<\/span><\/p>\n And all the time, you pound your little Remington amid the office debris and push your copy through the cigarette-smoke barrage encircling the city editor\u2019s desk\u2014and wonder, \u201cWhat do they mean GLAMOUR?\u201d \u2014 Nielsine Hansen, \u201cWhat About Glamour?\u201d (1929)<\/p>\n T<\/span>he relationship between glamour and literature is not often immediately apparent. Glamour, for one, is not so easy to pin down. It is often referred to as an \u201celusive concept\u201d (Wilson, \u201cA Note on Glamour\u201d 95) or more definitively as \u201ca formal category and an experiential site of consumer desire, fantasy, sexuality, class, and racial identity\u201d (Brown 1). The grammar of glamour inserts itself into the rhetoric of those intangible qualities that once demand and defy definition. Glamour\u2019s associative range of qualities complicate its meaning. For all its vivid depictions in magazines, film, and art, the realm of glamour is exclusive to the broad scope of the imagination, lending its essence to works that reflect its ephemerality. Indeed, glamour has historically been linked with sorcery and metamorphoses; it is precisely glamour\u2019s manipulation of reality that makes its essence so seductive.<\/p>\n Glamour\u2019s etymology traces back to the old word \u201cgramarye,\u201d an alteration of the word grammar that connotes learning as well as the mystifying effects of magic or the act of being charmed. The word glamour was popularized in English by Sir Walter Scott in 1805 with the publication of his long narrative poem, \u201cThe Lay of the Last Minstrel.\u201d Glamour, Scott wrote, \u201cCould make a lady seem a knight; \/ The cobwebs on a dungeon wall \/ Seem tapestry in lordly hall.\u201d Scott\u2019s use of glamour was an Anglicized version of \u201cglamer,\u201d which according to An Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language<\/em> (1897) referred to \u201cthe supposed influence of a charm on the eye, causing it to see objects differently from what they really are\u201d (qtd. in Gundle and Castelli 3). In tracing glamour\u2019s origins, its literary connections are evident. Glamour emerges as a literary form (Brown 9) in the modern era that communicates the language and grammar of transformation through its ability to stir desire and create the illusion of an eternal moment. In a New Yorker<\/em> article discussing the glamour of famed Brazilian author, Clarice Lispector, Benjamin Moser affirms glamour\u2019s power of transfiguration by reflecting upon Lispector\u2019s particular literary glamour. He notes that her distinct brand is \u201cdangerous\u201d citing an anecdote from one of her friends that warned her readers that \u201cit\u2019s not literature. It\u2019s witchcraft\u201d (\u201cThe True Glamour of Clarice Lispector\u201d).<\/p>\n Certainly, celebrated works of fiction carry glamour\u2019s lexical charm. In her study of glamour as an aesthetic symbol of modernity that emerged out of the industrial revolution, Judith Brown maintains that glamour has ties to progress and mass culture and can be used as a methodological tool to assess literature, photography, celebrity and commodity culture. She makes the case for reading<\/em> glamour in works of modernist literature by arguing that:<\/p>\n If critics have generally ignored the concept of glamour, modern writers at times explicitly invoked its magical powers, finding in its effect an expressive capacity akin to that of literature; among those who actually use the word and invoke its power are Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf (9).<\/p>\n For Brown, glamour is an aesthetic property of modernist literature that has come out of the United Kingdom and the United States; yet her practice of reading glamour extends the potential for reading practices across literary movements, temporalities, and nationalities. This article builds upon the complexities and practice of reading glamour, as suggested by Brown, and turns toward a Canadian context that focuses on reading glamour in Phyllis Brett Young\u2019s 1960 novel The Torontonians.<\/em> Young\u2019s text offers a particularly striking starting point into the discussion concerning glamour\u2019s expression in the city by focusing on a moneyed and upper-class Toronto of the 1950s. As Coral Ann Howells argues, we can understand that \u201cThe Torontonians<\/em> [is] a product of Canadian cultural nationalism of the \u201950s and \u201960s, reflecting a new era of prosperity and consumerism\u201d (56). I would extend her point to include glamour as a particularly national component of Young\u2019s text and one that challenges the 1960s perception of \u201cToronto the Good.\u201d1<\/a><\/span><\/sup> To be sure, glamour\u2019s talisman-like quality often lends itself to narratives that seek to challenge the borders of convention and good taste. Glamour, therefore, is Janus-faced. On one hand, it is routinely yoked together with celebrity culture, which conjures up nostalgia for images of Hollywood\u2019s Golden Age, and on the other hand, glamour belies a genuine terror for the natural world. Glamour\u2019s outward appearance is generally a reaction against the seemingly mundane or the absolutely horrific, recalling Shakespeare\u2019s famous line from the Merchant of Venice<\/em> that \u201cAll that glitters is not gold\u201d (2.7.73).<\/p>\n This article, therefore, considers how reading glamour in The Torontonians<\/em> is an exercise in challenging the preconceptions of the city, as the language, grammar, and challenges of glamour are used to de-stabilize assumptions and attitudes surrounding post-war Toronto while simultaneously acknowledging the anxiety of the developing modern city. Through Young\u2019s protagonist, Karen, a feminized urbane glamour emerges, thus building and expanding upon the dimensions of Canadian urban writing.