Home Social Landscape Featured Articles Encountering Emily: Alberta Women’s Responses to Magistrate Murphy

Encountering Emily: Alberta Women’s Responses to Magistrate Murphy 

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The beauty of Virginia Clin's fragmented expression and the sadness of her story are moving. I can only wonder what Murphy's response to this letter was, whether she felt any twinge of genuine affinity for this woman's situation or whether she would have completely cut herself off and insulated herself from the risks of extending her moral imagination into the insight and pain of this woman. From what they have left for us to understand them by, it would seem that the scattered, poignant, authentic, and poetic world of Virginia Clin was altogether uninhabitable for Emily Murphy.⁸

Even this one example of an encounter with Emily reveals that our project of relating to her historical persona is now necessarily conflicted. We may question whether her attitudes and actions can be fairly judged by our standards of equality and inclusiveness. We may seek to acknowledge and celebrate her accomplishments while expressing regret about her multiple forms of bigotry. But unqualified veneration of Murphy is no longer available as a legitimate response to her legacy.

In coping with these complex emotional responses to our history it is instructive to refer to the work of historian Eric Foner.⁹ Foner argues that our relationship to history can become more meaningful if, instead of trying to obliterate and tear down those historical figures whom we now find embarrassing or reprehensible, we would juxtapose our old memorials to tarnished heros and heroines with new counter-memorials signifying our critique of these figures as well as our recognition of the struggles of those whom they oppressed. Drawing on this insight we might, for example, respond to the recent controversy over whether a battered women's shelter should no longer bear the name of Emily Murphy given her complicity in inequality and injustice¹⁰, by forgoing the impulse to expunge Murphy's name while also embracing the need to recognize those people who were victims of her injustice. Perhaps, our historical understandings would be immeasurably enriched, made more authentic and complex, if we were even able to imagine naming a battered women's shelter Emily Murphy and Virginia Clin House.

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Aspenland II: Life and Work of Women in Central Alberta: a publication of the Central Alberta Regional Museums Network and the Central Alberta Historical Society, Spring 2003, edited by David Ridley.