Sticky blood and inscrutable textures in "A Red Girl's Reasoning"
Household conversations about Christine transition to a larger social scene in the next section of “A Red Girl’s Reasoning.” The next section begins again with Christine as the object of speculation: “she was ‘all the rage’ that winter at the provincial capital that winter at the provincial capital. The men called her a ‘deuced fine little woman.’ The ladies said she was ‘just the sweetest wildflower.’” (3). The narrative shifts in scale as though to mimic the movements of allotment policy, under which both domesticity and private land ownership are naturalized under a heterosexual order. In the case of “A Red Girl’s Reasoning,” “private” discussions between father and son-in-law all too easily evolve into a wider apparatus of white sentimentality and bourgeois dramatics. Even so, the narrative remains carefully ambivalent: “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” (3). Such understated language directly about Christine contrasts sharply with elaborate social perceptions around her: “in fashionable circles she was ‘new’—a potent charm to acquire popularity, and the little velvet-clad figure was always the centre of interest among all the women in the room” (3). I am interested in descriptions of Christine’s velvet, or Christine in velvet, both as metaphor and vital materiality. The velvet plays an integral part to the racial imagination of Christine: “she always dressed in velvet. No woman in Canada, has she but the faintest dash of native blood in her veins, but loves velvets and silks” (3). As such, Indigenous femininity is co-constituted by “native blood” on the one hand, and “velvet and silks” on the other. While Christine might otherwise be known as “an ordinary, pale, dark girl,” velvet suddenly animates her body to one of desire and legibility.
At a dance at the Lieutenant-Governor’s, Christine is the object of much questioning as others at the party attempt to make sense and subject of her. Their attempts proceed eagerly: “‘do tell us some more of your old home, Mrs. McDonald; you so seldom speak of your life at the post, and we fellows so often wish to hear of it all,’ said Logan” (4). However, when Christine refuses to indulge his question and turns the question around on him, Logan loses his footing. “‘Why do you not ask me of it, then?’ ‘Well—er, I’m sure I don’t know; I’m fully interested in the Ind—in your people—your mother’s people, I mean, but it always seems so personal, I suppose; and—a—a—'” (5). His attempts to speak hang awkwardly between trepidation and aggression. The continual breaking up of his sentences suggests a liberal anxiety about violence that cannot be named openly. Words fail him as he tries to cloak his inquiry with vague politeness. While he desires to know Christine, he might also be inhibited by the fear that Christine may break contract any moment and act indigenous in impermissible ways. For the rest of the party, the white settlers take turns around Christine to lag time—poking and prodding at her, careful not to scare or offend too much too quick. “‘All, all, my dear,’ cried Mrs. Stuart clamorously…‘tell us of yourself and your mother—your father is delightful, I am sure—but then he is only an ordinary Englishman, not half as interesting as a foreigner, or—or, perhaps I should say a native” (5). Against the liberal mandate that everyone be the same, racial markers of difference are eroticized. The Lieutenant-Governor’s dance is only an instantiation of larger public order. Conversely, all public space is made white through the settler colonial practice of land allotment. As Nichols writes on dispossession in the colonial context, the expansion of dispossession is always haunted by the fact that the dispossessed could eventually “accuse the sovereign not merely of a specific act of illegitimate expropriation but of himself being the effect of a prior dispossession: the sovereign as thief” (26). The slow poking and probing around Christine might be understood as the white ego confronting—or desperately attempting to keep at bay—evidence of its own illegitimacy. The social is then the white ego that in turn restructures the public order, always towards the project of regulating conduct and naturalizing race. As Hartman writes on the affective management of social order, public space is that which combines both a “sentimental rhetoric of reciprocity” and “rationale for white resentment” (150). The burden of having to manage the white ego—their fear and anger—falls on the shoulders of racialized subjects. Christine, however, was quick to break rules of social decorum. Her “blood leapt angrily up into her temples” as she “said hurriedly, ‘I know what you mean; I know what you were thinking” (5).
What is a red girl’s reasoning? Christine’s words—“I know…I know”—her marks a narrative turning point in which the social then begins to disintegrate. Ideals of domesticity and racial reconciliation fall apart. Here, I turn yet again to vital materiality of velvet. If western rubrics of liberal personhood—one’s ability to speak, reason, and be civil—do not apply to Christine, Velvet operates both as racial materiality and life otherwise. Velvet no longer simply suggests the native blood hiding under skin but renders Christine the source of inscrutable horror. Velvet can be both fetish object and the “the panther-like” quality to her “restless footfalls, a meaning velvetiness” that makes him “shiver, and again he wishes he were dead—or elsewhere” (7). “Her scarlet velvet cloak” is what covers “her bare brown neck and arms” from her husband’s violent reach. Even as she stands “leaning on the rail of the verandah” after having decided to leave him,” she has “about her shoulders the scarlet velvet cloak,” which only humiliates him, reminds of his own “mad” actions during the miserable night of the party (11). Christine then refuses to compulsively perform humanity even as the western liberal subject may beg for it (“Christie, Christie, my little girl wife, I love you, I love you, and you are killing me” (12)) Her disaffection—“no blaze, no tear, nothing in her eyes; no hardness, no tenderness about her mouth”—evoke what Xine Yao might call a tactical “disloyalty to regimes of power and authority” (11).