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-

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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-creating 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

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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)

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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 adherence to gender expectations and domesticity, Roy herself was not: “In , despite family opposition, [Roy] forsook the security of a traditional position near her home in Manitoba, for the uncertainties of pre-war Europe where she eventually abandoned her dramatic ambi- tions for the equally precarious career of female journalist” (). Whitfield suggests that Roy can be considered “feminist in the broad sense of the word” () for a variety of reasons, but the one that holds significance with respect to Roy’s gardens is Whitfield’s reading of “spatial tensions” within Roy’s works:

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Boyd.indd 192 4/27/2008, 11:16 AM Many critics emphasize the fascination that Gabrielle Roy’s characters feel for “the open road” and their conflicting, homeward-bound search for security[…]. Although these tensions have been related to universal themes, such as man’s conflicting desire for security and liberty, for the warmth of intimacy and the exhilaration of exploration, they may also reflect Gabrielle Roy’s conception of the particular constraints of the female experience. ()

e theme-related critics who focus on universals rather than the specifics of gender and to whom Whitfield refers are of particular rel- evance here, as they provide early and influential readings of the garden in Roy’s writing. Hugo McPherson’s “e Garden and the Cage” and E. D. Blodgett’s “Gardens at the World’s End or Gone West in French” associate a sense of idealism and even nostalgia with Roy’s fictional garden motif as it relates to man’s perspectives on his past and present condition. For both McPherson and Blodgett, Roy’s gardens speak to the polarized experience of the Everyman or French Canadian culture in general, but these critics take little notice of the politics of gender. In McPherson’s case, “[t]he values of the garden, childhood, innocence, and the past, array themselves against the forces of the city, adulthood, ‘experience,’ and the present” (). McPherson’s reading of Roy’s gardens of childhood innocence is a persistent interpretation that has been carried forward by critics. In her  book, Carole J. Harvey describes Roy’s gardens as the special domains of children: “Le jardin de l’enfance est présenté comme le cadre spatio- temporel par excellence de l’âge de l’innocence, où même les mauvaises expériences se font vite oublier” (). For these critics, Roy’s profound veneration of the garden is intimately connected to the pastoral tradition (particularly through Roy’s use of idyll) and the related sense of loss, as “[t]here can be no return to the garden” (McPherson ). But the comfort of garden enclosures is not merely limited to Roy’s narratives of childhood or universal themes; when it comes to specific narratives within Roy’s oeuvre, women and especially female artists are the most prominent inhabitants of her literary gardens. Moreover, whereas McPherson and Blodgett suggest that in keeping with the pastoral tradition the archetypi- cal return to the garden is impossible because maturity, change, and the future are all discovered through journeys beyond the garden’s confines, Roy seems compelled to make pivotal returns both literal and figurative to her various gardens in Enchantment and Sorrow. Furthermore, these visits are not static or regressive but, rather, transformational. Roy’s garden enclosures can be read, then, not just as the ideal place of the Everyman,

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Boyd.indd 193 4/27/2008, 11:16 AM the Western French Canadian, or the child but as uniquely feminine terrain in that they capture not only the “confines of female experience” (as Whitfield describes it) but also the complicated, outward growth of women’s artistic agency. Roy’s sensitivity to the development of her female subjects both within and beyond the home pushes her to plant within her literary gardens both a conformity to women’s submissive, familial roles and an acceptable, restrained dissension from these gender norms. rough her gardens, then, Roy works to “naturalize” emerging, modern feminine agency. e use of enclosure within her works aligns Roy with what Kerstin W. Shands perceives as a central feature of the history of feminist discourse: spatial metaphors. According to Shands, in both literature and feminist theory a predominant pattern in gender construction is that “women characters are found to be outsiders, […] locked into tarnished enclosures, colonized, or romantically imprisoned” (). e garden is, of course, an infamous enclosure for submissive feminine subjects. Pointing to the Medieval garden or hortus conclusus, where fortified walls safely enclose a virginal female inhabitant, Eleanor Perényi argues that historically the garden has contained women’s freedom and bodies, operating as a kind of green and growing “chastity belt” (). Within this “flower-filled feminine ghetto” (Perényi ), women’s physical nature is restricted, their agency minimized. Like the delicate flowers they tend in their gardens, women are aestheticized and their work discounted, as “[f]lowers are of all the plants the least menacing and the most useless” (Perényi ). Gardens may reflect women’s disadvantages and restrictions, but these spaces can also recast gender within a new, more formidable light, where femininity is dynamic, malleable, and active. As Shands writes, “Feminism, in its exploration of geographical and discursive terrains, employs an imagery of spaces, boundaries, circles, and cycles, as well as imagery of movement within or out of limited spaces in ways that recall those of our foremother Eve, as seen […] in her disobedient steps outside the Garden of Eden” (). e ever-growing yet stable enclosures of Roy’s gardens generate terrains where Roy’s oppositional themes of security, confinement, and stunted growth cross-fertilize with exploration, freedom, and fertility. Roy may construct her gardens through an idealized past and the pastoral mode, but she also refuses to forfeit their potential for transformation in the present. In her autobiography, then, Roy’s gardens facilitate a subtle opening out through the growth, maturation, and mobility of the female artist, creating a comforting image of change within constancy.

