From the Heart of the Heartland: The Fiction of Sinclair Ross

The Conflicting Signs of As for Me and My House

The Conflicting Signs of As for Me and My House FRANK DAVEY Le recit est une produit d'une application de la force du pouvoir sur une ecriture. Louis MARIN Re Recentcriticism of Asfor Me and My House has read much of the selection and interpretation of events in that novel as specific to the character of Mrs. Bentley, whose diary entries constitute the entirety of the text (Dooley 1979; McMullen 1979; Cude 1980; Denham 1980; Godard 1981; Stouck 1984) .While this application of Wayne Booth's concept of the unreliable narrator has often resulted in more complex readings of her narration, it has also tended to obscure the fact that Mrs. Bentley herself is a textual construction. She is not a free-standing agent whose "personality" can explain the emphases and omissions. In reading a fictional first-person narrative text such as that constituted by Mrs.Bentley's diary entries, we are in the presence of a double construction—a text which constructs its narrator by constructing that narrator's construction of events. Although many of the text's elements that I will examine here—including its peculiar array of proper names, its lack of information about Mrs. Bentley's childhood , its silence on economic issues—are indeed open to "explanation" in terms of her personality (she is Eurocentric, self-effacing, humanistic in cultural perspective), such "explanation" does not remove them or her from the overall textual operations of the book. Further, afictionalizedfirst-person text is not entirely defined by the personality of its narrator. Mrs.Bentley is not an etymologist, yet both Paul and his reflections on words become 26 parts of the novel; she has little interest in ranching, yet the malesexuality the text locates in horses and at the Kirby ranch is still signalled by many of the names various horses and bulls in the novel carry. The text's presentation of itself as a diary, its killing of Judith West in childbirth, its construction of Steve as Catholic and "Hungarian or Rumanian,"all evade recuperation by appeal to her personality. My interest here, then, is in the text and the kinds of constructions it offers, whether these be through its construction of Mrs. Bentley,through gaps, intrusions or contradictions itallows in her narration, or through other determinations. As for Me and My House has become, as Morton Ross observes (1978), a representative Canadian novel and a novel of prairie Canada. Even in 1957, when introducing the New Canadian Library re-issue of a book "unfamiliar to the Canadian public," Roy Daniells emphasized its Canadianness. It belongs to "the Canadian scheme of things," to "the prairie region, of which Saskatchewan forms the central expanse" (v). "Although precise dates, places and historical events are avoided, there is no doubt that these pages present the prairies of the drought and the depression, the long succession of years between the two wars" (ix). "There is even a brief holiday to the Alberta foothills" (ix). Daniells's assertion of "no doubt" appears to rest more on unstated biographical information about Ross than on marks in the text: "Ross's little town," he suggests, is "a composite of, or rather an abstraction from, little towns he had lived with and endured" (vi). In fact, the absence in the text that Daniells notes of "precise dates, places and historical events" is so pervasive that it is only by geographical inference that a reader identifies the continent on which the novel isset; the text's national setting, and its regional ones such as "Alberta" and "Saskatchewan," are neither specified nor implied. Reverend and Mrs. Bentley have arrived in a "little prairie town" with a "Main Street"; he is a "preacher" for a "Protestant" church referred to throughout the novel as "the Church." He has been educated at a "little university city" in "the Middle West" (32). Here he met his wife, a music student who was "saving hard for another year's study in the East," and wondering if she "might even make it Europe" (16). Her only other suitor had been a violinist who "went to England shortly afterwards,.. . then made a concert tour of South America" (77). The North American place names offered by the text are the mostly small-town names—Partridge Hill, Tillsonborough , Crow Coulee, Kelby, and Horizon—that have referents only inside the novel. The Bentleys at the end of the narrative leave Horizon to operate a bookstore in "the little city"where they used to live, "two...