SOURCE: Verduyn, Christl. “Translated without Transubstantiation: The Glassy Sea.” In Lifelines: Marian Engel's Writings, pp. 138-61. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1995.

[In the following essay, Verduyn discusses the dichotomy in women's lives between life and letters as explored by Engel in The Glassy Sea.]

I was going to have to turn human again so I could think.

Marian Engel, Joanne¹

There were Marys and Marthas and I knew which kind I was.

Marian Engel, Joanne²

Ruthie had never told a lie, but “oh,” she moaned to the principal, “I had to sit on the toilet, my mother made me sit on the toilet, I'm constipated, I had to sit on the toilet.” Whereas she had been outside the foundry watching them pull pigs of iron out of furnaces on red-hot rods, flying in devils' horns around her.

The lie grew and grew inside her. It is not truth that makes you free.

Marian Engel, “Atlas and Gazetteer of the West China Shore”³

The spaces between the lines of the stave of logic … were logical in themselves.

Marian Engel, The Glassy Sea⁴

Life, I decided, is a sentence between brackets.

Marian Engel, The Glassy Sea⁵

You can rewrite novels, but not your own life.

Marian Engel, “Under the Cypress Tree”⁶

There was considerable anticipation surrounding Marian Engel's next novel. What act could possibly follow a book about a woman's love affair with a bear? The author did not keep readers and critics in suspense for long. In 1978 The Glassy Sea appeared. It is a story about a woman who becomes a nun.⁷

On the surface, no two novels might appear to be more different than Bear and The Glassy Sea. A woman who becomes sexually involved with a bear and a woman who becomes a nun seem about as far apart on the spectrum as can possibly be imagined. But the plot differences prove to be substantively superficial. Closer examination shows the novels to be closely linked.⁸ Indeed, Bear is almost a stylized rehearsal for the The Glassy Sea, a sort of stripped-down, condensed preview of the more expansive subsequent story. In both works, Engel pursues her exploration of women's struggle with dichotomy. The Glassy Sea fleshes out this basic theme of the author's writing by exploring several new variations on it. The bare/bear bones version is filled in by the examination of additional tensions: between the floral and the carnal, heart and head, Mary and Martha, life and letters. The convent setting and rose imagery add further texture to Engel's continued investigation into the impact of dualism on women's experience.

This chapter considers The Glassy Sea in terms of continuity and innovation in Engel's work. Closely linked to Bear, The Glassy Sea exhibits affinity with Engel's other work as well. The author's post-Bear novels are in some sense “re-visions” of her pre-Bear books. The Glassy Sea and Lunatic Villas revisit many of the concerns and themes of Sarah Bastard's Notebook and The Honeyman Festival. For example, the struggle against small-town Ontario values reappears. Rita Heber grows up in West China Township, which resembles Minn Burge's home town of Godwin in The Honeyman Festival. Striking similarities exist between the protagonists' mothers as well. Indeed, Minn's mother Gertrude could be a sister to Rita's mother Eleanor. Both strive to instill good old-fashioned home-town values in their daughters. This becomes a point of difference between mothers and daughters and a source of considerable grief to all. Problematic in both Sarah Bastard's Notebook and The Honeyman Festival, the mother-daughter relationship is patently painful in The Glassy Sea. Indeed, this is Engel's darkest depiction of a protagonist's rapport with her mother. Whereas Sarah Porlock and Minn Burge eventually achieve some understanding of and reconciliation with their mothers, Rita Bowen and Eleanor Heber end up irrevocably split apart.

While illustrating the overall coherency of Engel's work, The Glassy Sea also introduces new elements. Most significantly, the novel injects the mediating factor of society in women's struggle with the forces of dichotomy. The author broaches the issue of the “social,” examining it from the perspective of women. Rita Heber Bowen/Sister Mary Pelagia discovers the extent to which women's experiences are shaped by the social values underlying structures and organizations such as the church and family—all major topics in the novel. The Glassy Sea marks a significant transition between Bear and Engel's final novel, Lunatic Villas. In Bear, women's social integration is left up in the air with the stars. Lunatic Villas, on the other hand, is the fullest embrace of the social in Engel's work. The Glassy Sea is situated between these two works, alternating social integration and isolation as the protagonist rejects and then revises the values which her family and society have taught her.

In addition to exploring the social, The Glassy Sea shifts attention from sexuality to spirituality. Bear's predominantly physical/sexual focus on a single summer in Lou's life is replaced by The Glassy Sea's interest in the psychic/spiritual vicissitudes of a lifetime. Engel places her ongoing examination of women's experience in a religious context. The novel deftly captures the experience of growing up as a member of the United Church in postwar rural Ontario, like protagonist Rita Heber and author Marian Engel. Although she did not consider herself religious, Marian Engel had an avid interest in religion.⁹ This stemmed in part from her upbringing.¹⁰ The Passmores were a United Church family, and, as a girl, Marian Engel attended church service and sang hymns such as the one from which The Glassy Sea's title is taken, “The Holy Trinity” by Reginald Heber (1738-1826).¹¹ The second stanza reads:

Holy, holy, holy! all the saints adore Thee,
Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea.
Cherubim and seraphim falling down before Thee,
Which wert, and art, and evermore shall be.(12)

The Glassy Sea's protagonist knows the hymn well. “I was a little girl and my name was Rita Heber,” she recalls. “R. Heber, and every Sunday in church we started with Hymn Number One, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy,’ by R. Heber, and I wrote it, and the golden crowns of the saints were cast in a glassy sea … I was in there with the cherubim and the seraphim. I had to be. I knew I belonged there—perhaps only with the splash, perhaps only as audience, but I belonged there” (19). The hymn situates a number of the novel's key concerns and motifs. The theme of identity is located in the play on names, which recurs throughout the novel. Rita is the diminutive of Marguerite, the protagonist's full name, although she never uses it. Instead, she is known as Sister Mary Pelagia throughout her ten years as an Eglantine nun, and in her subsequent marriage to Asher Bowen, who does not like “Rita,” she is Peggy—another diminutive of Marguerite. As Rita is later aware, Marguerite means pearl—the symbol of perfection (77)—or, in French, daisy. Both the flower imagery and the concept of perfection are central to the novel. Meanwhile, the push and pull of the spiritual/intellectual is symbolized by the golden crowns worn on the head, with the physical/sensual represented by the cherubim and seraphim.

Finally, The Glassy Sea fixes its gaze on the gap between experience and expression. This was a chasm which Engel felt most artists recognize. The Glassy Sea's Rita Heber tries to bridge the gap between experience and expression. She attempts to do this as other Engel protagonists have—by writing. Rita composes a long letter, which constitutes the body of the novel. The letter is essentially an account of her life. By making Rita's life experiences the substance of literary expression, The Glassy Sea radically narrows the gap between experience and expression. Rita's letter is the novel we read. Moreover, the life story that the letter/novel recounts is a woman's story. The Glassy Sea thus forcefully asserts women's life experiences as appropriate subject matter for art. Women's experience and literary expression are not discontinuous, just as life and letters are not dichotomous. This is Engel's affirmation in The Glassy Sea. “True understanding,” protagonist Rita Heber states, “is achieved by living through an idea, not just mastering it on the page” (66).

FORMING THE EXPERIENCE

The Glassy Sea's distinctive epistolary format is the formal expression of this understanding. It is also another illustration of Engel's sustained interest in, and experimentation with, literary form. The novel has three parts: a prologue, an “envoie,” and, in between, a long letter that makes up the body of the book. The letter is addressed to Philip “Yurn”—the Bishop of Huron pronounced with an Ontario accent.¹³ It is written by the novel's protagonist Rita, who is living alone in a house by the sea on Canada's east coast. The letter is an old literary form, and at first glance it may seem an odd or unfashionable choice for a “modern novel” written in the late 1970s. Moreover, with their vaguely Chaucerian overtones, the prologue and envoie that bracket the letter underscore Engel's departure from dominant modern literary norms. But, as usual, Engel's choice of literary form is both strategic and effectual. Letters have long been associated with a female writing tradition, women using letters and diaries as vehicles for literary expression. Engel participated in this tradition, adopting an epistolary form for her book. The Glassy Sea's prologue and envoie further evoke a tradition of belles lettres quite in keeping with the novel's style. Engel reported that when she was writing The Glassy Sea, she found it easy to compose “long, beautiful, rhythmical sentences.”¹⁴ Indeed, she was surprised to discover that she quite liked writing lyrical prose. Where Bear was lean and economical with a strong narrative line, The Glassy Sea is lushly intricate in language and composition. Rich in allusions, the text is multilayered in its modes of expression, from the religious to the psychoanalytical, from the confessional to the contemplative.¹⁵ With The Glassy Sea, Engel added to the array of literary forms and experimentation her writing displays, the book being yet another testimony to her versatility as a writer.

