Kym Bird: Bad Habits: Sister Mary Agnes, Jingoism, and the Question of Literary Citizenship in A Patriot’s Daughter and Other Plays

Sister Mary Agnes, a turn-of-the-twentieth-century catholic nun, wrote more plays than any woman of her generation.  Born in Boston Massachusetts, Agnes came to Montreal at the age of 23 and spent the rest of her life in Canada, where she penned as many as a hundred plays.  These facts alone would allow historians of Canadian drama to claim her as a Canadian playwright. But the question of Agnes’s literary citizenship is rather more complicated than circumstances allow.  Despite having written virtually every one of her dramas between 1909 and 1928 while a teacher at St. Mary’s Academy for girls in Winnipeg, and despite having mounted most performances of her plays there, the ideological slant of much Agnes’s work is stridently American.  With A Patriots Daughter (1914), Agnes wrote a play about the American Revolution that recreates in domestic and comedic terms the Boston Tea Party.  In it, the privileged values of Christianity, filial legitimacy, and proper feminine behaviour are linked to Yankee notions of liberty and Justice, whereas the British (and thus, the Canadians) are associated with a reign of tyrannical rule.