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Boyd.indd 194 4/27/2008, 11:16 AM As literary terrains shaped by bower conventions, Roy’s gardens in Enchantment and Sorrow provide space for introspection, creative freedom, and confidence-in-artistry to grow and be validated. Roy also departs from traditional bower conventions by choosing to domesticate these enclosures through the incorporation of gender paradigms—specifi- The “boudoir” cally familial relationships, feminine virtue, and the self-less nurturing of others. As a literary trope, the bower usually serves an essential role in character of the inspiring a male figure, normally a poet, to realize his artistic potential. e bower is characterized as a site of repose, a brief respite where an bower artist has time to reflect and bring his artistic vision and confidence to fruition. Indeed the very word “bower” signifies an enclosure. Accord- carries with it, ing to the Oxford English Dictionary, a bower is a “dwelling, habitation, abode” and can imply a variety of locales, such as “an idealized abode, of course, not realized in any actual dwelling,” or “a fancy rustic cottage or country residence” (“bower”). Bowers are largely associated with nature and fig- additional erotic ure as a “place closed in or overarched with branches of trees, shrubs, or other plants” (“bower”). As an idealized abode associated with nature, the connotations. bower in Roy’s Enchantment and Sorrow, which appears in the form of the Century Cottage garden, fulfills conventional expectations. When a young Roy stumbles across Century Cottage, the dwelling is surrounded by a magnificent garden: “[I]t seemed […] buried in a tangled profusion of flowers. I walked up a path winding this way and that, perhaps as dictated by the flowers themselves in their determination to grow and spread where it suited them” (). In addition to these notions of an ideal enclosure, a bower can refer more specifically to an inner room, or a “lady’s private apartment” or “boudoir” (“bower”). Fulfilling this interior aspect of the bower, the natural vibrancy of the exterior of Century Cottage extends into Roy’s “inviting country bedroom,” as the mantel is decorated with Scottish heather and other dried flowers, and the large windows open to the downs (Enchant- ment ). e “boudoir” character of the bower carries with it, of course, additional erotic connotations. Rachel Crawford notes that the bower’s convention of an enclosed, pleasurable, natural scene derives from the combination of two idealized concepts of place: the locus amoenus and the hortus conclusus. While the classical locus amoenus implies “murmuring breezes, birdsong, shady trees, sweet-smelling flowers, and clear-running brooks or fountains,” the Christian tradition of the hortus conclusus “provided an allegory for the inviolate body of the Virgin Mary” (“Troping the Subject” ). e “identification of the female body with the enclosed space” of pleasing and reposeful landscape results in a highly erotic natural

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Boyd.indd 195 4/27/2008, 11:16 AM dwelling (“Troping the Subject” ). Outlining the gendered features of bower scenes, Crawford observes that the enclosure is often “occupied by a female character or object, or is instilled with some feminine principle (for example the nurturing power of nature)” (“Troping the Subject” ). is female character occupies a secondary role, and the solitary male takes centre stage. His entrance into the bower constitutes part of his journey toward self-realization; the bower is merely a stop along his way. In addition to the locus amoenus and hortus conclusus, the romance epic furnishes the bower with “the figure of the lone knight/hero whose dynas- tic quest is punctuated by digressive interludes of embowered, sexualized encounters with maids, sorceresses, or divine female figures” (Crawford, Poetry, Enclosure ). An early example of the bower’s romance narrative can be seen in Edmund Spenser’s e Faerie Queene in which the knight Guyon encounters both the Bower of Bliss and the Island of Phaedria. Patricia Parker reads the bower as an ambiguous middle ground of transition for the male hero. Phaedria’s “sequestered spot, deep in the shady quiet of the dale, offers ease to both ear and eye, respite from ‘noyse of armes’ ” (Parker ), yet it also threatens the progress of Guyon’s quest, suggesting that this bower is “an image of the appeal and of the dangers of repose” (Parker ). As the bower tradition evolves through the centuries, the knight/hero figure appeals to poets’ reflections on their own journeys toward artistic self-realization, making the writing of the bower “highly conventional in that its primary reference is not to gardens but to the world of poetry” (Crawford, Poetry, Enclosure ). In these imaginative quests for artistic vision, the private and oftentimes erotic setting of the bower’s “boudoir” facilitates a heterosexual encounter between the male artist and his female muse—a union where the “traditional analogy for conceptual productivity is provided by sexual reproduction” (Crawford, “Troping the Subject” ). In keeping with the hortus conclusus that identifies the female body as the enclosed garden, the female muse can take the form of either a woman, or the “lap of nature,” both are suitable ground for the demonstration of masculine potency. e erotic, inspirational appeal of the bower does not, however, always elicit the same response from male writers (Crawford, “Troping the Subject” ). Andrew Marvell’s poem “e Garden” illus- trates, for example, what Crawford outlines as the male artist’s privileged, solitary possession of his garden enclosure. With Eve banished from this alternative paradise, Marvell’s speaker revels in his “happy garden-state” (), where Nature is a clear erotic substitute. e “luscious clusters” of vine (), the “curious peach” (), and ensnaring flowers constitute a lush,

