HUMANITIES ESSAY Minor architectures, micro empires: women and the production of domestic space on the nineteenth-century Pacific ‘Frontier’

This essay looks at three portraits of women as homemakers on the Pacific Northeast in the decades that followed the accession of British Columbia to the larger Dominion of Canada in 1873. In this period, when colonial relationships were buttressed by legal and administrative means, ideas and practices of the home were central to the spread of Victorian moral norms on the Canadian ‘frontier’. It was also the intimate microcosm in which colonial spatial notions of interiority and exteriority, relationships to the site, and object-regimes had to be negotiated. The work of space-making that ‘frontier’ women presented in minor pictorial and literary genres – letters, private photographs, and watercolours, was in itself a ‘minor architecture’ that was about finished form, or objecthood, and also about the perpetual negotiation of contradictory and unstable imperial spatial relationships. These relationships had to be reworked, reproduced, and redefined. The histories of these minor architectures on the ‘frontier’ reveal the power of architecture to weave hegemonic values into the very fabric of existence, as well as fundamental interconnectedness of the identity of settler women and their labour.

Imperial annexation went hand in hand with promoting white domesticity as a symbol of civilisation, morality, and piety. Large-scale dispossession of the Indigenous population, sanctioned by the colonial Canadian government and reinforced by coercive means [11], simultaneously involved establishing Victorian domesticity as a micro-political instrument of fortifying imperial rule [12; 13; 14]. It was during this period that the Canadian government called for the mass immigration of women of Anglo-Saxon origin, as a measure against the homosocial and mixed-race relationships which has characterised previous life on the 'frontier', the white patriarchal household becoming not merely a symbol of moral uprightness but also of belonging to British civilisation.
Glimpses I will start my exploration with three objects. The first is a letter from November 1874, in which Emma Crosby, a missionary wife living on the Northern British Columbian coast, describes her life and missionary efforts to her mother in Ontario ( Figure 1). The second is the photograph of Charlotte Kathleen O'Reilly, an unmarried woman from a high-ranking family in Victoria, in which she poses as a gardener (Figure 2). The third is a watercolour painting featuring a home interior arranged by its painter, Josephine Crease, an artist and home decorator ( Figure   3). Using minor literary and pictorial genres of letters, a private photograph, and watercolour, respectively, these women captured their work on cleaning, decorating, classifying domestic spaces by use, tending to home and garden, organising the form according to aesthetic standards of the time.
These objects are located in repositories of colonial culture -State-sponsored historical archives -of British Columbia and the University of British Columbia.
Historically understood as repositories of 'objective' knowledge, these archives can also be considered a self-representation, a self-portraiture of the colonial society -assemblages of all things deemed important as traces of collective experience.
In other words, not merely bodies of indexical evidence, as nineteenth-century historical norms would establish them to be, but, as Stoler would put it, 'supreme technology of the late nineteenth-century imperial state', as its supposedly objective trace [15: p. 57].
The three artifacts that I found hold a special place in this vast system of selfrepresentation. They are clearly subjective, as female self-portraits as homemakers -a letter about managing the household, a photograph of watering the garden, a picture of a well-ordered drawing room created by the one who made it. But it is precisely the 'subjectivity' of these images that offers us glimpses into ways in     Thomas Crosby's Methodist mission, founded in 1874, had as its goal moral and spiritual as well as economic integration of the Indigenous population into the Dominion. As he worked on converting the Tsimshian, the Nisga'a, the Haida, and the Gitxsan, while his wife managed the household and the church school. Their two enterprises -male and female, were materialised in two buildings emblematic of the mission -church and the mission house (Figure 4), both designed by an architect from Victoria, Thomas Trounce, as a donation to the mission, and emblematic of British 'taste' that was supposed to impress and aesthetically convert Indigenous people [17]. The house and the church were connected to two bodies of literary work -Emma's letters are one. The other is Thomas's memoirs of his itinerant work on 'converting' First Nations all across the region [18; 19] Let me now discuss the idea of 'domestic arrangements'. In a letter written to her mother during the period between 5th January and 11th February [27], Emma encloses the sketch of the house plan ( Figure 5). What the plan shows is not merely the layout of the new abode, but also Emma's Western competence in understanding spatial categories and architectural divisions that accompany them. Her letters testify to how, by applying particular rules of decorating and organising objects, she works on translating these categorisations into visual and haptic experiences and an order of things, in a manner consistent with the general Victorian female endeavour of translating 'the ideology of a perfect home', at the core of British middle-class identity [28: p. 9], into physical reality.
