“The Gates Closed on Us Then”: The Paradise-Lost Motif in Hugh MacLennan’s Fiction

"The Gates Closed on Us Then'': The Paradise-Lost Motifin Hugh MacLennan's Fiction HELEN HOY Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon; The world was all before them, where to choose Their place of rest (John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book XII) A poignant sense of loss and longing, present even in Hugh MacLennan's optimistic early novels, increasingly pervades his fiction, becoming the dominant note particularly of his latest work, Return of the Sphinx. Much of the action in his novels is sustained by the underlying myth of a paradise lost (associated with childhood and mother love, gardens and the sea, a lost innocence, graciousness, and happiness) and of a search in a fallen world for a new paradise. The myth, which has psychological, social, and political implications in the fiction, finds expression most clearly through MacLennan's portrayal of marriage and the family. And, since the novels are often narrated from the perspective of the hero, women characters become representative of a lost Edenic world and a more elusive promised land, in their identification with nostalgically remembered moments of childhood security or youthful romantic involvement, as well as with the more demanding adult love which replaces such moments . Northrop Frye has suggested that the pastoral myth, the vision of an ideal world associated with childhood or with earlier social conditions, is particularly strong in Canadian literature,1 and D.G. Jones specifies that frequently in this literature it is a female figure who is associated with Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 14, No. 4 (Hiver 1979-80 Winter) the idyllic, with childhood and the garden.2 Neither however applies this analysis to MacLennan 's work. It is not surprising to find the Eden myth so important in MacLennan's fiction, a fiction concerned with endangered values of civilization, marked by a strong sense of history and the passing of time, filled with wanderers, and concerned with the analysis of a Canada composed of exiled Loyalists, Scots, and Frenchmen, and of emigre Englishmen who, according to MacLennan, talk of their country "as Adam probably talked of the Garden after he had been thrown out of it.''3 The role of the happy family and happy marriage in evoking this lost Garden and the new promised land is striking. There are of course other mythological underpinnings which have been pointed out in MacLennan 's novels, in particular the Odysseus and Oedipus myths, but the Eden myth rivals these in importance, and can be seen, particularly in its association with marriage and the family, as subsuming or containing elements of these other myths. George Woodcock, who has emphasized the influence of The Odyssey on MacLennan's writing, identifies the wandering Odysseus and the faithful Penelope as among MacLennan's recurring symbolic figures .4 So Penny, Heather, Lucy, Mollie, Catherine, and (in a less literal sense) Margaret are all portrayed as patiently awaiting the return of an absent husband or lover often while courted by other suitors. At the same time, however, the Ithaca with Penelope at its centre from which the wanderer has been separated and to which he gratefully returns after difficult struggles can be contained within the more comprehensive myth of paradise lost and paradise regained . The imagery surrounding MacLennan's characters extends beyond the specific Odysseus story to evoke this more general sense of a lost Eden. The same is true of the Oedipus myth. Alec Lucas has argued that Oedipus rather than Odysseus is the controlling mythological symbol of MacLennan's work,5 and a number of the women characters do contain at least vague traces of the Jocasta wife-mother figure sought by the usurping son. These include Kathleen Tallard for whom her stepson Marius feels a guilty attrac29 tion, Lucy Cameron from whom Lassiter seeks a female approval denied by his mother, Mollie MacNeil whom Dr. Ainslie desires when he confuses her image with his mother's, Marielle Jeannotte who attracts Daniel because she reminds him of his mother and to whom he makes love in his parents' bed, and Constance who both reawakens and eases Alan Ainslie's longing for his mother. Again though this symbolism can be seen as part of a...