`Just like clear, fresh water from the pump’’: Class, Christianity, and Comedy in the Life and Playwriting of Clara Rothwell Anderson.

This paper will discuss the early, twentieth-century life and playwriting of Clara Rothwell Anderson who, apart from Sister Mary Agnes, wrote more plays than any Canadian woman of her generation. It will argue that her extraordinary productivity is directly related to her class and race privilege, both as the daughter of a teacher and politician and later as a minister’’s wife. It will further relate her social status to the ideology of the Social Gospel that galvanized many Protestant women’’s reform organizations, like the Ladies’’ Aid of MacKay Protestant Church in Ottawa, for which Anderson’’s plays raised money. It’’s treatment of Marrying Anne? (192--?) and Aunt Susan's Visit (1917) will identify the ways in which the ethics of the Social Gospel are reinforced by the generic constraints of comedy in which the hero’’s society, as Northrup Frye says, is "ushered in with a happy rustle of bridal gowns and banknotes."