Gabrielle Roy's Bower of Innocence in Enchantment and Sorrow

Domestic Gardening: Gabrielle Roy’s Bower of Innocence in Enchantment and Sorrow Shelley Boyd McGill University “A Chinese proverb says, ‘If you want a day of happiness, buy a bottle of wine and get drunk; if you want a week of happiness, get married; if you want a whole life of happiness, plant a garden.’ ere’s some truth in that, don’t you think?” Roy, Letters ’ as integral to “a whole Glife of happiness” resonates with the very form and content of her autobiography Enchantment and Sorrow, in which a garden motif traces Roy’s maturation as a young woman and the cultivation of her artistic expression. roughout Roy’s fiction and particularly her autobiography, gardens are extraordinary, readily visible terrains. Within these green, flower-filled spaces, Roy’s characters and Roy herself as protagonist experience security, innocence, happiness, and a lasting enchantment with their worlds. e idyllic innocence of Roy’s gardens does not preclude these spaces, however, from reflecting the complexities and evolutions of adult experience, particularly when it comes to Roy’s female artist figures. Within the safety and beauty of her gardens in Enchantment and Sorrow, Roy experiences moments of profound self-reflection and transformation—indeed, her gar- ESC . (December ): – Boyd.indd 189 4/27/2008, 11:16 AM dens are not simply cultivated earth, but pivotal bowers that construct and validate her role as a woman artist. But as much as Roy’s gardens provide vital space for her expression, these gardens also work to contain and to limit, revealing the problematic demands of femininity and, in Roy’s case, S B its rootedness in the domestic. completed her at Within her writing, Roy’s gardens are clearly domestic in nature, exist- McGill University and is ing as familiar, family-oriented environments that provide safe, conven- currently the Max Bell tional enclosures for her female characters and for Roy as the protagonist Postdoctoral Fellow at of her autobiography. Garden terrains associated with the “domestic” are the McGill Institute for “of the household” or “at home” and directly related to “what concerns the Study of Canada. e oneself” (“domestic”). As Mark Francis and Randolph T. Hester note in focus of her research e Meaning of Gardens: Idea, Place, and Action, “e garden is […] a is literary gardens in source of action requiring intimate and direct involvement. We cannot Canadian women’s dig, plant, trim, water, or harvest with detached passivity” (). A site writing. associated with daily work, living, and dwelling, then, a domestic garden is “an everyday place[…]. We experience it through the kitchen window or on a fall Saturday morning raking leaves” (Francis and Hester ). e comfort of a domestic garden also lies in the fact that it is highly portable in terms of both time and space; its dynamic can be dismantled, remade, substituted, or interchanged with other locales. ese features of comfort, portability, intimacy, and daily routine both align and distinguish a domestic garden from one’s original maternal home, which is fixed in time and a specific place. But despite the malleability of domestic gardens, the gendered aspects of these terrains remain decidedly persistent. Because domestic gardens are “an everyday place” of the quotidian, family, and delicate nurturing, they create a veritable “natural” domain for women. One only has to think of Virginia Woolf’s angel of the house—the selfless, ever-nurturing domestic goddess—and John Ruskin’s queen of the garden—the beautifying force in the private sphere—in order to see how the home, the garden, and related paradigms of femininity have contained and defined women’s social roles and identities. According to French philoso- pher Gaston Bachelard in e Poetics of Space, inhabiting space is “how we take root, day after day, in a ‘corner of the world’ ” and domestic space provides meaning and structure to the human subject: “For our house […] is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word” (). In the context of Roy’s writing, domestic gardens carry the same cosmos-creat- ing energy for her female characters and for herself as a protagonist, as these women subjects and their very expression spring from their homes and their related domestic roles and activities. In e Road Past Altamont, Christine’s declining Grandmother associates her independence and value | Boyd Boyd.indd 190 4/27/2008, 11:16 AM through her domestic abilities, such as making “plenty [flowers] grow” (). Similarly, Marta Yaramko’s prairie garden in “Garden in the Wind” is part of her daily work, comfort, and expression. In Street of Riches, Christine’s Aunt érésina Veilleux possesses a “real passion […] for geraniums” (), just as the women settlers of the Ukrainian colony