The Glassy Sea integrates artistic expression and personal experience, both through conjunctions between the novel and Engel's notebooks of the time, and through Rita's story. Her experiences as a nun notwithstanding, Rita's letter tells a tale similar to that of Engel's other protagonists. Like her predecessors, Rita is attracted to the aesthetic life. “My religion was, I think, aesthetic and literary only,” she confesses (96). Rita is drawn to the world of books¹⁶ and philosophical reflection. At the same time, she is anchored in the concrete “real” world, both by her family's practical approach to life and by the social expectations she faces as a girl and woman. Rita struggles to meet the imperatives of the contradictory forces in her life.

SURFACING

The Glassy Sea manifests its affinity with Bear and Engel's previous other novels through its investigation of dualism and its impact on women's lives. The fact is that The Glassy Sea belongs to the Bear era. The novel was elaborated during what Engel called Bear Summer.¹⁷ This was the summer of 1976, which she spent on Canada's east coast. Proceeds from her Governor General's Award allowed her to take time out and away from Toronto, and she rented a house by the beach on Prince Edward Island.¹⁸ This was more than a holiday. Engel had come for health purposes. “I came here to … what—unwind. Stop naming things. Suddenly I knew I was going really crazy, not connecting at all,” Engel wrote on 1 June.¹⁹ The entry is evocative both of Lou's feelings of disconnectedness in Bear and of Rita's experiences in The Glassy Sea. “Had to get out of Toronto, all that worry about what reality was … Bear summer is for unwinding. Letting go. Living in the moment, not time past or future … learning how to be. Not choosing not to be.”²⁰

Engel was suffering from stress and exhaustion. Years of parenting, political activism, committee work, and writing whenever possible were beginning to take a toll. She was physically worn out, mentally fatigued, and morally weary. “So tired of trying to make it, flapping my wings endlessly,” she wrote in her Bear Summer notebook.²¹ “Tired of order. Processions of words.” Engel felt she needed time out lest she lose her enthusiasm for life or, worse, for writing. “About writing: reading Far tortuga and a book of B.S. Johnson's I thought I'm tired of fireworks, farting away about form. Want to do something transparent now.”²² This was the purpose of Bear Summer and a primary intent of The Glassy Sea. “I think one of the things I was trying to get rid of when I wrote that book was a certain level of cynicism,” Engel commented on her novel. “Everyone I was seeing for a while, particularly aging media people, had grown so cynical. I thought everything was terribly besmirched. I was trying for myself to clean things up. I don't mean sexually. I don't even mean morally. I mean in the sense of starting to like things again.”²³

The Glassy Sea was “an elaboration on regaining a kind of innocence. A kindness and an unworldliness.”²⁴ Engel had passed the midway point in a decade filled with trials and triumphs. Although she had won a Governor General's Award and achieved hoped-for recognition, at the same time her health had deteriorated and her marriage had broken up. Engel and her husband had separated, and the couple divorced in 1977. In a Bear Summer entry dated 28 June, she wrote: “I'm redefining myself as most women are who have lived with men for long periods and then broken up. The pain is in deciding who you are without reference to that other person, who, having decided whom he wanted you to be forced that image on you. I am further on with the project than I was last year.”²⁵

Women's self-redefinition, a major theme of Engel's work, was also a personal experience. With The Glassy Sea, the links between the author's life as a woman and writer and her fiction are reinforced. As noted above, the novel may be Engel's most autobiographical.²⁶ Bear Summer notebook reveals her growing conviction that fiction “arises out of a need to integrate the elements of one's life in narrative form.”²⁷ Engel later affirmed that her “books generally come out of some kind of personal struggle and attempt to organize experience.”²⁸ She thus confirmed the part played by the personal in her writing. At the same time, she pointed to the importance of attempting to organize experience. “We need art because life has no structure,” she stated.²⁹ If art is needed to structure life, then life—or living—is necessary to furnish the substance for artistic structure.

Life experience and artistic expression were complementary and were both necessary for Engel. The Glassy Sea articulated her growing conviction about the place of the personal in art. In a fleeting throwback to the Monodromos experiment, Engel temporarily envisioned The Glassy Sea as a book that would be “all events and surfaces.”³⁰ She noted: “There's something in surfaces. Because if you neglect them the world disappears. That doesn't make realism the greatest kind of art, but I think you reach the Kingdom through surfaces.”³¹ This artistic agenda is strikingly reminiscent of the one Engel set herself in Monodromos. The goal then was to “synthesize: make a hard surface.”³² But once again, in The Glassy Sea as in Monodromos, the personal injects itself into Engel's writing. Rita's long epistolary account of her life reflects numerous thoughts and concerns found in Engel's notebooks. This changed the author's mind about the novel. “I thought it would be a long philosphical novel,” she told Toronto Star book reviewer Ken Adachi,³³ “but I lost my grip on it. It didn't turn out quite the way I wanted it to.” Tempted by transparency, seduced by surfaces as clear and smooth as a glassy sea, Engel discovered both to be fragile as glass. Diving into the depths of personal experience, her protagonist Rita Heber churns up muddy, troubled waters below the calm surface of the glassy sea.

THEORY AND PRACTICE

The personal integrated with the artistic in The Glassy Sea. Intellectual musing about writing and theory were relegated to Engel's notebooks of the time. In Bear, these interests reverberated throughout the novel by means of numerous literary references. With The Glassy Sea, they are confined to the cahiers. While Engel's enthusiasm for experimenting with literary form remained undiminished, her disposition towards literary theory was changing. The Bear Summer notebook tracks this change in attitude, recording once again the intensity which literary issues held for Engel. The author speculated that as her practice had improved, her theory had become worse. This was “as it should be,” she noted, “but hard on one's pretensions. Intellectual, social, etc.”³⁴ Engel expressed her admiration for people she felt had no pretensions, such as friends and fellow writers Margaret Laurence and Adele Wiseman. “They just are,” she stated. “An enviable stage to have reached.”³⁵ Writing and sense of self remained linked for Engel. Probing further, she wrote:

Tuesday 11 or 12

I have always preferred to think of myself as a craftsman rather than an artist. This is partly a safety device. It is easier to be a craftsman and at least then one is not a failed artist. i.e. a hobbyist. It also stems from my father's firm conviction that the trades are respectable, and my own tendency to keep my feet on the ground.³⁶

Engel acknowledged the practical dimension of her nature and her writing. “You set out and eventually become that elusive thing, yourself. The becoming is difficult. The art is in maintaining the craftsmanship.”³⁷ Her reflections continued:

I have until very recently been most interested in it [the novel] in its experimental variety, believing that since there are no new things to say one must find new ways to say old things. This attitude I now find a bore, perhaps because I am 43 and maturing or getting over the hill who knows which … I was very excited about the ideas about the nouveau roman in France in the '60's but now I find even Butor more or less unreadable though his theory is very pure and good. I mean Niagara is nothing but a bad radio script. And perhaps the nouveau roman was a necessary attempt on the part of the French to escape the roman. I no longer think that is necessary here.³⁸

When the youthful drive to “find a way or invent one”³⁹ was still strong, Engel felt she could write out an aesthetic. “Not any more. The bones are good prose and the flesh is you: that's all I know.” Engel felt herself “becoming less experimental, more classical. Recognizing that I'm not Sterne, nor Joyce. Still, I don't want to be Trollope, though. Others see me as turning to fantasy, I think. Don't know if I want to go there, either.” Then, in a characteristic spin-about, she added: “What I have to do is work out a number of theories and then give myself enough psychic space (i.e. rest) … to let what I have to do occur to me.”⁴⁰

As the Bear Summer notebook confirms, Engel was well aware of the practical streak in her as a writer and a woman. At the same time, she remained drawn to more abstract issues of theory and ideas. “The truth is,” her notebook records, “that unless I spend most of the morning in that fantasy I call thinking, I can't get through the day at all.”⁴¹ Rita's story reflects this perpetual push and pull in Engel's writing. For her interest in the aesthetic life, Rita encounters opposition from her family. Seeking to circumvent the social expectations of women in her milieu (marriage and motherhood), Rita makes the unusual decision to become a nun. The convent offers her a longed-for opportunity to read and think as well as to work. Rita is as happy there as Lou in her island retreat. But where Bear left Lou on the verge of social reintegration, The Glassy Sea returns Rita to society. After a decade in the convent, Rita takes up the life of an “ordinary” woman, affording Engel the opportunity to scrutinize the options that society offers women and to present possible remedies for women's limited social fulfilment. For this, Rita provides a voice.