In her letters, Emma devotes special attention to the furnishing of spaces which were customarily understood as female -bedroom and sitting room (or parlour).
She describes the bedroom to her mother: You ask if we have a 'good bed'? ... It is as good as I ever slept on I think.
The bedstead is a new one and quite pretty one we got in Victoria. The mattresses we got there too. It is made of something similar to wool.
The bureau has a large oval glass, marble top and white knobs -the washstand of an approved pattern. So with the new carpet and some of Auntie's little mats and your nice one bedside the bed, it is a cosy little room. [29] The 'cosy' space of familial conjugal intimacy, the bedroom, is complemented by the space of female solitude, a 'bright' sitting room, with 'bright carpet' and 'a green lounge in it, an oval center table and a little stand, a rocking chair' [29]. In contrast to the bedroom and the sitting room, dining room and study, gendered as masculine, were supposed to convey respectability and are 'plainly furnished', and 'hung with pictures and maps and contains the book cases and an oval table', as well as a variety of objects, such as a stereoscope and magic lantern, meant to impress the Tsimshian visitors.  Labour qua labour The goal of Emma's work was to uphold the standards of the Victorian household on the frontier. It involved maintaining the architectural arrangements which were part of British middle-class identity as fundamentally architectural, as Tange stressed in her analysis of Victorian literature [28]. This is concrete labour of buying things, sweeping the house, organising objects, a female architectural endeavour that is inseparable from other activities aimed at maintaining the physical and symbolic space understood as 'home'. In her letters Emma expressed pride in her knitting and crochet work, skill in repurposing clothing, mending stockings, sawing pinafore aprons for her daughters. Her letters provide fascinating details about the Anglo-Saxon diet on the colony's edge, with Emma baking bread and complementing local food staples -fish, venison, and clam -with fruits and vegetables from Victoria by steamboat -cherries, apples, tomatoes, green peas and beans, pears, and plums -and how she churned butter from the milk of their cow.
The spatial work Emma was performing as the organiser and classifier of domestic spaces is inseparable from her work on home upkeep, on home maintenance, and those together are the female parallel to the architectural act of erecting the mission house performed by Thomas Trounce and Thomas Crosby. In many ways, this was a work of minor, shadow architecture, key to translating the building into what Emma and other women of her age understood as 'home'.
Descriptions of housework absolutely dominate Emma's writing which, it can be deduced, had one important goal -to assure her mother (and possibly other relatives to which the letter was read) that Emma was a hard worker, relentlessly toiling to uphold the standards of a proper middle-class household on the frontier.
Let us look for a moment at the nature and importance of this labour within the larger historical context. The best analysis of the relationship between capitalism and Protestant self-understanding is still that established by Webber, who writes that at the essence of Protestantism is the cult of work, which corresponds to capitalist aversion of idleness of both labour and capital [30]. According to Webber, that Protestantism is a fundamentally capitalist religion as it condemns idleness of both people and capital and thus stimulates both labour exploitation and capital growth. Webber isolates three tenets of Protestantism in the service of this main idea. One is the promotion of work as an end in itself, with laboriousness presented as godliness. The other is that it develops the notion of work as 'calling', as fulfilling a higher purpose and giving life meaning. The third is that it promotes asceticism and thrift, ascesis as indicative of productivity (that is, absence of leisure).
All three are the principles of Emma's life. She works all the time and understands herself as a labourer; she sees her work as part of performing a larger calling; her work is epitomised in her judicious and thrifty management of the home. As an expression of protestant spirit, Emma's homemaking work was the microcosmic complement her husband, but potentially a superior one. It was work without end, a goal in itself, not justified by any kind of outcome or product, relentless, indefinite. And, as such, it was both a better manifestation of the capitalist ethos than that of her male counterparts and defined her as the labourer qua labourerin Protestant context, the epitome of piety.