Dunrea, Saskatchewan, insist on planting gardens even though Christine’s father, Edouard, does not see the value in this domestic embellishment: “e women even set out flowers along the paths that led from the houses to the little privies; and it seems that Papa had laughed at this excess in adornment” (). Being “rooted” in central paradigms of domestic femininity does not preclude, however, the possibility of experiencing alternative positions and questioning perspectives. e independent female subjects of Roy’s texts may be contained by their flower gardens that are typically domestic and constructed as feminine, but these gardens also serve to accommodate these women’s unconventional artistic spirits by acting as their very mode and means of expression. Examining women’s garden history during the nineteenth century, Jacqueline Labbe argues, “Because women are culturally accustomed to being enclosed, female writers can actually find more freedom within the garden” (). A garden tended within the private space of a familiar domestic setting is defined by routine and provides comfort. Women can shape this personal terrain with ease, reaping the benefits of freedom, confidence, and relevancy. Where Roy’s terrains significantly depart, however, from Labbe’s reading of actual nineteenth-century private gardens is the fact that Roy’s literary domestic gardens are cultivated within the public domain of readers and scholars. Labbe admits that despite the garden’s empowering ability, women remained divorced from communal involvement and from real social agency, as they were “accorded no such space in the political arena” (). For Roy, however, the garden is more of a paradox: it is both private in its enclosure of female subjects (within her texts) and public in the staging of gender through the literary conventions of the bower that are either adhered to or purposely revised (at the level of the text). In the past, gardens may have contained women within the private domain, but the twentieth-century literary bowers created by Roy, particularly those cultivated in Enchantment and Sorrow, reveal the shifting boundaries of women’s personal space and expression and Roy’s own difficult negotiation of these changes. Roy’s literary bowers are not merely private retreats without real consequence, then, but rather public spaces capable of stimulating social critique. Furthermore, by combining the centrality of the domestic (as space of routine and gender paradigms) Domestic Gardening | Boyd.indd 191 4/27/2008, 11:16 AM with the liminal quality of the bower (as a space of transformation and brief encounter), Roy facilitates and eases her transition as a young woman artist moving from silence to voice. rough her domestic garden enclosures and her re-working of bower conventions, Roy reveals and tests the In Enchantment limits of female artistry. In Roy’s fiction, enclosure and entrapment (of which gardens play and Sorrow, a part) have always been significant themes, particularly when Roy explores the urban and domestic worlds and the lives of her male and Roy’s garden female characters. According to Paula Gilbert Lewis, “[t]here exists […] a profound influence of environment—defined as one’s physical and, at imagery times, social milieu—upon all Royan characters” (“Female Spirals” ). In Roy’s depictions of the modern, urban world of alienation, both Roy’s illuminates these male and female characters are delineated by their environments, but it is the women especially who appear confined by their circumstances and challenges that gender. According to Lewis, Roy’s male characters frequently possess a linear mobility that allows them to escape, albeit momentarily, from are particular to the oppression of the city. Conversely, the women are forever contained within circular patterns, “caught in the round” of “female structures of a woman’s motherhood, crowds, and hereditary misery” (“Female Spirals” ). e freedom and movement of the female characters are markedly restricted, artistic as these women are impeded by domestic responsibilities and biology—a dilemma that critics such as Lori Saint-Martin and Phyllis Grosskurth development. have explored at length. Circumscription of women’s plots to the demands of marriage and domestic duty, entrapment within the home and the need to escape, and the paradoxical desire for a secure, private retreat of feminine expression all manifest themselves within Roy’s motifs of enclosure and, particularly, the garden. In Enchantment and Sorrow, Roy’s garden imagery illuminates these challenges that are particular to a woman’s artistic development. In “Gabrielle Roy as Feminist: Re-reading the Critical Myths,” Agnes Whit- field notes that while Roy’s female characters may appear conventional in their

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