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

Who Are You, Mrs. Bentley?: Feminist Re-vision and Sinclair Ross's As for Me and My House

Who Are You, Mrs. Bentley?: Feminist Re-vision and Sinclair Ross's As for Me and My House HELEN M. BUSS Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. (Lies, Secrets and Silence 35) Adr Adrienne Rich'sdescription of revision as a feminist literary activityhas special meaning for feminist readers of Ross's text. Seeking a Mrs. Bentley who accords with female experience is an "act of survival" that demands a revision of the critical reception of As for Me and My House, a reception that offers (in the majority of evaluations) viewpoints of the central female character that limit the reading act.But feminist revision also implies attention to the cultural situation of the revisioning critic, as exemplified by Rich's autobiographical stance in Of Woman Born, in which she makes her own history a part of the project of re-examining the institution of motherhood. In the same manner I intend to give attention both to the history of critical reception and to my own history as a reader of Ross's text.' A whole series of critical inquiries, mostly written during the seventies, concentrates on Mrs.Bentley in her role as Philip Bentley's wife. As such she becomes a pole of negativity. These critiques are based on the unacknowledged assumption that Mrs. Bentley's primary function in Ross's fiction is as wife in a patriarchal structure. And as wife she does not fulfil the functions of support, service, and submission of self that are to be expected. As wife she is (I quote a collage of various critiques) "manipulative," "hyp- 40 ocritical," "mean," "incorrect" and "less than human," a "barren" woman, with a "sharply voiced" and frightening "power to castrate."2 Assessments that concentrate on Ross's craft as writer, rather than the social world created by his text, point out Mrs. Bentley's role as narrator. She may not be the "pure gold" that Roy Daniells thought she was in his introduction to the first paperback edition of the text (1957), but she tends to receive a less negative assessment as narrator than as wife: "[she] is an almost incidental victim of her critics' attack on the real target, her role of narrator; what seems like a calumny is actually designed to expose her as a most untrustworthy narrator" (M. Ross 194). It would seem, by this kind of assessment, that Mrs. Bentley is not "guilty" as a character, but rather the hapless victim of her place in the narrative grammar of the text. But to label her victim is merely to call up the other side of the stereotyping patriarchal coin. If woman acts in the patriarchal world, she is witch, medusa, castrator, i.e., bad woman. If she does not act, she is acted upon, she is vessel, she is victim, i.e., good woman. It is curious, however, that when critics abandon these two stereotypical viewsand Mrs. Bentley begins to be identified as an artist figure, her negative image remains largely intact. The negativity clings to these assessments either because they ignore Mrs. Bentley's actual art, her journal writing , and assess her as pianist,so that "Philip'sartistic activities are intrinsically more creative than" hers (Godard 60), or because they see her as a "perverse Pygmalion" who is "turning her spouse into a statue" (Cude 18), or because they view her as "male-devouring" based on "the man in the study or bedroom , drawing failed pictures or pretending to write, white-lipped and crying . . ." (Kroetsch, "Beyond Nationalism" vii). I think Robert Kroetsch is on the right track when, despite the fear of women implicit in his "failed male" theory of female artistic impulse, he identifies Mrs. Bentley as a "powerful artist-figure . . . busily writing a journal . . . conniving the world into shape and existence . . ." (vii). But I seek a reading of the text that proposes a fuller view of female artisticproduction in the context of Mrs. Bentley's historical situation. Adrienne Rich makes a good start on such a facilitating position when she describes her own problems asa writer, burdened with the role (asdesigned by patriarchy ) of wife and mother: For a poem to coalesce, for a character- or an action to lake shape, there has to be an imaginative transformation of"reality which is in no way passive. And a...