A Portrait of the Artist as Laurence Hero

A Portrait ofthe Artist as Laurence Hero SHERRILL GRACE Phyllis Grosskurth was right when she said that in The Diviners we have "a looser, more complex, more sexually uninhibited Laurence. And never an Atwood victim."t None of Laurence 's heroines is simply an Atwood victim; Morag Gunn is a full-fledged 'hero'. The fact that Morag is an artist contributes immensely to her role as hero, but she is also part of a larger Canadian pattern. Contrary to Ronald Sutherland who has announced the arrival of a "new" hero in Canadian fiction, I do not believe that the hero he describes as always "lurking in the work of Margaret Laurence [and] coming...to full bloom in...The Diviners" is new.2 Within Morag's artistic identity lie many of the qualities that are present in Canadian heroes through the twentieth century beginning with Connor's The Man from Glengarry (1901) and Duncan's The Imperialist (1904). In this paper, I consider the nature of the Laurence heroine both in and of herself and as one type of Canadian hero. One can best appreciate an artist-hero like Morag Gunn by understanding not only the literary tradition of the artist as hero but, more importantly, the specific Canadian literary tradition to which she belongs. In order to do this I have divided my study into two parts. First, I briefly discuss the 'problem' of the Canadian hero. Recent criticism has been too quick to describe this century's fiction as strewn with victims, failures, and alienated or lost selves. Second, I analyse at greater length the nature of the Laurence hero, more particularly, Morag Gunn. I The Canadian hero is not new, not necessarily a victim, and should not be discussed as if 64 invented by novelists circa 1920. The danger in a cut-off date when trying to isolate a tradition, as Margaret Atwood does in Survival, is the implication that nothing came before. If one needs to set time limits, then 1900 is preferable because it at least includes Connor and Duncan, both significant figures in the novel tradition who look back, in many ways, to nineteenth-century fictional forms. Many of our heroes are not victims or miserable failures. Ranald MacDonald, Lorne Murchison, Abe Spalding, Daniel Ainslie, Isabel Jardine, James Potter or Felix Prosper, Dunstan Ramsay, and Morag Gunn, to name a few, are successful heroes of a specific type. That a group of Canadian heroes are failures is hardly deniable. There is also a small number who have affinities with the traditional rebellious, asocial, self-reliant American hero. In Butterfly on Rock, Doug Jones offers the Adamic myth (following Lewis' The American Adam) as a way out of the confines of a garrison mentality. But D.J. Dooley, in a sharp critique of Jones' idea, points out that this myth embodies a fundamental revolt against convention, and that it is ''illusory to see the Canadian as a new-born infant," that is, as an Adam.3 If we can believe our literature and our institutions, conventions are important to Canadians ; therefore, it comes as no great surprise that there are relatively few Canadian Adams. What is the Canadian hero? Frequently he is a failure or a victim, a Philip Bentley or a David Canaan (both failed artists); occasionally he is an Adam, a Duddy Kravitz or a Noman; often he is a hero, in Clara Thomas' words, a Hero and Builder.4 The factors that condition the type of hero found in a given novel are many. To some extent the characters in a novel reflect the accepted social mores of the particular historical period. At the same time, changes in literary form or mode, especially the shift from romance conventions to those of realism, dictate inevitable shifts in character portrayal. The nature of fictional heroes also reflects the national matrix from which the novel springs. Taken together, these heroes embody aspects of what Sutherland, in The New Hero, calls a "sphere of consciousness ." One essential conditioning factor of the Canadian "sphere of consciousness" is puritRevue d'etudes canadiennes Vol. 13, No. 3(Automne1978 Fall) anism; another is the land itself; still another is our social...