Siècle: E. Pauline Johnson on the Stage

Guest post: Tim Clarke (University of King’s College, Halifax)

I.

Let me begin with an axiom, which I will return to shortly: wherever we look, whether high or low, past or present, on the page or on the stage, the aesthetic posture of decadence always entails an interrogation of the category of authenticity.

II.

In 1889, the Canadian poet W. D. Lighthall included two poems by the Mohawk-Canadian writer E. Pauline Johnson (or Tekahionwake, ‘double wampum’) in his anthology Songs of the Great Dominion. These poems, ‘In the Shadows’ and ‘At the Ferry’, established her as one of the country’s leading literary prospects and a lyricist with a particular talent for meditative, sometimes melancholic nature poetry in a late romantic mode. Within a few years, Johnson was perhaps the most famous Canadian poet alive. [1] However, this cresting fame rose from very different foundations than the nature poetry that had so impressed Lighthall; Johnson’s celebrity was built instead upon dramatic stage recitals of stories, poems, and essays, with a special emphasis on her writings about broadly Indigenous themes and subjects, some of them romanticised fictions, some of them drawn from personal experience. Though these works made up only a tenth of her total literary output, they comprised roughly half of the pieces she performed at any given recital, and she toured them widely, to popular acclaim, across Canada, the United States, and Great Britain. [2] This overrepresentation was no accident but a strategic response to the appetites of Johnson’s overwhelmingly white audience, whose taste for exotic, heavily stereotyped depictions of ‘Indian’ life had been shaped by mythologising accounts of settler experiences on the Western frontier since the middle of the century.

The success of Johnson’s stage career depended in no small measure on participating in the verbal and visual vocabularies of these mythologies, though she did not do so naively; by a certain reading, her performances were decidedly subversive. A typical recital began with Johnson taking the stage in a distinctive buckskin dress, with her hair unpinned and flowing free. During intermission, she would change costumes and return to the stage wearing an elaborate Victorian gown, with her hair neatly pinned up. Occasionally, the costume change played out in reverse order. Whatever the order, Johnson’s status as a white-passing Mohawk woman allowed her to capitalise on her audience’s presumptions to produce a kind of culture shock, showing just how difficult it could be to place a sharp line between the supposed visual signifiers of whiteness and Indigeneity in the fin de siècle. The typical response from her audience was a mix of curiosity and flagrant essentialism. One such response was recorded in the Dundee Evening Telegraph’s writeup to a performance from her 1906 British tour, which marvels as much at the fact that ‘in appearance Miss Pauline Johnson shows but little trace of her ancestry’ as it does about her taking the stage in ‘the full garb of an Indian princess – a rich buckskin garment covered with the gaudy trappings and ornamentations so beloved of her race’. [3]

The title of the writeup, ‘From Wigwam to Concert Platform’, further speaks to the presumptuousness that Johnson faced whenever she set foot inside a venue. Chiefswood, the home her father built and where she grew up, on the Six Nations reserve near Brantford, Ontario, was no more a wigwam than she was a ‘princess’. It was instead a rather impressive Italianate dwelling that reflected the stature of its builder. Johnson’s father was a prominent hereditary Mohawk chief, George Henry Martin Johnson, while her mother was an English Quaker, Emily Howells. This mixed lineage contributed to the unusual circumstances of Johnson’s upbringing at Chiefswood, which combined the material trappings of well-to-do English life (including servants, a piano, and books reflecting the English literary canon) with a thorough immersion in the cultural practices and history of her father’s people, leading her to identify definitively in later life not as mixed but as a Mohawk woman. [4]

Fig. 1: Portrait of E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake). Photograph from American Women: Fifteen Hundred Biographies with Over 1,400 Portraits, 1897.

On the one hand, the structure of Johnson’s performances, with their expectation-subverting costume changes, neatly expressed her sense of herself as living at the juncture of two worlds widely presumed in the period to be mutually exclusive. On the other, that structure allowed her to ironise and undermine the audience’s presumptions about what Indigeneity did or did not look like in fin-de-siècle Canada. Her buckskin gown was not the authentic piece of Mohawk ceremonial dress that her audience typically supposed, but a kind of pan-Indigenous stage prop that ‘made no effort to replicate the actual clothing of any specific Native group’, and was instead, and conspicuously, inspired by illustrations of Minnehaha from the Johnson family’s edition of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha. [5] Johnson’s costumes played to but at the same time mocked her audience’s expectations, in that she appeared before them not as the Mohawk woman she was but as someone from no particular nation, a mythic vision of Indigeneity who more closely resembled the broadly-written Indigenous characters of settler adventure tales than any actual Indigenous people. In this sense, her performances amounted to a kind of autoexoticism, a gesture by which ‘exoticism is taken over by the exoticised other, reproduced and employed for the people of that other and to their own benefit’. [6] Robert Stilling has articulated a similar dynamic in the context of the relationship between fin-de-siècle decadence and postcolonial literature, observing that ‘postcolonial writers and artists were increasingly willing to make use of the fin-de-siècle decadents’ most critical and oppositional tools’ in order ‘to critique what they saw as the failures of postcolonial societies’. [7] Though Johnson writes within the fin de siècle and in a colonial, rather than a postcolonial, context, she employs decadent precedents to similar ends. Few recital-goers ever recognised it, but what Johnson performed on the stage was an authentic representation not of an Indigenous subject as such but of settler fantasies about how Indigenous subjects looked and acted. One can think of the recitals in this way as an elaborate in-joke by a Mohawk artist otherwise compelled to traffic in homogenised, pan-Indigenising tropes for the settler gaze.

