A Red Girl's Reasoning
“A Red Girl’s Reasoning”
First published in 1893 in Dominion Illustrated, a Montreal-based publication, “A Red Girls’ Reasoning” is a short story that vibrantly illustrates intimate relationships as sites in which colonial power structures are both enacted and contested. Following Charlie McDonald, a census-taker with a penchant for Indianology, who is newly married to Christine (or Christie) Robinson, the daughter of an English trader and a Native mother, the story is propelled by a debate over the legitimacy of Indigenous marriage rites. Prompted by the inquisitiveness of Mrs. Stuart, the settler character whose quote opened this exhibit, Christie reveals that her parents were married according to Indigenous customs rather than through Christian ceremonies—the ensuing argument between Charlie and Christie, in which Charlie refuses to acknowledge the validity of Indigenous understandings of marriage, leads to an irreparable split between the two characters.Through Christie’s argumentation, the story offers a forceful critique of settler colonial strategies for managing Indigenous populations, and Indigenous women in particular. At the climax of their argument, for instance, Christie asserts that she and Charlie have in fact never been married: “why should I recognize the rites of your nation when you do not acknowledge the rites of mine,” she reasons (Johnson 172). If this argument presents Indigenous and Canadian frameworks as equally valid but mutually exclusive (marriage that is legal according to one set of principles will be considered invalid within the other framework), Fee and Nason have argued that Christie’s reasoning is aligned with Six Nations alliances, which operated on an assumption of equality between two sovereign nations. “Although she is clearly from the Plains, not Six Nations,” they write, “Christie's application of this principle to her marriage supported not only the equality of nations, but also the equality of men and women, a profoundly feminist idea at a time when women's submission to men was not only taken for granted, but also embodied in law” (Fee and Nason, 22). Pointing to the Indian Act, established in Canada in 1876, as an example of this legal subordination, they suggest that Christie’s argumentation unsettles the frameworks this act put into place. Described by Leanne Simpson as “a specific body of law that recognizes Indians in a wardship status in Canada—not a nation-to-nation agreement by any stretch—created the categories of personhood and rights that severed Indian women from their communities when they married white men,” the Indian Act promoted heteropatriarchal systems deeply concerned with the suppression of Indigenous women’s bodily and political agency (Simposn 108). For Christie to suggest that Indigenous marriage rites are on equal standing with Canadian ones, and for her to maintain an attachment to Indigenous epistemologies even when married to a White man, is to act in direct opposition to the principles underlying something like the Indian Act. Already, then, we should be able to see the ways in which the content of Johnson’s writing may have worked to destabilize settler frameworks. Even if Johnson promoted the circulation of her stories by donning a costume that promoted the fantasies of the Indian Princess trope, stories like “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” would have complicated the supposedly non-threatening nature of such a figure.
Perspectival Ambiguity
In addition to Johnson’s self-presentation being complicated by the content of the story, static readings of Johnson and her work are also destabilized by the story’s structure. The narratorial voice of “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” remains closely tied to the characters—any exposition outside of a character’s perspective is rare—and at times it can be challenging to track when we are moving from one subject position to another. As a result, we are asked to inhabit the frameworks and visions of Indigeneity held by each of the characters, rarely offered the distance to gauge in the moment whether the story as a whole (let alone Johnson herself) endorses such an understanding. The story opens, for instance, on a discussion between Charlie and Mr. Robinson, Christie’s father, shortly after Charlie and Christine’s marriage. Warning Charlie to treat Christine well, Mr. Robinson reminds him that “Christine’s disposition is as native as her mother’s” (Johnson 163). Soon afterwards, readers are treated to a description of Christie’s mother that seems to adhere to this notion of innate, racialized dispositions: “like all her race, observant, intuitive, having a horror of