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"Love and Death": Romance and Reality in Margaret Laurence's A Bird in the House NORA FOSTER STOVEL BIRD IN THE HOUSE, Margaret Laurence's 1970 collection of short stories set in Manawaka,is a female Canadian Bildungsroman chronicling the maturation of protagonist VanessaMacLeod. A Bird in the House is also a metafictional Kunstlerroman like The Diviners, a fiction about fiction narrating the development of an artist, because Vanessa becomes a novelist, like Morag Gunn. Narrated by Vanessa, as an adult remembering her childhood, A Bird in theHouse offers a dual perspective, ironizing the chasm between the child's fantasies and the mature writer's memories. Laurence chronicles the creation of a writer by embedding Vanessa 's own stories in the narrative, as her development is measured by the maturation of her fiction. The name "Vanessa," meaning "butterfly," emphasizes the transformational element of the narrative, reinforced by the narrator's retrospections that conclude significant stories—"The Mask of the Bear," the title story "ABird in the House," "The Loons," and the concluding story, "Jericho's Brick Battlements"—underlining the development from the child's to the adult writer's perception of reality. A Bird in the House is not merely metafiction, however; it is "semi-autobiographical fiction " (Laurence, Dance 5) in the author's words. Laurence acknowledges, "The character of Vanessa is based on myself as a child, and the MacLeod family is based on my own childhood family" ("Loons" 805).l A Bird in theHouse is not only autobiographical metafiction; it is also metabiography, to coin a term, because stories Vanessa MacLeod writes are the same stories Margaret Laurence wrote. Both actual and fictional authors write a story about pioneers entitled "The Pillars of the Nation," and both write a tale about the fur trade set in nineteenth-century Quebec. A 100 Chronicling Vanessa's development as an artist thus reflects Laurence's own creative growth. Laurence says, "The ways in which memories and 'created' events intertwine in [A Bird in theHouse} probably illustrate a few things about the nature of fiction" ("Loons" 805). This artistic alchemyis illuminated by examining the metabiographical aspect of A Bird in the House by tracing Vanessa's own embedded stories. The story is an ideal genre for conveying the relation between art and life. For Laurence, the short story, with its lyric form, is the perfect vehicle for the theories of memory that she expounds in TheDiviners, because Vanessa'svignettes, like Morag Gunn's Memorybank Movies, dramatize spots of time that mark turning points in Vanessa'slife. Each of the stories in A Bird in the House recreates an epiphany, a negative epiphany as in James Joyce's Dubliners, as Vanessa becomes disenchanted or disillusioned —disabused of her childish faith in fair play in real life. The creative development Laurence recreates in A Bird in theHouse reflects real experience. Laurence's mother advised her to write about what you know when, as a child, she wrote stories about lords and ladies, castles and moats, and Laurence portrays Vanessa learning the same lesson from life. In "The Sound of the Singing," the first story in A Bird in theHouse,Vanessa , age ten, struggles to create "an old-fashioned lady" out of a clothespeg , pipe cleaners, and crepe paper—inspired by the dresser doll adorned with a curly yellow coiffure and a hoop skirt of fluted apricot crepe de Chine (26), among the treasures in Aunt Edna's bedroom, the gift of an old admirer—but Vanessabecomes frustrated when the lady's skirt refuses to stick properly on the doll: It had become, somehow, overwhelmingly important for me to finish it. I did not even play with dolls very much, but this one wasthe beginning of a collection I had planned. I could visualise them, each dressed elaboratelyin the costume of some historical period or some distant country, ladies in hoop skirts, gents in black top hats, Highlanders in kilts, hula girls with necklaces of paper flowers. But this one did not look at all as I had imagined she would. Her wooden face, on which I had already pencilled eyes and mouth, grinned stupidly at me, and I leered viciously back. You'll be beautiful whetheryou like it ornot, I told her. (22) Laurence observed, "There is a lot of history in myfiction" (Fabre 208), and she portrays Vanessa here as a would-be historian, marshalling her marionettes to reflect myriad cultures in a manner that allows her to play God, to control the...

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