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The Projection of the Unconscious and the Death of a Marriage: Mrs. Bentley In As For Me and My House
by
Guy A. Duperreault
English 357 Canadian Literature Since 1920
(Distance Education, Spring 1999)
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Mrs. Bentley refers several times times to the "false fronts" fronts" of the Main Street shops. shops. Discuss the idea of "false fronts" in the novel. What is the relationship Ross draws between the public and private?
As we are, so we create, both personally and socially. So it is with Mrs. Bentley. But the power of Ross's writing is such that he leaves the story open enough that the reader brings him or herself into the text, and, as we are, so we understand. understand. When John Moss writes that "There are not two realities in this novel" (140), meaning that Mrs. Bentley and Philip are a single construct of the narrator, he is correct. But at a more fundamental fundamental level he is wrong, because because he has denied the subjective reality that exists between a text and its individual reader and its distinction from the textual reality of the narration. Robertson Davies, who predicted, predicted, in 1941, the novel's critical acclaim and inclusion on university reading lists (18), astutely observed that "Mr. Ross is keenly aware of the subtleties of the human mind but he knows when to let the reader draw his own inferences.... The book is ... deeply stimulating..." (17). With this Davies also "predicted" the range of criticism, from Daniells' facile Mrs. Bentley as "pure gold" (2), to the mostly disappointing feminist tract of Buss, to Cude's Mrs. Bentley as manipulative hypocrite, to a Mrs. Bentley described by Hauser as "fundamentally "fundamentally simple, primitive" (14). (The extreme divergence divergence of both the reviews and criticism reminds me of that accorded Shakespeare's Measure for Measure , which suggests the validity of Cude's assessment that As For Me and My House is "an
integral part of the literature of the English English language" (14).) Like Cude (and others) I see Mrs. Mrs. Bentley as an unreliable witness. witness. She is a narrator who had an hypocritical hypocritical heart when she entered into relationship with Philip and was instrumental, though not solely responsible, in fostering hypocrisy in their lives personal and and professional. The year we see in the life of this relationship relationship is of Mrs. Bentley struggling not to understand herself, despite unwanted glimpses of the true natures of Philip and herself which which occasionally force themselves themselves upon her. She fails to understand her hypocrisy and its role in the sterility of her and Philip's relationships as wife and husband, woman and man, parent and child and as members of a community. community. She does not, or perhaps can not,
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break her heart's whole-hearted attachment to hypocrisy as social necessity, an attachment Matheson described as a "compulsion to conform ... to society's expectations" (163). That she does not learn is amply displayed in how she manipulates the events of the year so as to ensure their new life in a book store, without realizing that her manner of achieving it was little different than the one that had engendered her false-fronted marriage and main street life she so verbosely despises. She does not understand that the book store's signage is going to be a front no different than the one she hung up during their first day in Horizon. Early in the diary Mrs. Bentley describes the disingenuous wooing of her future husband: Before I met him I had ambitions ambitions too.... ¶But he came and the piano piano took second place.... I forgot it all, almost overnight. overnight. ¶Instead of practice ... it was books. books. Books that he had read read or might be going to read.... ¶For right from the beginning beginning I knew that with Philip it was the only way. way. Women weren't necessary necessary or important to him.... I even read theology. Submitting to him that way, yielding my identity — it seemed the way life was intended for (22). Clearly Mrs. Bentley put on a false front front in order to get her man. That she felt it to be the way of life is perhaps understandable, but acting on feelings does not excuses, justify or negate hypocritical behaviour. behaviour. It is curious, and a measure of the extent of her mendacity, that while she acted on her feelings of desire or love for him on the one hand, she chose not to act on her feelings of antipathy towards towards religion on the other. Instead she "even read theology" with the hope of being able to "nod comprehendingly" (22 my emphasis) as an aid to marrying "her" theology/artist student. She put on false airs and so began a marriage with someone she understood from the beginning as neither needing women or deeming them to be important. Mrs. Bentley "was teaching and saving hard for another year's study in the East" (22). This means that not only did she have at least some college education in order to be a teacher, she, even as a woman in the nineteen-thirties, was aware that there was at least one other life choice than attaching herself herself "selflessly" to a man — music. music. Mrs. Bentley's use of the word "seemed" in the above quote also hints that she had come to understand, early in the diary, that her perceived "life-
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necessity" was in fact an arbitrary choice, that she could have chosen differently. But this seems to have been merely a Jungian slip of the pen, an understanding that does not quite make it from an unconsciously made expression into realized concrete awareness, because over the next thirteen months she does not act on that realization, realization, or any of the others others which pop up. up. Instead every choice she enacts during the year tries, and mostly succeeds, in continuing the charade of social and religious propriety. The one exception is her "unwomanly" efforts to amass the thousand do dollars. llars. But even this act, with its minimal risk of social censure, is discoloured by the fact that the book store is itself a hypocritical construct, construct, a kind of bad-marriage trompe l'oeil . A central focus of Mrs. Bentley is that Philip is being worn down and destroyed by his religious hypocrisy. "For hypocrisy wears hard on a man who at heart heart really isn't that way" (21). But by Mrs. Bentley's own words words there is an ambivalence to that hypocrisy. For example, within the April 14th entry, of which the above quote is an early item, she describes her surprise, if not awe, at Philip's having been able to maintain his belief in a supreme being: And here's the strange part — he tries to be so sane and rational, yet all the time keeps on believing that there's a will stronger than his own deliberately pitted against him. He's cold and and skeptical towards religion. religion. He tries to measure life with intellect and reason, insists to himself that he is satisfied with what they prove for him; yet here there persist this conviction conviction of a supreme being interested interested in him, opposed to him, arranging with tireless concern the details of his life to make certain it will be spent in a wind-swept, sun-burned little Horizon (24). But four paragraphs later she writes "There are plenty of others ... who at best assert an easy, untried faith, but that's no solution for him. His guilt is that emphatically he does not believe. believe. His disbelief amounts to an achievement " (25 my emphasis).
