[In the following essay, Cameron argues that the protagonist of Bear escapes alienation and “hibernation” by coming together with nature.]

“In this country, she thought, we have winter lives and summer lives of completely different quality.”¹ Marian Engel's Bear presents the “summer life” of one Lou, a Toronto archivist, who goes to northern Ontario on a research assignment. The “winter life” Lou leaves resembles that of a hibernating animal as, mole-like, she digs among the maps and manuscripts in her basement room at the Institute (p. 11). Although she considers her job “the least parasitic of the narrative historical occupations” (p. 89), “She was still not satisfied that this was how the only life she had been offered should be lived” (p. 20). Her predecessor, Miss Bliss, whose life has been anything but blissful, has long ago taken to drink; Lou takes to the woods instead in an instinctive and desperate urge to break out of her underground “winter life.” Fearing that she will continue to age disproportionately like “the yellowed papers she spent her days unfolding” (p. 19), Lou sets out for Colonel Cary's northern island where she is to spend a few weeks cataloguing the Colonel's reputedly vast and valuable library which, along with his estate, Pennarth, and the island itself, has been left to the Institute. “The change will do you good” (p. 13). These parting words from the Director of the Institute turn out to be prophetic indeed, for Lou in her “summer life” at Pennarth undergoes a profound transformation.

Lou's grasp of history at the Institute has had its limitations. There the systematizing of trivia makes her recoil as if from something dead. Fossils. Mere bones of the past. As she digs about in the archives she consequently prays with some desperation that her “research would reveal enough to provide her subject with a character.”

The Canadian tradition was, she had found, on the whole, genteel. Any evidence that an ancestor had performed any acts other than working and praying was usually destroyed. Families handily became respectable in retrospect but it was, as she and the Director often mourned, hell on history.

(p. 14)

Lou's experiences at Cary's island afford her much upon which to speculate. Her researches at first confirm the version of history the Institute has embodied. Colonel John William Cary typified the 19th century colonial period of Canadian history now become familiar through the journals and letters of the period, such as those of the Strickland sisters. Fairly soon Lou concludes that “the material he owned was all imported” (p. 46). The octagonal house he had built in 1834 and in which she lives is an absurd example of “colonial pretentiousness” (p. 36). “Orderly people, the Carys,” she comments upon finding their neatly stored belongings in the basement (p. 102). “They intended to make watercolours and have Robert Adam do their drawingrooms, Humphry Repton their facades and Capability Brown their gardens. … If their consols prospered, they replaced the cabins with tall Victorian houses and sent their sons out for gentlemen who could return in later summers for the view” (p. 87). At every turn the artificiality of this imposed and imported order strikes Lou. English in its “gentility,” this 19th century culture is singularly inappropriate to a landscape as rough and strong as Canada's; it remains a thin veneer of little substance. Seeing beneath the surface to the brutal truth, Lou speculates:

The ones who were most truly romantic perished horribly, she remembered. Fell through the ice, contracted pneumonia or tuberculosis, died of strange fevers, scurvy, depression, or neglect. Only the hardiest survived and there [sic] few memoirs. Often the diaries that were left to the Institute broke off when the settlers arrived from England. If you were building your own cabin, making your own cloth and soap and candles, furniture and tools, there was no time to concoct a bottle of ink or find a quill to use it with.

(pp. 87-8)

At Pennarth, Lou discovers an evolutionary process by which this artificial colonial culture has spun backwards in time away from civilisation towards the land itself. This process of adaptation, Darwinian in that the fittest survive, but un-Victorian in its indifference to “progress,” is symbolized by the extraordinary life of the last Colonel Cary. She is the original Cary's granddaughter (christened “Colonel” so that she can qualify for the Pennarth inheritance). She rejects most of the trappings of her English heritage, preferring instead to live off the land. Though capable of entertaining a visiting Anglican minister and his wife in elegant style, she has given away much of the Cary finery—antiques and china she will never use. Striding around the island in men's trousers, she is sagacious and resourceful—even to the point of trapping a lynx and tanning the hide. Her friends are the local Indian or Metis people who, as their names suggest, are truly sovereign—Lucy Leroy and Joe King. Colonel Jocelyn Cary's life is, consequently, a dramatic departure from the order and civility of her grandfather's 19th century colonialism. By contrast it seems insane, bizarre.

