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- Title
"Is the Flapper a Menace?": Miss Toronto, Delight, and the Making of the Modern Toronto Girl.
- Authors
Franklin, Kathryn
- Abstract
Drawing upon the fanfare surrounding the first Miss Toronto pageant in 1926, this essay demonstrates how the city used the popularity of the pageant format to prescribe ideas tied to modern Canadian femininity. The winner of the 1926 Miss Toronto pageant, Jean Ford Tolmie, became a focal point for competing ideas about modern and traditional Toronto womanhood. Published in the same year, Mazo de la Roche's novel, Delight, which arguably contains an early example of the Modern Girl in Canadian literature, may be read as a reflection of these growing tensions through her examination of urban modernity coming up against rural traditionalism in a small Ontario town. Through the character Delight, de la Roche raises questions associated with the inherent public threat of the self-possessed Canadian Modern Girl and her place in the city. Ultimately, this comparative analysis of the Modern Girl in the 1926 Miss Toronto pageant and her fictional counterpart in Delight calls attention to her importance in shaping Toronto's urban imaginary in the 1920s while simultaneously calling attention to the city's ambivalence toward its modernity.
- Subjects
BEAUTY contests; FEMININITY; DE la Roche, Mazo, 1879-1961; CANADIAN literature; GIRLS in literature
- Publication
Space Between: Literature & Culture, 1914-1945, 2022, Vol 18, pN.PAG
- ISSN
1551-9309
- Publication type
Article