<\/p>\n Northrop Frye\u2019s conception of the \u201cgarrison mentality,\u201d that is, the sense of hostility towards nature by earlier Canadian settlers, has had a profound influence on the country\u2019s literature. While the trope of the Canadian landscape and wilderness has long dominated literary discourse, the Canadian urban novel has had a powerful, albeit often invisible, history, articulating a counter-narrative to the myth of the land (Ivison and Edwards 10). Nevertheless, for many years Torontonians maintained an intense bias against their own writers resulting in a cultural negation of the city\u2019s literary heritage. This \u201cpersistent self-loathing\u201d (Harris 19) extends as far back to the turn of the century, as outlined in \u201cLiterature in Canada\u201d (1899), an essay by novelist and critic Robert Barr:<\/p>\n The bald truth is that Canada has the money, but would rather spend it on whiskey than on books. [\u2026]. What chance has Canada, then, of raising a Sir Walter Scott? I maintain that she has but very little chance, because she won\u2019t pay the money, and money is the root of all literature. The new Sir Walter is probably tramping the streets of Toronto to-day, looking vainly for something to do. But Toronto will recognize him when he comes back from New York or London, and will give him a dinner when he doesn\u2019t need it. (qtd. in Harris 19)<\/p>\n In summoning Scott, the patron of glamour, Barr inadvertently addresses a longing for glamour\u2019s expression to radiate not simply within the pages of the city\u2019s literature but also in its celebration of literature as a national good.<\/p>\n Prior to the 1970s very little Canadian fiction was actively situated in Toronto. For example, Margaret Atwood\u2019s The Edible Woman<\/em> (1969) is notorious for taking place in a nondescript and anonymous urban landscape only vaguely hinting that the downtown she describes may be Toronto and not a nameless American metropolis. Yet in the decades after, particularly in the early aughts, Toronto as a tangible space imbued with its own sense of culture and mythology became increasingly popular in fiction by Toronto authors.2<\/a><\/span><\/sup> Justin D. Edwards and Douglas Ivison, the editors of Downtown Canada: Writing Canadian Cities<\/em> (2005), similarly champion the rise of the Canadian urban novel with their cri de c\u0153ur to honour the country\u2019s downtown spaces in its national literature:<\/p>\n No longer are we content to engage in thematic studies which privilege the wilderness, rural areas, or the small town as the place upon which Canadian identity is constructed. Instead we seek to bridge the gap that exists between the lived experiences of most Canadians, who overwhelmingly live in urban environments, and the public mythology of Canada and critical production on Canadian literature and culture, which has, until recently, largely focused on rural and wilderness spaces and small towns. (6)<\/p>\n The literary shift that began to assert itself toward the latter part of the 20th<\/sup> century to the present highlights Canadian cities as spaces equally worthy of celebration and critical discourse. Toronto-based literature continues to contribute and shape the production of the city, and arguably the city has contributed and shaped the production of literature (Edwards and Ivison 9). A similar sentiment is taken up in Amy Lavender Harris\u2019 Imagining Toronto<\/em>, arguing that Toronto is a textual city, and her work seeks to interpret Toronto literature against the backdrop of the city itself. Harris writes in her introduction:<\/p>\n This book is predicated on a belief that rather than comparing Toronto to the world\u2019s other great literary cities and finding it wanting, we should instead realize that Toronto\u2019s literature reflects an entirely new kind of city, a city where identity emerges not from shared tradition or a long history but rather is forged out of commitment to the virtues of diversity, tolerance and cultural understanding. (14)<\/p>\n Harris\u2019 approach to the city reflects my interpretation of the relationship between glamour and Toronto. Whereas prominent textual cities such as Paris, London, New York City, and Los Angeles are instinctively associated with glamour in the global imagination, Toronto is consistently negotiating its literary glamour as the city continues to develop and change.<\/p>\n Glamour, of course, is not a word that immediately comes to mind in discussions of Toronto literature. At one point in The Torontonians<\/em>, Karen jokingly remarks, \u201cToronto itself, in spite of what the rest of Canada seemed to think of it, had been a lovely city to live in. At the time nobody would have dreamed of calling it the New York of Canada\u201d (101). Caroline Rosenthal further corroborates this claim: \u201cIn an international perspective, Toronto lacks not only the glamour but also the darker aspects of New York. It is commonly regarded as the safer, cleaner, and more tolerant, albeit duller, of the two cities\u201d (31). The use of \u201cglamour\u201d in this context is clearly instructive in its suggestion that Toronto, within the urban imaginary, is completely devoid of glamour, especially compared to the much-mythologized New York City. Rosenthal continues: \u201cAs an imaginative city, Toronto is still in the process of becoming, not because there has been no fiction set in Toronto earlier in the twentieth century, but because it is only now that it is being discussed as a significant corpus of literature and as a way of symbolically building the city\u201d (33). Reading glamour, therefore, in Toronto literature becomes an exercise in challenging these preconceptions of the city and of the city\u2019s literature entirely.