ridicule, consequently quick at acquirement and teachable in mental and social habits” (Johnson 164).This characterization follows so quickly upon passages that are rooted in Charlie and Mr. Robinson’s perspectives that it could be fair to assume that we are still operating within their frameworks—they might believe “Indianness” to result in predictable personality traits and capacities, but the reader need not take this understanding to be the one endorsed by the story as a whole. Indeed, there is reason to believe that this notion of innate Indigenous dispositions is ultimately undermined by Johnson. Although readers are kept close to Charlie’s perspective throughout the story, by the end he doesn’t appear to hold much authority. In his final encounter with Christie he is described as “boyish,” and the story closes on his melodramatic exclamations (“dear God, I thought you loved me”) being interrupted by the attentions of his “big and clumsy and yellow” dog—he cuts a pathetic figure, eliciting sympathy, perhaps, but also more than a little ridicule (Johnson 177-8). The local socialites, whose fascination with Christie’s Indigeneity suggests their vision of “Indianness” may align with that of Charlie and Mr. Robinson, are similarly subject to critique even as the narrator takes on their perspective. Johnson places their descriptions of Christie, that she is “all the rage” and a “deuced fine little woman” in scare quotes, seemingly distancing their hyperbolized enthusiasm from that of the narrator, and their exclamations are quickly followed by what might be the most direct insertion of a narratorial voice: “she was really but an ordinary, pale, dark girl who spoke slowly and with a strong accent, who danced fairly well, sang acceptably, and never stirred outside the door without her husband” (Johnson 165). This insistence on ordinariness seems to deflate the incipient fetishization of Christie, suggesting that Indigeniety need not be understood as entailing spectacular inherent qualities.
At the same time, while the story does unsettle the settler perspectives that it inhabits, it does not necessarily offer a coherent opposition to the frameworks inhabited by settler characters. It is true that during the lengthy argument between Charlie and Christie, readers encounter Christie’s resounding critique of settler hypocrisy and Charlie’s bias. But at the same time, the scene could be read as fulfilling Mr. Robinson’s warning that, because of her Indigenous heritage, Christie could be expected to act “kindness for kindness, bullet for bullet, blood for blood” (Johnson 163). Indeed, in one of the few moments of description in a scene that otherwise proceeds rapidly from one character’s dialogue to the next, Christie is described as displaying “the voice of another nature,” one harsher and more threatening than the submissive wife she had previously appeared to be (Johnson 171). Does this "other nature" suggest a quality unique to Christie, or is it another way of pointing towards Indigenous disposition? If it does refer to some innate Indigeneity, might readers imagine this to be a vision of nature that is contrary to that imagine by Mr. Robinson, Charlie, and the socialites? Or should we read the emergence of this other nature as evidence that Mr. Robinson’s sweeping generalizations about disposition are in fact being endorsed, proof that Christie, like her mother and “all her race” has a “horror of ridicule”?
It might be easier to parse the argument being developed in this scene if it were clear which perspective readers are being positioned within. But, with the exception of a few descriptions that emerge from Joe overhearing the argument (he reacts to the “awful anguish in the little voice,” for instance), as well as the ambiguous reference to Christie’s nature, readers are mostly kept within the flurry of dialogue (Johnson 170). While we might expect Christie’s perspective to emerge as an antidote to the settlers whose framework she critiques, readers are only given fleeting access to her experience, a brief line in the final pages in which we are informed “she was conscious of but two things, the vengeful lie in her soul, and a little space on her arm that his wet lashes had brushed” (Johnson 177). I will return to this line when discussing sentiment in the story, but for now it is enough to note how limited this momentary perspectival shift is. Although the notions of Indigeneity held by the settler characters are subtly undermined, the story offers neither Christie nor any narrator that we could associate with Johnson as stable perspectival alternatives to such frameworks. The perspectives of these Indigenous women remain, at least to some extent, withheld.