WORKERS AND SHIRKERS

Rita is a Heber, the rural Ontario family that Marian Engel introduced in her short stories. The original Hebers had been Catholic, the family name deriving from the French Hébert. “We were not only country bumpkins,” Rita writes in her letter, “we were French-Canadian country bumpkins, and our line was called the French Line, which is why we could and should amount to nothing” (19). Over the years, Hebers had begun to attend United Church services and to marry Macraes rather than the Catholic McCrorys. Soon both sides of the families included red Hebers and black Hebers, red Macraes and black Macraes (22). Either way, the Hebers and Macraes were good plain country people. “We were not poor, for, as it was pointed out, there was good plain food on the table. Our clothes were not new, but they were in order … We had food, we had clothing, we had heat” (24-5). As Rita's mother repeatedly tells her, they were “plain folks, country people” (21), simple and sensible with no time for nonsense and romance (20). “I come of a plain people not made for mysteries,” Rita's letter recounts, “on the French Line we didn't hold with mysteries” (20). Mystery, Rita learns, was for Indians and Catholics. “They had mysterious church services they invited the United Church girls to (The Canadian Girls in Training, but I have forgotten what, in a white middy, for)” (20). The Hebers were practical and hard working, except for the odd and scandalous case like Aunt Mary Hunter, who had “nooooo children” and tended roses while Rita's mother was baking and patching and mending to make ends meet (21). Hard work, discipline, order, self-sufficiency, these were the values honoured by Rita's family. They formed the foundation of what she came to call her “ghastly Puritan background, the perfectionism. I can't work it out of myself” (12).

Like that of all Engel's protagonists, Rita's struggle is in large part against her background and upbringing. Family and milieu present early constraints to individual and unconventional desire. Childhood is not a carefree innocent time. “It's taken me most of my life to incorporate its first five years,” is Rita's telling remark (66). Despite its exotic name, West China Township (a title Engel considered for her novel) is “Genuine Old Ontario” (124). Values are traditional and gender stereotypes are well preserved. “The qualities the boys were taught to look for in a woman were those shared by ploughhorses (solidity, calm, lack of temperment),” Rita writes, “the externalized feminine of the fashionable world was as far from our world as the farther reaches of the real China were from West China Township” (30-1).

Her mother and aunts (Mary excepted) “routinely worked, as they said, their fingers to the bone, and thought, because they belonged to a puritanical religion and an even more puritanical culture, that it was right to do so. They were glad to work and scorned luxury” (30). Within this perspective, personal pleasure was pure selfishness; joy was suspect (Rita's mother “thought it correct to plant suspicion in our joy” [72]); and sex was downright sinful. At best, it was problematic. Boys were raised to believe that they were superior, but as men they were unable to prove this except by “one exhausting act,” as Rita writes. “And the women, secure in their feeling of equality when they left home, were insecure in their femininity: lie back to embrace frailty as they would, they could not unless they were drunk or diseased” (30). Sex was for “the martyrdom of women,” and marriage was “a serious affair meant for keeping people's noses to the grindstone” (71). In both cases, as a woman you were “damned if you did, and damned if you didn't.”

Rita's early insight manifests itself in a dramatic, physical way at her university roommate's wedding. Christabel (her name as symbolically suggestive as the others in the novel),⁴² the perfect, beautiful daughter of a rich knitting-mill owner, unexpectedly marries Rita's cousin John, a poor Ph.D. student and “nephew of Dr Stanley Macrae, Marxist economist, friend of J. S. Woodsworth, and husband of a leading Toronto Trotskyite … Aunt Frieda” (57). Christabel is pregnant, and as Rita explains, “If girls got pregnant then, they got married” (57). The wedding is neither joyous nor memorable, save for Rita “fainting dead away”⁴³ near the end: “It had something to do with the way I felt about the lives of women … but I think it also contained a prophetic quality. I suddenly saw, I remember my knees saw as they crumbled, that the marriage would be a disaster—and perhaps that most marriages are disasters—and arranged with my consciousness to absent myself from the pain of this vision” (57-8).

Rita's fainting vision is of the “reality” underlying idealized womanhood. For the general populace, Rita notes, “the ideal for womanhood was not Mary but Martha.” Marthas are good hard workers. “This was to be a country for workers and those who were not workers were beyond the pale” (69). This included Christabel, whose life ends in tragedy.⁴⁴ Women's options were few but firm. “Women's role was to take care of men and children. If one became a teacher and instructed them, instead of a mother baking for them, that was acceptable” (71-2). The case could be made for a woman to become a teacher, but that was about as far as women could venture into the realm of the “intellectual.” As Marthas, women were to serve their fellow men.

Rita Heber, however, wants more than a life of service.⁴⁵ In the prologue, she reflects on “serviceability.” “Funny, self-service in French is libre-service,” she notes. “Maybe the other way around. Free service. Service-free?” (14) She is interested in life as Mary and all that such a life represents: mystery, roses, knowledge, and, above all, the whole rather than the half-world: “My world was a half-world, with Tess and her folk eliminated by historical necessity, and the Indians faint and unknowable also, the mental map of the river shore blurred and erased by habit and prejudice. One didn't know the Catholics, or the Indians, or old foreign people, or the summer cottagers … One knew very little, one walked alone” (42).

Already as a child Rita wanted to know more, “to be certain. To know. To know not, as she thought, philosophy, but something more important. The truth. The truth for her. Not always to be torn, to wonder if …” (162). The Heber “half-world” prevents her from seeing the whole picture, leaves her wondering and torn inside. Rita sees herself doubled: as a child with a fever, and herself as an adult bending over her child-self, holding and comforting her. “I was a child again, an open greedy mouth, a vessel of one ingredient only, longing” (157). Rita's overwhelming longing surpasses the sober circumstances of her family. Her dreams and desires are inadmissable. She is a misfit—a Heber who is neither black nor red but beige (22). She is the “little one”⁴⁶ of the family, a lonely child who talks to animals and listens to “the voice of underground streams” (162). Her unusual behaviour goes hand in hand with “odd” ideas. Thus, as a child, Rita had failed to distinguish God's masculinity and her own femininity. “Aside from the fact that He was the Messiah and I wasn't, I didn't see that there was much difference between me and Jesus” (30). “I was, you see, perverse. Left-handed, too. I drove mother wild”(21).

Rita's behaviour and outlook on life are a source of major conflict in her relationship with her mother. Mrs Heber is frustrated by Rita's poor housekeeping skills, scandalized by her daughter's relationship with an older man (Boris Dawson), and categorical about Rita's decision to join the Eglantines. Rita recalls her mother's tirade:

I was a liar, a cheat, a thief. I had taken their money for my education and thrown it away, I had cheated the dean of women and the whole family by abetting that Christabel in her seduction of John, I had lied when I said I was going shopping in London with Mr Laidlaw (I had not said I was going shopping, I said I was going to see friends of his), I was a hypocrite if I thought I was religious, what I was doing was getting out of doing any work, women's work especially, that I had always been slack at, I was running away, I was failing to provide grandchildren, I was hiding from the fact that I had no friends and nobody liked me and I was wasting my life.

(70)

In Eleanor Heber's eyes, “to withdraw from the world to contemplate one's spiritual heritage was to be an irritant, not a worker but a shirker” (69). In the bleakest of mother-daughter relations in Marian Engel's work, Eleanor Heber rejects Rita and never reconciles with her. Despite her mother's disapproval, Rita embarks on a new stage in life as Sister Mary Pelagia.