<\/p>\n In the Summer 2017 issue of University of Toronto Quarterly,<\/em> Brandon McFarlane discusses the emergent Canadian fiction of 2015 and its tendency toward post-industrialist fiction. McFarlane draws upon Richard Lloyd\u2019s investigation into the rise of neo-bohemian spaces under the \u201cgrit-as-glamour\u201d aesthetic that \u201csuggests that some [Canadian] authors are breathing new life into old myths while creating radically new, transnational aesthetics that can mediate the disruptions and opportunities presented by the era of post-industrialism\u201d (4). Nevertheless, prior to the grit-as-glamour prose, which has become more pervasive in recent Canadian fiction as the country\u2019s major cities have become more global, Phyllis Brett Young was embarking upon her own creation myth for Toronto, using the transformative language of glamour to demonstrate how Toronto was a burgeoning city with a new sense of identity \u201cperched at the edge of modernity\u201d (Harris 289).<\/p>\n Upon first blush, the language of glamour mixed with the spirit of modernity may make for strange bedfellows, yet the two are intrinsically tied. Charles Baudelaire famously coined the term \u201cmodernity\u201d in \u201cThe Painter of Modern Life\u201d (1864) to convey the aesthetic and relative nature of time: \u201cBy \u2018modernity\u2019 I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable\u201d (13). Glamour, as Brown states, is \u201cproduced in the glance backward, now cedes itself to the future, where it may acquire new dimensions in a different language\u201d (19). Both concepts are further reflected in the \u201cmental life\u201d that Georg Simmel outlined in, \u201cThe Metropolis and Mental Life,\u201d concerning the modern<\/em> urban metropolis and how industrialism and rapid urbanization affects the spaces, both mental and physical, of its citizens. Certainly, Baudelaire\u2019s Paris and Simmel\u2019s Berlin occupy differing concerns from their separate geographies and eras, yet the 1950s post-war culture in Toronto exhibited in Young\u2019s text brims with cautious optimism and genuine desire to embrace the modern:3<\/a><\/span><\/sup><\/p>\n Toronto was a boom town where, with the easing of the liquor laws, you could at last buy a drink in public. That is, a real drink, something stronger than four-point beer. A cocktail in a place like the Cork Room, or the Silver Rail, cost you three times what it would have cost you at home, but you went to the bars in spite of this because the bars represented glamour and novelty. (60)<\/p>\n Glamour is broadly defined by its various combinations of fashion, beauty, luxury, celebrity, and wealth; however, early conceptions of glamour were associated with the fascination of the early modern city and modernity itself (see Gundle and Castelli). Young acknowledges Toronto\u2019s puritanical past by highlighting its harsh liquor laws but invokes the glamour of the bar as a fashionable space of conspicuous consumption that reflects the changing mores of the modern city.4<\/a><\/span><\/sup> While The Torontonians<\/em> is not considered a modernist text, albeit, it is a text that considers modern themes, it nonetheless bristles with domestic existentialism as Karen, too, recognizes the potential for her own personal glamour that correlates within the fashionable space that Toronto portends.<\/p>\n In 2007, McGill-Queen\u2019s Press re-issued The Torontonians<\/em>, thus reviving the name Phyllis Brett Young in Canadian literary discourse. In the introduction to the novel, Nathalie Cooke and Suzanne Morton demonstrate that while Phyllis Brett Young is not a common name in the Canadian literary canon, in the early 1960s she was an internationally regarded author alongside notable Canadian writers of the time such as Hugh McLennan and Mordecai Richler. Young was born in Toronto in 1914 and between the years 1959 and 1969 she published four novels, a memoir, and a thriller published under the pseudonym Kendal Young. The Torontonians<\/em>, her second novel, was an instant bestseller both in Canada and the United States, where it first appeared in hardcopy in October 1960. Certainly, this was no small feat for a book that is exclusively and unreservedly very much about late-1950s suburban Toronto. Young was so deeply committed to showcasing Toronto as a vibrant city that she had to fight with her publishers to keep the title. American and British publishers, however, were not persuaded. According to Young\u2019s daughter, Valerie Argue, \u201cIn those days for a novel, or movie, to be set in Canada (and especially Toronto!) was the kiss of death for international sales\u201d (x). Instead, Young\u2019s novel was renamed for the international market under two different titles, Gift of Time<\/em> in the U.S and Europe and The Commuters<\/em> in Australia, ensuring no immediate reference to Canada\u2019s largest city (Argue xi). Nevertheless, when the novel was released local Toronto bookstores were experiencing \u201cunusually large sales\u201d (Fulford qtd. in Grewal) and The New York Times<\/em> professed: \u201cIn a growing catalogue of books that have been proving the sweet life of suburbia, Mrs.\u00a0Young\u2019s stand out as both wise and witty\u201d (qtd. in Grewal), thus guaranteeing Young a modicum of celebrity.<\/p>\n In the foreword to the 2007 reissue, Valerie Argue writes, \u201cIt was not just Toronto and Torontonians but Canada and Canadians that Phyllis Brett Young wanted to put on the map, and in each of her works she tries to do just that. As she said in an Ottawa Citizen<\/em> interview (7 April 1960), \u2018I write because I love Canada and I wish more and more people would write about Canada as it is today\u2019\u201d (xi). Through Karen, Young offers meditations upon the development of the city that are filled with worldly insight and solid criticism acknowledging that Toronto is in the process of becoming a city of the imagination:<\/p>\n After Geneva, you were more critical of Toronto than you had been in the past, but paradoxically you loved it more than you ever had, and you were damn proud of it. It was not London, and it was not Paris, but it was Toronto, and that was more than good enough for you. You were terribly excited about this St.