Inside and outside
On the spiritual, economic, and administrative 'frontier', Emma's domestic toilas a manifestation of both piety and the nascent capitalist spirit -was constantly on display to the Indigenous people she was trying to convert. Home was part of the colonial 'exhibitionary complex' [31; 32]. It is crucial that what was on display was not only classifications of space, 'civilised' object assemblages, but also labour itself. Emma described her work to her distant family; but work was also what Macketlow calls, writing about missionary wives, a 'public performance of [spiritual] agency' [33: p. 151]. Emma saw her role in the Tsimshian community not as that of formal spiritual conversion (this was left to Thomas), but instead that of mothering, as manifested first and foremost in her guardianship over her Tsimshian 'charges' -girls that she took into her household to supposedly 'protect'.
These young women who were left there usually by their relatives to gain skills and social knowledge that would be helpful in the context of the dispossession and marginalisation that colonialism produced, were trained in gendered labour -cooking, knitting, cleaning, childcare. This training was supposed to culminate 6 Vujosevic T, Minor architectures, micro empires. Emma's 'domestication' in this context had two simultaneous connotations, which correspond to the dynamic between interiority and exteriority that Amy Kaplan has written about. Kaplan points out that there is a double structural opposition at the heart of the imperial project. It is the opposition between the domestic and the public coupled with the opposition between domestic and the foreign. In Kaplan's words, domesticity 'makes manifest the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race, while Manifest Destiny becomes in turn the condition for Anglo-Saxon domesticity' Emma's dissatisfaction with her 'charges', and here ambivalence about their presence in the home, especially after she had her own biological children, points to contradictions that plagued the Imperial project of domestication at large.
Like all colonisers, the Crosby's wanted, at the same time, to fold the 'Indians' into white 'civilisation', on the one hand, and yet to preserve racial boundaries on the other. In this situation, the Tsimshian were neither inside or outside the imperial realm, and, correspondingly neither inside nor outside the colonial home.
In Emma's household, this dynamic was manifested by her simultaneously feeling that she had a duty towards her Indigenous 'charges' set against her mistrust of them. By bringing them into her home, she was trying to incorporate the outer world into her motherly Imperial domain; but by also portraying them as less competent and less trustworthy, she was contracting her domestic sphere to assert The capacity to till the soil of this imaginary garden, which was in itself cyclical and repetitive work, formed the basis of imperial land claims. The difference between Indigenous people and the white settlers had been framed from the beginning as a difference precisely in their capacity to cultivate. As early as 1831, in his

'The Queen's Gardens'
The notion of the garden first mentioned in Jesuit narratives about Canada, and then taken up in colonial narratives of British Columbia, was hence a potent metaphor which framed the relationship between the white settlers and First Nations peoples. It was complex in that it simultaneously referred to two aspects: a Biblical sense of Eden as a site of economic fertility wherein the land was amenable to exploitation and cultivation, as well as the site's Edenic beauty in terms of its picturesque qualities.
In Victorian literature about gender, the metaphor of the domestic garden was likewise complex. Gardens were where gentile identity was crafted, with the flower garden especially being a locus where women performed their nurturing role in public [39]. Women were also themselves 'gardened' -an entire body of nineteenth-century literature presented them as 'delicate, frail flowers to be watered and cared for, as well as "gardeners" themselves, capable of caring for others once they are properly tended to' [40]. Perhaps the most notable use of the garden metaphor to refer to women's capacity to care and be cared for came in John Ruskin's lecture on 'Sesame and Lilies', in which he described the ideal Victorian home as 'The Queen's Gardens' [41]. The key topic of his speech was the importance of educating women in a way that would cultivate their hearts rather than their minds, enabling them to be the 'helpmate' of men. Once tended to as a 'lily', a woman would become capable of transforming her home into a garden: Charlotte's photographs belonged to a genre which had only just appeared in British Columbia -the private portrait. Previously, the initial use of photography had  Thus, in these two different photographs from 1890, Charlotte O'Reilly was shown both as an object of beauty in her father's garden, a Ruskinian 'lily', but also in her motherly role as cultivator who could make the garden and awaken its fertility.