Grappling with Sentimentality
This withholding, particularly in Pexa’s sense of seeming to fulfill settler expectations and offer access while in fact maintaining opacity, is also played out in Johnson’s relationship with the sentimental genre. Johnson was a voracious reader who would have been intimately familiar with the norms of sentimental fiction, and while she often conformed to the tropes of the genre in her work, she still “found a way to highlight the concerns of Indigenous people” within the sentimental framework (Fee and Nason 21). According to Fee and Nason, “sentimental conventions depict and evoke strong emotions aimed at promoting ethical behaviour and the love of God, family, and country. Men were expected to marry, to lead, and to die for these values. Women were expected to support their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons in this noble work” (Fee and Nason 20). Already, it should be clear that “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” puts this framework to new ends: it certainly depicts and evokes strong emotions, but the clearest ethical stance taken in the story results in an Indigenous woman questioning Canadian norms and rejecting her husband.“A Red Girl’s Reasoning” may be deploying sentiment in order to marshal reader’s sympathies for an argument that ultimately promotes the legitimacy of Indigenous epistemologies, but the logic of sentiment is also played out to unusual ends at a level internal to the story itself. If sentimental fiction imagines that it can put internal states on display, rendering emotions legible in order to activate responses in its readers, the characters that populate “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” similarly act as though they can come to understand feelings and temperaments through observation. To take one example, when Christie reveals that her parents had not gone through a Christian marriage, Mrs. Smith looks towards Charlie in order to discern whether Christie’s parents had informed him of this fact: “she too saw the young husband’s face,” Johnson writes, “and knew that they had not” (Johnson 169). In this moment, emotions are emblazoned on the body, and observation of such bodies leads to knowledge.
To some extent, this assumption of emotional visibility is extended to Christie as well, the character for whom claims to knowledge and assessment of internal disposition holds the greatest political consequences. At various moments, Christie appears to be subject to these same norms of romantic and sentimental genres: when reacting to Mrs. Stuart’s questioning about how her parents’ marriage “the girl’s blood leapt angrily up into her temples” (Johnson 168), and when approaching Charlie at the onset of their argument “her whole soul spring[s] up into her eyes” (Johnson 170). In both cases, Christie’s sensitivity causes emotional shifts, which in turn lead to physiological changes that can be read in her eyes and on her skin.
By the close of the story, however, Christie seems to have engaged in a course of bodily discipline that renders such legibility impossible. When Charlie approaches Christie in an attempt to reconcile with her, “she did not appear to hear the heart-break in his voice; she stood like one wrapped in somber thought; no blaze, no tear, nothing in her eyes …the only visible human life in her whole body was once when he spoke the muscles of her brown arm seemed to contract” (Johnson 176). While sentimental norms might lead us to expect porosity between characters, an emotional outburst from one provoking a sympathetic response in the other, Christie now appears to be immune to Charlie’s “heart-break.” And if once her whole soul could be seen in her eyes, now her body is devoid of more than a twitch of emotionality. Remembering that touch used to generate an emotional reaction in Christie (there were “times when he had but to lay his hand on her hair to call a most passionate response from her”), Charlie embraces her, and does manage to elicit some response: Christie “quivered” and “a warm moisture oozed up through her skin” (Johnson 177). But if Charlie expects to be able to interpret these physiological changes as signs of a changed emotional state—when he feels the warmth of her skin he “looked up” as if expecting her face to offer its usual legibility—he is ultimately frustrated. In attempting to read her face, Charlie is left only with the sight of her “cold” teeth, her eyes “as grey as stones,” and an insistence that her love for him has died (Johnson 177).
It seems that the usual circuit of interpersonal sympathy, bodily response, and visible expressions of emotion has been disrupted, at least for the characters. It is possible that the logic of emotional legibility remains intact for the readers through the unexpected entry into Christie’s experience—by revealing that Christie is conscious of “the vengeful lie in her soul,” suggesting that she does in fact love Charlie, as well as the “little space on her arm that his wet lashes had brushed,” suggesting that despite her appearance she remains highly sensitive, readers are offered the access to Christie’s interiority denied to Charlie. Yet as I suggested previously, the extent to which Christie’s perspective is made available to readers is extremely limited. Even if some sentimental expectations are allowed to linger, by the end of the story the overwhelming sense is that Christie has rendered herself stony and inaccessible. For both Charlie and the reader, “key opacities,” to use Pexa’s phrasing, remain inviolable.
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