Fig. 2: E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) poses in her performance costume, a buckskin dress modeled on illustrations of Minnehaha from Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha. Photograph from Library and Archives Canada, 1895.

Fig. 3: Chiefswood, the birthplace and childhood home of E. Pauline Johnson. Photograph from the Archives of Ontario, 1929.

III.

Let me circle back to my opening axiom, that decadence always involves an interrogation of authenticity. What justifies speaking of Johnson in the context of decadent performance? It is by now a banality to observe that even within the relatively narrow domain of aesthetics, the term decadence can have a sprawling, sometimes contradictory, range of meanings, naming everything from judgments of aesthetic emptiness or imitation to stylistic fixations on artificiality and moral transgression. Eschewing the classical ideals of holism and unity, the decadent artist, in the famous definition of Paul Bourget, opts instead for an aesthetic of excesses and extremes ‘in which the unity of the book falls apart, replaced by the independence of the page, where the page decomposes to make way for the independence of the sentence, and the sentence makes way for the word’. [8] The rhetoric of decomposition speaks to another oft-cited facet of decadent style: a morbid fascination with all things reputedly sick, decayed, or deviant. This pose of calculated morbidity is of a piece with the most abiding decadent concern, that is, a thoroughgoing hostility to nature as an ideal. The caricature of the decadent artist is of someone who repudiates nature with a brazenness approaching flippancy; think, for example, of Oscar Wilde’s Vivian, who pronounces the now-famous dictum in ‘The Decay of Lying’ that ‘Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life’. [9] But the decadent is seldom a mere provocateur; rather, this challenge to the aesthetic primacy of nature implies a substantive view that we can never find a source of normative values, whether they be ethical or aesthetic, in the mere givenness of the world, that is, in nature. If the decadent is a partisan of artifice, it isn’t for the disdain of nature, then, but of the smug satisfactions of those who would flee to nature as an escape from the obligation of making – and owning – their own evaluations and judgments. Underlying much decadence, if we pry at it long enough, is a sensibility that values are not found but made; they are artifacts, the end results, in other words, of a human activity – a kind of art.

At first glance, the connection between Johnson and the decadents’ concerns is tenuous, all the more so because her contemporaries often characterised her as a kind of antidecadent figure whose work offered a revivifying alternative to the morbid excesses of much fin-de-siècle art. [10] Hector Charlesworth, reviewing Johnson’s poetry in 1895, breathlessly lauds her ‘Indian ballads’ as ‘fresh and stimulating to healthy people with dramatic intelligences’ on account of their ‘fine Mohawk barbarity’, though he notably concedes to finding in her work the occasional ‘record of a mood that seems at first blush fin-de-siècle’. [11] Others, viewing her through the distorting prism of nineteenth-century myths of the ‘vanishing Indian’, characterised her as the noble representative of a dying people whose dignified forbearance in the face of historical doom offered white readers a useful model for dealing with their own inevitable descent into decadence. This was precisely the view of Ernest Thompson Seton, co-founder of the Boy Scouts of America, who memorialised Johnson in 1913 by cautioning readers to ‘remember that no people ever ride the wave’s crest unceasingly. The time must come for us to go down, and when it comes may we have the strength to meet our fate with such fortitude and silent dignity as did the Red Man his’. [12]

The picture looks quite different, though, if we turn our attention from Johnson’s reviewers to the coteries that she sought out and engaged with throughout her career. Her connections to the English decadents were so extensive, in fact, that Victoria Strong-Boag and Carole Gerson have argued for recognising her as one of the fin-de-siècle women writers whom Elaine Showalter memorably labelled ‘daughters of decadence’. [13] Charlesworth also makes a point of emphasising the provenance of Johnson’s debut volume The White Wampum (1895) as a publication of the Bodley Head, the outfit of John Lane and Elkin Mathews, which had by then become notorious as the publisher of the English decadents’ flagship periodical, The Yellow Book. [14] As The White Wampum made its way through the Bodley Head, its editorial reviewer was none other than the decadent poet Richard Le Gallienne. [15] When Johnson arrived at the London stop of her 1894 British tour, one of her priorities was to seek out Lane to gauge his interest in publishing her work, but she made a point, on the same stop, of making introductions to a wide array of decadents and Yellow Book affiliates, including Oscar Wilde, William Watson, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Swinburne’s confidante Theodore Watts-Dunton, whose early championing of Johnson’s poetry led her to credit him with her international success. [16] These associations underscore the surprisingly extensive role of the decadents in building Johnson’s reputation abroad.