\u00a0Lawrence Seaway thing they had started to talk about, because you could see that if it went through, your city, your Toronto, could become one of the great inland seaports of the world. (149)<\/p>\n Through Karen\u2019s judicious perspective, The Torontonians<\/em> unfolds like a creation myth that explains the essence of the city to the rest of the world offering a glimpse of its own particular urbane glamour.<\/p>\n Young\u2019s novel begins: \u201cEarly morning sunlight warm against the thin, smooth contour of one cheek, Karen sat in the breakfast-room and thought about suicide\u201d (7). This opening sentence faintly echoes Ezra\u2019s Pound\u2019s famous imagist poem \u201cIn a Station of the Metro\u201d5<\/a><\/span><\/sup> with its simple yet profound meditation of the morning. The cool, detached narrative style and stony prose develop like a photograph in a dark room, slowly setting the tone for the rest of the novel. The inherent sheen of glamour is apparent in the untouched beauty of the \u201cEarly morning sunlight,\u201d an alluring spectre, followed by the description of Karen\u2019s slick cheek as if she were a brand-new sportscar. Meanwhile, Young\u2019s opening line hints at the sinister elements of the novel with its casual suggestion of suicide revealing Karen\u2019s darker desires. The nonchalant approach to self-harm is faintly reminiscent of a 1929 journal article from The Iowa Homemaker<\/em> titled, \u201cWhat About the Glamour?\u201d in which the author Nielsine Hansen bemoans that \u201cthere will be days when your public will ring in kicks from morning until night until suicide looks like the primrose path\u201d (3); yet despite the annoyance and despair she concludes \u201cIsn\u2019t there some glamour in that?\u201d (3).<\/p>\n Phyllis Brett Young\u2019s Toronto exists through a lens of post-war ennui, where ladies lunch and men work on Bay Street and come home to cooked dinners made by their wives\u2014living up to its reputation as \u201cToronto the Good.\u201d Karen Whitney, the protagonist of Young\u2019s proto-feminist novel,6<\/a><\/span><\/sup> dreams of being more than just a mother and wife in a nicely manicured, Leaside-type home. Her psychological struggle to achieve a sense of purpose beyond her socially prescribed role forces her to reflect upon certain events that happened in her life while growing up in the city. As Karen carefully examines her past, Young expertly weaves Toronto developmental milestones into the narrative, such as the opening of the Yonge subway line in 1954 and plans to construct the new City Hall. This pas de deux<\/em> reveals as much about Karen\u2019s personal growth as that of the city\u2019s, intrinsically linking the two. The sense of optimism that concludes the novel reads as a forecast for the city that insists there is potential beyond Toronto\u2019s simple \u201cgood\u201d moniker.7<\/a><\/span><\/sup><\/p>\n Fig. 1 Cover of the 1960 Canadian version of The Torontonians<\/p>\n The cover of the 1960 Canadian version of The Torontonians<\/em> (Fig. 1) features a sketch of the new Toronto City Hall in the background while at the fore is an outline of a stylish woman drinking from a martini glass. The construction of the new city hall in 1965 by the Finnish architect Viljo Revell was a feat of modernist architecture and a nod toward the future of the city. With its two curved asymmetric towers, the new City Hall ushered in an era of enthusiasm and pride for the city. Revell had won an international competition to construct the building that would define the city. Many Toronto firms had put forth their own designs but were rebuffed by the public for looking too plain and boring.8<\/a><\/span><\/sup> In a Toronto Star<\/em> article celebrating the 50th<\/sup> anniversary of the construction of the new City Hall, Ryerson University architecture professor George Kapelos explained why the competition was so important for the city:<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t just about Toronto, but a convergence of a whole lot of issues that catalyzed here in this city. People were agitating for newness and modernity. Around the globe, interest in rebuilding cities was intense. Issues such as decolonization, monumentality and national identity were on everyone\u2019s mind. The timing was amazing. (qtd. in Hume)<\/p>\n The juxtaposition of City Hall\u2019s blueprints alongside the silhouette of a woman in the foreground conveys the grammar of glamour in its nod toward futurity and inaccessibility. The woman is presented as an ephemeral figure of beauty and fashion, yet \u201cglamour goes beyond mere fashion. Although the concept of glamour includes fashion, it ultimately involves more than what a woman puts on her body. It deals with the lady herself\u201d (Basinger qtd. in Steele 38). The Torontonians<\/em> is a text that deals<\/em> with the transformation of a city and the anxieties and desires that lie within. Indeed, both City Hall and the woman on the cover of The Torontonians<\/em> are rendered as apparitions that are waiting to be.