Literature as Pulpit: The Christian Social Activism of Nellie L McClung

Patricia Morley is professor emeritus of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University and the author of Margaret Laurence: The Long
Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

After four decades of neglect, Nellie McClung is making an impressive
and long overdue comeback, thanks to Firing the Heather, a biography by
Mary Hallett and Marilyn Davis, and to Randi Warne’s fine study of
McClung’s social activism and the vision that empowered it.

McClung’s writings consist of four novels, two novellas, three story
collections, a two-volume autobiography, and a great many speeches and
articles that bring the total to 16 volumes. Warne’s study examines
the writing, with particular emphasis on the Pearlie Watson trilogy,
Painted Fires, and In Times Like These.

The former includes Sowing Seeds in Danny, McClung’s best-loved
fiction; and Purple Springs, a novel that contains a description of the
staging of the Mock Parliament in Winnipeg. By reversing the
stereotypes, the drama parodies the treatment that McClung and other
women had been subjected to by Sir Rodmond Roblin, Premier of Manitoba.
In the play, men ask women parliamentarians for the vote and are rudely
rebuffed. Warne uses McClung’s essays, which she calls “impassioned,
revivalist sermons,” to discuss the antifeminist atmosphere of the
times. It was represented by such powerful opponents as Stephen Leacock
and Sir Almroth Wright, both of whom McClung challenged in print.

McClung’s fall from critical favor is shrewdly ascribed to her moral
idealism and didacticism: “McClung set herself firmly against the
prevailing literary paradigm, and paid the price.” Fashions change, in
literature as in everything else. Today’s political correctness, and
the convictions of many famous writers, have opened the door for
didacticism in good imaginative writing. Warne’s close critical
analysis of McClung’s writings within a religious and historical
context makes Literature as Pulpit a valuable contribution to both
literary theory and women’s studies.