All the Eglantine sisters have “Mary” as their first name. Rather than taking the obvious course and giving Rita the Eglantine name of Sister Mary Margaret (her full name is Marguerite—Margaret), Sister Superior Mary Rose chooses the more uncommon Mary Pelagia.⁴⁷ In keeping with the underlying twin motif of Engel's work, there are two Pelagias, as Rita discovers in due course.

First there is St Pelagia of Antioch, the prostitute turned holy person and later transvestite saint: “Once called Marguerite for her pearls and Marina because she was an inevitable cognate of Aphrodite.”⁴⁸ This Pelagia was “an actress who every night processed in splendour past Bishop Nonnus's fledging church, causing scandal among the Christians” (77-8). Her story earns Rita's admiration for what she later describes as its “obedience to form and the way it controls its temptations: the need to think, in poverty, of luxury, in chastity, of unchastity” (78): “Finally (could she have been losing her figure? Were her pursuers drawing too near?) she sat herself and her splendid pearls at the feet of the Bishop and asked to be converted … She became a holy person, and many years later, when an ancient eremite was being laid to rest, a Dester Father of large piety, much visited by troubled young hermits whose control over their starving vision was incomplete, the body was discovered to be female, that of Pelagia, not Pelagius” (ibid.) But Pelagia's story is more than exemplary literature. It resonates throughout Engel's work, with its sexual crossovers and conversions.⁴⁹ However, it is not for this Pelagia that Sister Mary Rose names Rita, but rather “for Pelagius, theologian and heretic, whose work we should study together.” Pelagius believed in individuals' potential to reach perfection. “He was,” she announced, “as great a Puritan as I” (78).

THE (UN)CONVENT(IONAL) CHOICE

The convent is an unusual choice for a young woman of Rita's time and place. For the author, the choice reflected a long-standing fascination with convents. The foreword to The Glassy Sea explains that Eglantine House is modelled after a convent Engel stayed in while living in Cyprus in the early 1960s. The author's preoccupation with religion stems from more than a church-going childhood. As usual, there was a solid intellectual basis to Engel's religious interests. She read a variety of books in connection with The Glassy Sea: A. M. Allchin, The Silent Rebellion: Anglican Religious Communities 1845-1900 (1958); Peter Frederick Anson, The Call of the Cloister: Religious Communities and Kindred Bodies in the Anglican Communion (1955); The Call of the Desert: The Solitary Life in the Christian Church (1964); and Michael Hill, The Religious Order (1973).⁵⁰ Engel's interest in religion was largely philosophical. Several far-reaching questions gripped her, and she explored them in her writing. They revolved around truth, honesty, grace, perfection, and imperfection.

At the time of The Glassy Sea, Engel was reading a book by an Australian philosopher, John Passmore, The Perfectibility of Man: “I liked it very much because I had been worried as a child and as a young adult growing up in a small town, being United Church, going to a Baptist University, by this eternal insistence that we ought to try to be perfect. I grew up in a family of perfectionists but I am not really one though I try to be in my work. My hand-eye coordination is not terrifically good and I am very sloppy and I was always in trouble with the standards I was brought up to and I was always a failure.”⁵¹ Engel was interested in Passmore's argument that philosophies of perfectability, particularly Christianity, can poison lives. The question of perfection intrigued her, and she wondered, “How do you deal with an imperfect world when you have been brought up to look for perfection?”⁵²The Glassy Sea is in part an attempt to answer this question. “I was working my way through and I was trying to take Rita through this whole course in the hope of finding a situation for her where imperfection was sufficiently acceptable that she could be involved in the world again.”⁵³

ROSES AND CROWNS

“It wasn't faith that got me to the nunnery,” Rita states, “it was taste” (65). “Oh, I was seduced early by roses and crowns” (19). The first time Rita visits the Eglantines, she is enraptured by the roses cultivated by the members of the order, whose name in French means wild rose. “I wanted roses and was willing to endure what I thought would be the thorns,” Rita recalls (24). The rose is integral to the wreath of symbols in The Glassy Sea. With its long history and tradition, it is a particularly rich symbol, laden with meaning. In Engel's novel, it operates in conjunction with other flower motifs. Thus, the rose (in French, églantine) combines with the marguerite (French for daisy, and Rita's full name) to create a floral setting that is irresistible to Engel's protagonist. With its beautiful beds of roses, Eglantine House offers “a kind of aesthetic romance” that Rita longs for (37). Life in the Heber household is very plain; with its roses, the convent represents an alternative to the staid United Church values of her family and milieu.

Eglantine House is at once a break with and an extension of Rita's surroundings. On the one hand, many of the Eglantine house rules⁵⁴ recall those of her family. “Habit, order and rule gave our lives structure,” Rita relates (79). The sisters dress plainly and sensibly. They espouse efficiency and self-sufficiency, growing their own vegetables and managing their own affairs. They respect hard work and self-improvement. They are honest and sexually virtuous. On the other hand, where Rita's family sees life in black and white, the terms of reference in the convent are single and simple—like a rose. In the spirit of the order's founder, Sister Harriet Isbister, “a plain, sensible woman who had her wits about her,” the Eglantines steer a deliberate course between “the Scylla and Charybdis of Protestant bigotry and Papist seduction” (65).

Eglantine House represents an attempt to override dichotomy. The community's superior, Sister Mary Rose, described as the “head and heart” (75, emphasis added) of the Eglantines, incarnates the intent to unite intellect and feeling, head and heart, Martha and Mary, life and letters. Within the order, the body is acknowledged but is neither ador(n)ed nor scor(n)ed. Elevation, like mortification of the flesh, would only draw attention to the body. “How could a plain, ordinary Eglantine, not chafed by her costume, be aware enough of her flesh to exercise its longings?” Rita asks (66). A similar attitude is adopted at the table. Deprivation and denial might generate food fetishes. Better to eat well but in moderation. Thanks to the skills of Sister Benedict, the order's cook, the Eglantines eat almost sinfully well.

If the body is not sacrificed for the soul, neither is the mind. Sister Mary Rose gives Rita access to the library and the opportunity to take courses at the university, where she enrols in philosophy. As a contemplative order, the Eglantines provide Rita with ample opportunity to pursue her interests in philosophy and theology. “The bliss of the Order was always the time it afforded me for the examination of conscience, the acquisition of tranquillity in meditation” (85). Once again, the convent's roses strike a chord for Rita, responding to her desire and longing for knowledge and certainty. “There is nothing uncertain about a rose, nothing tentative. Temporary, certainly, the flower: but not uncertain,” she says (162). A single rose, with its whorl of petals, evokes the possibility for an existence not split by indecision and uncertainty.

Eglantine House represents possibile fusion, both within the self and without. However, the sisters encounter the oppositional forces of society. “It was not taken into account,” Rita observes, “that the Eglantines would gladly have been workers if they had been allowed” (69). The order might happily have combined Mary and Martha, heart and head; but the world at large (Rita's mother and the bishop included) did not. Mary and Martha were perceived as two distinct identities. In life, there were workers and shirkers. The former deserved recognition and reward, the latter were “good for nothing.” Willing as they may have been to work within society, the Eglantines encountered few opportunities to do so. Rita obtains an acceptable position as a teacher, but when (male) colleagues discover that she is an Eglantine, she endures unwelcome teasing.

Women encounter social resistance when they step out of their stereotypical roles. Engel steered her protagonist back into society to examine this reality. The Glassy Sea proceeds from where Bear left off, exploring Rita's return to the “outside world.” When Sister Mary Rose falls ill, Rita becomes “deputy sister superior by default” (85). She is forced to deal with the day-to-day matters of living. Her practical abilities are tested and proven. “Rows of Macraes and Hebers, purl and plain, stood behind me as I balanced the accounts and paid the bills and did the laundry” (87). But as the practical “Martha” in Rita waxes, the spiritual “Mary” in her wanes. As Rita's spiritual life withers, the dreamer in her dies.⁵⁵ With the eclipse of Mary, the Pelagian in Rita surfaces. Crowns are cast down, cherubims and seraphims splash about in the sea, and the dancing girl makes her entrance. “My physical nature,” Rita observes, “was at last asserting itself” (92).