<\/em><\/p>\n The Torontonians<\/em> was serialized in the pages of Chatelaine<\/em> appearing in three instalments in the October, November, and December issues of 1960. According to Cooke and Morton, \u201cin the 1960s Chatelaine<\/em> explored the very issues at the heart of Young\u2019s novel\u2014the roles and choices available for women in a changing world and the possibilities and anxieties caused by change\u2014in a number of formats within each issue\u201d (xxv). As a distinctly feminine text\u2014one that was featured in a woman\u2019s magazine devoted to \u201cfemale issues,\u201d9<\/a><\/span><\/sup> including fashion and lifestyle advice \u2014 The Torontonians<\/em> exemplifies a glamour that is specifically female.<\/p>\n Glamour, I propose, manifests itself differently in male- and female-driven narratives. For men, glamour is typified by a desire for success. Arguably, one of the most glamorous characters in the English-speaking language from the past one hundred years would be Oscar Wilde\u2019s demonic dandy, Dorian Gray. For Dorian, success is measured by his eternal youth and beauty: \u201cAnd when winter came upon [the portrait], he would still be standing where spring trembles on the verge of summer. When the blood crept from its face, and left behind a pallid mask of chalk with leaden eyes, he would keep the glamour of boyhood\u201d (72). A comparable American counterpoint would be the iconic Jay Gatsby who relies on glamorous excess in order to entice his beloved Daisy Buchanan with his success: \u201cTo the young Gatz, resting on his oars and looking up at the railed deck, the yacht represented all the beauty and glamour in the world\u201d (107). A similarly classic example of a Canadian exhibition of male glamour within the country\u2019s literary canon is Robertson Davies\u2019 Dustan Ramsay in Fifth Business.<\/em> The entirety of the text reads as a defence of Ramsay\u2019s success while celebrating his glamorous exploits.<\/p>\n The modes of glamour take on a different narrative when the central character is a woman. Female glamour is made evident by the character\u2019s longing for circumstances different from her own. Carol Dyhouse notes, \u201cglamour was often linked to a dream of transformation, a desire for something out of the ordinary, a form of aspiration, a fiction<\/em> of female becoming\u201d (3, added emphasis). One may be reminded of Gustave Flaubert\u2019s Emma Bovary poring through fashion magazines day-dreaming of a more glamorous life away from her boring husband. That The Torontonians<\/em> appeared in the pages of a fashion magazine is by no means incidental. As Howells argues, \u201cYoung\u2019s emphasis is on fashionable body images of women and glamour\u201d (58), the staple features of women\u2019s fashion magazines. More to the point, Young emphasizes women in Toronto in the 1950s who occupy one of Canada\u2019s preeminent cosmopolitan spaces. For women reading Young\u2019s text in the pages of Chatelaine<\/em> magazine in the far reaches of Canada\u2019s small-er town and rural communities, Toronto\u2019s glamorous position as a growing modern cosmopolis would have been keenly understood. In Roughing it in the Suburbs: Reading Chatelaine Magazine in the Fifties and Sixties<\/em>, Valerie Korinek goes into detail about one particular article from 1954 that describes how a young woman from northeastern Nova Scotia was magically transformed into \u201cThe Cinderella from Pugwash\u201d while getting a head-to-toe makeover in Toronto. When she returns to her small town with her new hairdo and sophisticated fashion her family is shocked by her transformation, if not a little put off by her new cosmopolitan style. As Korinek remarks, \u201cthe meaning was obvious in this piece: style and glamour triumphed over down-home values and the natural look\u201d (201). So too, does Young\u2019s text reveal the ways in which glamour in the city is a chimera that is both fanciful and frightening in its ability to change public personas and ambitions.<\/p>\n Much of the narrative focuses on Karen fantasizing about her life as a younger woman with her lover in Geneva when the world seemed to be full of possibility instead of limited by her current life circumstances as a homemaker in the fictional Toronto suburban neighbourhood of Rowanwood. Certainly, The Torontonians<\/em> would have resonated with the readers of Chatelaine<\/em> at the time, many of whom would surely have shared Karen\u2019s frustrations:<\/p>\n If you had been a stranger from another planet, you might have wondered if Rowanwood was inhabited at all. You would not have understood the phenomenon of mid-morning doldrums. You had to live in Rowanwood to know that the men had all left the boxes in which they lived for other boxes in the business section downtown; to know that the women were either hidden inside cleaning the former, or had gone off in smaller mechanized boxes to the shopping plaza. These things explained to you, you, the stranger from another planet, would still fail to understand why the women should spend so much time shut up in their boxes. You would, if you had come equipped with any knowledge of the civilization you had invaded, wonder how on Earth women had allowed themselves to be hoodwinked into believing what the manufacturers wanted them to believe\u2014that they had never had it so good. (55)<\/p>\n Judith Brown refers to \u201cThe Moment of Glamour,\u201d the point where the character exists as a moment distinct from the ordinary passage of time: \u201cThere will be no reckless galloping forward of narrative time but the unsteady interplay of past, present, and future that become layered, almost inseparable\u201d (78). Young\u2019s narrator often breaks into the second person, effectively blending the passage of time and sense of place. The speaker\u2019s tone is at once sympathetic and accusatory, prompting us to wonder if the speaker is admonishing Karen or the reader when she reflects:<\/p>\n You did not at the time realize what was happening to you, because when you were really young, rather than \u201cstill young\u201d as the magazines now put it, you were resilient. Incredibly so. It