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Boyd.indd 196 4/27/2008, 11:16 AM seductive atmosphere (–). e male hero’s imagination is free and fertile, reflecting the very fecundity of his surroundings, as he forms “a green thought in a green shade” (Marvell ). While Marvell’s speaker indulges in his bower, other male poets, notably those from the Romantic period, capture problematic visions of this supposedly inspiring terrain. Accord- ing to Crawford, the bower can also be “a space of dilemma, ambiguity, and frustration in the quest for subjectivity” (“Troping the Subject” ). William Wordsworth’s bower scene in “Nutting” demonstrates a difficult rite of passage through Wordsworth’s boyhood discovery of a “virgin scene” () and that bower’s final “[d]eformed and sullied” () state subsequent to his enraged destruction of it. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “is Lime Tree Bower My Prison” captures further a mature male subject’s ambivalent response to a bower that does not offer repose but, rather, despair and isolation: Well, they are gone, and here I must remain, is lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost Beauties and feelings, such as would have been Most sweet to my remembrance (–)

e bower fails to fulfill the desires of the speaker who yearns to wander the countryside with his companions. Creative renewal and inspiration arrive only when the poet imagines himself beyond his idle, despairing, and embowered state. As Michael Raiger argues, the source of poetic fertility springs more from the poet’s mind and spirit than from the bower itself, as the poet “sought communion with both absent friends and absent nature” (), and this active “vision has transformed the lime-tree bower from a prison of the senses into a playground for the spirit” (). Whether the bower provides a secure, sensual, or problematic environment for the knight/hero or male poet, it remains largely his privileged domain. is veritable garden “boudoir” creates, then, a difficult scenario for Roy, who wishes to use the bower as a haven, not a site of exploita- tion. e description of Roy’s extraordinary, garden-embowered abode in Enchantment and Sorrow concurs with typical bower settings, but where Roy strays from convention is in her elevation of her status as the female inhabitant. Roy is not merely a decorative fixture within her bower but, rather, is her own artistic, questing subject. e granting of artistic agency is not a straightforward task, however, as bower conventions work to restrict the feminine. In this feminized, private abode, a woman can both inhabit the bower, and be associated with the bower itself, particularly in terms of her body and its ties to reproductive nature. According to

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Boyd.indd 197 4/27/2008, 11:16 AM Dorothy Mermin, this paradoxical role creates an impossible situation for the female subject who has “to play two opposing roles at one time—both knight and damsel, both subject and object—and that because she can’t do this she is excluded from the worlds her imagination has discovered” (–). With conventions catering to artistic male interests, the bower enclosure controls and contains the female subject—she is prohibited from entering as an artist¹ or faced with a prescribed role within it as object and muse. In response to the bower’s limitations, women writers have devised ways appropriate to their socio-historical milieus that enable them to negotiate this gendered terrain. Crawford points to Felicia Hemans as one writer of the nineteenth century who legitimized the embowered female as an artist rather than muse by devising heroines who embodied the “sexual regulative ideal of the passionless female […] thus forming an unexpected association between authorial power and the regulated female character” (Poetry, Enclosure ). Whereas Hemans had to tread carefully within the bower tradition by adhering to ideals of womanly virtue, the contemporary Canadian writer Phyllis Webb infuses her bower poem “Marvell’s Garden” with a clear feminist vision as she protests openly the bower’s exclusivity to male artists. Webb’s speaker laments women’s sad erasure from the bower and their being denied this rite of initiation into poetic achievement. Rather than quietly reposing in the shade as Marvell does, Webb’s speaker responds with anger in a “hot glade” (). Webb undermines Marvell’s argument for a paradise of one and instead inserts feminine difference and a vision of “contradiction” (), revealing “the shade green within the green shade” (). By the conclusion of the poem, the speaker denies men access to her own “garden” and mourns the gender division that precludes the possibility of exchange. Unlike Webb’s angry response to the bower, Roy does not address with defiance the exclusion and gendered hierarchy typical of bower scenes. Instead, Roy uses the bower as a subtle means of validating her artistry by mediating those tensions she encountered as a young woman, a woman who needed to circulate freely within the public domain while also address- ing socio-cultural norms that dictated familial and domestic responsibility during the first half of the twentieth century. Rather than being a site of explicit feminist reshaping, Roy’s enclosure is a site of reassurance, affirm- ing gender norms and rendering the female artist a benign creature as

 Mermin points to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem “e Lost Bower” in which the speaker fails to locate her bower as an example of this gendered exclusion: “It is the loss of a poetic world and a poetic subject, lost because she can’t fill both roles that the story requires” ().