What are we to make of these contradictions contradictions within one day's entry? I suspect that Mrs. Bentley is not even fully aware of them, as she insists on ascribing to Philip what is without doubt her own hypocrisy. As Cude points out (10), it may well be this hypocrisy, the hypocrisy of his wife, which is the most enervating enervating in his life. life. But I think that that there is more more to it than that. Perhaps
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the best indicator of it, and a clue to the nature of Philip's struggle with life, comes when he describes the meaning of art. "Religion and art," he says, "are almost the same same thing anyway. Just different ways of taking a man out of himself, bringing him to an emotional pitch that we call ecstasy or rapture. They're both a rejection of the material, material, common-sense wo world rld for one that's illusory, yet somehow more more important. Now it's always when a man man turns away from this common-sense world around him that he begins to create, when he looks into a void, and has to give it life and form" (148). This is one of the few quotations Mrs. Bentley makes of Philip, and is thus significant in understanding both Mrs. Bentley and Mr. Bentley because it suggests the nature of Philip's struggle with God and contradicts Mrs. Bentley's perception of Philip. Philip sees religion as a means to take him to "an emotional pitch we call ecstasy or rapture" and it is a "rejection of the material, material, common-sense common-sense world". Yet what kind of life is he he leading? He is struggling with the material poverty of the dust bowl, scratching nickels and dimes from farmers who haven't had a crop in five years. In his life and sermons he is struggling with Job's God, the mighty struggle between a supposedly just God and His world with the human world filled with injustice and cruelty. The struggle that Mrs. Bentley describes describes as Philip's struggle with his hypocritical lack of faith is simply the projection projection onto him of her struggle. struggle. And no wonder he struggles to write his sermons! How can he babble compassion and trust in God when when all he sees about himself is a malevolent supreme being, acting on, or at least not interfering with, a world which is arbitrary and cruel? This struggle is compounded by by being burdened with a woman woman who is contemptuous of his faith and the people whom he earnestly, if ineffectively, strives to help. As for Mrs. Bentley, the reason she felt his "religion and art" statement worth quoting is that it jars against her construct of him as an atheist struggling with the hypocrisy of his lack of faith. That she does not appreciate appreciate what he is saying saying is made evident in the next next entry, July 30th, in which she notes that Philip winced when a farm woman who was being starved out by "his compassionate" God accused him of having the soft soft life of a country preacher. In that entry Mrs.
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Bentley did not make any reference to Philip's struggle with the justification justification of that accusation in his eyes, even though the entry bluntly contrasts Philip's sermons of a compassionate God with dust-bowl starvation (149). Instead Mrs. Bentley Bentley elaborates on material concerns and Steve. It is she who is the atheist, who recognizes that she is the devil citing scripture (81), who sees within humans the need to ascribe vacuous meaning in life (131), who can acknowledge her own heresy (123). So although she easily admits to her own superficial superficial hypocrisy, she is ignorant of just how deep it is (123) and continues to see it, greatly magnified, in Philip. The extent of how unaware Mrs. Bentley is of herself is well described by Cude in his sharp insights into how Mrs. Bentley's relationship with Paul could be seen by others, especially her husband (4). It also suggests a bias in Mrs. Bentley's reporting because her entries regarding Paul avoid any possibility of sexual impropriety in either thought or deed despite the suggestion of "innocent" flirting. Mrs. Bentley puts in motion the means to get her and her husband out of Horizon and the ministry. Her stated motive is to "get "get him out of [the Church]..." Church]..." (141) with the hope of giving him back his artistic creativity. That she makes this decision without consulting consulting him and has assumed that she was his bane by keeping him in the church and will now be his saviour by expunging him from it displays both her hubris and condescension. condescension. But it is not a driving ambition in him (178-9), although he does actively actively participate once the plan plan continues to develop (209-10). (209-10). And when she writes that she does not want to "be one of those domineering females that men abominate" (210) she seems unaware that she has dominated the relationship from before the marriage, and that her husband does, by her own frequent entries, abominate abominate her! And she seems to have forgotten that she wrote "It's a woman's way, I suppose, to keep on trying to subdue a man, to bind him to her..." (85). And of her methods, the dissembling and blackmail are a work of creative artistry, as Cude describes them (6). She hypocritically pretends for a long while that his infidelity infidelity did not happen so as to keep him and her marriage (178), despite its lifelessness. lifelessness. Then with the pregnancy pregnancy of Judith by Philip Mrs. Bentley is able to keep him by blackmail, which does engender some