wasn\u2019t until much later, when you found yourself thinking of death as a restful state, and saw your friends leaning on barbiturates, whiskey, and tranquillizers, that you began to understand that, somehow, mechanical evolution had outstripped any social evolution as it might apply to you and most of your generation. (13)<\/p>\n The narrative shift from omniscient to second person is simultaneously intimate and alienating\u2014an effect that reveals part of the grammar of glamour in its \u201cunsteady interplay\u201d of narrative points of view. Ilya Parkins similarly muses that \u201cthe glamorous feminine figure might be better understood to complicate the chain of binaries on which modernity rests\u201d (192). In this regard, Karen\u2019s slow mental breakdown ultimately challenges the prevailing associations and binaries of man\/culture\/city and woman\/nature\/home.<\/p>\n Glamour, Brown notes, is \u201cthe ache for the beautiful thing just out of reach\u201d (87) and in reading glamour the narrative must effectively convey the \u201cbeautiful thing\u201d as far from the reader\u2019s grasp as possible. Brown further argues \u201cGlamour is starkly aligned with the coldness of technology, the rush into the future [\u2026], and therefore bears a relationship to reality, although its reality is nevertheless one of masks and illusion\u201d (106). The Torontonians<\/em>, at its core, is about the \u201cmechanical evolution\u201d of the city and the hesitancy with which the characters accept its steady development into a cosmopolitan urban centre. In this, the reader cannot fully identify with Karen without potentially acknowledging their own deeper desires and anxieties that the second-person narrative demands.<\/p>\n Glamour, no doubt, can be cruel and oppressive to women. At the start of the novel Karen is 40-years old and has two grown daughters who are away in university. She married her husband, Rick, right out of college and immediately had children at a young age. She then stayed home to take care of her children while her husband was away, all the while looking the part of the \u201cexecutive\u2019s wife in a fish blue cotton dress, its utility denied by a wide collar and a frivolously full skirt\u201d (46). Karen\u2019s speech is often imbued with the tropes of glamour: fashion, beauty, and youth. At one point she looks in the mirror and remarks: \u201cI look [\u2026] as if I had stepped out of Vogue<\/em>. A cardboard doll cut out of nothing. I am a success. I have conformed to the pattern, and I wish to God I hadn\u2019t. How have I let this thing happen to me? When did it begin, and where?\u201d (47). Karen\u2019s frustrations were certainly not endemic to Toronto women of the 1950s, but the acknowledgement that she was \u201csimply losing a battle with Helena Rubinstein\u201d (47) demonstrates that Torontonian women shared a sophisticated knowledge of the punishments and indignities that they often must endure.10<\/a><\/span><\/sup><\/p>\n Certainly, The Torontonians<\/em> exhibits a very white and wealthy expression of glamour echoed by Karen\u2019s recollection of some social doggerel she reads in Saturday Night<\/em>: \u201cToronto has no classes, \/ Only the Masseys and the masses\u201d (144). Indeed, who are the Torontonians in The Torontonians<\/em>? Howells further asks, \u201cwho are these people designated by the novelist as representative of the city and its values?\u201d (58). Certainly, there is a whiff of chutzpah<\/em> in a title that suggests the<\/em> definitive text of the city. Moreover, Howells\u2019 work suggests that Young\u2019s title is ironic given that \u201cthe spatial conception of Toronto is focused almost entirely on the new burgeoning surburbia\u201d (59). Karen refers to this area as \u201cThe Hill,\u201d referring to the geography of the neighbourhoods north of Bloor Street. Rowanwood, while fictional, would have resembled the tonier uptown neighbourhoods such as Rosedale, Forest Hill, and Leaside.<\/p>\n The concept of glamour has rightly been criticized for its focus on wealth, and whiteness, and the exoticization of certain cultures and people,11<\/a><\/span><\/sup> but of course, The Torontonians<\/em> is also a product of its time. Laura Mulvey provides further context by referencing American mass consumption in the 1950s:<\/p>\n It was a time when, in the context of the cold war, advertising, movies and the actual packaging and seductiveness of commodities all marketed glamour. Glamour proclaimed the desirability of American capitalism to the outside world and, inside, secured Americanness as inspiration for the newly suburbanized white population as it buried incompatible memories of immigrant origins. (96)<\/p>\n Beyond glamour\u2019s common material components of beauty, youth, and wealth lies less charming elements such as class division, commoditization, and envy. However, there are many different types of glamour that extend beyond fashion and luxury. As Virginia Postrel notes, \u201cGlamour is an imaginative process that creates a specific emotional response: a sharp mixture of projection, longing, admiration, and aspiration. It evokes an audience\u2019s hopes and dreams and makes them seem attainable, all the while maintaining enough distance to sustain the fantasy\u201d (140). For Young, writing in the 1950s and 60s, Toronto had the potential for glamorous escape much in the same way that narratives that feature prominent textual cities such as New York, Paris, or London offered its characters the experience of seduction and enchantment. Nevertheless, Young was also aware of the tensions between \u201cold\u201d and \u201cnew\u201d Torontonians. In Imagining Toronto<\/em>, Harris addresses one of the more overtly satirical moments in the novel when one of Karen\u2019s obnoxious neighbours, Millicent, phones and insists that Karen partake in the charity bridge tournaments she\u2019s organizing to help \u201cNew Canadians\u201d:<\/p>\n You could trace the history of the world back across a good many years just by remembering Millicent\u2019s brief but forceful enthusiasms. The Koreans, the Israelis, the evicted Egyptians, the Hungarians. Without even looking at a newspaper, you could be quite certain that things were relatively quiet in foreign parts if Millicent could find nothing more alarming with which to concern herself than the difficulties, if any, of New Canadians. (14)<\/p>\n The joke, Harris points out, is that Millicent fails to recognize Rowanwood\u2019s homogeneous population, made up entirely of white Anglo-Saxons, where the motto of its inhabitants is \u201ceverybody should live in ranch-style bungalows and be just like themselves\u201d (21).