The question asked in much Canadian Literature, Northrop Frye has speculated, is not “Who am I?”, but “Where is here?”² For Marian Engel the two questions are inextricably related. In a “crisis of faith” after she has begun her researches at Pennarth, Lou wonders “by what right she was there, and why she did what she did for a living. And who she was” (p. 82). Exploring the Carys' past consequently prompts Lou to recall briefly her own family history where the exigencies of adaptation also resulted in irregularities. The loss of a son overwhelmed her emigrating ancestor, whose sudden death leaves his brother to supervise the second lap of their journey to Ontario via New York with two women and eighteen children. “There was,” Lou comments, “a certain mad toughness and a definite fear of New York in the family still” (p. 88). As Lou strips away these layers of history, she comes closer to an anarchy which threatens her own sanity. To counteract this, she reverts to the safe “winter” occupation of ordering, cataloguing and systematizing:

She tried to concentrate on externals, on her cards, on her notes. … She always attempted to be orderly, to catalogue her thoughts and feelings, so that when the awful, anarchic inner voice caught her out, her mind was stocked with efficacious replies. … She justified herself by saying that she was of service, that she ordered fragments of other lives.

(p. 83)

Especially as a consequence of hearing Homer's story of the female Colonel Cary, Lou senses that there is another kind of truth against which order is no defense.

You could take any life and shuffle it on cards, she thought bitterly, lay it out in a pyramid solitaire, and it would have a kind of meaning; but you could never make a file card that said, “Campbell, Homer” convey any of the meaning that Homer had conveyed tonight.

(pp. 83-4)

Lou, for a time, veers back and forth between the “winter” world of order and the “summer” world of anarchy, interspersing her research with deep draughts of nature. Although she temporarily fixes on her instructions from the Director to resolve her dilemma by giving her something solid to cling to, she merely forestalls the inevitable abandonment of order as a principle of life. It may be, as she says, “a licence to exist,” but it is no substitute for living. At this stage Lou is half-evolved; “She felt like some French novelist who, having discarded plot and character, was left to build an abstract structure, and was too tradition-bound to do so” (p. 84).

Once her despair at the emptiness of her ordered, deathly “winter life” outweighs her fear of madness and anarchy, Lou gradually abandons herself to a saturnalian “summer life” on Cary's island. Here she perceives another kind of history linking her to a past whose sources she can tap for energy and love. Symbolically this other history, which she has glimpsed through the bizarre elements lying beneath and flowing from respectable 19th century colonialism, flutters to her in the form of random notes from between the pages of the civilized literature which constitutes Colonel Cary's library. These are jottings about bears and they remind Lou of pre-history, of a past in which man and nature were one, where magical transformations gave hope and vitality to life. In them is charted the history of consciousness itself—Jungian archetypes whose reality is imprinted on the consciousness of all living creatures. The bear, she learns, has been god, man and beast. Venerated by Eskimos, Lapps, Irish, Norwegians, Swiss and Japanese, bears have held a central place in mythological lore. In one myth, it was thought that “they, not Adam and Eve, were our first ancestors” (p. 73). Lou is intrigued with this pre-history, especially with the Finnish myth that the offspring of a woman and a bear is a hero. Pennarth itself, she discovers, means “the bear's head.” Jocelyn Cary's bear, last of such pets kept by the family, consequently seems to Lou, in her “summer life,” the means to salvation. Like the unnamed heroine of Margaret Atwood's Surfacing, who hopes to conceive, in accordance with primeval rites, a “god” who will be “covered with shining fur”³ who will not be debased by speaking words, Lou's fantasies revolve around the possibility of mating with her bear to conceive a hero:

She lay naked, panting, wanting to be near her lover, wanting to offer him her two breasts and her womb, almost believing that he could impregnate her with the twin heroes that would save her tribe.

(p. 121)

Considered in this way, Lou's relationship with the bear takes on allegorical significance. Through it she makes contact with a deeper level of reality than any she has known, a pre-history involving the sources of life itself. “It was as if the bear … knew generations of secrets” (p. 70). While sinking her hands and feet into his thick fur she muses, “There was a depth in him she could not reach, could not probe and with her intellectual fingers destroy” (p. 119). For Lou, contact with this deeper history is a kind of joy:

She looked up at Cary and down at the bear and was suddenly exquisitely happy. Worlds changed. … She felt victorious over them [Cary and Beau Brummell]; she felt she was their inheritor: a woman rubbing her foot in the thick black pelt of a bear was more than they could have imagined. More, too, than a military victory: splendour.