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Boyd.indd 198 4/27/2008, 11:16 AM her artistic agency, creative mobility, and solitariness are “brought home” within a gender-appropriate bower. Within the parameters of the Century Cottage enclosure, Roy is defined first by familial roles rather than characterized as a completely independent figure. Second, Roy is capable of being objectified without jeopardizing her quest of self-development—a strategy that maintains a familiar sense of feminine submission in relation to her more novel artistic agency. And third, Roy continues to nurture others through her art, thereby curbing the self-centred and seemingly unfeminine nature of her artistic pursuits. e garden at Century Cottage, located in Upshire, England, appears at a pivotal point in Roy’s autobiography, providing a much needed ref- uge and place of maturation during Roy’s long, unconventional journey toward self-discovery as a young woman. Leaving behind her mother and her Manitoba home, traveling to Paris to pursue an acting career, and finally residing in London only to feel dismayed by her lack of dramatic inspiration and the abrupt end of her first love affair, Roy leaves the city of London on a whim and boards the Green Line bus that takes urban dwell- ers out to the countryside. Departing from Trafalgar Square, a physically and psychologically exhausted Roy arrives by chance at a small garden called Century Cottage, which is owned by Esther Perfect and her father, a retired manor gardener. Instilling in Roy a sense of renewal, wholeness, and security, Century Cottage garden is the highly idealized “salvific” bower that Crawford describes by offering both “ground for an initiation into subjectivity” () and “the passageway to a vocation as poet” () or, in Roy’s case, a writer of fiction. When Roy first encounters Century Cottage, she represents herself as a questing heroine in need of shelter and rest after an arduous journey, and although she happens at the steps of the cottage by chance her entrance into this bower figures as a destined turning point in her experience: I came to a door of dark wood. I reached for the knocker but as if I’d had enough strength only to bring me as far as this doorstep, I suddenly drooped against the doorframe. I think I was so tired that tears came to my eyes, so exhausted I felt I was arriving […] from the agonizing uncertainties I’d been living with so long[…]. is was my last thought before letting my head fall against the door, no longer able to keep my eyes open. (Enchantment ) Roy’s emphasis on her fragile and emotionally vulnerable state draws attention to her typically feminine character; yet her solitary status and her independence, as suggested through Roy’s multiple use of the pronoun

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Boyd.indd 199 4/27/2008, 11:16 AM “I,” alternatively highlight the unconventional nature of her solitary journey as a woman artist. During her time in Europe, Roy has been decidedly removed from the domestic scene, but the cottage bower scene will realign Roy with gender expectations at the same time as it brings Roy to Roy’s discovery artistic fruition. Grappling with all the uncertainties of her life and her vocation, Roy of her vocation discovers in the garden-embowered Century Cottage a place of quiet self- reflection and withdrawal from the world. is place enables transforma- follows the tion, and through the conventions of the bower Roy stages her initiation as an artist. John Lennox notes that the larger framework of Roy’s autobi- pattern that ography works as a fairytale and is filled with archetypal scenes in which Roy “plays” the heroine role, and the Century Cottage bower scene is no Whitfield exception. In Lennox’s reading, the first section “e Governor’s Ball” (a ball to which Roy’s parents are invited but decide not to attend when they contends is so see the expensive attire of the other guests) brings to mind the Prince’s ball that Cinderella is barred from attending: “e metaphor of the ball central to Roy’s suggests a fairy-tale pattern of usurpation, hardship, initiative, and res- toration” (). In fairytales, the heroine “is marked for greater things; her writing about destiny is strong” (Lennox ). is sense of predestination as a writer, and specifically a woman writer tied to the domestic, is clearly played out at women—the Century Cottage. “[B]uried in a profusion of flowers,” the garden envelops Roy instantly upon her arrival: “I must have disappeared […] among the tall oppositional delphiniums, giant hollyhocks, and Canterbury bells” (Enchantment ). Imbued with the magical nature of most bowers, the little back garden pull of journey filled with herbs and flowers feels almost otherworldly, out of time and space, with the “Canterbury bells bearing more big sumptuous bells than and home. [Roy has] ever seen anywhere else” (). e garden is alive, burgeoning with plants and sensations, and the immense fertility of the place promises a productive imagination. Roy even refers to her recollection of Century Cottage as a “fairy story”; it “was all [she] could possibly desire” (). Yet for all the lushness and fairytale attributes of Century Cottage, Roy’s enclosure is a domestic setting that facilitates and naturalizes her artistry. Roy’s initiation as a writer comes not from a conventional erotic encounter that typically suggests “conceptual productivity” (Crawford ) but, rather, from a comforting bedroom, doting parental figures, and childhood memories. Roy’s discovery of her vocation follows the pattern that Whitfield contends is so central to Roy’s writing about women—the oppositional pull of journey and home. Roy’s construction of her bower as a site of innocence and childhood clearly illuminates some of the restrictions faced by the female artist. Perhaps conscious of the fact that her craft is at

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Boyd.indd 200 4/27/2008, 11:16 AM odds with more traditional gender norms and domestic responsibilities as modeled by her mother Mélina, Roy uses the bower to align these disparate roles. With Esther and the retired gardener “Father Perfect”—the title Roy reverently attributes to Esther’s father—Roy realizes a long-desired, idyllic enclosure of family and belonging. Roy actually parallels her first morning at the Cottage—the morning she fervently begins to write—with a morning of an earlier time in Manitoba: When I woke I was perhaps more at peace than I had been since […] the days of summer holidays at the farm when I’d wake on my first morning in my uncle’s house not knowing where I was; then I’d […] know for certain I was happy again in the house I loved so much, where I’d known only peace and happiness[…]. With the return of this peaceful feeling so long absent from my life, I discovered just as suddenly a burning urge to write. () rough the domestic routine and comfort of Century Cottage, Roy is significantly “brought home” and pursues her writing within a familial setting. e virtuous protection of Father Perfect reinforces Roy’s reclaimed sense of childhood. In this secure and contemplative shelter, the young female artist may safely take root and develop along appropriate gender lines. In the autobiography, the Upshire bower is the culmination of Roy’s earlier development of a plant and garden motif that shapes the opening chapters. roughout Roy’s life journey, her central preoccupation is with her heritage of déracinement—the experience of being uprooted, or of uprooting herself. Roy foregrounds her sense of exile both as a young Francophone living in the English majority of Manitoba and as a young woman who chooses to leave her family in order to travel to Europe and follow independent pursuits. Roy’s uprooted nature creates tenuous and problematic bonds between identity and home, particularly as a young woman rejecting familial obligations and a sedentary domestic life. Roy works to naturalize her need to escape her home and to pursue elsewhere her cultivation as an artist through garden imagery. As a young girl attending the English-run Normal School in Winnipeg, Roy finds there is no opportunity for Francophone students to experience “ ‘an opening out’ ” or a “ ‘blossoming of the self’ ” (). Seeking cultural and intellectual stimula- tion, Roy admits that there is little that reflects, or speaks to, her French way of life, which leads “to a kind of withering” and makes her feel that she is “living in some walled enclosure” (–). But perhaps the most difficult déracinement for Roy is her departure from her mother and the