PELAGIA, THE DANCING GIRL

Pelagia is another of the dancing figures who appear in different guises in Engel's work. Monodromos's dancing boy and Bear's bear both anticipate The Glassy Sea's saint. In each case, the dancing figure is associated with (ambiguous) sexuality and an instinctive or emotional approach to life, as opposed to one founded solely on thinking and reason. While the convent may seem well removed from “the flapping wings of Eros” (63), “the absence of sex,” Rita realizes, “implies its presence in the strongest terms”; “Christian imagery is as well highly sexually charged. For centuries the idea of chastity has invoked the dancing girls of the mind” (78).

After ten years as an Eglantine, Rita's dancing self begins to emerge, even as she argues inwardly—in her mind—with “St Augustine, with Paul, with all the Christians” (92) about the new feelings that are beginning to invade her consciousness: “If it was our nature to have these feelings, why was it evil to accept them? Why must we fight them down so hard? Surely this war she fought internally was killing Mary Cicely, who, though she seemed better, looked haggard and guilty. Surely it was better to accept that one was a physical person” (92). Visions of herself as Venus give Rita pause, and she is not entirely surprised when Sister Mary Rose says there is no future for her in Eglantine House. The order is slowly dying, and unlike the other sisters, Rita is young enough to start a new life. Thus, Sister Superior arranges for Rita to go back into the world as an au pair for Maggie Hibbert.⁵⁶ Rita is plunged into the Hibbert's busy social life. The household is as male as the convent was female. In addition to four strapping sons, Maggie has many male dinner guests, whom she pointedly introduces to Rita. “The change,” Rita says, “was sudden and violent” (96).

WALKING ON EGGS

Rita's departure from the convent and return to society entails major temporal and spatial dislocation. This in turn generates profound psychological disorientation. “The space between provincial London and sophisticated Toronto is still very wide,” Rita remarks. Travelling the distance is comparable to crossing a time warp “from Mediaeval to Modern, as our old history text used to be called” (97). Social and historical reintegration triggers an even more important and deep-seated identity crisis. “Emptiness slapped me,” Rita recalls, “big nothing again. A void I had met before, before I was born even, and would meet again. I was never able to fill that void with prayer, Philip. It was born in me” (99). Devastated by a feeling of loss, Rita compares her emptiness to an egg.⁵⁷

In the back with me sat Loss, round, complete, an enormous egg. I clung to it and wept.

What had I lost that I did not have to lose. Family? Innocence? I did not know then. But my loss was an egg and it had one of those faces on it Mother used to draw on our eggs when she was in good humour: a face with a terrible frown; and I could not reverse it, turn it upright, to a smile. It was too big for me, my arms could not encompass it.

(97)

Loss: I was empty. I incorporated my egg. I was a white swollen thing, gut-blown before painting.

(100)

Rita's distress derives from her perceived need to renounce “not the fact of Eglantine House, but the ideal: that a community could improve the world” (97). It is also linked to her relations with her mother. Mrs Heber cut Rita out of her life when Rita decided to join the Eglantines. Rita writes and visits, but Mrs Heber never accepts her. The pain this causes Rita is not diminished by understanding that her mother was too proud to change her mind. The only way Rita could ever please her mother was by being “ill and passive”—hardly the basis for building a strong sense of self (70). Thus, it is no surprise that years later Rita still wonders who she is and what her dreams and desires are. Searching her past, she asks of the child she was: “Who was I? What did I want? I had no idea” (41). As an adult, she continues to wonder, “What are my visions? What are my dreams?” (159) Insecure and lacking the sense of self that might have been instilled and fostered by her mother,⁵⁸ Rita marries “the perfect profile” (40). His name is Asher Bowen, and he has Rita do “a dance [she'd] never dreamed” (143). Unlike the other men Rita meets in rapid succession at Maggie's, Asher does not ask Rita to dinner. He asks her to church. They have a whirlwind romance and get married. In time, however, the marriage fails.⁵⁹ “Mary is only one incarnation of the rose,” Rita learns, “a male projection of the floral on the carnal (12).

THE FLORAL AND THE CARNAL

At first, marriage to Asher is utter bliss for Rita. As she later acknowledges, she invests all her emptiness in him, making him “God, home, Mary Rose, family” all in one (109). Asher easily fills the void. “He told me what to wear, what to do; when he knew me better, he often told me what I felt. He filled my mind, my thoughts, my body. He sat beside me in church. During sacraments his face gleamed pale and fanatic; he had an intensity I had never seen in any Eglantine but Mary Elzevir. I loved him very much indeed” (109).

When Rita expresses her desire for children, however, she perceives a problem in the marriage. The difficulty seems symbolized in the painting that Asher insists on hanging over their bed. Rita sees it as a “sex-hating icon” with its “dead eyes of a hysterically Jesuitical, unresurrectible Jesus” (115). Asher is angry and lectures Rita on the painting's value and its significance in his life, on wifely obedience, and on Christian marriage. Thereafter, he sleeps in a separate room. But Rita is pregnant, a delight Asher does not share with her. “We were so different, Ash and I,” Rita realizes in hindsight. As his name suggests, Asher was “life-denying, with his black and brass furniture and grey-green Christ. He was restrained, refined, autocratic, and eloquent in court … I was none of those things” (118). A “judge's son,” he is in turn judge/mental, as well as authoritarian, snobbish, and repressed. He becomes increasingly critical of Rita, who glories in her pregnancy and physical experience. She carries her rounding belly proudly, and when Chummy is born—sadly, and symbolically, hydrocephalic—Rita is able to love him in a way that Asher never can.

Chummy signals that all is not well in a world where head is separated from heart and where the self is divided. Asher was attracted to the Mary in Rita. He guides the former nun back into society and encourages her to resume her university studies. But he seems repelled by Rita as mother. The non-virginal, physical Rita is rejected. Asher's saint has become a sinner—a sexual woman. A real woman has replaced the ideal woman he had sought as a wife. In Asher's eyes, Chummy is “a punishment” for sins (123), and he displays little feeling for the child. Head and heart are separate spheres for Asher. Like the intellectual and the instinctive, the perfect and the imperfect, they are best kept separate—like Chummy and Rita. Keen on a new political career, Asher engineers a “separation of powers” (121), whereby Rita and Chummy are to stay out of sight while he develops his public profile. Asher devotes himself to his election campaign; Rita devotes herself to Chummy. To her surprise, Asher wins the election. To her despair, she loses Chummy—and her faith.

Following Chummy's birth, Rita had adopted an existentialist outlook on life in order to resist Asher's view of their child as a punishment rather than a blessing. “I felt that it was only by rejecting, well, original sin that I could cope with him. [Chummy] taught me to be, if not an existentialist, at least to cease to be Pelagian” (123). When Chummy dies, Rita becomes deeply depressed and drinks to assuage her sorrow. Her depression is exacerbated by the definitive breakdown of her marriage. Like the tattooed woman, Rita discovers that she has been replaced by a younger woman, someone more appropriate to Asher's public profile. His wife's drinking has become an embarrassment, and Asher makes an arrangement whereby she must move and stay out of province. Rita ends up on the east coast, living alone in a house by the beach.

For the second time in her life, Rita finds herself isolated from society, her efforts for a successful and satisfying integration having demonstrated the limited possibilities available to women. In becoming an Eglantine, she had initially avoided the predictable female socialization of her milieu leading to service—not the libre sort, implying freedom and self, but the socially acceptable kind as wife and mother.⁶⁰ The convent offered an alternative to the stereotypical roles assigned to women. As a young woman, Rita had glimpsed the potential of life as an Eglantine. But this had been usurped by the return to the “norm” for women of her time and place. Reintegrating into society a decade later, Rita serves as expected—and winds up a wreck on the beach. It takes Stern and Stone to repair the damage, along with some Eglantine-style meditation.

A ROSE IS A ROSE IS A ROSE

Dr Stern is Rita's psychiatrist. Mentioned briefly at the outset of the novel, he reappears several times subsequently in the course of her long letter. Like the star his name signifies⁶¹ and in the style his name evokes, Dr Stern helps guide Rita out of the darkness into which she has plunged. As Rita expresses it, “You know, Philip, I thought being with Dr Stern might lead me to some big mystical experience. I guess I'd read too much Jung. But it didn't; he was a logician. I don't remember much of what he did, except let me cry a lot, but when he really got me working on myself, what he did was lay out reality like a deck of cards, so that instead of the mysterious id, I was contemplating what was; not what had been, not what should be, but what was” (142-3).