The relationship was not one-sided, though, and Johnson engaged on her own terms with certain elements of decadent aesthetics. At the same time, this engagement was not obviously stylistic in nature – apart from a few poems, such as 1889’s dreamy ‘Shadow River’, a wistful paean to the idealities of art and ‘the pathless world of seeming’, her poetry does not typically read like that of the decadents. [17] Her aesthetic debts are rather more subtle and lie in the decadents’ fascination with artifice. Johnson’s stage performances revel in their own artificiality, albeit an artificiality unrecognisable as such to her audience. They fixate on the distance between appearances and realities, presenting art as if it were nature or givenness itself. They perform a wry, silent repudiation of her audience’s fetishisation of superficial, even fictive signifiers of Indigeneity (the buckskin dress in imitation of Longfellow’s Minnehaha, her array of accessories and adornments, some drawn from Johnson’s own people, some from nations unrelated to her, and some from no nation at all). Having been compelled throughout her public life to caricature herself for audiences with no more sophisticated an interest in or curiosity about Indigenous life than could be sated by the likes of James Fennimore Cooper or Longfellow, Johnson reasserted her agency on the stage by a kind of bait-and-switch. Her audience paid admission to witness an authentic performance of Indigeneity; what they received, on the contrary, was an Indigenous performance of what settlers mistook for authenticity – a jibe that they could not grasp and that mocked their confusion of living Indigenous subjects for the flat, stereotyped characters depicted in countless settler novels, stories, and poems.

While the content of Johnson’s performances seemingly owes little to decadent aesthetics, the same cannot be said of their form, which enacted at every moment an incisive and savvy critique of the settler fetishisation of a supposed form of authenticity. Just as the decadent artist leaned into a scandalised public’s hyperbolic charges of moral, social, and aesthetic decay to reveal deeper dysfunctions in the quarters of society that so sincerely and gravely made those pronouncements, Johnson leaned into her audience’s fantasies about Indigenous life to reveal their very emptiness. It would tax the elasticity of the term to call Johnson a decadent as such – yet no understanding of her performances could be complete without understanding them by the light of decadence and its daring critiques of the very concept of authenticity.

Notes

[1] Hector Charlesworth, ‘Miss Pauline Johnson’s Poems’, in Margary Fee and Dory Nason (eds) Tekahionwake: E. Pauline Johnson’s Writings on Native North America (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2016), p. 262.

[2] Carole Gerson, ‘Rereading Pauline Johnson’, Journal of Canadian Studies 46 (2) (2012), p. 50.

[3] ‘From Wigwam to Concert Platform’, Evening Telegraph [Dundee], 4 July 1906, in Fee and Nason, Tekahionwake, p. 269.

[4] Veronica Strong-Boag and Carole Gerson, Paddling Her Own Canoe: The Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), p. 50.

[5] Strong-Boag and Gerson, Paddling Her Own Canoe, p. 110.

[6] Xiaofan Amy Li, ‘Introduction: From the Exotic to the Autoexotic’, PMLA 132 (2) (2017), p. 393.

[7] Robert Stilling, Beginning at the End: Decadence, Modernism, and Postcolonial Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), p. 12.

[8] Paul Bourget, ‘The Example of Baudelaire’, New England Review 30 (2) (2009), p. 98.

[9] Oscar Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying’, in Plays, Prose Writings, and Poems (Toronto: Everyman’s Library, 1999), p. 87.

[10] For a more extensive discussion of Johnson’s reputation as an antidecadent figure, see Tim Clarke, ‘After a Decadent Fashion: E. Pauline Johnson and the Staging of Indigeneity’, Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies 6 (1) (Spring/Summer 2023), pp. 39-57.

[11] Charlesworth, ‘Miss Pauline Johnson’s Poems’, p. 263 and p. 266.

[12] Ernest Thompson Seton, ‘Tekahionwake (Pauline Johnson)’, in Fee and Nason, Tekahionwake, p. 280.

[13] Gerson and Strong-Boag, Paddling Her Own Canoe, p. 144.

[14] Gerson and Strong-Boag, Paddling Her Own Canoe, p. 262.

[15] Betty Keller, Pauline Johnson: First Aboriginal Voice of Canada (Montreal: XYZ Publishing, 1999), pp. 36-37.

[16] Keller, Pauline Johnson, pp. 37 and 97-98.

[17] E. Pauline Johnson, ‘Shadow River’, in Fee and Nason, Tekahionwake, pp. 150-51.