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Boyd.indd 201 4/27/2008, 11:16 AM familiar confines of home; Roy’s transplanting to France leaves her “tim- idly” trying to “find [her] feet […] like some bruised plant in a protective layer of compost” (). Roy’s need to pursue her education and artistic cultivation beyond the home parallels her journey with those of her male characters, who undertake similar independent quests away from their families. In e Cashier and e Hidden Mountain, Alexandre Chenevert and Pierre Cadorai respectively sever themselves from their homes and embark on solitary quests. What distinguishes Roy’s journey from those of Alexandre and Pierre, however, is the degree and ease of separation between the questing subjects and their homes. Alexandre and Pierre find inspiration in moments of near-complete isolation; they are not amid familial surroundings but, rather, the untouched reaches of the wilderness. Leaving his wife Eugénie behind in Montreal, Alexandre finds his ideal paradise in the rough wilds and pristine forests of Lac Vert. Here, he rents a cottage from the trapping family, Le Gardeurs, and keeps to himself. He is so completely immersed in his solitude that monsieur Le Gardeur even pays a visit to the cottage to “root” Alexandre out of his isolation after madame Le Gardeur expresses concern for his anti-social behaviour (). e Le Gardeurs may provide a protective, familial component to Alexandre’s respite, but he spends little time with them, preferring instead to remain alone. Similar to Alexandre, Pierre is a man disconnected from family and home. An artist searching for his vision for more than a decade and traveling alone through the North, Pierre appreciates that “a hearth and home [are] not for him” (Hidden ). Pierre’s source of inspiration is wild nature, and when he finds himself living in the heart of Paris he continues to paint the North, seeing little appeal in the contained space of Paris’s public squares. Marie-Pierre Andron writes, “La recherché d’intimité avec la matière inspirante est impossible, les squares et les jardins, comme parenthèses dans la frénésie urbaine, sont impossible. Il ne peut y avoir ni recueillement, ni retrouvailles, ni intimité” (). In contrast to Pierre’s insufficient garden-inspiration, a fleeting glimpse of the Tuileries Gardens in Paris from a bus window sparks Roy’s revelation regarding her talents: “What I can’t forget is that seeing the beautiful garden of Paris […] made me realize I had a faculty for observation I hadn’t really been aware of before, together with an infinite longing to know what to do with it” (). Simi- larly, Roy discovers a much-needed reprieve in the Luxembourg Gardens after her uninspiring acting rehearsals: “With great relief I sat listening to [the old women] talking about everyday things among themselves over their knitting. e more I saw of the theatre, the more I was drawn by

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Boyd.indd 202 4/27/2008, 11:16 AM people’s simple, everyday lives and their everyday language […]. ough I didn’t realize it, I was approaching what would prove to be the right, the only school for me” (). In comparison with the wilderness quests of her male characters, Roy’s own journey toward artistic realization is cast in a clearly gender- appropriate light of enclosed, family-oriented femininity. Roy appreciates the Tuileries pond “with children playing around it” and “the impeccable rows of round-headed chestnut trees” (Enchantment ). All three figures—Roy, Alexandre, and Pierre—may ultimately return home in their own ways, but Roy seems the most compelled to relate her writing to house and home and, by extension, to the domesticated nature of her bowers and garden enclosures. For Roy, the female artist is necessarily informed by both her independent quest and the constant cultivating influence of the domestic. Guilt weighs on Roy for having left her mother Mélina and resurfaces when Roy receives a letter from her mother during her stay at Century Cottage. Roy’s reflections reveal the peculiar entrapment of the woman artist who is torn between solitary pursuits and familial obligation: “I always trembled when her letters came, not because I was afraid of reading reproaches or complaints—there never were any—but because seeing her writing was enough to open the door to memories of all the suffering culminating in me. Surely I shouldn’t be the only one to escape, I would think, and I’d feel condemned to suffer, as if it were a duty” (–). As a narrative told in retrospect, Roy’s autobiography and especially her garden motif are coloured by her sense of feminine responsibility. One familial childhood garden that looms large in Roy’s memory is that of her grandmother’s Manitoba home. ere, Roy’s grandmother “used to grow the same flowers in her garden that she’d had in Quebec” (). From the “mansard roof” and chimney of the house to the “plants around it, it proclaimed Quebec very loudly in Somerset, which in those days was at least half English” (). e garden demarcates territory; it generates a “home-ground” that is syn- onymous with Roy’s familial and, of course, Francophone identity. Unfor- tunately, the final image of this garden is one that Roy encounters later in life on returning to visit Manitoba in her Romantic-like quest for ruins. Roy discovers a “tumble down ruin,” “deserted and mournful,” “abandoned […] crumbling” (). With a sense of neglected, unfulfilled responsibility, Roy feels “reproached” by the deserted original maternal home (). In this scene, the young Roy (having uprooted herself in her search for her vocation) and the mature Roy (reflecting on and writing about the homes of her past) stand together in the narrative; the dual perspective magnifies

