Lifelines: From Defiant Monarchy to Reluctant Republic 9780773565586

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Lines of Inquiry: The Tattooed Woman
2 Between the Lines: Marian Engel's Notebooks
3 Scratching Around: Early Writings and Unpublished Work
4 The Texture of Women: Sarah Bastard's Notebook and The Honeyman Festival
5 Instincts and Lessons: Monodromos
6 Transformations: Bear
7 Translated without Transubstantiation: The Glassy Sea
8 Ambivalence towards Completion: Lunatic Villas
9 In the Golden City: Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
T
U
V
W
Z

Citation preview

Lifelines Marian Engel's Writings

Before her death in 1985 at the age of fifty-one, Marian Engel had published seven novels, two collections of short stories, and numerous essays and articles. Despite this impressive output and various literary honours, including a Governor General's Award for her 1976 novel Bear, Engel's work has not received the critical attention it deserves. Lifelines fills a major gap in Canadian literary criticism. Christl Verduyn analyses Engel's work from a feminist literary perspective, exploring Engel's investigations of women's experiences and perception of the world, female identity and the social constraints on its development, female subjectivity and self, the motherdaughter relationship, and forces opposing women's artistic selfexpression. She not only presents in-depth readings of the novels but relates them to Engel's reflections on her experiences as a woman and a writer as found in her personal notebooks and other writings. Verduyn demonstrates the extent to which Engel's work enriches our understanding of women's experiences and broadens our view of women's worlds. Lifelines will make a significant contribution to Canadian literature, women's studies, and the recently acknowledged genre of life writing. CHRISTL VERDUYN is chair and professor of Canadian Studies, Trent University.

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Lifelines Marian Engel's Writings CHRISTL VERDUYN

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Buffalo

© McGill-Queen's University Press 1995 ISBN 0-7735-1337-x (cloth) ISBN 0-7735-1338-8 (paper) Legal deposit fourth quarter 1995 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen's University Press is grateful to the Canada Council for support of its publishing program.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Verduyn, Christl, 1953Lifelines: Marian Engel's writings Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7735-1337-x (bound) ISBN 0-7735-1338-8 (pbk.) i. Engel, Marian, 1933-1985 - Criticism and interpretation. 2. Women in literature. I. Title. PS8559.N5Z941995 0813'.54 095-900486-6 PR9199-3.E5Z94 1995

This book was typeset by Typo Litho Composition Inc. in 10/12 Palatine.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction 3 1 Lines of Inquiry: The Tattooed Woman 8 2 Between the Lines: Marian Engel's Notebooks 21 3 Scratching Around: Early Writings and Unpublished Work 44 4 The Texture of Women: Sarah Bastard's Notebook and The Honeyman Festival 62 5 Instincts and Lessons: Monodromos

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6 Transformations: Bear 117 7 Translated without Transubstantiation: The Glassy Sea 138 8 Ambivalence towards Completion: Lunatic Villas 162 9 In the Golden City: Conclusion 181 Notes 201 Bibliography 261 Index 271

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Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for its support of this project and thank several people who played a part in its completion. Warm thanks go to Drs Charlotte Stewart, Carl Spadoni, and Kathy Garay, archivists at McMaster University Research and Archives Division, where Marian Engel's papers are located, and to Dr Robert Brandeis of Victoria College, University of Toronto, who was helpful at the outset. I am especially grateful to Dr Garay, who catalogued Marian Engel's papers and with whom I spent many enjoyable hours talking about the material. Her finding guide to the Marian Engel Archive1 was very useful in my research, as was Annette Wengle's "Marian Engel: An Annotated Bibliography." Joe'lle Favreau was a stellar research assistant from beginning to end, and Jennifer Gillard an energetic graduate student assistant in the final stages. Marlene Kadar's invitation to contribute to her collection Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice with an essay on Marian Engel's notebooks was a welcome opportunity for an early exploration of the author's cahiers. Joining John Burbidge's Trent University Canadian Studies class in a discussion of The Glassy Sea was both stimulating and helpful in clarifying several references to hymns and saints. Audiences who listened to paper presentations of early parts of this book (at the University of Edmonton in April 1990 and at Montreal's Simone de Beauvoir Institute in January 1992) provided encouraging positive reaction. So, too, did a variety of individuals to whom I spoke of this project and who willingly shared

viii Acknowledgments

their memories and observations of Marian Engel.2 Friends and colleagues Patricia Smart, Kathy Garay, Laura Groening, Marlene Kadar, Julia Gualtieri, and Lynda Morrisey kindly read and commented on early or later drafts or parts of the manuscript. The text benefited greatly from the comments of anonymous assessors, particularly "Reader A," and from the experienced editorship of Philip Cercone and his staff. For permission to quote from several personal letters used in this research, I am very grateful to Mr Shirley Woods, literary executor for Hugh MacLennan (letters from MacLennan to Engel), to Pamela Russell Jessup (letters from Diarmuid Russell to Engel), to Dennis Lee (letters relating to Monodromos), and to {Catherine Punch (letter of 18 February 1974). For permission to include the photograph of Marian Engel from his papers at McMaster, I would like to thank Peter Such. And for allowing the reproduction of The Honeyman Festival's original 1970 Anansi House jacket, alongside the cover of Nicole Brossard's L'amer (1977), I would like to acknowledge Stoddart Publishing Company Limited and VLB Editeur. The cooperation of members of the Engel family throughout was most appreciated, and I would especially like to thank Charlotte Engel for her patience and trust and for much-appreciated meetings over coffee along Bloor Street. Finally, I would like to thank Robert Campbell for his practical assistance, encouragement, and interest in my work, despite the demands of his own research and publications in the field of political science. I dedicate this book to him and to our four young children - sons Malcolm and Colin, daughters Lachlan and Frances - lifelines of another kind.

Lifelines

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Introduction

Marian Engel (1933-85) belonged to the generation of Canadian women writers who came to prominence during the 19705. While contemporaries such as Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro are well known and widely read, Marian Engel has received less attention despite an impressive literary output and significant contributions to the profession of writing in Canada. Before she died of cancer in 1985, Engel published seven novels,1 two collections of short stories, two books for children, a nonfiction work on islands, and numerous articles and essays. She was also first chair of the Writers' Union of Canada, which was established in 1973. As a trustee for the Toronto Public Library from 1973 to 1976, she played an instrumental role in the creation of public lending rights. Engel accomplished all this and more while raising twins, largely as a single parent. Her literary achievements and contributions were recognized by her colleagues.2 However, Engel became best known only after her fifth novel, Bear, won the 1976 Governor General's Award for English-language fiction. But if Bear triggered a wider recognition of Engel as a writer, it did not generate a comprehensive appreciation of her work. This has left a lacuna in Canadian literary criticism, which the present volume hopes to fill. In bringing critical attention to Marian Engel's work, this study explores the major concerns and interests of her writing. Engel was concerned with women's experience and women's expression of the world. She was interested in female identity and creativity, and the constraints to their development. Her early unpublished plays and

4 Introduction

stories, her novels, and her notebooks repeatedly explore the challenges facing women committed to living and working on their own terms as artists and writers. Oppressive social stereotypes and family expectations, economic and emotional insecurity, and lack of recognition are recurring themes in her work. The emergence of female identity through artistic expression is an interest Engel shared with her late-twentieth-century contemporaries. Several English-language Canadian examples come to mind: Margaret Laurence's protagonist in The Diviners, the writer Morag Gunn; the artist protagonist of Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye; and the writer as a young girl in Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women. The appearance of women as writers or artists in these and other works signals the possible expression of female imagination and creativity, and the challenges to it. How do women survive, physically and psychologically, as artists when society and the world of art are dominated by men? When writing is identified as a masculine activity, how does a woman write? This dimension of Engel's work is one of several links it establishes with a feminist literary tradition, which provides the theoretical framework for this study. Spanning the quarter century from the early 19605 to 1985, Marian Engel's writing coincided with the emergence in Canada of secondwave feminism and its contemporary, postmodernism. Her work reflects a number of the concepts and concerns developed by these two important movements. If a position "somewhere in the middle," in "the space between," is characteristically postmodern,3 then Engel's work might qualify as an appropriate and rewarding subject of postmodern literary analysis. But in its exploration of the author's work, this study draws on several elements of feminist theory, which might be aggregated under the umbrella concept of revision - in Adrienne Rich's sense of looking again with fresh eyes.4 Strategic use of visual imagery throughout Marian Engel's writing reflects its underlying concept of "re-vision." Engel saw the writer's job as one of "devising different methods of seeing:" "One of the things fiction writers can do is lay out the cards a little differently so that the pattern can be more clearly seen," she told colleague and friend Graeme Gibson.5 Engel actively sought different ways of looking at life and literature. She consciously developed a variety of women's perspectives. She was interested in the view achieved by including "the whole crystalline structure." These are protagonist Lou's words in the short story "Transformations."6 While Lou's friends view life from a single angle, she develops a multifaceted or crystalline outlook. Revision in Engel's work involves a wide and ambitious range of subjects, from the borders between reality and fiction to the

