"So entirely unexpected": The Modernist Dramaturgy of Marjorie Pickthall's The Wood Carver's Wife

"So entirely unexpected": The Modernist Dramaturgy of Marjorie Pickthall's The Wood Carver's WifeI PATRICIA L. BADIR Both during her life and after her death, Marjorie Pickthall was praised for her earnest spirituality, her fervent patriotism, her moral sincerity, and her love of nature and of all its simple creatures. Pickthall's novels, short stories, and poems, published between 1903 and 1925, were heralded for Iheir "delicate lyricism" and for their satisfying contemplation of a world that knows "no villain , no absolute evil.'" As Diana M.A. Relke has argued, the acknowledgement of all of Pickthall's feminine virtues "assured her immediate survival as a practising woman poet," and furthennore won her "recognition as the foremost poet of her generation."3 Pickthall herself, very much aware of the place she occupied in the Canadian literary landscape, understood the degree to which her success was predicated upon existing models of the writing woman. To her good friend Helen Coleman shecomplained that ft]o me, the trying part is being a woman at all. I've come to the ultimate conclusion that I'm a misfit of the worst kind. in spile of all superficial femininity - Emotion with a foreknowledge of impermanence, a daring mind with only the tongue as an outlet, a greed for experience plus a slavery to convention, - what the deuce are you to make of that? - as a woman? A s a man, you could go ahead & stir things up fine.4 This revealing and oft-cited passage from Pickthall's letters was written just months before the first appearance, in the University Magazine, of Pickthall's play The Wood Carver's Wife (1920).' This one-act verse drama, centred on a love triangle, a murder, and the carving of a Pieta, appears to have caught Pickthall somewhat by surprise. Writing to her father upon completing the play, she remarked that it had "rather made me gasp ... being so entirely unexpected .'''' The Wood Carver's Wife does not represent a sharp breach with Pickthall's conventional work; like much of her poetry, it draws upon Romantic themes in glutinous. often trite verse. What is remarkable, however. is the Modern Drama, 43:2 (Summer 2000) 2I6 Marjorie Pickthall's The Wood Carver's Wife 217 way in which the text, and arguably the first productions of the play, make manifest a boldness of theme and image that mixes, rather uncomfonably, with the prominent presence of a very Protestant sense of propriety and decorum . The result of this curious combination is no slave to convention but rather a kind of tentative An Theatre that toys, in a genteel son of way, with repressed desires cloaked in violent externalizations of cruelty, Moreover·, the play's almost sacramental confrontation of the relationship between iconography and experience seems to have achieved, within the Canadian Little Theatre community, some status as a Modernist experiment.7 At the centre of the play's plot is the wood carver, Jean, who has been commissioned to carve an altarpiece, in high relief panels, for the church. His model for the Virgin is his wife, Dorette. The carving is not successful, for the model's face does not reflect the inconsolable grief of the Mater Dolorosa. The carver leaves his work to retreat to the church for inspiration. His departure is followed by the entrance of his wife's noble lover, Louis de Lotbiniere, who falls into Dorette's arms only moments before the carver returns. Jean has learned of his wife's adulterous liaison from Shagonas, his Indian companion , who is immediately dispatched to slay Louis. The Indian returns, having completed his bloody task, with the lover's sword, which he places upon Dorette's lap. Her posture - she is resigned now, gazing at her lover's weapon with immeasurable sorrow - is perfect, and the carver resumes his work:.8 The Wood Carver's Wife was fondly remembered after Pickthall's sudden death in 1922. An obituary in the Montreal Star heralded the work as imbued with "such promise of genius as has marked no dramatic work from a Canadian author's pen in this generation at least." The writer reflected that in the play's lines...