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Patrick McEvoy-Halston
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English 5793HFProfessor Colin Hill02 January 2006Quitting Home in Sinclair Ross’s
 As For Me and My House
If we were to assemble a canon of Canadian texts based on their ability to help Canadianslive better lives, we might do well to include Sinclair Ross’
 As For Me and My House
as one of its core texts. For the text is not simply a “prairie book”—it may in fact speak to the primaryneeds and concerns of most contemporary Canadians. The texts narrator, Mrs. Bentley, oftenexpresses in her journal her fear that she lives in a threatening and insecure environment. Yet sheultimately portrays her environment as one which is more secure than it is insecure. It is in factinspiring—the various pressing threats are manipulated by her in her journal so that they actuallywork to empower her. And for the reader, the reading experience might not be anywhere near asclaustrophobic and uncomfortable as we might assume it would be given Mrs. Bentley’snumerous complaints concerning the various particulars which make Horizon such a horror. Thetext may in fact feel roomy, and offer the reader pleasing variety. For some it may indeed serveas a place they nestle in for awhile and develop the resources and savyness to help make their own self-growth seem both more possible and permissible.After 9-11, many literary critics might agree that we now live in an age which is moreaptly identified as posttraumatic than as postmodern. But it may be that even before 9-11 madethe world seem so threatening, that Canadians well knew what it was to feel threatened by theworld around them. For if psychohistorians such as Lloyd deMause are correct, throughouthistory and still today, most people have not been sufficiently well nurtured by their mothers tofeel otherwise. DeMause believes that history is a nightmare we are just waking up from (1). He
 
 believes most people are prone to imagine the world as a threatening place, regardless; for he believes that most of us learnt early on that to be apart from our mothers, to belong to a worldoutside of her environs, meant to some extent feeling abandoned and alone. The reason we maycome to deem separation so threatening is that if we were unfortunate enough to have motherswho were poorly themselves poorly nurtured (and deMause is one who believes that mostmothers have throughout history been insufficiently nurtured, supported), they interpret our ownself-growth, our own movements toward exploring the world, as us abandoning them—and theyrespond in kind, that is, they to some extent withdraw their support and love from us (deMause,“Psychogenic Theory of History 165). They expect us to met their unmet needs, an experiencewhich is responsible for us later in life feeling just like Mr. Bentley feels, in that we too at somelevel feel that “a will stronger than [our] [. . .] own [is] deliberately pitted against” (24) us—andwhen attend to our own, we can in fact experience fears of death, as Joseph Rheingold explains:Basically, it is generally agreed, separation means separation from the mother. It mayhold no connotation of punishment, but its more significant meaning is desertion by themother. Although in infancy the mere absence of the mother is a threat to survival,separation becomes associated with purpose, that is, with abandonment. Death is equatedwith willful withdrawal of the mother. Separation anxiety seems to be universal and is amajor source of death anxiety throughout life. 17Being a psychoanalyst, of course, means that Rheingold devoted himself to assisting patients sothat they would feel less overcome with death anxiety. He believed that as a therapist he wasempowered to help them, for “[t]here is no more powerful corrective force than the ‘good-mother’ protectiveness of the therapist” (227). But perhaps if not as good, texts, that is,alternative worlds traumatized readers might immerse themselves in, might also function as a
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“powerful corrective force” in helping make readers feel some of the security they need to liveengaging, playful, healthy lives.Trauma theorists have increasing respect for the important of texts as therapeutic aids,with most discussion not now on whether or not they may ease suffering, but on which sorts of texts are the most emancipatory (Vickroy 12). Though the study of reader immersion in textshas “not been particularly popular with the ‘textual’ brands of literary theory” (15), as “itconflicts with [their] [. . .] concept of language” (92),reader-response literary theorists andcognitive psychologists who study readers’ involvement in texts, generally agree that readinginvolves the reader in “creating” a world that “stretch[es] in space, exist[s] in time” (Gerrig 15).The cognitive psychologist Richard Gerrig argues that the text actually “serve[s] as [a] habitat”(15) for the reader, and that readers are “placed” within the text as “side-participants or overhearers” (119). He does not believe that “transportation into a narrative world is dependenton narrative skills” (95), but surely not all texts draw readers in equally ably. We know thatrealist texts were once “accused” of evoking readers’ emotional responses to an unprecedenteddegree, and it may be that even “difficult” modernist ones have the potential to be even moreinvolving. For, according to Norman Cantor, “the burden of the modernist novel [was the] [. . .]existential discovery of a deeper, mythic, more human self” (53). He writes that “[t]he modernistnovel does contain a story, which may be by turns elaborate and minimal, but it serves only as avehicle for the exploration of sensibility on the part of the author, which helps the reader todiscover him—or herself” (53).If Cantor is correct that texts which involve the exploration of sensibility involve thereader in them to such an extent that it leads to dramatic personal discoveries and changes, then itmight be that
 As For Me and My House
, which is all about the exploration of the
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