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Boyd.indd 203 4/27/2008, 11:16 AM the problematic position faced by Roy as the female writer whose domestic and artistic roles seemingly counter one another. If the pressures of gendered propriety ultimately push Roy to construct her artistry through traditional feminine associations and responsibilities, Roy is not then the creation of a domestic bower is not without its challenges. Roy must carefully navigate and revise bower conventions—particularly the immune to erotics of the natural “boudoir”—if she is to initiate an acceptable, even virtuous, feminine artistry and at last bring the questing woman subject gender “home.” In creating a domestic bower within a chaste familial model, Roy minimizes the typically erotic aspects of the conventional setting. When performance her former lover Stephen unexpectedly arrives at Century Cottage, however, Roy seems in danger of slipping into the object position, reverting to within the the female muse confined by a masculine-centred narrative, rather than becoming the burgeoning female artist. Indeed, Roy even writes, “Nothing bower. happened to break the spell [of Century Cottage] for several weeks” (), until Stephen appears like a questing male hero, traveling “the long way through the forest” and “suffering from the oppressive late-morning heat” (). In his study of bowers in eighteenth-century fiction, J. David Macey notes that female heroines, retiring to their garden seat, realize that the garden is “far from an absolute retreat”; “conventional scenes of discovery” transform the women into objects of amorous male interest” (). e discovery of the female love object draws attention to the “theatrical quality of the bower scene” (Macey ), suggesting that women’s privacy is “conventional rather than actual” as they must continue to perform according to gender norms (Macey ). Roy is not immune to gender performance within the bower; both her encounter with Stephen and her later descriptions of her artistic role reveal a writer with a deferential sensitivity to gender propriety. e slippage of Roy from an artist subject to an embowered love object is not surprising, as Roy is inclined to stage traditional femininity within her bower. With her desire to naturalize the female artist, Roy’s bower must afford reassurance as much as it invites novel female independence. When Stephen enters the bower of Century Cottage, then, Roy strikes a balance between her own agency and conventional feminine submission. Initially Stephen’s appearance jeopardizes Roy’s own artistic quest, as he seems to supplant Roy from her own story and assume the heroic role: “As I had done when I first arrived in Upshire, [Stephen] was looking above the doors of the cottages for their names[…]. He came to our gate and paused to rest his laden arms on it” (). When Stephen arrives as the questing male subject, Roy sits above in her bedroom window like a conventional

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Boyd.indd 204 4/27/2008, 11:16 AM embowered female, yet Roy revises this discovery scene by supplying a unique point of view. Maintaining possession of her bower plot, rather than being made the object of the male gaze, Roy takes advantage of her position (gazing down from her window upon an unsuspecting Stephen) and uses her first-person narration to ascertain Stephen’s state and express her own subsiding feelings for him. From her privileged position, then, Roy avoids becoming the love object, minimizes Stephen’s seductive power, and maintains her status as the female artist subject (). Later in the parlour, Roy focuses Stephen’s attentions away from romance to her own progress as a writer, showing him the royalties cheque from her first publication and allowing him to read her latest manuscript (). Eventually, the erotics of the bower find a place in Roy’s narrative, but Roy works to maintain a sense of innocence through the security of her domestic scene. Although Roy initially distances herself from the role of adoring muse who greets Stephen upon his entrance to the bower, Ste- phen’s “burning, intense way” () of looking at Roy prompts the former lovers to leave the Cottage garden and walk through the forest where they become “entwined, clinging to each other as though [they] were the last of our species left together on earth” (). e erotic exchange occurs outside of Roy’s idyllic shelter and is staged within a familial dynamic that serves to reign in Stephen’s presence and reduce the sexualization of Roy, the artist, and her child-like bower. For instance, Esther reminds Stephen “of a beloved Ukrainian great aunt” (), and during lunch Father Perfect and Esther assess the young couple in the manner of concerned parents: “[Father Perfect] and Esther were delighted to find me less alone in the world than I might have seemed, and their eyes kept straying from me to Stephen and from Stephen to me as if to show me they approved of my choice” (). Here, the erotics of the bower have been safely melded with a courtship scenario. By the end of the chapter, Stephen leaves Century Cottage to participate in the conflict of the coming war, and his departure solidifies Roy’s independence, a status that seems necessary for her individual artistic pursuits. Roy’s careful containment of the illicit bower, or “boudoir,” scene enables her to foreground domestic-familial obligations and to downplay the unconventional, even immodest independence of the female artist. Roy’s creative outpouring is not the result of a fertile, sexual exchange; instead, her writing springs from a domestic model that depends upon the self-less nurturing of others. In his biography of Roy, François Ricard writes that Century Cottage provides Roy with an “exemplary image of what writing is: a shelter from the world; and what it needs: quieted pas-

