[In the following excerpt, Socken examines the major themes in Wild Roses.]

In Wild Roses, Jacques Ferron explores the topography of the land inhabited by the sane and the mad and raises questions about some of our society's most fundamental assumptions about those two states. The result is a novel which implies that no map can be drawn to distinguish the two areas, no clearly-defined borders can be established, for they are part of the same country, the uncertain country of the human mind.

The story centres on the Baron, a man whose wife bears him a daughter, goes mad shortly thereafter and commits suicide. Totally devoted to the daughter, Rose-Aimée, the Baron decides to leave her with a good Acadian family and to visit her every spare moment. He is described as a "tall, handsome, impeccably dressed young man, who was courteous and considerate in spite of his exuberance…." This, and similar descriptions of him, repeatedly occur and serve as a refrain which explains everyone's admiration for him. He appears to be the best society can produce, the very epitome of success. The tone of the descriptions is mocking, however, and alludes to the Baron's complacency and superficiality. As the Baron becomes more and more devoted to rising in the company hierarchy and his daughter grows increasingly attached to her Acadian adoptive family, he realizes that they are becoming irrevocably estranged. He makes a last desperate attempt to reclaim her affections by taking her home to live with him and Sister Agnes who will care for them.

Sister Agnes has retired from a lifetime devoted to caring for the mentally ill and feels out of place in her new environment. She "did not like this world, which unlike an asylum, did not declare its insane." Her unique experience of having witnessed life among the "sane" and the "insane" lends a profound insight to the novel:

Sister Agnes had seen misery and some horrible suffering in her long years at Saint-Jean-de-Dieu. She had shown compassion and implored heaven's mercy. She had been on the side of misery and suffering then. Now she had broadened her scope, she was in the midst of life, life which must go on, must find a way round misery and suffering … she knew it was her duty to keep life's tragedy locked in her heart, that the beauty of each day might be spared.

This comment reveals much of what is at the heart of the novel, Life, inside and outside the walls of the asylum, is seen to be fundamentally the same. It is tragic and full of suffering, yet without any obvious meaning or justification to alleviate the misery. Life, in this absurdist sense, is thus insane. Yet life outside the asylum is different in one crucial sense—it must contain and surpass suffering so that it may "go on." This involves a certain pretense ("life's tragedy locked in her heart") which is necessary to continuing the struggle. Pretense gives one the illusion that life is rational and under some control. Why this accent on persevering? Because, as expressed in the preceding quotation, there is "beauty" in living life for the moment ("each day") and it is one's obligation ("duty") to preserve it. Sanity, this passage and the novel seem to be saying, is ultimately recognizing the fundamental insanity inherent in life and working dutifully to salvage what is beautiful.

The wild roses symbolize the paradox of the novel, the value of beauty and its threat. For centuries roses have been celebrated as the most perfect, the most beautiful of flowers. The Baron plants some around his home, but becomes so enamored of them that each summer he lets them almost overrun the house. Their wild nature (in French, "sauvage"), which is paradoxically inseparable from their magnificence, constantly threatens to displace him. Beauty must be restrained, but the Baron cannot establish this control. He too goes mad. The roses are, in fact, uprooted at the end of the novel when the Baron is dead and Rose-Aimée and her husband move into the house:

They never knew that Sister Agnes had cut down the rose-bush and torn up its roots, and that in its place she had planted some very ordinary flowers, gloriosas, poppies, and petunias.

The use of the word "ordinary" describing the other flowers implies that the roses were extraordinary, that their exceptional beauty and intoxicating fragrance could no longer have a place there. With the death of the Baron and the removal of the roses we have the end both of beauty and of the threat beauty poses and in its place come the ordinary, the mundane, that which can be managed and subdued.

It is interesting that it is Sister Agnes who cuts down the roses. Her choice signals a conscious desire, perhaps a need, for constancy after contact with so much instability. Her action suggests that in the final analysis she values the manageable (sane) over the potentially chaotic (insane), even if the latter yields beauty and the former does not. Perhaps her action speaks for all of society. We uproot wild roses and lock away "exceptional" people since both pose a threat to our mediocrity. Neither roses nor humans can be allowed to grow wild. Our need for order and constancy is stronger than our ability to cope with the challenge of the exceptional.

Society, in Ferron's works, is responsible for the disorientation it produces. It is portrayed as stiff, rigid, and totally unaccommodating. Even expressing emotion must be authorized: "to a man people in the firm seemed to have decided to feel sorry for him" (when the Baron's wife died). Francophones in particular are alienated from society and from their own culture. As the narrator comments: the graduates of the University of Moncton "work harder and end up third in line for jobs, after the graduates of Dalhousie and Fredericton. It will take them ten or twenty generations to become Anglophones." In the process they are set adrift and float rudderless, culture-less, and alienated from themselves as much as from everything around them.

Ultimate responsibility, Ferron states explicitly, rests with the British "conquerors," the Americans who have displaced them, and the society both have imposed: "The victor (Britain) has felt the need to perpetuate his racist instincts, extending his policy of ethnocide to European immigrants, Quebecois, Acadians, little suspecting that in so doing he is creating in their place Americans more monstrous than himself." It is at this point that one perceives Ferron either as a writer expounding profound truths about the nature of modern Quebec and Acadian society or as a radical voicing ill-founded platitudes. It is up to the reader to choose, depending on his own bias. But let us not lose sight of the fact that we do not have to agree with Ferron's view of Francophone turmoil in order to appreciate his insights. Whatever the historical causes, Francophone Canadians share a sense of apprehension about their future and Ferron gives their fears eloquent and imaginative expression. Confused and uncertain in a turbulent society, they represent modern man; in this way their concerns are ours.