<\/p>\n The Torontonians<\/em> is indeed a novel of manners, and arguably, a novel of manors<\/em> as well given how much attention is placed on the nicely manicured lawns and interior designs of the houses in Rowanwood. The language exhibited in the text often verges on high modernism with its change in narrative tone and imagistic tendencies, yet simultaneously the text frequently reads like a No\u00ebl Coward play12<\/a><\/span><\/sup> set in the suburbs of Toronto instead of Manhattan, featuring a cast of well-heeled sophisticates exchanging witty bon mots<\/em>:<\/p>\n \u201cBut don\u2019t you love it darling?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThat might be putting it a little strongly,\u201d Rick said.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re not a woman.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI think somebody once \u00adpointed that out to me before.\u201d (70)<\/p>\n The charming interplay among the characters is interspersed among the various social gatherings they are either hosting or attending, thereby exhibiting a constant air of sophistication and glamour. Sophistication and glamour plainly share many similar traits, although Faye Hammill is quick to point out that \u201cThe word \u2018sophistication\u2019 undoubtedly has a much longer and more etymologically complex history than \u2018glamour\u2019; I would also argue that the idea of sophistication as a desirable quality goes back a little further than the idea of glamour\u201d (19-20). Young, for her part, made a point to treat Toronto as the \u201csophisticated, cosmopolitan city it is\u201d (qtd. in Grewal), and as such she created characters that reflect a Toronto imbued with the tenets of glamour and sophistication in popular fiction. In this regard, she effectively shifted the discourse away from the wilderness and ravines and embraced the beauty, desires, and tensions of the modern city.<\/p>\n The Torontonians,<\/em> for the modern reader, is a fantasy of a bygone era in Toronto that elevates the narrative\u2019s textual glamour. Indeed, glamour and nostalgia share similar aesthetic properties as expressions of the untouchable and distant past. Elizabeth Wilson notes, almost tautologically, that the \u201clonging of nostalgia has a glamour or a sweetness of its own\u201d (Cultural Passions<\/em> 35), which resonates in the pages of Young\u2019s text as she glosses over decades of the city\u2019s development. The layers of glamour and nostalgia work in tandem in The Torontonians,<\/em> as the modern reader may yearn for the glamour of the past while Karen comes to understand that she has glamorized her past in Geneva and is slowly recognizing the possibility that the modern city offers. Toward the end of The Torontonians,<\/em> Karen walks towards Queen\u2019s Park and makes the realization that the freshly manicured homes of Rowanwood are not for her:<\/p>\n A city with a future, like an individual with a future, could never remain static for long, could not afford to expand indefinitely along the lines of least resistance. The suburbs, as they now existed, were the city\u2019s lines of least resistance. The towering buildings to the south were the real yardstick of its stature. (319)<\/p>\n To be sure, Toronto has had prior difficulty accepting its stature and potential as a glamorous cosmopolitan space. In a Toronto<\/em> Star<\/em> article discussing the use of the Toronto Reference Library as the site for a music video by The Weeknd, a popular Scarborough-raised singer, Edward Keenan writes, \u201cSometimes you need something like a music video to make you look at your own city with new eyes. See the glamour of your home.\u201d Indeed, Wilson attests that, \u201cThe appearance of glamour resides, though, or is created in combination with dress, hair, scent, and even mise en sc\u00e8ne<\/em>\u201d (\u201cA Note on Glamour\u201d 107). As a matter of course, definitions of glamour are slippery and mutable as well as personal. The language of glamour that infuses the The Torontonians<\/em> communicates a distinctly white middle-class feminine desire to move beyond the suburban domestic sphere of the 1950s into the developing and lively bustle of the urban core that the city promises. Certainly, Phyllis Brett Young\u2019s work offers a window into an exciting time in the city\u2019s history, seemingly showcasing the glamour of home. However, the Toronto of The Torontonians<\/em> has vastly changed since its publication. The current expression of glamour in the city reveals itself in the celebrity of Drake and The Weeknd, both racialized people, underscoring how the glamour of home is a partial reflection of Toronto\u2019s vibrant multiculturalism. Young\u2019s work does not anticipate the increased diversity of the city\u2019s growing population nor does it foresee the patina of glamour that paints the city during spectacular events such as the Toronto International Film Festival, the Toronto Pride Parade, Caribana or fashion week; however The Torontonians<\/em> does assume an innate glamour for the city that, much like definitions of glamour, remains fluid.