In the former photograph, Charlotte appreciates the beauty of the landscape around her house in the same way that an explorer or tourist would when they encountered the supposedly 'virgin land' in Canada's Pacific frontier. In the latter action portrait, however, this frontier woman presented herself as part of the colonial process of resource extraction. Her effort to capture herself in these two completely different roles was a negotiation between her microgeographic (domestic) and macrogeographic (imperial) relationship to the site on which Point Ellice House stood. Charlotte's self-representations -as connoisseur and worker -reflected the contradictory rhetoric of Canada as an imperial garden both to behold and to exploit.   their material qualities and symbolic meaning -but then also the capacity to arrange these objects in a manner that demonstrated education and refinement, to reveal character and imperial identity, and of how to morally influence the behaviour of inhabitants and visitors [39]. It was their relationship to objects, and the ability to create object assemblages, which turned Canadian women into creatures of sophistication and good taste while also expressing geopolitics within the microenvironment of their homes. Susan, also a watercolourist. Josephine's painting is part of a larger series that does not include her, but which reveal the object arrangements in the intimate spaces she inhabited (Figure 7). What is particularly interesting in this instance is that Josephine figures both as the maker of this interior and the painter of the interior she made. This negotiated her artistic and decorating expertise as two kinds of aesthetic work. Although she is absent from the painting, Josephine used the image to assert her identity as a woman and a colonial subject, creating a particular sensory environment.
Josephine Crease's watercolours thus display a wealthier and more sophisticated version of Emma Crosby's parlour, with the painter's identity being projected through her choice of books, urns, dishes, artworks, mirrors, books, curtains, tablecloths, chairs, tables, candlesticks, vases, mirrors, cushions, drapes, lamps, tea sets, and countless other knick-knacks -all of them mass-produced objects that Josephine would have acquired as a consumer from Canada's upper class.

The morality/immorality of consumption
Literature on Victorian interior decoration and its connection to 'character' stresses the importance of the choice and arrangement of objects. In the imperial context, such objects were not just a neutral means of negotiating female identity; instead, they also were laden with ethical, economic, spiritual baggage, creating contradictions that were not easy to solve and yet which framed Josephine Crease's efforts.
The problem with acquiring and consuming objects within that historical context was the contradiciton between the need to demonstrate wealth, culture, and status, while simultaneously regarding consumption as ethically suspect, a product of leisure and waste that was antithetical to the Protestant work ethic. This applied not only to domestic decoration but also to the whole object-dynamics of the British Empire, whereby the circulation of commodities and the capacity to acquire goods from across the globe was simultaneously a sign of British power and its profligacy [44]. There was hence a conflict between the fruits of capitalism and what Webber called its 'spirit' [30]. Wealth resulting from imperial dominance was celebrated, while at the same time Christian missionaries, who provided colonial expansion with 'spiritual' ground, bringing it into the domain of the most intimate relationships, warned sternly against excessive consumption.
Western imperialism thus meant conversion to varieties of Protestant religion that condemned surplus and waste, as well as inculcating a taste for western goods.
Britain considered itself to be privileged by God due to the volume and extent of its trade, and to its ability to 'domesticate' frontiers in Canada and elsewhere [44: p. 126]. Yet at the same time, consumption was immoral, according to Protestant norms, creating a particularly schizophrenic condition. In The Protestant Ethic, Webber talks about 'ascesis' as the third key element of the Protestant 'spirit', in addition to the sanctification of work and the idea about labour as one's calling.
But what does 'ascesis' mean in the context of the British Empire? My hypothesis here is that ascesis did not necessarily mean abstinence from consumption, but rather the imposition of aesthetic rules onto the acquisition and arrangement of objects to present these collections as rational and disciplined.
The significance of these aesthetic rules was all the more pertinent on the British Empire's frontiers, where the relationship to objects was particularly fraught and emblematic of colonial relationships. In the Pacific northeast at the dawn of Canadian/British Columbian statehood, great care was put into distinguishing the display of objects according to British middle-class taste as a sign of capitalist civilisation from the wasteful attitude towards objects in the barbarous Indigenous Indigenous peoples, such as those who paid for Dr Bertrand Wilbur's westernstyle model cottages for the Tlingint in Alaska in the 1880s and 1890s, were assured by the fact that the 'cottages are, in fact plain, but have both comfortable and aesthetically pleasing decoration' -possessing 'a carpeted, sofa at one side, rocking chairs, table and book case, as we -should find in any comfortable home', along with 'a cabinet with some pretty china and a few odd trinkets treasured by the family' and some 'bedsteads and the usual furniture' [45: p. 164]. In contrast the potlatch was portrayed by colonisers as being 'primitive' because it was wasteful of resources, which should be accumulated and not given away, and of time, which would be better spent in productive work [45].