Contemplating what is, the here and now, is the task Rita sets herself in an effort to pick up the pieces of her life.⁶² In this, some of her Eglantine experience is of use as she brings her focus to bear, once again, on roses. Rita discovers Rosa Eglanteria—wild roses—growing bountifully in the surrounding countryside. By concentrating solely/souly on the roses, by clearing her mind of everything but thoughts of roses, Rita struggles to touch ground again. Fleeting desires for “the rose-world inhaling all the mysteries … the metaphysic and the crowns and the thorns … to go into the heart of them all” (18) are quickly squelched by a firm determination to “look at what is.” She explains: “I use the word ‘contemplate’ to mean that, not as the expression of a mystical attempt to achieve oneness with God, or Buddha-hood or the Tao. Rosa Eglanteria is a small, five-petalled pink rose, just that” (143). Rita resolves to see things as they are. Asher had “made [her] stand for something that could destroy him” and in so doing had destroyed their marriage (161); Rita now rejects such symbolism. “I am myself, myself and that only,” she affirms (161). Interested only in “what is, not what might have been” (146), she asserts that the field stretching out in front of her seaside retreat is a field and nothing more. The birds spiralling above the field are just snipes. “I was tempted to run to the dictionary, mind you, to search for symbolical connotations of the snipe,” Rita admits. “But I didn't. A snipe is a long-beaked marsh bird who amuses himself by spiralling into the sky and whistling with his wings” (143), and “it is a life's work to keep an eye on the field.” This is the work Rita cuts out for herself in a renewed bid for a calm, smooth existence. “Life, I decided, is a sentence between brackets: these must be seen to contain what is, not what might have been” (146). But Rita's neat and tidy summation of life and her self-sentence as crazy lady by the sea are disturbed when A. Stone lands on her doorstep.

Brother Anthony Stone, “possessor of a Canada Council grant to work on the history of the Protestant monastic establishment in Canada” (152), shows up in the middle of a snowstorm with a letter for Rita. It is from the Bishop of Huron, who has a proposal for her to consider. It is to oversee the reopening of Eglantine House. As the prologue reveals, Rita eventually accepts the bishop's proposal. But as the envoie shows, the decision is a very difficult one. The envoie relates the darkest, angriest moments in Rita's life and is the most grim and grievous part of the novel. Both critics and author expressed dissatisfaction with this segment of The Glassy Sea. Engel admitted that in the end she just had to finish her novel. “I got so far involved in it that I would have had to spend the rest of my life on it to do it right. At the end I cut it off.”⁶³ For some critics, the problem was Engel's “us and them” treatment of the “battle of the sexes” in The Glassy Sea's penultimate “paranoid fantasy” section.⁶⁴ This seems a defendable description of Rita's thoughts on the battle of the sexes, which she admits are evil and malicious: “They must dispose of women, I thought: they want it that way. We must give them their heads: this is what they want, a world free of women who are past their nubile best, who are capable of thinking, who can direct them, who bring guilt and repression to the world. Women brought sin, they believe that, their hearts and their balls believe it, they act it out every day of their lives, treating their daughters like toys and their wives like encumbrances. Therefore let them get rid of women” (148).

Rita's “mad plan for the holocaust”⁶⁵ is a lament for the fate that society reserves for middle-aged women—those who are “free of the moon [and] the rages of romance, of sex, of childrearing” (148). Recounted in the past, however, the sequence expresses old dark thoughts about men's “hunter's dream.” This is a guilty dream that soils and misinterprets women (150). It captures women's fear of men, which Rita has come to share, and illustrates just how dark and bleak a vision Engel's work can convey (161). Indeed, it is as an antidote to despair and an alternative to the “mad plan for the holocaust”⁶⁶ that Rita ultimately decides to accept the bishop's proposal to reopen Eglantine House, a decision she reaches with the help of the bishop's envoy, Brother Stone.

Like Monodromos's Bishop of Maloundia, Brother Anthony Stone is a man of contradictions: he is both religious and rational. And like Dr Stern, he plays a key role in Rita's development. In Monodromos, Maloundia's intervention in Audrey Moore's experiences served to identify certain physical and sexual lapses in her life. In The Glassy Sea, Anthony Stone's encounter with Rita (though not devoid of physical attraction, at least on Rita's part) is mainly a match of minds. “He was clever,” Rita remarks (152). “He looked into the abyss of my cluttered mind” (153). It takes Brother Anthony Stone almost a month of clever and compassionate arguments to counter all Rita's reasons for remaining a recluse. “He wasn't interested in theories, he said, he was interested in facts; sounding more than he knew like Dr Stern” (153). Finally, caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place, Rita faces the fact that, as Anthony succinctly sums it up, “Eglantine House exists. We need you to resurrect it; we are calling you; for practical reasons; and because we think you can do it” (156). Rita's response is to break down and cry, thereby unleashing her night of reckoning.

That was a strange, upset night; the wind came up again and rattled the house in all its dimensions. I turned and groaned, and moaned with the wind; shuddered as the snow blew like hail in the old, loose windowpanes. Half of me was wanting to putty them in the spring, as if I would ever get around to working with my hands in that male way, half of me was tied to the mast so I wouldn't rush in and throw myself on Anthony; I was trying to think and it wasn't thinking I was doing; I was drowning in an enormous surge of feeling: somebody wanted me; I wanted to be wanted … I was a child again, an open greedy mouth, a vessel of one ingredient only, longing, and it was not a man that would answer this time.

(156-7)

Racked with longing, torn between thinking and feeling, Rita must navigate the dark divide like other Engel protagonists before her.⁶⁷ From this an answer emerges: Rita will reopen Eglantine House and help create a world to “have an importance in” (157). Re-establishing Eglantine House might provide women with other possibilities in life. Rita agrees to be Sister Superior, but Eglantine House will be a place where women come “not to serve but to belong” (164).⁶⁸

LEARNING HOW TO BE, NOT CHOOSING NOT TO BE⁶⁹

Rita envisions a newly reopened Eglantine House as “a kind of hospice,” a hostel or commune for women. “I want a core of women helping other women to put their lives … in order,” she decides. “It is women I am committed to working with and I shall do that” (163). The vision of women devoted to other women—a radical one within a male-referential framework—may account for the discomfort some readers and reviewers have with regard to the envoie. For Rita, it is a vision whereby women can move out of destructive situations, and learn how to be, rather than choose not to be: “In a month, this house, this quiet, blessedly silent house will be a crawling mass of non-contemplative, cross, contentious humanity. Kids throwing stones at the chapel windows, drunken husbands beating obscenely on the door. We'll sort out the beaters from the beaten, the drunks from the health-food nuts, the masochists from the maoists. Scrub up the children, teach them not to fear” (164).

Planning Eglantine House, Rita discovers a sense of self and certainty that has eluded her all her life. “Now I know who I am and what I want,” she is able to say. “I am certain of this as I am of very few things” (163). Rita's newly acquired sense of self acknowledges the “bloody-minded Martha” in her, and in her mother and Grammacrae before her (164). This recognition is more a reconcilation than a prescription for being. Rita is able to accept her mother, “a difficult woman because she had had a difficult life,” Rita decides (71).⁷⁰ But she leaves a window open for Mary and roses.

“NOT LITTLE ME. SISTER MARY PELAGIA”

Becoming Sister Mary Pelagia for the second time marks the end of “feeling small” for Rita, an experience familiar to all Engel's protagonists. “Little me? Who couldn't be trusted to dust old Mrs Bowen's Chinese pots?” No, is Rita's reply. “Not little me: Sister Mary Pelagia” (165). Significantly, this declaration is linked to finding her voice. “I heard my voice rolling up its sleeves and I knew that I was at the end of a long delicious seduction. Nor ever chaste except You …” (165-6). Where Bear's Lou was seduced by Trelawny's voice (his, not hers), Rita finds her own voice. She speaks for herself. She is no longer spoken for.

With the end of the “long delicious seduction” ends the period of self-denigration, as in Story of O. Rita informs Philip that she “won't take all that stuff about women bringing sin into the world and therefore having constantly to be beaten for it.” “Leave the virgins and the unicorns back in the middle ages,” she states. “I'm living in the here and now” (166). Rita's commitment to the here and now is a commitment to reality. “Finally, I've acquired a taste for it,” she remarks, musing on the many times in her life she has hidden from reality (143). Choosing the real over the symbolic means controlling the interfering “mind's eye” (17, emphasis added). Distinguishing the symbolic from the real, Rita breaks through the surface of the glassy sea.