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motivation from him for the store. store. These actions suggest a level level of deep hypocrisy, because for her the marriage's false front is more important than the shabbiness of what exists behind that front. It is also significant that her stated goals do not include herself, a person to whom getting out of Horizon has immense immense importance, given her stated hatred of false-fronted false-fronted towns (7). She sees herself and her need to be creative as somehow less important than it is for Philip, despite the pleasure and satisfaction it gave her to practice and play before the marriage and for the play/Philip in Horizon. When she imagines herself in the book store she argues herself herself into a back corner teaching music, but not for herself and and her need to be creative, or even for pleasure. pleasure. Instead she does not want to embarrass Philip because she has better business sense than him and might be able to earn a few extra dollars so as to make the venture more viable without threatening his masculinity (210). And as to the state of her marriage, there are two different passages which indicate that she seems to have an unconscious awareness of its death, even as she has begun to repaint its false front. The first is implied when she writes about her imagined imagined role in the business business venture "I'm convinced that Philip would be be better without me" (210). The second comes with her her insistence that the infant be named Philip. She has transferred her creative energy energy to a new object of desire, one subdued at birth and who will be, at least for the first years, incapable of resisting her need "to possess him, to absorb his life into mine" (84). Mrs. Bentley began her marriage by putting on false airs and denying her own creative energy. Despite indications indications that she is aware of the implications implications of that in herself, Mrs. Mrs. Bentley does not ever come to understand that the hollowness of her marriage and friendships is largely because she has erected her own personal personal main street false front. Instead, she uses her creative energy and happenstance happenstance to manipulate and coerce coerce her husband into being a bookseller/artist. bookseller/artist. She is not aware that in her drive to achieve this goal she was re-enacting the process which engendered their sterile marriage and social life in the first first place. The degree of self-ignorance self-ignora nce on her part can be seen in how she imagines imagines her relationship with Philip. She sees herself as a hidden away away in a dark corner quietly teaching piano, with her energies devoted to "absorbing" into her life the infant
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Philip. This is a sad book, but one that is, as Davies Davies said, "deeply stimulating" because Ross has brilliantly capture the unconscious psychological dynamics within an empty marriage.
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WORKS CITED
Buss, H.Mrs. Bentley "Who are you, Mrs. Bentley?: Feminist re-vision and Sinclair Ross's As For Me and My House", from Canadian Prose of the 20th Century: Additional Readings, ed. Carol Gerson. Burnaby: Simon Fraser University Distant Eduction — English 357-5, 1998. As For Me and My House", from Cude, Wilfred. "Beyond Mrs. Mrs. Bentley: A Case Study of As Engl432 - Modern Canadian Fiction: Supplementary Readings Readings, eds. Carol Gerson, Douglas Cronk, Laurie Ricou. Burnaby: Open Learning Learning Agency, 1992, in association with Simon Fraser University Distance Education (English 357).
Daniells, Roy. "Introduction to the 1957 NCL Edition" from Engl432 - Modern Canadian Fiction: Supplementary Readings, eds. Carol Gerson, Douglas Cronk, Laurie Ricou. Burnaby: Open Learning Agency, 1992, in association with Simon Simon Fraser University Distance Education (English 357). Davies, Robertson. " As For Me and My House" from "Caps and Bells," Peterborough Examiner , 26 April, 1941; from Sinclair Ross's As For Me and My House: Five Decades of Criticism, ed. David Stouck. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991, pp. 16-18. Franz, Marie-Louis von. Projection and Rec-Collection in Jungian Psychology: Reflections of the Soul . LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court Publishing Co. 1990. 1990. Hauser, Marianne. "A Man's Failure" from New York Times Review of Books , 2 March 1941; from Sinclair Ross's As For Me and My House: House: Five Decades of Criticism , ed. David Stouck. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991, pp. 13-14. Jung, C.G. "From The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious", from The Basic Writings of C.G. Jung, ed. Violet Violet de Laszlo. New York: The Modern Library, 1959, pp. 105-82. Jung, C.G. "From 'The Shadow'" from The Essential Jung, ed. Anthony Storr. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983, pp. 91-3. Matheson, T.J. "'But do your Thing': Conformity, Self-Reliance, and Sinclair Ross's As For Me and My House" from Sinclair Ross's As For Me and My House: Five Decades of Criticism, ed. David Stouck. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991, pp. 162-177. Moss, John. "Mrs. Bentley and the Bicameral Mind: A Hermeneutical Encounter Encounter with As For Me and My House", from Sinclair Ross's As For Me and My House: Five Decades of Criticism, ed. David Stouck. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991, pp. 138-148.
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