Madame de Toucainville's Magnificent Hat

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, Japan Foundation Fellow 1991-92, and the author of
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered:
Leo Kennedy’s Story.

This delightful picture book for children and imaginative adults makes
an environmental statement in a whimsical way. Sue Bland, currently a
partner on a farm near Regina, is also a lover of beauty and high
spirits. Her story and paintings of a young farmwife in the Canadian
West, circa 1907, illustrate the Victorian/Edwardian love of elegant
clothing amid rural and small-town prairie life.

“Oh, how Madame de Toucainville loved hats” is the story’s
opening line. Even for daydreaming in the coulee, picking Saskatoon
berries, or shopping in Fort Qu’Appelle, she favors elaborate
creations with exotic plumage. Madame, alias Lucy, is devastated to
learn from the Montreal Gazette that vast numbers of birds are being
killed just for ladies’ hats. She has simply never thought of the
source of feathers for her “cheerful, gleeful, joyful hats” and now
vows to buy no more.

Her behavior changes, and so does her mood, until she discovers that
flowers from her garden will decorate a large-brimmed hat equally well.
Her magnificent arrangement on a second-hand green velvet hat from a
pawnshop wins her the “Bonny Bonnet Contest” in the Pheasant Creek
Annual Garden Show. On the way home, the wind returns the hat, along
with the birds and insects it attracted, to the coulee.

Bland’s colorful illustrations, from the dour expressions on her
rivals’ faces to Lucy’s bliss as she bicycles across wheatfields,
are pure fun. This is Bland’s first book for children. One hopes to
see many more. Highly recommended.