[Bednarski is an educator and critic who has translated several of Ferron's works into English, including Wild Roses. In the following essay, she remarks on the theme of insanity in Wild Roses and examines the novel's distinctive qualities.]

By now Jacques Ferron needs little introduction to English Canadian readers. Acclaimed for over a decade in Quebec, he is rapidly gaining the recognition he deserves in the rest of the country. But as a writer he is many-sided, elusive, and Wild Roses may well come as a surprise to those who feel they already know his work. Disconcerting in its simplicity, almost Victorian in tone, it lacks the fantasy, the baroque complexity of his other books. Readers accustomed to Ferron's mordant wit and black humour will find this novel unexpectedly sober. There are few winks here, few barbs, and he permits himself only the gentlest of irony. While there is much that is familiar—the theme of the salvation of one human being through the death of another, the preoccupation with mental illness and institution life, the concern for the fate of Canada's French speaking minorities—the perspective is new. And this perspective, unique so far in Ferron's work, is of particular significance in the context of an English translation.

In Wild Roses, as in The Juneberry Tree, Dr. Cotnoir, and several of his short stories, Ferron views mental illness from his own highly personal standpoint, drawing on his experience as a doctor at Saint-Jean-de-Dieu psychiatric hospital, yet searching beyond the limits of psychiatry for some deeper meaning in the lives of the insane. The barely fictionalized case history told in "Love Letter" reflects his dissatisfaction with professional terminology, and in the novel itself he accounts for the failing of individual minds in terms which are not those of medical orthodoxy, nor indeed of medicine itself, seeking not so much to negate psychiatric interpretation as to complement it. There is the haunting symbolism of the roses and a spell that can be likened to a curse. There are allusions to wrathful deities and to tragic destiny. And Wild Roses, with its grandiose perspective, is above all a novel of destinies.

Individual destinies, but also collective ones. For the lives of the characters are linked irrevocably to the historic destinies of three Canadian peoples: the French in Quebec, the Acadians, and the English-speaking Maritimers.

For Ferron, who writes, as he says, to help his "uncertain country" towards certainty, Quebec's struggle to attain dignity and autonomy has been a major preoccupation. In this novel it is more an implicit than an explicit theme. Baron, the Montrealer, is a businessman whose only loyalty is to his company and in whom political consciousness is all but stifled by personal ambition. His daughter, however, is independent, outspoken, and the new era of happiness heralded at the end is perhaps an era of collective fulfilment, for with Baron's death and the uprooting of the roses, a young generation is freed from the harmful influences of the past. But in Wild Roses this concern for Quebec, central to Ferron's work, is eclipsed by his affection for Acadia and a people even more uncertain than his own.

Ferron's vision of Acadia is first an idyllic one, and reflects his nostalgia for simple values and a way of life fast disappearing from Quebec. The gentleness of Wild Roses is, in part, his hommage to the gentleness of Acadia. Le pays chiac has inspired some of the book's most lyrical passages. It is also the pretext for its most clear-sighted political comment. Like Pierre Perrault, another sympathetic Quebecker, whose film, L'Acadie, L'Acadie, first brought the plight of New Brunswick's French-speaking minority to the attention of the Canadian public, Ferron has registered the complex and often elusive reality Acadian writers are now beginning to express for themselves. He himself has walked the streets of Moncton, he tells us—was it in 1966 or 1967? He is familiar with other parts of Acadia—north-eastern New Brunswick in particular—has often written articles about it, but never before a book. In Acadia Ferron is no crusader, no revolutionary, no prophet. He is a mere observer. He is not out to provoke. His remarks are deliberately low-key and lack the violence of much of his comment on Quebec. Yet in spite of the restraint one can sense his emotion, the indignation at past and present injustices, reluctant pessimism with regard to the future, and the sad conviction that Acadia's destiny is indeed a tragic one. It is Ferron's position as a concerned Quebecker which gives his vision of Acadia its particular intensity. And at the same time to discover Acadia, its landscape, its history, its mythology, is, for the Quebecker, to discover a unique vantage point from which to view himself and his people. Baron's Moncton idyll provides him with much food for thought and the occasion for some rather disquieting self-assessment.

Baron discovers Acadia in the company of an English-speaking Maritimer, the dignified young descendant of a race of conquerors, on whose territory he finds himself in Moncton. This people is in search of its destiny and, if we are to judge by Ann Higgit, every bit as uncertain as the other two. After being symbolically rejected by the people her ancestors conquered, she goes to spend her life in England, more at home there than in Ontario or her native Newfoundland. Much has been said and much remains to be said about Ferron's anglophilia. The English, great at the expense of others, proud yet ill at ease in their role as conquerors, have won his sympathy and admiration, though they may often be the targets of his scorn. Englishness—one kind of Englishness—exerts a great fascination for him. He is drawn in particular to qualities he considers British: simplicity, candour, restraint, and a kind of sober dignity, all lacking, he feels, in the brasher world of Upper Canada and the United States, but present still in the Maritimes, where Victorian England has left its indelible mark. On to this very personal vision of the English Maritimes he has projected something of the stark grandeur of the puritan New England he knows from the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne. These, then, are the qualities embodied in the young woman from Newfoundland. They are also the most striking qualities of the book itself, the very qualities that make it stand out as unique among Ferron's works.

For Ann Higgit is more than the representative of the English Maritimes. Here is the central mind of the novel. It is in her consciousness that meanings crystallize. It is through her comments, and in particular through her reflections on the life and work of Louis Hemon, that the reader reaches a deeper understanding of the tragic significance of Baron's life. And while she is not the narrator, it is in her somewhat grandiose yet simple terms that events are conveyed to us. To her particular qualities of Englishness correspond qualities of Ferron's style, which, while they are not absent from his other works, are nevertheless present here to the exclusion of all else. Indeed, in Wild Roses Ferron has shed so much that he risks disconcerting his reader. He has done so in order to explore to the full a fascination, a temptation, one side of his nature perhaps, one element in his Canada. Call it what we will, Victorianness, Englishness, puritan innocence, the result is a narrative voice unheard in his work before Wild Roses, and unrepeated since.

This voice, for all its Englishness, speaks French. To translate it into English has, ironically, not always been an easy task. But I feel it has been an important one. There is great wisdom in this deceptively simple little book. And English Canadian readers will recognize in Ferron a Canadian writer whose deep concern for reality beyond the borders of Quebec sets him apart from other writers of his province.