Lovely tender exotics: exploring Victorian female agency in the western Canadian fur trade, 1830-51

Abstract

This thesis explores the ability of Victorian-era women to demonstrate agency in the colonial setting. The subjects of this study are Frances Simpson, Isobel Finlayson, and Letitia Hargrave, all upper-middle class European women who married fur traders of the Hudson’s Bay Company in the first half of the nineteenth century and relocated with their husbands to Rupert’s Land. While traveling to, and living in the fur trade, these women recorded their experiences and actions in the form of travel journals and letters, demonstrating how they purposefully and deliberately upheld the expectations placed upon them to be respectable, domestic, feminine women. This thesis argues that by acting in ways expected of them as Victorian-era women, Simpson, Finlayson, and Hargrave found the ability to display agency and negotiate their physical and social spaces in the fur trade.