5 Introduction

limits of language and artistic representation. It also engages the feminist notion of revision as taking an/other look, seeing again with fresh eyes. Such revision has provided literary criticism with new impetus and perspectives. Thus, feminist theory has generated a greater understanding of the impact of gender on writing. As many women writers have argued recently and in the past, being a woman makes a difference to being a writer. Marian Engel was aware of this. "The difference between being a male writer and being a female writer in this country," she once reflected, is that "the women have to work in opposition."7 Engel identified gender as a "region" in which she wrote. "If you think gender is not a region," she told a conference on Canadian regionalism in the early 19705, "try writing a novel from the other gender's point of view."8 Substantive and theoretical concerns in Engel's work converge in a conjunction between the author's writing and her life. "Fiction probably arises out of a need to integrate the elements of one's life in narrative form," she once remarked.9 "We write out of ... our selves which we hope to make universal, out of our reality."10 Engel's work reflected a decision to use ordinary everyday life to represent the realities and fictions of women's experiences and to articulate a concrete strategy for transcending the dichotomy between the "real" world and the realm of imagination and the fantastic. In this sense, the author's life is meaningful to her work. Information about Marian Engel's life is introduced in the pages to follow not so much with biographical intentions11 but as a productive ingredient in the critical appreciation of her writing. Extending the substance of her own life to others where it fits - "That is where my fiction comes from," Engel asserted.12 "I am autobiographical, I am confessional. I am told my novels are, and it hurts. I don't like to reveal myself, if I did I wouldn't invent fictional personae. But my own history is the history of hundreds of people I know."13 This is not to insist that Marian Engel's writing is autobiographical. Rather, it is to suggest that her work might fruitfully be read with reference to her life and experiences as a woman and a writer.14 Indeed, this conceptual point is made concrete in an important part of Engel's writing - her notebooks, or cahiers. Marian Engel's notebooks are a compelling illustration of "life writing" - the term for a wide variety of autobiographical-seeming texts, including journals, memoirs, letters, testimonies, and metafiction.15 Exemplified by Engel's cahiers, life writing is attributive of the author's writing in general, for living and writing were profoundly connected for Marian Engel. "I think I was born wanting to write books," she once reflected.16 "I decided to be a writer when I was 10. I bought a notebook and said, T'm going to be a writer, Mother.' And

6 Introduction

she said, 'That's very hard/ I said, 'I don't care/ "17 Engel's recollection of her early decision to become a writer identifies the key role of the notebook as well as the mother figure, and also the early awareness of the difficulties involved in being a writer. This was particularly true for a young girl growing up in small-town southwestern Ontario during the postwar period. "Trying to live off writing in this country is a form of insanity," Engel wrote in later life. "But some people manage it. They come out a little funny in the end, but there are some pleasures, like putting the right word in the right place."18 Words and writing were a way of life for Marian Engel, even when the pleasure of getting the right word in the right place did not always compensate for the constant pressure for time and money faced by many women writers. Engel wryly observed: Writing is one of the cheaper arts, and the one best practised in captivity. Therefore, women and convicts have been able to distinguish themselves in the field. Long winter afternoon, children abed. Captive afternoons (Jane Austen hiding her manuscript and taking out her embroidery). Sometimes rebellion, (Sappho sings). Financial need. (Mrs. Moodie and Mrs. Traill desperately mailing manuscripts in the bush). The tradition of producing mild artistic successes to please one's father or husband backfired when Mary Shelley sat down and wrote Frankenstein.19

A life committed to writing might make a woman seem a little "funny" at times; it could also keep her sane. Writing allowed Engel to drift but stay afloat. Like an umbilical cord, it connected her to life and its artistic representation. It was, in real and symbolic terms, a lifeline. Neither life nor writing - least of all Engel's - are normally experienced as linear, entirely logical, or chronological. Their scholarly study however, can perhaps sustain such a line of inquiry. The chronological consideration of Engel's work in this study reflects its interest in tracing the lines of her writing as well as the broad strokes of her life as a woman artist. This approach was most effective in tracking the evolution of Marian Engel's writing and her life as a woman writer. So, too, was the examination of her notebooks, or cahiers. The cahier marked Engel's debut as an author and remained a vehicle of expression throughout her life, mapping her life as a woman and writer. Her notebooks are the subject of chapter 2, following a brief introductory chapter outlining the "both/and" (re)vision that informs Engel's work and its resistance to dualist or dichotomized experience. These chapters, like the others, present capsule summaries of the major ideas discussed as well as giving plot summaries of the

7 Introduction

novels or work under study. Chapter 3 considers Engel's youthful and unpublished work, while chapter 4 examines her first two novels, Sarah Bastard's Notebook (1968) and The Honeyman Festival (i97o).These two books "textualize" and "texturize" women's experiences, fixing the woman-focused outlook of Engel's writing and inscribing a number of feminist themes and concerns. With Monodromos (1973), Engel was more pointedly attentive to questions of literary form and theory. This third novel was written during a period when she was reading a great deal of literary theory, particularly that related to the nouveau roman. This will be explored in chapter 5. Bear (1976) marked a turning point in Engel's life and career, and it will be the centre of discussion in chapter 6. This work brought together Engel's interest in women's experience and artistic expression on the levels of both content and form. It also articulated a new concern for women's experience of the social. The Glassy Sea (1978) is the subject of chapter 7, while chapter 8 investigates Engel's last published novel, Lunatic Villas (1981). A final chapter considers "Elizabeth and the Golden City," the novel Engel was working on at the time of her death. It also reviews the major accomplishments of the author's writing by returning to several short stories from The Tattooed Woman and Inside the Easter Egg. Excerpts from these two collections form my point of departure as well: chapter i expands briefly on some of the ideas introduced here, and it presents the compelling figure of the tattooed woman, who recurs in different guises throughout Engel's work and provides a key to the readings that follow.

i Lines of Inquiry:

The Tattooed Woman Fling out the Life-Line.

Marian Engel, The Glassy Sea1

It is by line, by melody, by story, that artists connect to the people. Marian Engel, "Elizabeth and the Golden City"2 We are led to believe that we are determined by a series of dichotomies black, white, pro, contra - while all the time the shades are neglected ... the truth should always be somewhere in between. Marian Engel, personal notebook3 I think of the people who go around carrying the scars on their arms that they have made for themselves. It is defiance of the real. It is saying you can defy reality by mutilating your skin (that surface). As if your own physical matter is the place where you can leak outside of the real. It is a refusal of desire (at which point, do we not refuse memory too?). The poet, instead, defies "real"-ity by writing it hard into the pages, building that surface (content), as a form wherein she makes her defiance visible. (The "real-" that women have never inhabited as whole being: it has never been formed by our desire, Irigaray says.) Erin Moure, Furious4

The mesmerizing figure of the tattooed woman embodies several key concerns of Marian Engel's writing. The author's interest in female identity and women's artistic re/presentations are elucidated by a number of theoretical concepts of feminist analysis. Of particular interest are the re/vision of the mother-daughter relationship and experimentation in the area of literary form. A "both/and" vision challenges a dichotomous approach to life and its artistic expression. In the introduction to her posthumously published collection of short stories, The Tattooed Woman (1985), Marian Engel expressed her belief in the irrational - "the area where, when the skin of logic is pulled back, anything can happen."5 This was the domain in which the author increasingly situated her work. For Engel, "ordinary" reality tended towards "super-reality" - "that element in everyday life where the surreal shows itself without turning French on us, and people have extraordinary conversations because they have confused clam and lamb soup" (TW, xii-xiii). Even as she played her cards on

9

The Tattooed Woman

the side of the surreal,6 the fantastic, and the irrational, Marian Engel expressed her choice by means of concrete examples taken from everyday life - the soup as opposed to the soul. Engel's work attempts to span and synthesize these two domains of life - the mundane and the extraordinary. The "in between" site of her writing is strategic: it locates the tension in a dichotomous view of existence and represents a resistance to dualist vision. Engel's exploration of dualism and dichotomy was pursued through the examination of women's experience - the main concern of her work. The representation of women's reality and day-to-day lives is a fundamental feature of Marian Engel's writing. "I think there is a point in recording female experience, which is different from male experience," she once stated. "I think there's more new material for women. We're able to say the things we've so often thought, but which weren't considered acceptable or decent. We're describing experiences that haven't been described before."7 "Half a century ago, women had to disguise everything about their heroines. Nobody menstruated, no one came closer than embrace or disgrace, childbirth was veiled. Women's lives were half blocked off."8 Marian Engel's writing explores the forces that halve and block off female realities. Her work probes the dualist underpinnings of social, philosophical, religious, political, and epistemological traditions that are the heritage of classical and Judaeo-Christian world views. This scrutiny can be situated within a wider critique of dualism - and the hierarchicalism and theoretical absolutism related to it - which emanates from feminist scholarship and research. Critic Annis Pratt elaborates: "We [feminists] are particularly suspicious of either/or thinking, the dualistic assumption that everything must be in one category or another, and of a corollary hierarchicalism insisting that every item be either superior or inferior, up or down, good or bad. Dualism and hierarchicalism in Western thinking have led, in turn, to a kind of theoretical absolutism, a taking of ideas as more important than the materials they describe."9 Marian Engel's protagonists endeavour to fuse oppositional forces in their lives, in an effort to avoid a dichotomized, alienated existence. The Honeyman Festival's Minn Burge insists that one should not "divide the world into two sides and ignore its multifariousness" (98). In Sarah Bastard's Notebook, Sarah is impatient with the view that "life is a simple dichotomy" and people can "mend their own fissures by resorting to easy dialectic" (12). This forthright and dynamic protagonist "want[s] it all both ways" (99). This goal reverberates in The Glassy Sea, where Rita Heber seeks "not always to be torn, to wonder if" (162). Like Sarah, Rita "always wanted to have things both

io Lines of Inquiry

ways" (58), a desire that shapes Engel's literary universe.10 Colliding with the dictates of dualism, it accounts for the struggle that characterizes her protagonists' lives. It also helps explain the tremendous appeal that writing held for the author. "There are marvellous things that can be done in writing," Marian Engel observed, "because one uses a combination of imagination and reality."11 Her writing records the enormous attraction of a life of intellectual pursuit and imagination while demonstrating the pull and interest of everyday reality as a woman. Her characters are constantly drawn in both directions at once as they seek to express their personal understanding and vision of the world. The imaginary exerts a powerful influence, for it moves beyond the confines of reality and rationality towards a "super-reality" and the fantastic. The world of dreams and ideas, philosophical reflection and intellectual pursuit, is exceedingly attractive to Engel's protagonists. In it they find an outlet for their instincts, emotions, and unconventionality. At the same time, there is the pull of logic, reason, order, propriety, gentility, and middle-classness. Even as Engel's protagonists lean towards the world of art, dream, and the nontraditional, they are drawn towards conventional reality, logic, and order. This push and pull creates a tension that is characteristic of many lives, if not all human existence. For Marian Engel, this life tension was not so much resolved as transformed - through writing. Writing was the means of living and working on one's own terms and as a woman. It was the way to resist dichotomy and to survive a divided female self. This problematic evolves throughout Engel's writing and is powerfully articulated in her image of the tattooed woman, the mesmerizing figure who serves as a metaphor for the basic challenge of female representation which Engel's work engaged. UNE FEMME "ORDINAIRE" MAIS COMBIEN EXTRAORDINAIRE:12 THE TATTOOED WOMAN