(p. 57)

This primitive truth in its dark energy both contains and is an extension of a powerful natural world. Through midsummer madness, Lou finds the answer to the question “Where is here?” in the fierce vitality of the northern landscape she, for a season, inhabits. Many of the descriptive passages in Bear demonstrate the impact this wild landscape has on her. At first it is “hectic with new green” (p. 18), giving her “an odd sense of being reborn” (p. 19). As summer peaks, the natural world around Lou burgeons in a mad festival of destruction and fertility. The sun “rakes” her skin, the water is “icy,” the fish she catches “gashes” her skin even though it is dead, the mosquitoes and black flies are “maddening”; even Nature's fecundity is threatening to Lou—the proliferation of sounds, the thick underbrush, the insolent way in which the phallic wild asparagus and mushrooms flourish, while her planned garden fails. Nature asserts itself against imposed order here in much the same way as it does in Atwood's “Progressive insanities of a pioneer” where

The ground
replied with aphorisms:
a tree-sprout, a nameless
weed, words
he couldn't understand.(4)

The landscape, as Lou observes, has its own “orgasms of summer weather” (p. 117).

This random vitality in nature is, at first, terrifying to Lou as she gingerly lets go of the protective “winter” world of the tomb-like Institute. Her relationship with the bear is emblematic of her tentative exploration of, gradual immersion in, and full acceptance of the primitive forces in the world and herself. In his penetrating gaze, the eyes “gleaming, red-gold in the dark” which follow her in her days at Pennarth, lies the vitality she sees all around her nature. The stages of her relationship with the bear—her reversion to eating and shitting with him, their swims in the river, their sexual contact—mark a dramatic contrast to her “winter life” in the city where “it was now impossible to find a woman who smelled of her own self” (p. 19). Lou, by the end of the summer, “Knew that her flesh, her hair, her teeth and her fingernails smelled of bear, and this smell was very sweet to her” (pp. 119-20).

In a scene that points up this contrast, Lou tries on one of Colonel Jocelyn Cary's dresses, unearthed from one of the trunks in the basement. Homer observes that it seems incongruous with her tanned skin, an observation that emphasizes the discrepancy between an artificial social world and the nature which increasingly affects Lou. Indeed, by the novel's end, she is physically transformed:

She looked at herself in the female colonel's pier-glass. Her hair and her eyes were wild. Her skin was brown and her body was different and her face was not the same face she had seen before.

(p. 125)

Her recognition that her “summer life” has ended also corresponds with the change of season. Looking at the bear she thinks,

Something was gone between them, though: the high whistling communion that had bound them during the summer. When she looked out the window, the birch trees were yellowing, the leaves were already thin.

(pp. 134-5)

In addition to discovering “Where is here?” Lou, in her “summer life”, answers the question “Who am I?” When she reads the extraordinary reminiscences of Trelawny, she moves into another kind of reality than that represented by the Institute. She recognizes that she has never read the book before because “Someone, some scholar, had told her it was a pile of rubbish” (p. 90). In an act of defiance against those who have controlled her life and responses, Lou relishes the story of Trelawny's remembrances of Byron and Shelley. For once pursuing her own impulses, she recognizes the truth in Trelawny's tale: “HE SPEAKS IN HIS OWN VOICE” (p. 91). This realization awakens Lou to the possibility of her own authenticity as a person. Trelawny has followed his dream, has taken the risk of being himself, no matter how ridiculous or pathetic his actions may seem. No longer prepared to “carry out the Director's instruction,” resisting colonization of the soul as the Canadian landscape has held its own against Colonel Cary's 19th century civility, Lou also can take the risk of letting her “anarchic inner voice”⁵ lead where it will. It is at this point that she allows the sexual relationship with the bear to begin. In tribute to Trelawny, she later contemplates naming the bear after him, but quickly realizes that this too would be an imposition, a kind of colonization:

This was no parasitical collector of memoirs, this was no pirate, this was an enormous, living creature larger and older and wiser than time, a creature that was for the moment her creature, but that another could return to his own world, his own wisdom.