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Boyd.indd 205 4/27/2008, 11:16 AM sions, total availability, and obliviousness to all material preoccupations” (). Roy’s bower is undoubtedly an ideal shelter for a woman writer, but “total availability” and freedom from “material preoccupations” seem at odds with the argument that Roy domesticates her bowers, thereby tying her female artists to daily, familial obligations. With the regeneration of her childhood at Century Cottage, Roy is, of course, able to disengage from domestic duties as she benefits from “the presence of some kindly and protective, discreet and yet utterly devoted figure”—Esther (Ricard ). With Esther’s practical help and affection, Roy possesses the freedom to pursue her writing, just as Roy’s male artist Pierre Cadorai immerses himself in his painting. But where Cadorai finds inspiration in the wilds of the uninhabited reaches of the North, Roy situates herself in a domestic, familial setting, which begs the question: Is Roy’s construction of her role as a woman writer as subtly enclosed within gender paradigms as the terrain of her bower? Roy may be free of immediate domestic concerns, but Roy’s continued preoccupation with home becomes expressed in other ways. Century Cottage may provide a shelter for Roy’s transformation, but Roy must leave her idyllic bower in order to observe and write critically about the world. As Roy observes, the innocence of Century Cottage is not conducive to her further development as a writer: “[Father Perfect] lived in a kind of Garden of Eden and the woes of mankind haven’t touched him as they have most people. And there really isn’t much left to say about Eden once the story’s been told, is there?” (). Deciding that “[t]here was no closing one’s eyes any longer” (), Roy leaves Century Cottage in order to confront the impending war. Although she seems to be exiting a world of innocence—the enclosed Eden of Father Perfect—Roy qualifies her entrance as a woman artist into a fallen world of experience. First, Roy carries the bower motif forward as a way of creating both continuity and subtle disruption between her gendered and artistic roles. Rejecting the ease and shelter of her bower, Roy believes that a key responsibility in her role as a writer is to be exposed to the mutability and disparity of her modern world. Rather than remaining the aspiring woman writer planted and protected within the safe domestic realm, Roy becomes an artist confronted with a dangerous, unsettled milieu. Roy complicates her bower motif, then, upon her return to London just prior to the outbreak of World War II when she describes walking through Hyde Park where men “were digging trenches”:

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Boyd.indd 206 4/27/2008, 11:16 AM ey […] were mining beneath the world’s most lovingly nurtured lawns. Sometimes a shovelful would splatter into a bed of flowers. Children brought there by their nannies were hugely entertained by the transformation of the gardens into Roy works to a battlefield. Playing at throwing grenades, they were hurling lumps of mud in one another’s faces. Adults went this way and naturalize her that, saying and seeing nothing. (–) e “globs of clay” and “splatter” stand in sharp contrast to the cottage unconventional garden left behind by Roy. Re-invoking the garden motif, Roy grounds herself in her vocation, but the extreme juxtaposition of garden images choices and her further clarifies the direction of her craft. at is, Roy wants to be immersed in, rather than isolated from, her milieu, observing first hand artistry, as only the perceptive eyes of a writer can. e adults of Hyde Park may drift aimlessly, “saying and seeing nothing,” but Roy is there to witness however, by and relate. As much as Roy is drawn to a garden of innocence as a means of naturalizing and protecting the tentative female artist, Roy does not casting her want her writing to be entirely enclosed by it. Venturing forth into this turbulent setting, Roy appears initially to launch on a more masculine writing in a quest, as the domestic bower and familial model no longer surround her. Roy’s continuing concern for gendered propriety is subtly revealed, how- domestic and ever, as Roy concludes her narrative by using the domestic garden motif as a means of framing—and thus properly containing—her narrative of organic light. feminine independence and artistry. Following her European travels, Roy decides to live and write in Mon- treal rather than returning to Manitoba, her mother, and her teaching job; while this step toward independence seems necessary for the pursuit of her writing, Roy is also keenly aware of the need to be “at home” as a woman artist. At first, Roy appears to shirk family obligations, as she writes to her mother to inform her that she will not be returning. e solitariness of Roy’s journalistic and artistic career counters more traditional femininity that entails domestic involvement or a teaching career. Roy works to naturalize her unconventional choices and her artistry, however, by casting her writing in a domestic and organic light. Montreal may not offer the profusion of flowers and security of Century Cottage, but it becomes a kind of alternative bower for Roy—a domesticated urban haven where she cultivates her expression. Like Century Cottage, Montreal grants Roy the “feeling of having come home” (). e French “words and expressions of [her] people, of [her] mother and grandmother” comfort the solitary Roy (). Moving from the abandoned childhood garden of Manitoba, to the idyllic bower of Century Cottage, to the war-altered reality of Hyde

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Boyd.indd 207 4/27/2008, 11:16 AM Park, and to the somewhat familial, Francophone surroundings of the city, Roy’s final descriptions of her early writing in Montreal form a significant conclusion to the entire trajectory of Roy’s domestic garden motif. Work- ing as a journalist for the farming publication Bulletin des agriculteurs, Roy hones her talent for observation and begins to pursue her own impulse for fiction, “build[ing] on the reveries [she] germinate[s] beside the old [Lachine] Canal” (). In the French edition, Roy writes “des rêveries nées ce soir d’avril au bord du vieux canal” (La Détresse ), which is not as clearly linked to the gardening motif as the translated verb “germinate.” e French text conveys, nevertheless, an organic model of the birth and growth of Roy’s writing in the springtime, and, taken in the context of her earlier garden motif, Roy maintains a naturalized, gender-appropriate model of her art as a nurturing, life-giving process. In her newly adopted urban bower, Roy tends not only the garden of her writing but also the garden of her familial heritage by immersing herself in French society and her mother tongue. As the questing woman writer, Roy has been, once again, “brought home,” and she instills in her writing a “natural,” nurturing quality that somehow compensates for her unconventional quest that not only takes her away from her family, but also remains haunted by the deserted home of her grandmother, the “wind […] plucking at the vestiges of [the] garden” (Enchantment ).