The short story "The Tattooed Woman" first appeared in 1975, when it was aired on CBC'S "Anthology" program. It was not published until 1985, the first in a collection of stories bearing the same name. Conceived precisely at mid-career, the tattooed woman is emblematic of Marian Engel's literary corpus and reflects themes and struggles that appear in both her earlier and later work. The figure offers an illuminating point de repere in reading Engel's writing. The story's premise is not unfamiliar: a forty-two-year-old woman, who remains unnamed/3 discovers that her husband of

ii

The Tattooed Woman

twenty-one years is having an affair with someone half her age. Faced with the prospect of loss of identity and rapid descent into nothingness, she embraces a new strategy and creates another identity. She does this by literally carving one out of her body. She takes a razor blade to her skin and, marking herself up, becomes a tattooed woman - an artist, a somebody, a wise old woman: "I am an artist, now, she thought, a true artist. My body is my canvas. I am very old, and very beautiful, I am carved like an old shaman. I am an artifact of an old culture, my body is a pictograph from prehistory, it has been used and bent and violated and broken, but I have resisted. I am Somebody ... an old, wise woman, and at the same time beautiful and new" (TW, 8). The phantasmagorical transformation of identity through self-inscription - tattooing - is the extraordinary strategy embraced by the "ordinary" women of Engel's work. These are women who have experienced life and wish to express that experience. The tattooed woman appears in Engel's work in various guises: "Miss Incognito" of the title story of Inside the Easter Egg; Mrs Nice of Engel's early 19805 Toronto Star column, "Being Here";14 Joanne of the same-named short novel; the equilibriste of the story "Madame Hortensia, Equilibriste." After losing her lover for someone "smaller and neater," Bear's protagonist Lou carves anagrams of her rival's names on her arm (118). In Lunatic Villas, Sidonia, the adopted daughter of protagonist Harriet Ross's alcoholic sister, is a young tattooed woman. A beautiful teenage delinquent, Sidonia is a "Lady of Shalott,15 counting her money in her sleep" (15). Harriet thinks the young woman needs to go right back to her childhood and start again, because "inside, somewhere, there's someone who's very smart and very scared. Every once in a while she carves up her skin with a razor blade just to let that person out" (45). Engel's tattooed woman is the physical and symbolic expression of individuals who bear the marks of their lives as women and the wisdom of their years. The figure incorporates Engel's notion that in living lies the work of art. The tattooed woman illustrates this understanding by being a living work of art - herself, her body as canvas. This seemingly mad behaviour has a logic. Making her (own) mark(s), the tattooed woman moves from a passive to an active stance. She refuses to be engraved by age or by the anonymity Western society would ascribe her as "just another old lady." Instead, she inscribes her own marks, stepping out of the stereotypical female role of reproducer into that of active producer and marker. Making her marks, the tattooed woman asserts herself as a somebody, re-creating herself as an artist - a re/marked and remarkable woman.

12 Lines of Inquiry

The emergence of female identity through artistic expression does not always materialize in the extraordinary figure of a tattooed woman. More typically, this realization is expressed through the emergence of the woman writer. Women writers and artists feature throughout Engel's work. They tend to appear in the background or in the context of their ordinary everyday lives, as in the case of Lunatic Villas' Harriet Ross and her neighbour Marshallene. Engel's writing examines the panoply of obstacles that women confront in their efforts to express and represent themselves. It explores the character and nuances of these obstacles which, in abstracted and aggregated terms, comprise the traditional roles and life opportunities that society reserves for women as daughters, mothers, and lovers. The rejection of the ordinary and Engel's characters' desire to transcend the mundane alternate with the realization of its all-too-real and even welcome existence. Thus, while the self-expressing artist emerges and indeed is the symbolic hope of transcendence and social transformation, Engel's work vibrates with everyday experiences and the small details and often grim banalities of daily life for women - writers included. The tattooed woman not only establishes complex connections within Marian Engel's work, but she interpolates a wealth of external intertexts and symbolic allusions. The concept of women as those who are marked resonates throughout both cultural and linguistic domains.16 As suggested most recently by Deborah Tannen,17 "there is no unmarked woman." A staggering range of items and practices serve to mark women, from make-up, clothing, and hairstyles to titles (Ms, Mrs, Dr, etc.). Even no make-up is a female marker, Tannen points out, since "some men see it as a hostile refusal to please them." Possibly the most vexatious female markers are linguistic.18 Tannen notes how grammar designates the female as the marked case. A staple of linguistic theory, the term "marked" "refers to the way language alters the base meaning of a word by adding a linguistic particle that has no meaning on its own. The unmarked form of a word carries the meaning that goes without saying ... The unmarked forms of most English words also convey 'male.'"19 Being male is the unmarked case. Endings like ess and ette mark words as female - and somehow frivolous. Women's disadvantaged position in language has been the subject of intense scrutiny by French feminists, whose language marks the feminine in even more noticeable ways. As scholars such as Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous point out, language simultaneously "marks out" the feminine and suppresses female reality. Language is informed by a male vision of the world, and whole dimensions of

13 The Tattooed Woman

women's reality - particular those involving the female body - are missing from language and literature. As Adrienne Rich asserts, "The world [men] have described is not the whole world."20 There is a universe of women's experiences and realities for which words are wanting. Faced with language's deficiency, French feminists elaborated the notion of ecriture aufeminin. Often translated as "writing in the feminine mode," ecriture aufeminin strives to ensure woman's representation in language by writing the female body into the text. This breaks the taboo both on the female body and on the woman writer.21 Engel's tattooed woman illustrates both these tasks. The old practice of tattooing is one associated with men more than women, particularly men in certain walks in life - sailors, soldiers, and criminals. By appropriating the activity for herself, the tattooed woman challenges this taboo. Then, by practising it to an extreme, she draws attention to women's problematic cultural inscription. Incorporating women's desire for artistic representation, the tattooed woman is an articulation of female identity and experience in Engel's writing. Like that of other contemporaries, Engel's work suggests that, through writing, women might re-present female experience of self and promote other models of identity by means of a new language. SOUNDING THE SUBJECT

Considerable theoretical energy has been expended by feminists and other researchers in reconsidering notions of human subjectivity. These reflections have highlighted the crucial role played by gender in shaping the experience of self and other. When additional critical variables such as race and class are factored in, human identity is revealed as a highly complex concept. Feminist analysis has been alert to this complexity in its debate about the female subject and the meaning of femininity. Feminists have expressed reservations about the formulation of self as a singular, separate, coherent, and centred unit/y. This construction has been seen as limited and misleading, developed out of a Western "phallogocentric" tradition, meaning centred around the male subject and valuing logic and order. The French theoretician Luce Irigaray has suggested that theories of the subject have always been appropriated by the "masculine." She argues against the fundamentally narcissistic (male) "specular" logic that underlies Western discourse. This logic represents woman as the negative of its own reflection, the "other" in a system that seeks sameness. For Irigaray, woman is not only the "other," as Simone de Beauvoir demonstrated; she is specifically man's other - his negative

14 Lines of Inquiry

or mirror-image. Femininity is better analysed, in Irigaray's view, as nonspecular and free from the either-or model. It is more appropriately described as inclusive and noncentric, as plural or multiple. In this view, women's efforts towards single, separate, centred, and coherent subjectivity are likely to end in frustration. Conceptualizing female subjectivity as multiple, relational, and fluid has been an important and inspiring proposal of feminist analysis of human identity. It has not gone unscrutinized. Both from within and outside feminist analysis, scholars and women writers have brought various subtleties and factors to bear on this vision of self. Marian Engel's writing contributes to this general questioning and revision of female identity. Her protagonists pit their sense of self against identities projected upon them. Their struggle for identity is overlaid with the tensions flowing from a dichotomized world view. These materialize as a thinking versus a "feeling" approach to life, which values reason over emotion, logic over the irrational. These are ideas telegraphed in another short story dating from the period of the tattooed woman's conception - the title story of Inside the Easter Egg. MISS INCOGNITO INSIDE THE EASTER EGG

The story's point of departure is a decidedly female experience. Protagonist Mary Abbott (who reappears in The Tattooed Woman) is in hospital for a tubal ligation. The Easter egg image of this story and the collection as a whole is rich in symbolic and ironic meaning.22 The egg is widely understood as a symbol of fertility; protagonist Mary is in hospital to be "sterilized." She and her husband Osborne have three children. Mary's mother Mrs Beatty, who has come to help out during Mary's hospitalization, is not fond of Osborne, whose values are at odds with her own. A university professor of philosophy, Osborne is "a thinking man" who likes to read in bed in the morning. Mrs Beatty is "one for getting up early and hustling through the morning" (13). Mary feels torn between her mother's matter-of-fact, no-nonsense approach to life and that of her husband, a specialist in moral ethics who is involved with matters other than the clutter of everyday concerns. The theme of identity unfolds on several levels in the story. First there is the play on "Miss Incognito," a name called out repeatedly over the hospital intercom system during Mary's stay. A double entendre is at work. On the one hand, incognito's meaning of being disguised or unknown evokes Engel's theme of women who are not known to those around them and may not entirely know themselves. On the other hand, the philosophical association with the Cartesian