(p. 119)

Respecting his independent authenticity, she is free to accept her own.

Bear, consequently, belongs to one of the recent trends in Canadian fiction described by Robert Kroetsch in his article, “Unhiding the Hidden.”⁶ By getting underneath the veneer of 19th century gentility to the vital natural landscape, and by realizing her own authenticity as a person beneath the controlled responses which are socially imposed, Lou “unhides” what has been there all along. As Kroetsch puts it, “In recent Canadian fiction the major writers resolve the paradox—the painful tension between appearance and authenticity—by the radical process of demythologizing the systems that threaten to define them … they uninvent the world.”⁷ Like the Indian drawings in Atwood's Surfacing, the cave of bear worship in Robertson Davies' The Manticore, and the Crees in Rudy Wiebe's The Temptations of Big Bear, Engel's bear represents the essence of a primitive truth which is uncovered by stripping away an imported and imposed tradition.

Scott Symons in his article, “The Canadian Bestiary: Ongoing Literary Depravity,”⁸ obscures this central theme of Bear when he criticizes what he terms the “extrinsicness”⁹ of decor and detail and prose in the novel. Far from being jealous of the genteel tradition, as Symons asserts, Engel reveals the relative superficiality of that tradition when juxtaposed with the powerful forces of the land itself. The fact that some aspects of this imposed civility are “extrinsic” is essential to an understanding of the novel's bid for personal (and national) authenticity. Ironically, Symons himself, a writer in the mainstream described by Kroetsch, makes much the same point in Place d'Armes, though in a different way, by having his protagonist reject the hollow aspects of his regimented life in Toronto.¹⁰

What is accomplished by Lou's “summer life”; to what end is this midsummer madness? As has been seen, Lou's bizarre relationship with the bear effects a personal transformation which reaches far beyond the physical. Contacting the natural world with and through the bear has linked her with some sort of primal energy, with her own deep roots in history. Furthermore, by discovering the authentic voice of the land, she finds her own voice, her true self. In these two ways she “unhides” the hidden. But her summer sojourn also teaches her what love is, and ultimately she resolves the problem of romanticism and comes to terms with the disillusionment that results when the real world contradicts impossible expectation.

Love has eluded Lou in her “winter” world. Her weekly sexual encounters with the Director of the Institute on her office desk have become “only habit and convenience.” “There was no care in the act” (p. 93). “Oh, she was lonely, inconsolably lonely; it was years since she had had human contact. She had always been bad at finding it. It was as if men knew that her soul was gangrenous” (p. 92). Her soul-cure consists in the spontaneous caring and joy she feels for the bear. At home with him in a natural world, Lou experiences deep feelings of tenderness, happiness, generosity, pleasure and fulfillment. Their relationship encompasses the full range of human experience. At times the bear seems “like a middle-aged woman” (p. 36) gently loving and protective, like a mother. At other times it is Lou who feels motherly towards the bear, brushing his fur and doting on him as if he were a “near-sighted baby” (p. 54). To her he is also friend and companion, accompanying her on her daily romps in the water, digging about in the ground while she gardens and lying with her by the fire in the evenings. Most important, he is to her the perfect lover, giving and receiving without limit; “like no human being she had ever known it persevered in her pleasure” (p. 93). After their first sexual encounter, Lou does not feel guilt: “She felt loved” (p. 94). By the end of the summer, Lou and the bear inhabit Pennarth like some bizarre king and queen, relaxed and happy with their kingdom:

She was idle and grubby. Her nails were broken. She and the bear sat in pompous idleness on the lawn. In the evening, they lazed by the upstairs fire.

(p. 131)

Engel uses bestiality to explore the various aspects of human sexuality. At times female, at other times male, the bear frees Lou from what she has viewed as the strictures of heterosexual relationships. In the “winter” world, Lou's sexual experiences have lacked warmth and fulfillment; modern love has been for her a wasteland of the emotions in a male-dominated world. Just as the Director has used her, so has one of her previous lovers. She recalls that he “loved her as long as the socks were folded and she was at his disposal on demand; when the food was exquisite and she was not menstruating” (p. 118). Life-denying, he has forced her to have an abortion.”¹¹ Her resulting hostility to male phallic aggression causes her initial rejection of Homer:

She was younger, he was stronger. She liked him, but she did not like what he was doing. Taking, she thought, advantage. Suddenly, she wanted to pull rank, pull class on him, keep him in his place.

