3 MARIAN ENGEL'S "BEAR" 107 seems to have affected the Canadian imagination differently from that of their American neighbours, for there is much less of the challenge of frontier experience and individual conquest and far more of the feeling of "wilderness," disorientation, and a sense of human inadequacy in Canadian literature just as there is a stronger awareness in modern Canadian writing of the regenerative powers of landscape and the possibilities it offers for psychic and spiritual renewal. The penumbra of allusions to nineteenthcentury wilderness literature like Major John Richardson's Wacousta, The Journals of Susanna Moodie, and the animal stories of Jack London, E. Thompson Seton, and "Sir Charles Goddam Roberts" (who also wrote a novel about a bear, The Heart of the Ancient Wood) plainly signals the context within which Bear will spell out its differences, for though it too is a response to the strangeness of Canadian landscape it is finally not about hostility and victims but about the inviolability of natural order and the healing corrective power of nature to save us from ourselves. The novel also carries a strong sense of the alien Canadian landscape which human beings have to come to terms with in order to go on living in Canada. The brownness of the bear is of a different quality from the whiteness of the whale in Moby Dick, for even if the bear is a blank to human beings, his colour makes him a part of the Canadian landscape with its dark forests and curiously dark clear lakes. The bear's otherness, something that D. H. Lawrence would have appreciated if he had gone to Canada as well as to Australia and Mexico, is a sign of the mystery of the natural world that remains outside human comprehension. Jay Macpherson spells out the literary response to this perception of affinity between the creatures and the wilderness : In Canadian writing as a whole, the ambiguity of the animal and of our relation to it, its passivity in suffering, its inability to speak, balanced by the occasional power to make itself felt in destruction, make it embody the imaginative essence of life in this [Canadian] setting. (Macpherson, p. 255) The behaviour of the bear in this story presents the same enigma, with its indifference to the woman's initiatives and its final assertion of power as it tears her skin in an indecipherable gesture which she is free to interpret as she pleases. She can see the gash
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6 110 CORAL A N N H O W E L L S quarters were matted with dirt" (p. 35 ). She is the one who takes all the initiatives, asserting her own wishes and instructing the bear in ways to give her sexual pleasure with his licking and later his dancing. It is always her gratification which comes first, for she continually emphasizes the bear's indifference and lack of sexual responsiveness although, womanlike, she wants to include love in the relationship. As she says, "He served her" (p. 118). The animal with his own vitality gives the woman something she needs: the free expression of her sexuality uninhibited by any male expectations of what a woman should be. c Although the novel has a realistic setting, it is actually closer to fantasy, for Lou's summer experiences on the island constitute her own private odyssey and have no direct connection with her real life in society. Indeed, it is the bear's otherness that she enjoys so much, for like the wilderness itself he is a blank screen on to which she can project any image that she likes : She had discovered she could paint any face on him that she wanted, while his actual range of expression was a mystery... (P- 72) So the bear undergoes a variety of transformations which are an index of Lou's own needs and desires. He can be "solid as a sofa, domestic, a rug of a bear" (p. 70) or "a strange fat mesomorphic mannikin" (p. 113) ; he can be a male lover to whom she extends her impossible fantasies of rescue : Bear, take me to the bottom of the ocean with you, bear, swim with me, bear, put your arms around me, enclose me, swim, down, down, down with me. (p. 112) And at the end, when summer is over and the bear is being taken away in the Indian's boat, he can be feminized into "a fat dignified old woman" in a fur coat (p. 138). 7 These are imaginative transformations of course, counterpointed by the woman's sane recognition that the bear is always a bear and ultimately invulnerable : There was a depth in him she could not reach, could not probe and with her intellectualfingersdestroy, (p. 119) The bear is her ideal fantasy object, malleable to her imagination 2ff7e9595c
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