15 The Tattooed Woman

cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am") evokes a series of connotations, mostly critical. To be incog(n)ito, or not cogito, is to be nonthinking, irrational, illogical, uncontrolled, even nonexistent. I do not think, therefore I am not. I am not rational, logical, controlled, therefore I do not exist. I am irrational, illogical, emotional. I do not exist. "I don't think," are protagonist Mary's first cited words. Engel splices the enunciation after these words, the sentence continuing only after the protagonist's state of mind has been made eminently clear. Mary is not like her thinking, rational, philosopher husband. Indeed, she feels as if "her brain had melted; it did not make sense" (10). The theme of identity develops on a second level through the renaming of Mary's daughter Emma. Before proceeding to a tubal ligation, Mary had considered having another child in the hope that it might be a daughter she could name Polly. On further reflection, she decides that it is the name - a word, the idea - that she likes. So se can simply rename the daughter she already has. This brings Mary closer to her daughter as she struggles towards a renewed sense of her own identity. The hospital's "women's ward" provides a firmly female context for her exploration. After her operation, Mary walks and talks with the other women in the corridor. Their conversations revolve around their bodies: varicose veins, abdominal scars, pregnancies, the side effects of contraceptive pills. It is with reluctance that Mary leaves the company of the women in the hospital to return to life at home. She feels restless and questioning. This is captured in the story's ambiguous ending, where Mary herself acquires the identity of Miss Incognito: "Osborne came upstairs and advanced a philosophical proposition she was too tired to understand. 'Good night, Miss Incognito/ he said, switching out the light" (17). The protagonist of "Inside the Easter Egg" is one of several Miss Incognitos that Marian Engel's writing presents. Women's sense of self involves revising received wisdom about female experience. This in turn involves discarding traditional thinking (cogito) as well as familiar identities - going incognito for a time. As "Inside the Easter Egg" suggests, it also involves the mother-daughter relationship. "WE THINK BACK THROUGH OUR MOTHERS IF WE ARE WOMEN"23

Marian Engel wrote often and consciously about mothers and daughters and their relationships, though fathers have a presence in her writing as well; indeed, a father interest appears in her later work and may be traced to Bear. But mothers feature far more prominently in her published and private writings alike. On the one hand, this may

16 Lines of Inquiry

reflect an internalization of society's greater assignment of parenting responsibilities to women than to men. On the other, mothers in Engel's work are associated with writing and storytelling, like Mrs Beatty, whose irresistible tales even Osborne cannot resist.24 It is to her mother that the child-writer, armed with a notebook, declares her artistic intentions, and it is from her mother that she received inspiration, as illustrated in the following anecdote which Engel recounted in varying versions:25 "One day my mother put four sticks in the ground in our yard, two big sticks and two little sticks, and said, 'There. There's the mother and the daddy and the two children. What are you going to call them?' I swear that's how I became a novelist."26 In recent years, female creativity has been (re)envisioned within the symbolic reunion of daughters and mothers. Feminist scholars and psychoanalysts have drawn attention to the pre-oedipal stage, dominated by the mother. This period of maternal bonding is characterized as one of fluid and reciprocal identity relations, as opposed to the separate and fixed identity model targeted at the oedipal moment. It is also characterized by another (pre-verbal) language the mother tongue - displaced by the father's language at the moment of social integration. Both the pre-oedipal state and the mother tongue are valuable re(dis)coveries to the extent that they are seen to have the potential to release women's creative expression. In this way, female artistic expression is linked with the maternal. At the heart of women's writing is the mother. The daughter's story is the mother's story is the story of writing. Within the exploration of female identity formation and women's subjectivity, Marian Engel was particularly interested in the motherdaughter relationship. Critical attention traditionally has been directed towards the bonds between fathers and sons or between lovers. This tendency has altered in recent years as a result of the efforts of a wide variety of scholars27 who have focused on the motherdaughter relationship in exploring female identity.28 Reconsidering this relationship has been an important part of the revisionist project. Examining the ties between mothers and daughters, feminist theorists have been better able to measure the extent to which these bonds shape women's lives and work, and the development of female identity.29 The "mother-daughter plot" is reconsidered within the "family romance."30 This is the story we tell ourselves about the social and psychological reality of our families and the patterns of desire that motivate the interaction among its members. It is a story that threads itself through Engel's writing, replete with orphans and bastards, lost sisters and mothers. "What the adopted lack," contends Elizabeth, protagonist of the novel Engel was working on at the time of her

17 The Tattooed Woman

death, "is a family romance."31 "Deprived of one family romance, I embarked on another," rejoins the narrator of a short unpublished piece entitled "It's a Wise Child That Knows Its Own Father."32 In Engel's fictive family romances, as in her "real-life" one, mothers and daughters are dual figures. A mother is lost and is replaced by an "other mother"; daughters are twins and are separate/d sisters. Born on 24 May 1933 in Toronto, Canada, Marian Engel herself was the second of twin girls, who were named Eleanor and Ruth. Since their mother was eighteen, unmarried, and unable to keep her daughters, the girls spent the first years of their lives in foster homes. Then, when they were about three years old, they were separated: Ruth was adopted by Mary Elizabeth and Frederick Searle Passmore, who had another daughter named Helen. The couple called their new daughter Marian.33 In Engel's writing, doubles proliferate, inscribing the twin motif and the mother-daughter theme, and transmitting the challenge of the divided or doubled female self. In "The Tattooed Woman," the protagonist looks at the young woman who has replaced her and sees not "the other woman" but herself - the younger version of herself. "She is my daughter, she is my other self," the protagonist remarks (9). The phenomenon of women's double/divided selves resonates throughout Engel's work, with the author's figure de proue again capturing this key concern, even at the levels of sound and spelling: "tattooed" contains two double letters and echoes the word "two." The "other woman" - the sister self, twin, daughter, and mother - appears time and again as the manifestation of women's split selves. Broadly speaking, these doubles may be assembled into two groups. The first consists of characters who represent the socially acceptable woman. Examples include Sarah Bastard Notebook's respectable woman professor, Dr Lyle, who provides the rebellious Sarah with a glimpse of what her future will be if she remains an academic instead of trying to be a writer. The Honeyman Festival's cool and regal Jane-Regina makes "messy "Minn seem mired in motherhood. The Glassy Sea's Christabel is the apparently perfect college roommate of protagonist Rita. These women, in contrast to the protagonists, embody social stereotypes of femininity and female achievement, which becomes especially troubling when incorporated in the mother figure. Thus, Minn's mother Gertrude, in The Honeyman Festival, or Rita's mother Eleanor, in The Glassy Sea, are agents of women's social stereotyping, causing their daughters painful confusion and ultimate rejection. In the alternate grouping, Engel's protagonists accept the proverbial place within the male-dominated structures of society, and the

i8 Lines of Inquiry

"other" woman is the marginal/ized female artist. Hence, Lunatic Villas' Harriet Ross is a writer, but not a "real" one like her friend and neighbour Marshallene. Bear's Lou has a position as bibliographer at the Historical Institute. When these women encounter an "other" type of woman, their lives are challenged and changed. Monodromos's Audrey Moore senses her "psychic other" in Aphroulla, the only woman artist on the Greek island where the novel unfolds. The most challenging double Engel's work presents may be the figure of the bear. In this and other instances, Engel's protagonists seek links with, rather than separation from, the "other." They try to resist the dichotomies that divide women in and among themselves. They reject the dualism whereby women are either intellectuals or earth mothers, saints or sinners, Snow Whites or Rose Reds.34 There emerges instead the powerful figure of the tattooed woman. With this figure, in her various guises, and through a re/vision of female identity and the mother-daughter relationship, Engel challenges dualism, elaborating an "other" or different conception of human experience - a "both/ and" vision that may qualify a "female aesthetic." As Marianne Hirsch points out, "double consciousness" has become a paradigm for the discussion of women's writing within feminist criticism, and a "both/and" vision seems most useful for a reading of modernist texts by women writers, where oscillation and contradiction are key strategies of resistance and opposition.35 The chapters to follow illustrate the extent to which Engel subscribed to this "female aesthetic." Her work represents a double life, sitting on the seam where the realm of thinking, dreaming, reading, writing, the imagination, the fantastic, and the surreal meet the everyday world and experiences of feeling, instinct, emotion, and physical existence as known by women. Engel's novels and characters alternate between these worlds - a novel leading its protagonist into one domain followed by another leading the protagonist in the other direction. Within individual novels and stories, the protagonists are pulled in both directions at once. Thus, a pattern may be discerned among Engel's works. It consists of two interacting cycles. The first consists of Sarah Bastard's Notebook, Monodromos, and The Glassy Sea. The second includes The Honeyman Festival, Bear, and Lunatic Villas. In the former instance, the protagonists struggle intensely with their attraction to a life on the more abstract level of ideas while retaining a clear sense of the importance of the concrete, female world. In the latter case, the protagonists are presented in a world of everyday reality dealing with children and female physical experience, but they exhibit a keen awareness of the pull and possibilities presented by the imaginary. This is a pattern that is most broadly apparent. It is not a

19 The Tattooed Woman

rigid construct; the dualist vision is embraced neither in the life experiences nor in the body of writing that Engel produced. Everything in the author's work resisted dichotomy even as it probed and tested it. Her characters are sketched and woven as they live through the dilemmas of choice forwarded by the two worlds. Engel searches for strategies to fuse this dichotomy as her characters seek to discover a place somewhere in between the lines. This study looks both "at" and "between the lines" of Marian Engel's writings. These were many and varied, including essays and articles, book reviews and newspaper columns, letters and journals, in addition to her novels and short stories. While the chapters that follow are organized around Engel's novels, these works are examined with reference to her other writings.36 The latter shed light on her endeavours in the novel and fill in the contours of her evolution as a woman writer. This is particularly true of her short stories and notebooks. Marian Engel did not consider herself a short story writer, nor did she ever claim the form to be her forte,37 even though she produced two collections - Inside the Easter Egg (1975) and The Tattooed Woman (1985). She much preferred the novel, citing "the bigness and the challenge and the complexity, and the looseness" of the genre as major attractions. She also liked its lack of rules. "You know there are no rules," she remarked to fellow writer Graeme Gibson, "no rules at all. There are critics who make up rules, but there are no rules except what comes off and what doesn't."38 While the short story did not offer Engel the room and structural range she required in writing, it did offer a way of making a living as a writer. Popular magazines such as Chatelaine paid for publishing short stories - hence Engel's view of them as "practical exercises in earning necessities, chronicles to pay the bills. "39 In addition to the two collections of short stories, Marian Engel produced the short novel Joanne. Published in 1975, it coincided with "The Tattooed Woman" in marking the mid-point of her writing career. These works date from a hectic but productive decade for the author. During the 19705, Engel published three novels (Monodromos, 1973; Bear, 1976; The Glassy Sea, 1978) as well as two books for children (Adventure at Moon Bay Towers, 1974, and My Name Is Not Odessa Yarker, i977).4° This study leaves aside Engel's two children's books, along with her nonfiction work, The Islands of Canada (1981), for the expertise of specialists in these areas of literary analysis. But Joanne and stories from the two collections form part of the investigation, for Engel's shorter efforts rehearsed themes and concerns that are central to her novels. They were especially helpful in crystallizing key Engel

