In the Skin of a Lion

The rapid industrial growth and demographic change in early 20th-century Canada are crucial to the novel. Canada saw a wave of immigration at the turn of the century: Between 1896 and 1914, about 3 million immigrants—mostly from Eastern Europe—flooded into the country to satisfy the demands of a growing labor market. Agriculture had previously dominated the Canadian economy, but during this period there was a pronounced shift toward mechanized industry and increased demand for wage labor. Even before the World War I, Canadian industry was growing rapidly, particularly as the Great Lakes were beginning to be exploited for their natural resources, but the war gave this industrial expansion an additional boost in the later 1910s. The supercharged economy dramatically widened the income gap between the wealthy and the working class, and also led to increased unionization, culminating in a nationwide labor revolt in 1919. A decade later, the Great Depression caused a dramatic slowing of the Canadian economy that sent the unemployment rate skyrocketing. In the Skin of a Lion makes palpable this shifting landscape and consequent class tensions.

Although Chapter 1 alludes to the influx of immigrant workers through the loggers in Patrick’s rural hometown, Chapter 2 deals with the topic much more explicitly. It covers the growth of Canadian industry and infrastructure through the Bloor Street Viaduct construction site and the characters of Nicholas, an immigrant laborer, and Commissioner Harris, a titan of capitalism. Furthermore, many of the novel’s important themes are corollaries of this expansion of industry and heightened socioeconomic inequality, including the dehumanization of workers and exploitation of their bodies as tools, the arbitrariness of who becomes wealthy and powerful, and the destructive potential of natural resources, particularly water. Chapter 2 introduces all of these themes, which are further developed throughout the rest of the novel.

From the first paragraph’s description of workers who act “as if they don’t own the legs or the arms jostling against their bodies” (25), the reader begins to understand this pervasive idea of disembodiment. Nicholas’s lack of regard for his physical safety, as demonstrated by his willingness to perform wildly dangerous tasks on the bridge, is a further example.

Commissioner Harris is introduced as a character who prefers not to see the humanity in the building of the bridge. He observes the construction from a distance so he can disregard the individual workers and “concentrat[e] on form” (29). This attitude embodies the capitalist industrialist paradigm that dehumanizes the working class.

The mysterious and dramatic incident with the nun becomes a linchpin of the novel’s plot. It is notable that the nun (who is eventually revealed to be Alice Gull) is silent at first introduction, because later in the novel she becomes an actress, an activist, and a highly extroverted motivator of communities.

Chapter 2 is also notable for Patrick’s absence. Nicholas is the viewpoint character. Besides Nicholas’s penchant for dangerous work, his character is noteworthy for two other aspects. First, he is comfortable working on the bridge in darkness, without visual information, because “he does not really need to see things, he has charted all that space” (35)—an important commonality between Nicholas, Patrick, and Caravaggio. Second, like Patrick, he has an unusual and minimalist manner of speaking—being a non-native English speaker who learned the language by listening to actors and singers—which causes his peers to perceive him as somehow abnormal.