“If you neglect surfaces, the world disappears,” Engel noted in her Bear Summer cahier.⁷¹ The world reappears for Rita at the end of The Glassy Sea, and she situates herself squarely in the middle of it. As Sister Superior of the newly reopened Eglantine House, her function is managerial. She entrusts the spiritual direction of the house to Sister Mary Frances. Rita will deal with the practical details of daily reality as women experience it. “There's such a lot to do,” she remarks, but not too much, perhaps, for “just a little garden” (167).

The Glassy Sea is a complex renewal and extension of Marian Engel's concern about representing women's experience. The novel examines the social dichotomies and dualisms whereby women are separated as Marys and Marthas, saints and sinners, virgins and sex objects. Society's dualist perceptions create division within and among women. The female self is divided as the external social gaze is internalized. Women's identity is lost. Mothers and daughters are split apart and women become isolated and lonely.

The Glassy Sea's Eglantine convent presents a possibility for a more “sisterly” alternative to society's traditional dualist vision. It is an interesting approach, but one that ultimately needs revisiting. When Rita returns to Eglantine House, she is intent on living in the present and seeing things as they are. The long and lovely seduction of symbolism is over. A rose is a rose is a rose. Rita's experiences have measured the possibilities that society offers to women. To change society and its constraints on women requires planting oneself squarely in the middle. This is the strategic space of Engel's next novel, Lunatic Villas.

Notes

1. Engel, Joanne, 55. This chapter's title is from The Glassy Sea, 29.

2. Ibid., 81.

3. Engel, “Atlas and Gazetteer of the West China Shore: Working Notes for a Novel.”

4. Engel, The Glassy Sea, 153.

5. Ibid., 146.

6. Engel, “Under the Cypress Tree,” 77-8.

7. “My original impulse was to see Toronto with a naive eye,” Engel told interviewer Alan Twigg in 1978. “I wanted to bring a stranger to Toronto and see what she would make of it. Eventually she became a nun” (Strong Voices, 64). Sister Mary Pelagia is the Eglantine name of Marguerita (Rita) Bowen (née Heber), protagonist of The Glassy Sea. She is known as Mary P. for short. This is what Philip calls her (11). Names and initials are always interesting and significant in Engel's work. The author's own initials M. E. spelled the word “me.” (See “The Life of Bernard Orge,” in Engel's Tattooed Woman, for an intriguing play on these initials.) In this context, is Mary P. (M. P.) a play on Engel's family name, Passmore? Engel's early work is signed M. P.

8. Elizabeth Brady is of the same opinion. “The Glassy Sea simply offers a different technical orchestration of a familiar theme” (Marian Engel and Her Works, 43). There is a “a shared nexus of ideas” that links Bear and The Glassy Sea (ibid., 46).

9. It was a subject she often broached with her friend, philosopher Leslie Armour. Armour recalled that the idea of organized religion “horrified” Engel. At the same time, she found it a fascinating topic (interview, August 1990).

10. Engel sang hymns both in and out of church. In one notebook entry (in the embargoed notebook, MEA, box 6, file 28), she expressed her surprise at finding herself singing hymns. In this she resembled her friend and colleague, writer Margaret Laurence, who was also given to hymn singing.

    In this sense, The Glassy Sea had been in the works for years. Indeed, hints of the future novel appear early. In the notebooks, for instance, The Glassy Sea appears as “The West China Shore”—the name of the township from which the Heber family comes. The John Donne line “Nor ever chaste but you ravish me” appears in notebooks belonging to Bear long before it is cited in The Glassy Sea. There is Monodromos's interest in monasteries, which prefigures the convent. There is as well an article Engel published in Queen's Quarterly in which she reflects on the “genesis” of The Glassy Sea (“Atlas and Gazetteer of the West China Shore: Working Notes for a Novel”).

11. First hymn in hymn books widely used in the Canadian churches of Engel's time and place. For more on images used in the hymn, see Revelations 4:6, Isaiah 6, and Ezekiel 1:22.

12. The Hymnary of the United Church of Canada (Toronto: United Church Publishing House), 1.

13. This is Engel's second bishop character (the first appearing in Monodromos), a figure evoking both male and religious authority.

    In an unpublished essay, “Onward, Naked Puritans! The Progress of the Heroines of Bear and The Glassy Sea” (MEA, box 32, file 32), Ann M. Hutchison offers several fine reflections on Engel's novel, including the following: “Just as Philip's official name, Huron, identified the authority of his office, so his nickname, with its pun on ‘yearn,’ defines his relationship to Rita. As she writes to him to explain ‘why I can't do what you ask for the church’ (20), Rita's longing for such a vocation, for ‘roses’ and ‘escape’ from the world (24), invades her letter. Through the letter, too, memories of her recent sessions with psychotherapist Dr. Stern counterpoint the story she relates to Philip. The letter seems, in some measure, an attempt to weigh her experiences as Dr. Stern's patient against the attraction of the life Philip offers … With Philip she can speak of the metaphysic and mystery of ‘the rose world’ (24), its crowns and its thorns, and of the rose ‘enthorned, thus enthroned’ (24). With Dr. Stern, who ‘would be disapproving’ (19) and unsympathetic with her ‘yearning’ for mysteries, she learned about reality.”

14. Matyas and Joiner, “Interview with Marian Engel” (hereafter, Matyas-Joiner interview).

15. For a fine discussion of the various modes of writing in The Glassy Sea, see Hutchison, “Onward, Naked Puritans” (MEA, box 32, file 32).

16. “How I fed off books in that house. How I nourished myself on them” (159).

17. “Calling it that because Bear bought me it.” Her “Bear Summer” notebook is in MEA, box 14, file 15.

18. She secured the house through Libby Oughton, who was editor of Gynergy Press and one of the five people to whom the novel was dedicated.

19. MEA, box 14, file 15.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid., “Day 3.” Rita echoes this sentiment when she says she is “sick of striving … to be a better Christian, to be a better girl” (136).

22. MEA, box 14, file 15, “Day 4.”

23. Twigg, Strong Voices, 64.

24. Ibid.

25. MEA, box 14, file 15.

26. Without being true to life. For instance, Engel never was a nun. Critics have argued both for and against The Glassy Sea's “autobiographical” dimension. See Brady, Marian Engel and Her Works (46-7), on “the contentious issue of point of view” in The Glassy Sea. Brady cites Dennis Duffy's argument, in his review of The Glassy Sea (which appeared in the Globe and Mail, 30 September 1978), that the narrator is a naive protagonist who is being used for ironic effect. She then cites Sylvia Vance who, in her review “A Novel Worth the Wait,” perceives no distance between the norms of the narrator and those of the implied author. Brady herself gives examples in support of what she considers Engel's resolute intention to place her narrator at a considerable distance from herself. At the same time, Brady admits that there is some blurring of the borders between author and protagonist: “The most worrisome example of the danger of authorial identification with Rita comes when she vents her ‘mad plan for holocaust’ (146-52). Engel seems here to be speaking directly through her narrator, thus temporarily destroying her own subtle distancing device” (Marian Engel and Her Works, 47). This lapse diminishes the persuasive force of the book for Brady.

27. MEA, box 14, file 15, “Day 13.”

28. Klein, “A Conversation with Marian Engel” (hereafter, Klein interview).

29. Ibid.

30. MEA, box 14, file 15, 28 June 1976. Even In Bear, the personal concerns about human relationships which informed the novel were expressed mainly in the author's notebooks.

31. MEA, box 14, file 15, 5 June 1976.

32. MEA, box 6, file 18. This is not the only resemblance between Monodromos and The Glassy Sea. The latter's envoie presents a sequence of experiences Rita undergoes that are very similar to those Audrey Moore must face near the end of Monodromos. This parallel warrants in-depth study.

33. Adachi, “The Versatility of Marian Engel.”

34. MEA, box 14, file 15, “Day 5.”

35. Ibid.

36. MEA, box 14, file 15.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid.

39. MEA, box 6, file 18.

40. MEA, box 14, file 15, “Day 13.” Her friends proved to be right. In her preface to The Tattooed Woman, Engel discussed her attraction to the fantastic.