2O Lines of Inquiry

figures such as the tattooed woman, Miss Incognito, and the emerging woman artist. The short fiction also provided Engel with opportunities to experiment with literary form. Among its goals, this study attempts to establish Marian Engel as a writer who was keenly interested in and impressively innovative with respect to artistic form and representation. "The ordinary literary process is a very slow one," Engel commented in her preface to Joanne. "It allows for all the rewriting and reconsideration in the world. It turns even the most mercurial people into tortoises. Joanne was another kettle of soup: on-the-spot fabrication." Writing Joanne was a learning experience for Engel, who delighted in literary exercise. It was a chance to work with the serial and with the diary. The former, an approach practised by many authors Engel had read, including Dickens, Thackeray, and Collins,41 required a small cast of characters and short pieces - literary vignettes or epiphanies. The latter, "the great companion of suppressed womanhood" as Engel described it,42 interested her enormously. "We have most of us read excerpts from Virginia Woolf's and Anai's Nin's ... What would a compilation of women's diaries have to tell us now, I asked myself ... Much, it seems. Many lives are still subterranean; many have been grief-stricken and heroic."43 Marian Engel's own journals and notebooks tell much of the subterranean lives of women in the day-to-day world. Her cahiers are a key element in the analysis that follows. When Engel began to write at the age of ten, she started with a notebook, and she continued to write in notebooks throughout her life. The Marian Engel Archive at McMaster University contains nearly fifty of the author's cahiers. Their number alone confirms that, for Engel, notebooks were more than an outlet for writerly ideas and phrases. These cahiers, the subject of the next chapter, trace Engel's restless transfer between the world of writing and the reality of daily existence as they track the writer in the making and the evolution of her work.

2 Between the Lines: Marian Engel's Notebooks Ah, mon cahier, ecoute ...

Marian Engel, personal notebook1

First thought... Have to learn to accept that a lot of the good things are like me, somewhat between the lines. Marian Engel, unpublished jottings2 Writing private things is very good, you can go on and on and please yourself. Marian Engel, letter to Margaret Laurence3

Like the foundation or edifice for her published writing, Marian Engel's notebooks are an intriguing example of the kinds of alternate forms that women's writing has taken. The notebooks, or cahiers, are a unique expression of the concerns and themes that inform Engel's work and of the tension between imagination and reality that characterizes it. The author's desire and determination to be a writer and her attraction to the world of the imagination were at the source of a lifelong interest in intellectual life and artistic creativity. She investigated literary theory and explored literary form. Her considerations involved a variety of philosophical reflections about the nature of reality, the existence of truth, and its relation to fiction. Alongside such writerly concerns, there was also - and always - day-to-day life. Numerous personal notes attest to the importance of everyday reality in Engel's evolution as a writer and a woman. A particular subject of reflection - and rebellion - were the constraints experienced as a result of attitudes and values promoted by a small-town postwar Ontario upbringing with puritan overtones. Over and above the letters, drafts of books, and papers that typically characterize a literary archive, the Marian Engel Archive at McMaster University contains an intriguing and significant item: close to fifty notebooks. From the time she was ten until she died, Engel wrote extensively in notebooks, or cahiers, as she often referred to them. These inexpensive, school exercise books played a vital role in her life and work as a writer and a woman. In addition to capsulizing the content of her writing and tracking her thoughts, the note-

22 Between the Lines

books reflect in microcosm the experiments with form that her work constantly engaged. This unique component of Marian Engel's writing is the subject of this chapter. After a discussion of the notebooks in the context of life writing, attention will be directed to their content through an examination of some of the cahiers' major recurrent themes. The cahier was for Engel a deliberately chosen and even preferred form of expression. In the catalogue describing the author's papers, Dr K.E. Garay notes: Marian Engel ha[d] a Gallic passion for the cahier, and early in her career acquired the habit of recording ideas, notes on books read, drafts of letters never sent, plot outlines and many other things in her notebooks. While some notebooks relate entirely to a particular novel (e.g. the Monodromos cahiers) others seem to have no relation to any novel or relate to several. Few of the notebooks contain dates and ... to complicate matters somewhat, early notebooks containing blank pages were sometimes "rediscovered" and include much later entries by the author.4

Engel's passion for the notebook is particularly interesting in view of modern critical reflection on literary genre and alternatives to traditional forms of writing, such as the recently identified life writing. Engel's cahiers offer a productive example of this form of writing, characterized by its particular blend of the canonical and the marginal. In recent years, conventions of literary expression and of artistic representation in general have been confronted by new critical theory and practice. Feminism and postmodernism have been instrumental in legitimizing forms of literary expression that lie beyond the more familiar genre categories such as the novel or poetry. The analysis of the relation between genre and gender has resulted in an expansion of the literary canon to include forms of writing that frequently, though not exclusively, have been practised by women. Such revision has had particularly interesting results in the field of Canadian literature. Canonical revision has established the importance of work by numerous women writers who chose alternative literary practices or forms of expression. For example, at the end of the nineteenth century, Quebec writer Laure Conan challenged the dominant literary mode of the historical novel with her book Angeline de Montbrun. Incorporating letters, journal entries, and narrative, Angeline has been claimed as Canada's first psychological novel, and its complexities continue to be revealed by modern criticism.5 Another Quebec

23 Marian Engel's Notebooks

woman writer, Jovette Alice Bernier, took the exploration of the psychological novel a step further with her controversial 1931 book, La chair decevante. Unlike the then-dominant roman du terroir,6 Bernier's novel recounted in journal form the story of an unwed mother's struggles with societal pressures. Expanding the canon has also reinstated English-Canadian women writers such as Anna Jameson, Laura Goodman Salverson, Lily Dougall, and Marjorie Pickthall.7 The new literary terrain now includes travel writing, letters, diaries and other private papers, oral history and narrative, fiction-theory,8 and the more recent "life writing." This last is a compelling area of literary theory and investigation. Life writing encompasses many kinds of texts, both fictional and nonfictional. All are linked by a common thematic concern with a life of the self. Marlene Kadar, editor of the 1992 collection of Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice, describes life writing as a "genre of documents or fragments of documents written out of a life, or unabashedly out of a personal experience of the writer."9 While life writing may include some of the elements of the more familiar genre of autobiography, it steps beyond genre boundaries and disciplines, particularly with regard to narrative unity and objectivity. Empirical demonstrations of the concept of life writing include the court testimonies of non-elite young women in early seventeenth-century Rome describing their loss of virginity; the work of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, who wrote at the end of the seventeenth century; and the journals of Elizabeth Smart, which span the decades of the mid-twentieth century.10 Other examples illustrating the notion of life writing include Engel's notebooks, or cahiers, In Marian Engel's cahiers, fiction writing coincides with other writings, ranging from personal introspection to financial accounts and food recipes. The effect of this combination is the breakdown of the traditional separation of fiction from other forms of writing. Engel's notebooks are thus a vivid illustration of life writing and a convincing demonstration of the author's lifelong interest in literary representation. Each of her published works will be seen to attest to this concern for literary form and innovation. Engel was keenly interested in the theoretical and intellectual dimensions of literature. Literary theory was an important personal and lifelong interest. "I want to work out an aesthetic [of writing]," she wrote on 25 August 1972." It was also an expertise shaped by her university studies at McMaster and McGill. The cahiers contain pages of notes taken in class and lists of books read during her university years and later.

24 Between the Lines

A notebook for 1962-63 includes a reading fist of the following authors and works: Jane Austen Fanny Burney, Evelina Goldsmith, The Vicar ofWakefield Defoe, Moll Flanders, Jonathan Wild, Journal of the Plague Year Dickens, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Barnaby Rudge, Bleak House Scott, The Bride ofLammermoor Thackeray, Vanity Fair, Henry Esmond Butter, The Way of All Flesh, Erewhon Hardy, The Return of the Native Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence, Cakes and Ale Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga Arnold Bennett, Anna of the Five Towns, etc. Virginia Woolf , To the Lighthouse EM. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread Americans: Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby Hemingway, A Farewell to Anns, the short stories Schulberg, Disenchanted (about Fitzgerald) Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, For Esm& with Love and Squalor, Franny andZooey Cather, Shadows on the Rock A.B;Guthrie, These Thousand Hitts Stegner, The Big Rock Candy Mountain Van der Post, Venture to the Interior, The Dark Eye in Africa, The Lost World of the Kalahari Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country Moorehead, Alan, The White Nile, The Blue Nile Slocum, Sailing Alone around the World (MEA, box 6, file i) Even after leaving the university milieu, Engel kept up with the intellectual movements of the day. Her notebooks feature copious notes on the theory and practice of the nouveau roman. An entry dated 30 January 1970 urges: "The Nouveau Roman, the Old Roman & the New Roman. Straighten out your ideas before you continue."12 "Analyse abstract writing," another entry instructs. "There still should be another way to go. Read analytically. Read Greek