The empire of things
Josephine Crease's paintings of domestic interiors were inspired not only by the impetus to articulate a 'civilised' relationship to objects but also by middle-class manuals such as Isabella Beeton's Housewife's Treasury of Domestic Information, a volume of more than a thousand pages first published in 1865, which advised women on every possible aspect of home management from gastronomy and clothing, needlework, 'toilet', hiring servants, through to facial care and the choice of games for leisure hours [46]. Its largest section was dedicated to how to decorate various rooms and how to develop expertise in buying objects like carpets and rugs and furniture -the essential components of well-appointed home. The Housewife's Treasury was the ultimate consumerist manual for an imperial world, discussing as it did the best way to purchase mass-produced goods such as 'musical instruments, paintings, statuary, a portfolio of engravings'

Ascesis
Josephine Crease was clearly obsessed with things. In her diaries she does not focus on social events, like most upper-class women in British Columbia at the time, but upon inventories and descriptions of household objects. She thus not only listed them but attempted to establish a system of things, a discipline whereby she could relate to them through colour coordination -a system that connected the subject and the object, the painted with the painting. Isabella Beeton likewise sought to establish a direct connection between painterly and homemaking knowledge. She described home decoration as an art, quoting Lacroix, Pugin, Owen, Plato, and referred for example to Pugin's rediscovery of Gothic design as a watershed moment in nineteenth-century history, leading to the provision of Gothic Revival furniture [46: p. 244]. She also realised that a knowledge of colour was essential to link art to the home, so she recommended housewives to read the work of Owen Jones, who had established order within the chaos of the Crystal Palace by colour-coordinating its interior and then elaborated on his ideas in his classic book, The Grammar of Ornament [47].
It is interesting to see how the colour-coding of the Crystal Palace, as a monument to the British Empire, trickled down into the aesthetics of Victorian home interiors in Britain and its colonies as small-scale settings for displaying imperial riches -albeit in a more restrained, disciplined, and ascetic manner. Isabella Beeton, expanding upon Owen Jones, provided her readers with instructions on how to choose the colour of wallpaper, upholstery, furniture, and carpets as the most essential elements of interior decoration. She thus helped to introduce the idea of 'complements' (such as green and red, or yellow and blue, as featured in Josephine Crease's watercolours), and of secondary colours, and of tertiary colours (citrine, russet, olive, etc).
Josephine Crease's fascination with household objects in her diaries was matched by her painterly fascination with colour coordination, suggesting that the main aim of her interior watercolours was not really the formal arrangement of things but the juxtaposition of colours to follows Jones's and Beeton's principles. Londonschooled Josephine would have been familiar with those books. Thus, we can see deliberately contrasting hues of purple and yellow, red and green. Drapery, wall surfaces, and upholstery are all carefully matched. Her watercolours and her colour coordination show Crease as capable of both physically creating and representing the home, her identity being formed in the oscillation between these two endeavours. By removing herself from her paintings, and instead projecting herself through objects, she was, of course, reifying herself through her selfidentity with the world of goods. Yet through painting, she also managed to be an observer of the domestic realm, her aesthetic sensibility inseparable from her work in terms of domestic space-making. In that, she elevated housework to the level of an (imperial) artistic enterprise, and, in turn, presented art as an (imperial) domestic act.
The art of minor architecture on the settler frontier in British Columbia was therefore the art of making and remaking the home according to prescribed rules coupled with the art of representing oneself in the act of making. This production of home space in the Pacific northeast in the 'Age of Empire' involved translating colonial understandings about interiority and exteriority, sites and objects, into a domestic spatial logic. In the process of physical and symbolic production, the three women discussed in this essay each negotiated their identities as both aesthetic and productive subjects. In contrast to the architecture of their male counterparts, as well as the broader imperial realm, the minor architecture produced by women did not ultimately exist in any finished form, since it was about labour itself -that is, the labour of making, maintaining, rearranging, re-matching, and so on. The power of architecture in this register was both to tie female identity to labour qua labour and also to refract imperial spatial categories within the physical microgeographies of the intimate and everyday spaces of white settlers' homes.