41. MEA, box 14, file 15, 7 June 1976.

42. For Rita, Christabel was a shock:

    She had heard that there were moral decisions and dismissed the idea. She knew nothing about the uses of money, the necessity of eating, or obligations of any kind. She was serenely and gloriously independent of rules …

    She looked like a flower. All the boys envied my living with her and I knew why. She was one of the rare creatures whose beauty is sustained by no artificial aids; she woke as lovely in the morning as she looked all day. She had round grey eyes and lovely teeth and a heavenly smile. Nothing about her was imperfect. When I saw her undressing and thought of her piece by piece I understood, finally, what men saw in women's bodies. Her flesh was fine-textured and blue veins showed through her skin. She was as substantial as any girl of our generation, but beautifully … arranged. All her underwear was made of lace.

    She was fun, too. She had not a moral in the world … She did not know it was evil to lie; she thought it was evil to be uncomfortable.

    (51-2)

43. Later, Rita diagnoses that this is her body acting out her soul's rebellion, and she wishes she had listened harder “to what my body was telling me” (109). But in proper puritan tradition, body and soul, heart and head, are kept separate.

44. “Calamity led to calamity. She drank, had affairs, failed to notice outbreaks of eczema and impetigo, put on weight, let her teeth go. One night, when John was at the Learned Societies' meeting somewhere out west, she managed to let the house in Wishing Well Acres burn to the ground. The eldest child, sleeping over at a friend's, was saved. Christabel, surveying the ruin, screeched, leaped into a neighbour's car, and drove away from the scene … The police found the neighbour's car, but never Christabel” (106).

45. In this, she resembles Lou who was no more enamoured of women's “serviceability.”

46. Like previous protagonists, Rita feels small even as an adult.

47. There is a St Rita, according to R. M. Levy in Heavenly Friends (Boston: Daughters of St Paul 1984). Born 22 May 1381, near Cascia, she is “the advocate of the hopeless.” Married at eighteen, St Rita had two sons. Following the death of her husband, and of her two sons shortly thereafter, she devoted her life to God and was soon recognized for her miraculous powers. The saint has an association with roses. Nearing her death, St Rita asked that a rose be brought to her from her home town. It was not the rose season and yet blooming roses were found. “For this reason roses are blessed in the Saint's honor” (211). St Rita was canonized on the Feast of the Ascension, 24 May (Marian Engel's birth date) 1900.

48. Rita's cousin John (Christabel's husband), citing the Penguin Dictionary of Saints that “Pelagia's a false cognate of Marina who is Aphrodite” (141). The Penguin Dictionary of Saints does indeed contain this information. It is likely that Engel herself consulted the book.

49. One thinks of Engel's lifelong interest in religion. In her notebooks, as in a column for the Toronto Star, she wrote of the appeal of comfortable men's clothing, as opposed to the constrictive clothing designed for women. Then there is Bear's bear, male at times, female at others.

50. MEA, box 1, file 39.

51. Klein interview. In this interview Engel said, “Because my name is Passmore you tend to pay attention to Australian philosophers you wouldn't ordinarily run into” (29).

52. Klein interview.

53. Ibid. Imperfect Rita is twinned with perfect Christabel. “Nothing about her was imperfect,” Rita observes of her rich and beautiful roommate. But Christabel is not the perfect female Christ her name suggests, and as Rita discovers, perfection means death.

54. A softened version of the Benedictine Order's rules.

55. “The trouble is, however, that when I am being practical, the dreamer in me dies; I become restless and difficult and bad-tempered” (87). Rita's “practical side gnawed away at my spirituality” (89). Finally it wins out. “My spiritual life had died—if it had ever existed—in the practical details of the house” (93).

56. In her unpublished essay (“Onward, Naked Puritans,” MEA, box 32, file 32), Ann M. Hutchison points out the close resemblance between Maggie Hibbert's name and Rita's—Marguerite Heber: “Maggie indeed joins Christabel, Sister Mary Cicely, etc., as another in the series of alter egos Rita encounters, and thus the coincidence of names seems calculated on Engel's part.” I agree with Hutchinson on the deliberate use Engel makes of names, not only in The Glassy Sea but, as suggested at the outset of this study, in all her works.

57. As noted in earlier discussion, Engel's writing establishes links between the image of the egg and the human ego and/or human identity. Rita is undergoing a difficult change in identity.

58. Faced with loss and filled with emptiness, Rita turns to psychotherapy. “Some things are anti- or pre- or post-rational,” psychiatrist Dr Stern instructs her. “Others are rational. It's a question of putting things in their place” (10). It is within this context that Rita comes to terms with her mother. Eleanor Heber could not help having the standards of her time, Rita concludes (34). Her bigotry was part of her culture (71). If she was a difficult woman, it was because she had had a difficult life (71). Childhood experiences had left their mark on her, as they had on Rita: “Somewhere, buried in her past, was a lash she could not forget, that she expected again, and again and again” (98). If Rita achieves some sort of reconciliation with her mother, the reverse is not true. Mrs Heber never reconciles herself to Rita's decision to join the Eglantines, and she never speaks to her daughter again. The mother-daughter relationship depicted in The Glassy Sea is the darkest in all the author's novels.

59. “‘Ash Bone, Ash Bone,’ I hear Stuart's mournful cry. But then the bell tolled differently” (107).

60. Or the type of work endorsed by social norms, such as nursing or teaching.

61. In German. One is reminded of the stars that guide Lou at the end of Bear. Evoked in the novel's epigraph—an excerpt from the final stanza of Rilke's “Herbstagg”—German is one of the languages Engel studied as an undergraduate at McMaster. It is worth underscoring the pertinence of Engel's choice of epigraph. As Ann M. Hutchison usefully points out in her unpublished essay “Onward, Naked Puritans” (MEA, box 32, file 32): “This poem significantly belongs to Rilke's transitional volume, Das Buch der Bilder, which moves away from the subjective emotionalism of his early poetry to the more objective stance of his mature work, and evokes a mood of inner change mirrored in the seasonal change, a time for keeping watch, for reading, and for writing long letters, as Rita herself describes her days at the end of her letter. The association with Rilke is interesting, since in his verse he attempts to grapple with his problems and seeks to interpret himself, and his numerous letters also seem to mark the stages of inner progress towards a resolution and acceptance.” Hutchison footnotes Craig Houston, “Rilke as Revealed in His Letters,” in Rainer Maria Rilke, Aspects of His Mind and Poetry, ed. William Rose and G. Craig Houston (New York: Haskell Publishers 1973), especially 22-3.

62. She sees herself as a woman “in rags and tatters floating around the house in eddies of wind, my old self lying on the hard dirty road listening to underground streams, my sensual self taunting Anthony, and another piece of me wrestling with all I could know of Hopkin's God, and me, who was I?” (157).

63. Klein interview.

64. As Engel claimed the second-to-last chapter of all her books to be. The Glassy Sea is not formally divided into chapters, but the passage falls in what arguably would be the penultimate chapter.

65. See Brady, Marian Engel and Her Works, and Vance, “A Novel Worth the Wait.”

66. Hutchison, discussing this same aspect of Engel's novel, writes: “Destruction is not Engel's mode; her heroines are, if anything, survivors. Somewhere in the depths Rita realizes that all the time she counted on an ending: ‘I caught my breath: I was banking, finally, on some kind of ending to the plan; on limitations; somewhere in my black, angry, jealous heart there was still room for a small eternity: a resurrection’ (151-2). The almost miraculous arrival of Brother Anthony Stone gives Rita ‘a faint and interesting frisson’ (152); ‘her intuition has been right’” (MEA, box 32, file 32).

67. The similarity between her experience and Audrey Moore's in Monodromos is especially striking.

68. Readers, will recall the notebook citation in which Engel expresses her own need to belong (see chapter 2).

69. MEA, box 14, file 15, 1 June 1976.

70. “Somewhere, buried in her past, was a lash she could not forget, that she expected again, and again and again” (98). Rita's experience of life teaches her that her mother's brand of bloodymindedness must be moderated with more love and less demand for perfection. Perfection is death—as tragically demonstrated by Rita's former roommate, the beautiful, rich, and apparently perfect Christabel. To be perfect is a lonely project. Rita's mother dies alone (symbolically of heart failure). Although Mrs Heber never accepted Rita as Mary (Pelagia), Rita learns to accept the Martha her mother was.

71. MEA, box 14, file 15, 5 June 1976.