25 Marian Engel's Notebooks

tragedy ... Get glasses!"13 Engel tracked the development of the idea of art becoming its own subject and the role of language in this new self-conscious representation. Reading Maurice Blanchot's Le livre a venir, she noted that a "special lit. [erary] language [was] being created in America."14 She was intrigued by Jorge Luis Borges's concept of fabulation: "He says a great deal to me," she wrote on 30 January 1970. "His parables deal w[ith] what one can refer to as 'artistic creation' - or creation or discovery. His labyrinths are tunnels for seekers - and writers are par excellence seekers (if I can't find it, I'll invent it)."15 She argued on paper with Robbe-Grillet about the "myth of depth" and the need to see things as they are: "He may be right but what I want is to place the rare joys of reality against those few elements of reality that seep through to me."16 She devoted considerable attention to the demise of literary realism, recording under a notebook title "Butor - Repertoire II" that "realism is hostile to morality & the intellectual. It is made of mediocrity, hate, flat sufficiency."17 At the other end of the spectrum, the cahiers record Engel's tendency towards romanticism, in both the literary and the emotional sense.18 The dilemma of the romantic faced with reality is debated often in the author's notebooks and in her fiction.19 In the early unpublished play "Beat Up the Rain," protagonist Kate admits she is a romantic who believes in plots of the rich-boy-meets-poor-girl variety. In a 1963-64 cahier, Engel asks: "What can the searching romantic do until his desire for wholeness fades into content, but continue the guilty chase for eternity."20 Another notebook entry records the author's intention that Sarah Bastard's Notebook have, among its themes, "the influence of romanticism."21 An early version of Sarah declares, "I knew already I was a literary-dictionary well-defined romantic case-book reveller in the remote and strange, the more introverted the moment, the farther I reach."22 Engel's interest in literary romanticism accounts for numerous references, throughout her novels and short stories, to writers exemplifying the movement. Bear is a notable case in point. The Gary estate library covers the nineteenth century in three languages: "Hume and Smollett. Byron, of course, and the other romantics. Sheridan, Dickens. Thackeray. Eliot. No Trollope. Mrs. Gaskell. Bulwer Lytton. Ah, Darwin - but not a first edition. Jane Austen, of course. De Maupassant. Lamartine. Goethe, Schiller ... Those credits to womankind, Mrs. Hemans ... and Eliza Cook ... Young's Night Thoughts. Oh, everything" (43). Appearing within a published novel, this list mirrors many similar lists of books within the author's notebooks. This is how the notebooks and fiction worked, one reflecting the other.

26 Between the Lines

Books & Attitudes Hardy - his premises - that the world grinds down women who defy convention - are surety defensive Graham Greene - after Joyce,flogginga dead horse Orwell - Exciting, but siSU the upper class describing the lower. Read Jean Santeuil more Balzac Peacock Moore Dorothy Richardson Freud (1964-65 notebook, MIA, box6, file 9) Books to get & read Wyndham Lewis Thos Mann T,E Powys Krbank Beckett HanO'Brieri Henry Williamson Reading Tom Wolfe on Ken Kesey (list dating from 1967, MBA, box 6, file 13) While Engel was profoundly interested in literary experimentation and innovation, the options available to her were limited. A writer intent on publishing in Canada at the time Engel was embarking on her career could not be unconventional in the ways subsequently facilitated by feminist literary practice or embraced by the concept of life writing. Although Engel tried (and published) poetry, she soon realized that this would not be her literary metier. "I wrote poetry when I was in my early twenties ... then I had a run-in with Louis Dudek at McGill, who didn't like my work. I stopped writing poetry and realized that if I could stop, I was no poet."23 Theatre offered another venue. Engel's unpublished work includes a number of plays, which Hugh MacLennan thought were good. He described "Beat Up the Rain" as "true, vivid, vital and excellently constructed ... the work ... of a very observant writer who has produced some real if naive characters, thrown them together and made them live."24 But Engel did not pursue play writing past the period after her return from Europe

27 Marian Engel's Notebooks

in the mid-1960s, when she wrote radio and television plays and scripts. Instead, she turned to the novel, which offered her the possibilities for experimentation and the room for the "looseness" that she required for literary representation. "I want to cut the novel up," a 1972 notebook entry records, "cut loose from conventional plo[t]."25 At the time when Engel was beginning to publish, literary unconventionality was a difficult project to pursue. Feminist and postmodern critiques had not yet engendered rebel perspectives in the realms of human social values and creativity. The cahiers offered a solution.26 Marian Engel's notebooks provided her with a vehicle of expression in which to depart from linear narrative and the delineation of genres. The cahiers display little concern for chronology and sequence, and present a collage of writing practices. Fiction, theory, introspection, autobiography, all mixed together, make reading Engel's notebooks an experience in contradiction and inspiration. Elegant passages that appeared subsequently in published novels blend with baking recipes, budgetary accounts, or the harried thoughts of a tired mother, cook, and housekeeper. Marian Engel's notebooks are not simply a catalogue of early drafts and passages, nor are they a jumbled shopping list of thoughts and impressions. They unite the "canonical" and the "marginal" by juxtaposing and playing off fictional/writing experiences against day-to-day life as a woman, wife, daughter, and mother. In this way, the notebooks document Engel's life as a writer and woman, and illustrate how the two are inseparably connected. They fill in between the lines of Engel's published work, offering a wealth of material that assists in understanding the author's novels and appreciating her life as a woman writer. The balance of this chapter elaborates two overriding themes which recur in the notebooks and which informed Engel's published work and her life as a writer. On the one hand, the notebooks expressed her intense desire to be a writer and her critique of the elements and forces in life which frustrated this desire. On the other hand, they explored areas which, for Engel, fostered writing and the expression of self: feelings, emotions, the irrational, the imagination. The notebooks were a vital strategy in both cases. "All I wanted to do as a child was write," Engel recalled.27 The notebooks provided an early and ongoing outlet for this desire. They were a private place away from the middle-class values and puritan attitudes of Engel's surroundings. They served a subversive function, as a sort of underground tactic by which a young girl aspiring to the artist's life could express herself and would not be obstructed by "the knowing that you will not be understood because you are not big enough to say what you want."28

a8 Between the Lines SMALL GIRLS AND SMALL TOWNS

"Feeling small/' like a child or, later, like a "failed artist," is an important and recurrent theme in Engel's writing.29 The notebooks express the complex origins of not being "big enough," suggesting strongly that belittlement is inextricably linked to being female. The child who wants nothing more than to write is a girl. The girl becomes a woman aspiring to the artist's life. In the process, she encounters family and societal notions about what she ought to do and who she should be. "Should?" Engel asks. "Isn't that the great Canadian word, though?" She goes on to recall how "should" hassled her all her life "through school and Sunday School and a Baptist university, which I thought was about books and turned out to be about people hanging in your doorway saying Marian, you shouldn't hang about with those people who read so much, you should curl your hair. Should, should, should, until you think you're going to die of it."3° In her notebooks as in her fiction, Engel explored the oppressiveness of "should" and its various agents of school, church, family, and society.31 These were formidable institutional opponents to personal desire, especially that of a young girl longing to be a writer. Female upbringing was a subject of endless fascination for Engel in her fiction and notebooks alike.32 All her major characters grapple with the question of how they were raised. "The years from five to ten are influential ones," Engel observed in an essay recalling her childhood in Gait, Ontario.33 During these crucial years, and in the milieu in which Engel grew up, family, church, school, and society were key players in female socialization. One of the most striking features of Engel's writing is her portrait of postwar small-town southwestern Ontario. Exploring some of the socializing forces of this milieu, notably the mother and her complex role as both catalyst and constraint in the process of becoming a writer, encompasses the first broad theme of Engel's writing identified above: the desire to be a writer and the rebellion against the constraints to this desire. Considering this theme in its various manifestations leads directly to the second overriding theme identified above: the exploration of emotions and instinct, imagination and intellect.

C I N D E R E L L A AND THE T H R E E MRS: "NICE," "NO-ONE," AND "NASTY" "I was brought up to be a nice, refined, Ontario girl," Engel once remarked. "I was Miss Square, and, having been handed 'Sex, Marriage and Birth Control' at a tender age, I decided it was just as well. Besides, I wanted to be a writer."34 Even as a young girl, Marian Engel

29 Marian Engel's Notebooks

was conscious of the unconventionality of her aspirations. She recalled "sitting on the front steps at 13 in khaki pants and an old army shirt saying I won't, I won't, because I knew I was going to be processed like cheese in order to become an acceptable late-fifties woman: wrapped in elastic and shaved and frizzed. I was horrified at the idea. "35 You GSR be, but you can't do. A bad rule for later life, it turned out, but she couldn't have known that. ("The Smell of Sulphur," The Tattooed Woman, 119) She could hear all the fourteen-year-old boys in the world whispering, "Nita Nobody, got no tits..." and the rest of it, which was worse. {"Anita's Dance" The Tattooed Woman, 94} From an early age, Engel resisted the social conventions by which young girls are "processed" into the women their culture thinks they should be. "Wrapped in elastic and shaved and frizzed," the late-fifties woman was primed to attract a husband, get married, and have children. Tutored by their mothers - "First World War and Depression women, who knew what happened to women without men"36 - girls of Engel's generation and milieu were taught the importance of appearances and proper ladylike behaviour. "What will people think" was the guiding principle.37 "Respectable was ... the key word," Engel recalled,38 gentility the main aim, and "no thing stronger than tea" a whole philosophy.39 Moderation was the motto and was manifested by being reasonable, rational, practical, and forthright. "The strange things that people talked of in hushed voices" remained mysteries which Western Ontario Protestantism failed to explain: "sex, mysticism, violence and those combinations of sex, mysticism and One [was] formed by bombardment with unarguable propositions stated as self-evident truths: God is Love, Whistling Girls and Crowing Hens, A Stitch in lime Saves Nine, The Things We Hate in Others are the Things We Loathe in Ourselves. One ends by wanting to mow them down with machine guns, or at least shout "Don't just stand there, do something/' but there is no fighting the text on the waU, the articles of faith, the morality slogan. (Review of The Rules of Chaos, by Stephen Vizanczey, MIA, box 24, file 32)