<\/p>\n Argue, Valerie. Foreword. The Torontonians<\/em>, by Phyllis Brett Young, McGill-Queen\u2019s UP, 2007, pp.\u00a0vii-xii.<\/p>\n Bailey, Peter. \u201cParasexuality and Glamour: The Victorian Barmaid as Cultural Prototype.\u201d Gender & History.<\/em> vol.\u00a02, no. 2, 1990, pp.\u00a0148-72.<\/p>\n Baudelaire, Charles. \u201cThe Painter of Modern Life.\u201d The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays.<\/em> Translated by Jonathan Mayne. Phaidon Press, 1964, pp.\u00a01-35.<\/p>\n Brown, Judith. Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form<\/em>. Cornell UP, 2009.<\/p>\n Castelli, Clino T. and Stephen Gundle. The Glamour System<\/em>. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.<\/p>\n Cooke, Nathalie, and Suzanne Morton. Introduction. The Torontonians<\/em>, by Phyllis Brett Young, McGill-Queen\u2019s UP, 2007, pp.\u00a0xvii-xxxi.<\/p>\n Edwards, Justin D, and Douglas Ivison, editors.\u00a0Downtown Canada: Writing Canadian Cities<\/em>. University of Toronto Press, 2005.<\/p>\n Dyhouse, Carol. Glamour: Women, History, Feminism. Zed, 2010.<\/p>\n Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby<\/em>. 1925. Scribner, 1953.<\/p>\n Grewal, San. \u201cThe story of a local literary gem, lost and found.\u201d The Toronto Star<\/em>, 26 Jan.\u00a02008, https:\/\/www.thestar.com\/news\/2008\/01\/26\/the_story_of_a_local_literary_gem_lost_and_found.html<\/span><\/a>. Accessed 15 Aug.\u00a02017.<\/p>\n Gundle, Stephen. Glamour: A History<\/em>. Oxford UP, 2008.<\/p>\n Harris, Amy Lavender. Imagining Toronto<\/em>. Mansfield Press, 2010.<\/p>\n Hansen, Nielsine. \u201cWhat About Glamour?\u201d The Iowa Homemaker<\/em>. vol.9, no.5, 1929, pp.\u00a03.<\/p>\n Hammill, Faye. Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History.<\/em> Liverpool UP, 2010.<\/p>\n Hill, Colin. Modern Realism in English-Canadian Fiction<\/em>. University of Toronto Press, 2012.<\/p>\n Howells, Coral Ann. \u201cFrom Rowanwood to Downtown: The Torontonians<\/em> and Girls Fall Down.<\/em>\u201d Literature and the Glocal City: Reshaping the English Canadian Imaginary<\/em>, edited by Ana Maria Fraile-Marcos, Routledge, 2014, pp.\u00a055-68.<\/p>\n Hume, Christopher. \u201cAt 50, Toronto\u2019s City Hall is ahead of the curve.\u201d The Toronto Star,<\/em> 30 Aug.\u00a02015, https:\/\/www.thestar.com\/news\/gta\/2015\/08\/30\/at-50-torontos-city-hall-is-still-ahead-of-the-curve-hume.html<\/span><\/a>.Accessed 14 Aug.\u00a02017<\/span>.<\/p>\n Keenan, Edward. \u201cVideo images of local haunts help you see the glamour of home.\u201d The Toronto Star<\/em>, 18 June 2017, https:\/\/www.thestar.com\/news\/gta\/2017\/06\/18\/video-images-of-local-haunts-help-you-see-the-glamour-of-home-keenan.html. Accessed 15 Aug.\u00a02017<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n McFarlane, Brandon. \u201cEmergent Fiction.\u201d University of Toronto Quarterly<\/em>, vol.\u00a086, no. 3, 2017, pp.\u00a01-24.<\/p>\n Moser, Benjamin. \u201cThe True Glamour of Clarice Lispector.\u201d The New Yorker<\/em>, 10 July 2015, https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/books\/page-turner\/the-true-glamour-of-clarice-lispector<\/span><\/a>. Accessed 17 Aug.\u00a02018.<\/p>\n Mulvey, Laura, and British Film Institute. Fetishism and Curiosity: Cinema and the Mind\u2019s Eye<\/em>. 2nd ed. Palgrave Macmillan on behalf of the British Film Institute, 2013.<\/p>\n Parkins, Ilya. \u201cElsa Schiaparelli and the Epistemology of Glamorous Silence.\u201d Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies.<\/em> no. 25, 2011, pp.\u00a0190 -5.<\/p>\n Postrel, Virginia I. The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion<\/em>. Simon & Schuster, 2013.<\/p>\n Pound, Ezra. \u201cIn A Station of the Metro.\u201d Academy of American Poets,<\/em> https:\/\/www.poets.org\/poetsorg\/poem\/station-metro<\/span><\/a>. Accessed 14 Aug.\u00a02017.<\/p>\n Rosenthal, Caroline.\u00a0New York and Toronto Novels After Postmodernism: Explorations of the Urban.<\/em> Camden House, 2011.<\/p>\n Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice<\/em>. Yale University Press, 1923.<\/p>\n Simmel, Georg. \u201cThe Metropolis and Mental Life.\u201d The Sociology of Georg Simmel<\/em>. Translated by Kurt Wolff. Free Press, 1950, pp.\u00a0409-24.<\/p>\n Steele, Valerie. \u201cFashion.\u201d Glamour: Fashion, Industrial Design, Architecture<\/em>, edited by Phil Patton, Virginia Postrel and Valerie Steele, Yale UP, 2004, pp.\u00a038-49.<\/p>\n York, Lorraine M. \u00a0Literary Celebrity in Canada<\/em>. University of Toronto Press, 2007.<\/p>\n Young, Phyllis Brett. The Torontonians: A Novel.<\/em> 1960. McGill-Queen\u2019s UP, 2007.<\/p>\n Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray<\/em>. 1890. Penguin, 2000.<\/p>\n Wilson, Elizabeth. \u201cA Note on Glamour.\u201d Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture,<\/em> vol.\u00a011, no. 1, 2007, pp.\u00a095-107.<\/p>\n \u2014-. Cultural Passions: Fans, Aesthetes and Tarot Readers.<\/em> I.B. Tauris, 2013.<\/p>\n
\nReading Glamour<\/span> in Phyllis Brett Young\u2019s The Torontonians<\/em><\/h1>\n
\n<\/a>Introduction: The Language, Grammar and Challenges of Reading Glamour<\/h2>\n
<\/a>Finding Glamour in the Margins in Toronto\u2019s Literature<\/h2>\n
<\/a>Phyllis Brett Young and the Glamour of The Torontonians<\/em><\/h2>\n
![\"Fig.](\"https:\/\/imaginations.space\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/Torontoniansbookcover-665x1024.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>The Modes of Female Glamour<\/h2>\n
<\/a>Glamour\u2019s Blithe Spirit<\/h2>\n
<\/a>Conclusion: Finding the Glamour of Home<\/h2>\n
<\/a>Works Cited<\/h2>\n
Notes<\/h2>\n