Acknowledgements e completion of this article was supported by the “Groupe de recherche sur Gabrielle Roy” at McGill University, directed by François Ricard, Jane Everett, Nathalie Cooke, and Sophie Marcotte and funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Fonds .

Works Cited

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Boyd.indd 208 4/27/2008, 11:16 AM Blodgett, E. D. “Gardens at the World’s End or Gone West in French.” Essays on Canadian Writing  (): –. “bower.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. . nd ed. Oxford , .  April, . http://dictionary.oed.com. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “is Lime Tree Bower My Prison.” e Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M. H. Abrams. th ed. Vol. . New York: Norton. –. Crawford, Rachel. Poetry, Enclosure, and the Vernacular Landscape, –. Cambridge: Cambridge , . ———. “Troping the Subject: Behn, Smith, Hemans, and the Poetics of the Bower.” Studies in Romanticism . (): –. “domestic.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. nd ed. Oxford , .  Nov. . http://dictionary.oed.com. Francis, Mark, and Randolph T. Hester. e Meaning of Gardens: Idea, Place, and Action. Cambridge:  Press, . Grosskurth, Phyllis. “Gabrielle Roy and e Silken Noose.” Canadian Literature  (Autumn ): –. Harvey, Carol J. Le Cycle Manitoban de Gabrielle Roy. Saint-Boniface: Plaines, . Labbe, Jacqueline M. “Cultivating One’s Understanding: e Female Romantic Garden.” Women’s Writing . (): –. Lennox, John. “ ‘Metaphors of Self’: La détresse et l’enchantement.” Reflec- tions: Autobiography and Canadian Literature. Ed. K. P. Stich. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, . –. Lewis, Paula Gilbert. “Female Spirals and Male Cages: e Urban Sphere in the Novels of Gabrielle Roy.” Traditionalism, Nationalism, and Feminism: Women Writers of Quebec. Ed. Paula Gilbert Lewis. Westport: Greenwood Press, . –. Macey, J. David. “ ‘Where the World May Ne’er Invade’? Green Retreats and Garden eatre in La Princesse de Clèves, e History of Miss Betsy oughtless, and Cecilia.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction . (): –. Marvell, Andrew. “e Garden.” . e Norton Anthology of Poetry. Ed. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy. Shorter th ed. New York: Norton. –.

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Boyd.indd 209 4/27/2008, 11:16 AM McPherson, Hugo. “e Garden and e Cage.” Canadian Literature  (): –. Mermin, Dorothy. “e Damsel, the Knight, and the Victorian Woman Poet.” Critical Inquiry . (): –. Parker, Patricia. “e Progress of Phaedria’s Bower: Spenser to Coleridge.” English Literary History . (): –. Perényi, Eleanor. Green oughts: A Writer in the Garden. ; New York: Modern Library, . Raiger, Michael. “e Poetics of Liberation in Imaginative Power: Coleridge’s ‘is Lime Tree Bower My Prison.’ ” European Romantic Review . (): –. Ricard, François. Gabrielle Roy: A Life. Trans. Patricia Claxton. ; Toronto: McClelland, . Roy, Gabrielle. e Cashier. Trans. Harry Binsse. ; Toronto: McClel- land, . ———. La Détresse et L’Enchantement. Montreal: Boréal Express, . ———. Enchantment and Sorrow. Trans. Patricia Claxton. ; Toronto: Lester and Orpen, . ———. Garden in the Wind. Trans. Alan Brown. ; Toronto: McClel- land, . ———. e Hidden Mountain. Trans. Harry Binsse. ; Toronto: McClel- land, . ———. Letters to Bernadette. Trans. Patricia Claxton. ; Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, . ———. e Road Past Altamont. Trans. Joyce Marshall. ; Toronto: McClel- land, . ———. Street of Riches. Trans. Harry L. Binsse. ; Toronto: McClelland, . Ruskin, John. “Of Queen’s Gardens.” . Sesame and Lilies. ; London: J. M. Dent and Sons, . –. Saint-Martin, Lori. La Voyageuse et la prisonnière: Gabrielle Roy et la question des femmes. Montreal: Boréal, . Shands, Kerstin W. Embracing Space: Spatial Metaphors in Feminist Dis- course. Westport: Greenwood Press, . Webb, Phyllis. “Marvell’s Garden.” An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English. Eds. Russell Brown, Donna Bennett, and Nathalie Cooke. ; rev. and abr. ed. Toronto: Oxford , . –.

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Boyd.indd 210 4/27/2008, 11:16 AM Whitfield, Agnes. “Garbrielle Roy as Feminist: Re-reading the Critical Myths.” Canadian Literature  (): –. Woolf, Virginia. “Professions for Women.” Feminist Literary eory: A Reader. Ed. Mary Eagleton. Oxford: Blackwell, . –. Wordsworth, William. “Nutting.” . e Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M. H. Abrams. th ed. Vol. . New York: Norton. –.

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