30 Between the Lines

violence which inevitably occurred and were undreamt of in our philosophy."40 Propriety combined with discipline and religious righteousness made for a strict and sober upbringing. "A lady is: A godfearing person/' Engel noted.41 She recalled growing up in a world in which religion was a major force. "What church do you go to?' was the great Canadian question," she observed.42 "It got so that one automatically knew, on arriving, whether one was in a Presbyterian town or a United Church one - a pithy summary of small-town pride and prejudice."43 Marriage was a serious affair meant for keeping people's noses to the grindstone; and sex, it seemed to me from the books she gave me about it, was for the martyrdom of women... and women's role was to take care of men and children. If one became a teacher and instructed them, instead of a mother baking for them, that was acceptable. (The Glassy Sea, 71-2) God, I'm a trivial woman. But then I live a trivial life. Mine is a world of undershirts and carpet linings, socks, pants, geraniums and wheatgerm. (Joanne, 27) Church, school, family, and society collaborated in processing and packaging women who would assume conventional postwar roles as wives, mothers, and housekeepers. This was the generation of Betty Friedan's "feminine mystique." Engel had her own name for the woman sequestered into domesticity. She called her Mrs Nice - the woman who "fits well into a society where everyone is quiet and polite and burning with rage underneath."44 A fiery Engel made Mrs Nice the subject of her inaugural "Being Here" column for the Toronto Star in the early 19805. Mrs Nice also turned up in fictional guise - as the protagonist of Joanne, for instance. Joanne is the "little woman"(8) who shrinks into an even smaller person when her children are taken away from her during divorce proceedings. "My life, my personality, my whole being went down the kitchen drain," Joanne confesses. "I became a transparent entity. Mrs No-One. The lady who used to have children, and had no more. A person who had done one thing only in her life, and that was bringing these two children into the world, and they were hers no more" (54). Joanne's experiences of marital and family breakdown demarcate a new phase in her life and identity. She abandons the role of Mrs

31 Marian Engel's Notebooks

Nice and Mrs No-One to become Somebody. She revises her self-image as a little orphan -"our Else, the little kid in the Katherine Mansfield story about the doll's house" (i) - who sees the lamp but not the light. She begins to write. Committing her thoughts and feelings to a diary, forty-two-year-old Joanne joins the ranks of Engel's tattooed women, marked by life but illuminated and wiser for it. If Joanne was a fictional character, Mrs Nice/Mrs No-One was a real-life scenario for many women in the postwar era, including Engel. The aspiring writer did not want to become a woman whose energies were consumed by the "art of housekeeping" instead of the art of writing. "Housework," Engel was emphatic, "gives me the crazies."45 In Godwin, the upbringing of women was severely practical. But somehow it had not penetrated to her that frills and wax-looking dolls would lead to the coarse mysteries of pubic hair and blood in the pants and absent husbands, and that if they did/ and she did not like it, she would be unable to take her Victorian self up to her room for 40 years. Enough of us go to asylums, she thought and remembered her mother Gertrude standing over her saying she had got to learn to scrub a decent toilet, and herself rebelling "Never!"; and the strength of Gertrude, her big feet: and her own angry tears. And that goddamn Gertrude accusing her of being finicky when, the tears were for missing the swimming meet. (The Honeyman Festival^ 9) "Margaret Atwood said to me once," Engel recounted, "'The reason Cinderella got the prince was that she was a good housekeeper/ I hated that statement as much as I hate housekeeping, but I think it's one of the world's awful truths."46 Engel claimed to have "found out" about her housekeeping when she was living on the island of Cyprus. "No matter how hard I'd work I would never be any good at housework at all," she noted, quipping later: "Like Virginia Woolf, I have a wonderful gift for not seeing dust."47 Engel wrote of being "haunted" by housekeeping, "perpetually guilty and defiantly untidy, and sometimes rampantly unfair, and often evasive on the subject of housekeeping - and not housekeeping."48 As these public statements suggest, Engel's passionate response to "mundane housekeeping" signalled deeper sentiments. In her notebooks, the subject takes on significant symbolic meaning. Indeed, housework becomes a metaphor for excessive tidiness and obsessive cleanliness in more than the household. It evokes being "prim and proper" and repressed and suppressed in all areas of life. The domain

32 Between the Lines

of sexuality was particularly problematic. Bear is perhaps the author's best-known exploration of female sexuality but the topic turns up regularly in her notebooks. "Relying on sex only drives one into frantic self-disgust," Engel noted in an early cahier. "Denial, on the other hand, eventually distorts one's whole life."49 The distortion of values was Engel's definition of provincialism, borrowed from T.S. Eliot: "the exclusion of some, the exaggeration of others, which springs, not from lack of wide geographical perambulation, but from applying standards acquired within a limited area, to the whole of human experience."50 From an early age, Engel wanted to step beyond provincialism and the sobriety of her small-town southwestern Ontario upbringing. "I guess what I wanted out of life," she reflected in later years, "was to get away from ... seriousness and plainness because it was so Ontario ... I wanted some form of gaiety and abandon."51 Gaiety and abandon were not likely ingredients in Mrs Nice/ Mrs No-One's lives. These were women schooled in the arts of "feminine modesty, feminine chastity and feminine obedience."52 At the age of thirteen, the mere prospect of being processed into Mrs Nice generated an irresistible urge in Engel to wear men's clothes,53 be sloppy, and become a writer. It is worth pausing briefly to consider the connection Engel saw between writing and clothing. Publicly, she wrote that the "dowdiest duds help women writers' creative juices flow."54 Not entirely tongue-in-cheek, she cited Virginia Woolf's old mended cardigan, Edith Sitwell's knitted bedjackets, George Sand's trousers, Dorothy Richardson's wish for better tailoring, Margaret Atwood's elderly Shetlands and holey cashmeres, and finally her own old brown bathrobe, in which she both wrote and slept. In the privacy of her notebooks, the matter of clothing, like the task of housekeeping, took on deeper meaning. Linked to questions of love and sexuality, it was also tied to issues of body image and weight. This is made clear in her most personal notebook: The clothing hassle has its origins in the "androgynous" side of me. Also I do not want to pay for love in costumes, am too proud. I can always visualize being naked & sex or wearing men's clothes - nothing in between - my usual tendency to extremes emerging extremely. Images from adolescence: 1) wearing Dads shirts ist time 2) dressing up naked in silk scarves Androgyne by day, women at night? Wearing H's clothes, Dads ...! Weight: "You look pregnant" - being chosen. Being fattened up.

33 Marian Engel's Notebooks Problem is this: I can't please others except by being ill - skinny ain't natural to me. H. always said this was a rationalization. I am too proud to go around scrimping on food to get love. But being too much overweight is being sloppy55

Part of the appeal of the old brown bathrobe was the tendency to "run to what is politely called in French embonpoint/' wrote Engel.56 "I am, alas, stout," she stated.57 "I have a round face ... I feel better without bindings, and when I feel better, I write better. And in spite of its holes, my robe is comfortably draught-proof. Most of my body is at ease and at an even temperature; it can't distract me."58 It is in this context that the emotion with which Engel wrote of the "clothing hassle" in her notebooks can best be understood: "Clothes keerist they make me angry. I like uniforms, clothes that move on the body."59 In this regard, Engel felt she resembled many other women writers, who wore similarly comfortable, stretched "ancient duds" or who wrote in bed, "where they are warm and as far away as possible from the kitchen."60 "Women's life is waiting," someone said, James Joyce, I think, I'm a lousy waitress. (Joanne, 67) Like many of her contemporaries, Engel had learned that "to be a woman you must be desirable"; this was the key to marriage and "femininity."61 But she resisted the social forces by which girls and women of her milieu became consumed with being slim and pretty, neat and tidy - Cinderellas in the kitchen waiting for their prince to come and then to live happily ever after. Engel disliked housework, her hair was defiantly straight, she tended towards embonpoint, and, in any event, she wanted to be a writer. Writing offered an opportunity to be one's real true self, rather than a "processed" artificial one. "Mrs Nice is a phony," Engel asserted. "She makes bad decisions, puts up with terrible poetry readings, and is as dependent as a morning glory vine."62 She may have looked the part, Engel stated, but she was not Mrs Nice. And she could be Mrs Nasty: "When Mrs. Nice took off her mask, Mrs. Nasty had a lot to say. She was rather like that little girl I was, who when she was introduced to kind ladies by her mother, grabbed mother's lead and growled like a dog. She's jealous, competitive, greedy, selfish and lazy. She suffers from all the seven deadly sins at once. If you put her together with Mrs. Nice, you have an average human being."63

34 Between the Lines

Mrs Nice/Mrs No-One/Mrs Nasty are "domestic" illustrations of women's divided selves - the female "schizophrenia" that Engel captured so powerfully in the figure of the tattooed woman. The author's rejection, from an early age, of traditional female roles flowed from the unconventional ambition to be a writer. But if she could bypass "sex, marriage & birth control" on the road to becoming an artist, love was quite another matter. The need to be loved and to belong is one of the most compelling subjects of Marian Engel's cahiers. THE LITTLE ORPHAN

The determination to be a writer ran headlong into the need to be cared for and wanted. "How true is it that a woman must be made to submit her will before she can have a relationship?" Engel asked in one notebook.64 Not only must her will be subjugated, but woman's "real sexuality ... real rationality" had to be sacrificed.65 Engel wanted "desperately to belong when there [was] something around to belong to."66 In the first instance, family could provide this sense of belonging. On several occasions, Engel wrote of the distress of feeling orphaned. A notebook entry entitled "Tues. after Thanksgiving" (1968) reads: "Need father & mother figures very badly these days. Feel orphaned. Why?"67 Publicly, Engel suggested that writers were prone to feeling orphaned, in her "Being Here" column of 5 December 1981, she wrote: "Writers, being self-employed and therefore self-rescuing, often feel as self-sufficient as Robinson Crusoe. A surprisingly large number of them started life as orphans, or in situations where they felt orphaned living with unsympathetic grandparents or in lonely boarding schools. So their isolation is often chosen and they know a lot about coping with loneliness."68 Engel was herself such a writer, as her notebooks reveal. An entry dated 22 October 1967 records that she was feeling "low for many days": "My mother ran away. It is very hard not to have the courage to. I see no reason to go on. It is silly not to be able to arrange one's life efficiently. One might as well be dead."69 On 25 April 1984 she wrote to Margaret Laurence: "I didn't realise it HURT so much to be a fosterchild and orphan etc., until I read 'In Search of April Raintree' and things started to break open. I got that pain more or less out of my system." A few weeks later she asked her friend, "Have you read about Indian children in Manitoba being sent to the States to be abused? You'd think enough people did it here. I don't mind about being adopted except that it was treated as a dirty secret which, perhaps, to them in the end it was. I don't think Mother was really sure enough of herself for it. I still dream about her."70

