Kate Beaton's ​Bodies of Art, Bodies of Labour

Reviewed by Adam McPhee

(University of Alberta Press, 2025)

Elephants were rarely encountered in medieval Europe. In fact, there were only two* known to have lived on the continent: Abul-Abbas was a gift from the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid to Charlemagne, and died while marching to put down the Danes in 802 AD. Hanno, a gift from a king of Portugal to Pope Leo X, died in 1516 AD after only two years in Rome, while being treated for severe constipation. Naturally, European artists had trouble depicting elephants in their bestiaries and marginalia. How would you even describe one to a medieval monk? ‘It’s a like a pig, but bigger than a horse––no, way bigger, like you can put several archers onto sort of a little house on its back. And its nose is like a snake that acts as a shovel and a hand.’ Something like that. Leave it to Kate Beaton, who made her name writing and illustrating the long-running webcomic Hark! A Vagrant, to draw an analogy between the clumsy depictions of medieval elephants and the clumsy depictions of the working class in Canadian literature. The monks at least had an excuse.

This analogy is to be found in Bodies of Art, Bodies of Labour, a very short book of sixty-odd pages taken from the eighteenth Kreisel Memorial Lecture, which Beaton delivered in Edmonton in 2024.

Part of the book’s charm is that it doubles as a short survey of Cape Breton’s literary canon: there’s Rita Joe, the Mi’kmaw poet; internationally acclaimed short story writer Alistair MacLeod; Lynne Coady, the “gritty” author from Port Hawkesbury. But her book is really about the working class and its relation to art. Beaton’s background helps her navigate this tricky subject: she’s from Cape Breton, a region with a distinct culture and a working-class background that often acknowledges itself as such.

Beaton backs up her elephant analogy by juxtaposing a condescending travel article about Cape Breton that ran in an 1886 edition of Harper’s Magazine with the Gaelic poetry of Aongas mac Alasdair, Beaton’s great, great, great-grandfather, born in Mabou in 1817. This leads, inevitably, to a discussion of Ian McKay’s Quest of the Folk, a 1994 book that Beaton rightly describes as having “influenced all writing on literature around Atlantic Canada since it was published.”
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As Beaton describes it:

McKay’s book goes heavy in the ring with folklorist Helen Creighton, who scoured rural Nova Scotia for folk songs and folklore during her career in the early twentieth century, but selected for publication only that which she deemed authentic and appropriate and to her taste. That taste was very conservative and sanitized, and racially selective. Her work was very popular, and helped promote an anti-modern aesthetic for the region that the middle class and outsiders flocked to. But it did not represent the reality, which was modernizing, industrializing, racially diverse, and often cruder than she would allow.

In short, Creighton’s work was essential to the creation of a commodified image of a Nova Scotian ‘Folk’—“backwards rural people, simple, friendly, and pre-industrial,” as Beaton puts it. The image of the Folk was used to create and sell tourism, and stood in opposition to the actually-existing working class.

Beaton stands halfway between McKay and Creighton. She agrees with McKay’s argument, understands all too well the damage done by the romanticized image of the Folk—it excludes anyone who doesn’t fit the image, and thus works to make them unwelcome in their own home; it also condescends to those who do fit the image, encouraging outsiders to see these simpletons as too backwards to be allowed to make decisions for themselves, as too sentimental to be allowed to aspire to a different future. And yet, Beaton also feels for Creighton’s side of the argument: anyone familiar with Beaton’s art knows she enjoys riffing on the sort of stories Creighton collected, and even in this essay Beaton relates several anecdotes that would be at home if found in one of Creighton’s books (though one wonders if Creighton would have given Beaton credit, it being one of McKay’s contentions that denying credit to her sources was part of Creighton’s method of creating the impression of Folk culture as emerging from the ether—this also helped Creighton control her collections as intellectual property). Beaton understands better than most that the image of the Folk was drawn from a real culture, and to write that culture off is as much of a disservice as to subject it to commodification.

More broadly, Bodies of Art, Bodies of Labour brings attention to a longstanding problem: people from poor and working-class backgrounds have a harder time making it in the world of art. What data there is backs this up, but even here there’s a problem, in that Canadian arts organizations collect demographic information on pretty much everything except class, and, as Beaton relates, the working class often has trouble identifying itself as such—both because it can be hard to define and because anyone who finds themselves somewhere between homelessness and yacht ownership is encouraged to think of themselves as middle class. This is a problem for everyone, because without working-class art we’re back to the worst version of the Creighton side of the spectrum: oafs and buffoons who will never rise beyond caricature.
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It’s a huge problem but there is, at least, a solution. Per Beaton, “You don’t have to be from the same class to understand a book. We ought to read books from people of all different backgrounds than ourselves; it will make us a better society. But… you can’t help what people see because we all read books in our own way, and we all make sense of what we take in based on who we already are:

You have to try, though. And maybe what I’m really talking about is just another way of saying that we need is more art from working-class artists so that things stop feeling like a fantasy, are realities that we accept instead.

​So: let’s get writing. 

*​Correction: The author has been made aware of a third, unnamed elephant in medieval Europe that belonged to King Henry III of England. Louis IX of France also had an elephant, but it might have been the same elephant as Henry's. The point stands that medieval European artists didn't have a whole lot to go on.

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Adam McPhee’s fiction has appeared in Old Moon Quarterly and Ahoy Comics, and has been longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize. His book reviews have appeared in Exacting Clam, minor literature[s], Necessary Fiction, and elsewhere. He writes the Substack newsletter Adam’s Notes. Originally from Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, he now lives in Alberta.