Written by Sarah Stupar | December 2020
One of my favourite things to do is periodically check the wikipedia page about my home town Cranbrook BC, to see if anything has changed. Lo and behold I noticed at my last checking, a new addition under “Notable People” - an author named Evah McKowan who lived in Cranbrook around the turn of the century. Although she has her own modest wikipedia page, I’d never heard of her before, so I decided to track down her books to expand my local knowledge.
Cranbrook’s Evah McKowan is, in truth, a ‘Daughter of Ontario’. She was born near Carlisle, Ontario around 1885, but migrated to Cranbrook in 1900 with her parents and three sisters as a girl, when her father came west to try his luck in the lumber business (a classic British Columbia experience.)
Evah exemplified everything that a Daughter of Ontario should be. A respectable, well educated White Anglo Saxon Protestant, she remained in Cranbrook the rest of her life where she was an avid contributor to public life, noted for her involvement in many local associations, basically, “bringing civilization to the untamed west” as Ontario girls were wont to do.
McKowan wrote two novels, one called Janet of Kootenay: Life, Love, and Laughter in an Arcady of the West, published in 1919 and Graydon of Windermere published in 1920. I soon discovered that both novels were out of print and quite expensive to acquire, but luckily Janet of Kootenay is available at the Cranbrook Public Library. Or, to be more exact, it is available at the public library as part of a larger work from the Early Canadian Women Writers Series. McKowan’s novel Janet of Kootenay is packaged alongside early reviews of the book, some additional articles also written by the author, and a 61 page introduction written by Dr. S. Leigh Matthews, a Lecturer in the department of English and Modern Languages at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops.
Janet of Kootenay: Life, Love, and Laughter In An Arcady of The West By Evah McKowan | Introduction and edited by Dr. S. Leigh Matthews | Tecumseh Press 2014
The goal of the Early Canadian Women Writers Series is to “recover and make available significant works of fiction by key nineteenth and early twentieth century women writers of interest to scholars of literature, history, and women’s studies”, which is a laudable goal, but I must confess the novel Janet of Kootenay will probably not interest anyone beyond those who might read it for academic purposes.
The novel is an epistolary one, which means the plot is revealed through a series of letters. At first I was excited about the novel for that reason (I myself am a prolific letter writer), but as the novel wore on I found it hard to retain interest. There is very waspy romance that plays out slowly in between lists of chores essentially. Beyond being an epistolary novel however, this work could also be filed under #cottagecore.
For those who are not perpetually ‘online’ cottagecore may be a new term. A handy definition comes to us from the New York Times in March 2020 where it is described as a “budding aesthetic movement… where tropes of rural self-sufficiency converge with dainty décor to create an exceptionally twee distillation of pastoral existence.” (Think of all the sourdough bread photos you were subjected to in the early days of quarantine.) Cottagecore online existed before the pandemic of course, some pinpointing its online origins to 2019, or as early as 2017, but according to a Jstor Daily article on cottagecore by Angelica Frey, it’s been around for at least 23,000 years. Frey links cottagecore to the ancient Greek region of Arcadia, which through art and discourse became more of an intellectual concept than an actual physical place, representing an “untainted, yet benign countryside and the spiritual haven of a simple life.” This is the same ancient greek “Arcady” referenced by McKowan in the title of her novel.
Janet of Kootenay follows the story of Janet Kirk, who has come to the Creston Valley as a single woman, to pursue her dreams of farming. Janet, like her progenitor Evah, is a daughter of Ontario, who arrives in the Kootenays with a large sum of money that enables her to buy her land and everything that she needs to set up her “Arcady of the West”. A romantic plot line slowly unfolds in her letters back to her friend “Nan” who runs a farm just over the mountains in Alberta. Cottagecore enthusiasts may be the only ones who appreciate the detailed descriptions of chopping down trees and planting seeds, but personally I found it to be less interesting than when Laura Ingalls Wilder did it.
Janet boldly states that she intends to do a man’s work on her farm, and the more interesting themes of this book revolve around the changing roles of women in Canada during WWI. In order to work like a man Janet must dress more like one, and her fashion choices immediately put her in conflict with her sanctimonious Christian neighbour. Other women in the community embrace her forward thinking fashion, and due to the ongoing War in Europe, there are more young women than men in the area working the land.
For its time, this book was considered very progressive as it included among Janet’s love interests, a disabled veteran. However all the “Feminism” in this book is most accurately described as White Feminism. There are only white women in this book, which is not an accurate representation of the demographics at the time, and the White Women are expanding their own personal freedoms, in service to bringing their “civilizing” talents to a previously wild and savage land inhabited by wild and savage people.
In her letters Janet speaks highly of the work ethic of her Chinese farmhand, but displays a general distaste for the local Indigneous peoples who are never fully humanized nor identified as being what they would have been (Ktunaxa). One can expect the normal racial slurs of the era to appear in the book, and even while there are no black people in it, the author still finds a way to squeeze in the “N” word (as part of a now offensive adjective for stingy.)
The new prominence of the “Cottagecore” aesthetic online has been challenged by its detractors as being tainted with white nationalist sentiments. Its defenders insist that the modern resurrection of the celebration of an idealised Arcadia through aesthetic posting is actually deeply tied to queer culture and the longing to seperate from society and hide out in the woods while creating a self-sufficient rustic paradise.
Evah McKowan’s contributions to cottagecore through this book are certainly a product of their time and support the nation building projects of the time (the war is patriotic and good, and the holidays being celebrated are those of the British Empire). But there is also in this book a critique against the self sufficiency notions of cottagecore fans: Janet is unable to create her Arcady without relying on her neighbours. At the end of the day there is nowhere you can go that is empty untamed land, and it is not possible to live without assistance and support from a greater community.
I would only recommend this book to scholars of early Canadian literature. While it has value as a historical document, it is simply not engrossing or remarkable enough to entertain the casual reader.