The Gallant Invalid: The Stage Consumptive and the Making of a Canadian Myth

Abstract

This essay explores theatrical and cultural performances of pivotal figures in Canada’s colonial history as they relate to a forgotten chapter of theatre history and an image of masculinity it helped to create. The “gallant invalid” of the nineteenth-century stage was a consumptive young man hopelessly in love with a woman he could not possess and forced to steel his ailing body for a battle against forces that threatened honour and virtue. His first major theatrical incarnation came in the guise of Henri Muller in Alexandre Dumas père and Auguste Anicet-Bourgeois’s drama Angèle (1833). A crosser of national, class, and gender boundaries, Muller experiences deep emotions that the audience glimpses via the performed symptoms of his disease. As English translations of plays influenced by Angèle crossed first the Channel and then the Atlantic, I argue, they helped to create an internationally recognizable male consumptive type who shared these characteristics. In Canada, performances of this type shaped both British imperial mythology and an emergent narrative of Canadian political heroism. They transformed the received image of one of the founding heroes of imperial Canadian history, General James Wolfe, and shaped the public persona of the ‘great conciliator’ of French and English Canada, Wilfrid Laurier. This operation helped to establish the agency of the bourgeois, politically liberal male subject within the new nation. Yet it also associated his power with an acknowledgement of its own transience, rooting imperial masculinity in a performance of mortality that destabilized the very mastery it sustained.