35 Marian Engel's Notebooks

In another notebook, Engel refers to her "mother thing," the "terrible (STILL!) sense of deprivation/resentment."71 Yet another notebook entry includes adoption in a list of "embarrassments" that Engel drew up in response to a self-imposed question of what comprised the "strong feelings" of her life. Compiling her list, she noted the importance of the "search for surrogate parents": Strong feelings. fear of mother, jealousy of sister (what were my early feelings there? Simply a determination to hog the limelight) Desire for praise Embarrassment - sex, writing, religion, adoption72

Adoption appeared to be an underlying reason for the need to belong and be loved. The figure of the little orphan who wants to be noticed, taken home, and loved occurs regularly in Engel's fiction. The protagonist of Joanne introduces herself as "Our Else," the waif who sees the lamp.73 But if family could fulfil the need to be loved and belong, it could also stifle the desire to write, particularly when its values were steeped in stereotypical attitudes towards women. "What are the values?" Engel asked in notes to her early unpublished play, "The Deception of the Thrush." In answer, she wrote: "Family solidarity, feminine modesty, feminine chastity, feminine obedience."74 The consequences of deviating were clear from the beginning. As a schoolgirl, Engel had sometimes dawdled on her way home, hanging about the Gait foundry, which fascinated her.75 "Once I came home very late and there was a crust of dry bread and a glass of water for my supper," she recalled. "Oh, my parents were very tough."76 Engel portrayed her parents as highly disciplined individuals: "My mother used to be a lieutenant-governor's secretary and there were times we all wished she would go back to work because she had so much power, so much energy, and she organized with such efficiency."77 "Home was, if your father was a teacher, in many ways school. You worked and worked, your tongue tracing letters on the inside of your cheek."78 As a girl, Engel was taught to value education and hard work, practicality and respectability, and moral responsibility. The values of the Passmores, who were members of the United Church, had obviously puritan overtones. Marian learned that "every choice was a moral choice"79 and that one had to "pay for joy."80 It is against such an outlook on life that her various female protagonists rebel. Although she is on record as having had a "lucky" childhood,81 Engel speculated that her later-life crises originated from her strict upbringing, which provided "no outlet for normal rebellion."82 The

36 Between the Lines

ambivalent attitude towards the family - wanting to belong, wanting to rebel - was played out to its most intense degree in the relationship between child and mother. As an orphan, Marian Engel did not know her biological parents - neither mother nor father. Nevertheless, the figure of the mother - the lost (birth) mother and the "other" (adoptive) mother - (pre)occupies Engel's writing, both public and private. "M O T H E R I N G

V S S M O T H E R I N G '83

Engel's writing reveals a complicated, multifaceted attitude towards the mother, combining admiration, fear, love, and resentment. On the one hand, mothers are associated with the act of writing. On the other hand, they are associated with housekeeping and its metaphoric meaning of being prim and proper, repressed and suppressed: I know a lot more, really, about my mother and housekeeping. She, too, was a historic case - and still is, in her neat little house. But she worked to another system. As a schoolteacher's wife in the Depression, she learned to do without those stacks of virginal towels and learned to like doing without them. She is by nature a minimalist... It would be easier, I think, if like my mother I was a minimalist. She comes down and says "Marian, the books! Why don't you go to the library?"84

A big-little motif underpins the mother-daughter relationship depicted in Engel's writing. The notebooks confirm the novels' portrait of "minimalist" mothers playing huge roles in their daughters' lives. "Mother was always a very large person in everyone's life," Engel remarked.85 Beside the mother, the writer was potentially ever the small child, even as an adult86 with her own children: "Came home Mother insisted on buying a Dom.[inion] Store chicken - wouldn't buy one at the Elizabeth - hauled me around like a kid, told me when to do things, I was nearly crazy by the time H came for supper. So drank a lot."8? Mothering felt like smothering when it meant the discipline of respectability, propriety, practicality, reason, logic, and control. Engel did not disdain discipline. Although not a model housekeeper, she was a highly disciplined writer. Indeed, she was surprised that she had turned out to be "such a neat writer. I suppose ... [if] you are programmed by your grandmother, I have to be neat somehow."88 Where discipline became a liability, however, was in the divorce of feelings, intelligence, and action.89

37 Marian Engel's Notebooks

And Mother? I tried to open her mind/ too, don't we all: fifteen on a kitchen stool, proselytizing the minister's daughter of the nineties, IWs ^vas considered an intelligent milieu, certainly most of them went to university and that part of the world which it excluded couldn't be thought about. A nice girl, reasonable brain, and damn well not roving. But out of it Her stories were of adolescent shyness, fear: fear of father, fear of public opinion (the Congregation was an ogre), shyness of her friends. Whenever anybody, even when I was ten, told me autobiography I identified, but I was never quite able to carry that fear for her. She was, then, a big and not gentle personality, fear having constructed edges: but a gentle mother; the opposite of my father, whose sternness was puton. Mother was us, and underneath all she believed in—love, mercy, magic - she had a toughness and a fear. She had feared her father; the mother was distant, invalid. Perhaps (he British are right to separate the child early from its mother, hoping to escape the seven generations' transfer of the consciousness of sin. But what shall we pass on if not what we are? There went a pretty girl, my mother, and a nice girl, but strong. Once someone said, I met your mother, Sarah, she's such a lovely frail lady. Frail, I said, frail, arid 1, fully grown, thought, thank God Tm bigger than she is now. She was our love and our hate,foomrngbigger than me Cheshire cat, and when the sun shone, more beneficent than God. Examining eyes like an owl's. Now that I am at last grown up I weep to=see her from the outside, frail and opaque. She was all poetry, magic, power, and strength. You could light candles to her and make incantations. Now we have all expiated her, like a sin. {Sarah Bastard's Notebook, 123-4) "Feelings count so much," Engel declared. "You have to feel emotionally pressed to write."90 When the writing was going well, her overwhelming sense was one of "disobeying orders - living instinctively instead of logically ... riding high."91 "Never mind what the story says," she jotted in one cahier, "it proves that the instincts are right."92 Writing was a process of "feeling through the emotions while making the fiction."93 Engel valued instinct and emotion in writing. She expressed the view that "most women's writing, even some of the best, in spite of its awareness of physical sex and liberation from inhibition, still neglects the instinctual core of female behaviour, except metaphorically. There are rooms on which the door

38 Between the Lines

has remained closed for political reasons."94 Women writers had begun to open these doors, Engel noted, citing Plath, Atwood, MarieClaire Blais, and Violet Leduc as writers who have "toyed with the doorknobs." Marian Engel shared these writers' initiative. But in a social context that sanctioned logic and control, instinct and emotion were disparaged for being illogical and irrational. This was especially true when the emotion and instinct in question were a woman's. A 1963 notebook entry records this realization and its unhappy consequences for Engel: 1) I drink more and more 2) I am less and less logical 3) I am less and less sure of which level things come from: hysteria.95

Engel's cahiers reveal that as a writer she experienced the sort of distress which feminist investigation has found many women artists share.96 In situations where emotion and instinct triumph over logic and control, both the individual and society arrive at a verdict of hysteria. For Engel, though, instinct and feelings were neither illogical nor disconnected with intellect and rationality. On the contrary, she equated instinct and rationality. Upbringing and milieu, however, undermined this logic. "What was it taught me not to trust my own instinct & rationality?" she asked in one cahier, replying that: "pain, self-sacrifice, & instruction [of] the female virtues ... led to their logical conclusion - destruction of the self and of other women's selves."9? In order to avoid the destruction of women's selves, the "virtuous" female roles of Cinderella and Mrs Nice had to be circumvented, even at the cost of maternal disappointment: "Down with sentimental loyalties - filial piety. Sometimes you have to let go."98 The notebooks were a place for letting go, a space in which to question and criticize maternal, familial, social, and religious values. In these cahiers, Engel could disobey the rules of female socialization and could be "sloppy," emotional, intellectual, even egotistical" as she moved away from becoming Mrs Nice and towards being a writer. SCRAMBLED JOURNALS INDEED100

"Writing in so many notebooks," Engel recorded on 4 June 1965,101 "as ever, disorganized." She later commented: "Fragmented is the word for my mind."102 Such observations occur throughout her notebooks, less in criticism of herself than of traditional values of unity and order, and of socially acceptable modes of being. Engel acknowl-

39 Marian Engel's Notebooks

edged the fragmentary nature of her life, asserting that "we become composites very early in our lives."103 Reading Maurois' life of Balzac in 1966, she expressed her admiration for "the multiplicity of the man. The love of the chaos hugger-mugger. Junkshop or splendid museum of a mind? Versailles and Highgate Cemetery. Means of knowing people - prolific intimacy. How many people's stories do I know this way?"104 Engel saw multiplicity as a way of realizing intimacy with others and self alike. Apparent chaos could generate self-knowledge. Reading Harold Nicolson on 10 October 1968, she noted: "I must keep a diary, keep it regularly as an act of self-discipline and labour and sanity." Then, knowingly and with a frankness typical of the cahiers, she added, "My pen will run out. Always I fight against the grain of my upbringing."105 Against her background of respectability, purposefulness, and reason emerged the universe of imagination, reading and writing, and books. In school I ranmy nose up and down flie foolscap trying to feel the lines until they sent for the eye doctor. ([Ute Glassy Saa/as) She had never wanted hermottier's life, one of Hying elbows and fits of bad temper a»daspirations tiiatweiemmu4" - ->., ;*a53^|Efa^i