(p. 108)

With the bear Lou has a relationship in which she is no longer controlled. The fulfillment it provides for her swings between the two poles of parental affection and infantile devotion. Feeding on this more generalized affection, Lou relives some lost early stage of her life—a loss she has been vaguely aware of as she arrives at Pennarth:

She remembered a beach, a lake the colour of silver, something sad happening. Something, yes, that happened when she was very young, some loss.

(p. 19)

And she begins to develop an acceptance of heterosexuality. She feels for the first time “a clean passion she had never felt before” (p. 118); she learns to love. The force of this love transforms Lou in the same way as mere facts become art:

Facts become art through love, which unifies them and lifts them to a higher plane of reality; and in landscape, this all-embracing love is expressed by light.

(Epigraph, Bear)

Lou's second encounter with Homer is an index of the distance she has travelled towards integrating this love into her experience with men. Although fulfillment still eludes her, she has abandoned the passivity she resented earlier and can approach him on her own terms (p. 126).

The importance of Lou's reading of Trelawny in discovering her authenticity as a person has already been seen. This episode, moreover, triggers another aspect of Lou's transformation as well. Through it she is able to place her personal revelation in a wider context.

Trelawny. Colonel Cary. The bear. There was some connection, some unfingerable intimacy among them, some tie between longing and desire and the achievable.

(p. 91)

The relationship between this “longing” and “the achievable,” the difference between a romantic ideal and hard facts, presents a dilemma for Lou which is only gradually resolved. In her “winter life” she has felt keenly the discrepancy between what she wants and what she has: “the image of the Good Life long ago stamped on her soul was quite different from this, and she suffered in contrast” (p. 12). As has been seen, the “mole-like” Lou feels that she has been “intended for an antelope” (p. 12). Or, as she comments later in reference to Homer's querulous wife, “Fishwives. Fishwidows. And we all set out to be mermaids” (p. 104). She finds a similar longing in Beau Brummell, whose biography she looks at in Cary's library. Comparing Brummell to Cary, she thinks to herself,

as much as Blake and Wordsworth, Cary and Brummell had wanted a better life. The egotistical child attempting to attract the attention of the sovereign at Eton, the high-coloured young officer on the thunderbox, map-dreaming in Malta, were as infected by romanticism as the poets they would have scorned as lower class.

(p. 61)

Later, reading Trelawny, the connection between romantic “longing” and “the achievable” becomes clear. Just as Trelawny has “wanted to find a poet, to know a poet, because he couldn't be one, and he was romantic about poets” (p. 91), so Cary “came to find his dream, leaving his practical wife behind him in York. He was adventurous, big-spirited, romantic. There was room for him in the woods” (p. 92), room for “hope and change” (p. 92).

The example set by Trelawny and Cary of men motivated by visions never attained completely, inspires Lou to free her own romantic longings; she abandons order and reason to let the relationship with the bear happen to her. As that relationship, or, more accurately, her perception of it, develops, she hopes, beyond reason, that she can truly be the bear's mate. Passionately vowing that she will make herself “strange garments out of fur” (p. 113) so that she can stay with him in the winter, Lou implores him to “make [her] comfortable in the world at last” (p. 112). Acting out a corresponding fantasy, Lou attempts to make the bear into a man, by trying to get him to rear up and dance with her (p. 113). Finally, in a scene which is reminiscent of the Swiss custom alluded to in one of Colonel Cary's random notes, that the bears mate in full view of the populace to mark the summer solstice (p. 73), Lou attempts to mount the bear. The impossibility of this romantic longing is reflected in the natural imagery of the passage:

he lay beside her and licked the water from her body while she, on her back, let the stars fall, one, two, fourteen, a million, it seemed, falling on her, ready to burn her. Once she reached up to one, it seemed so close, but its brightness faded from her grasp, faded into the milky way.

(p. 121)

After this attempt to conceive “the twin heroes that would save her tribe” fails, the star image is taken up again: “The stars continued to fall. Always out of reach” (p. 122). Immediately thereafter, Lou realizes that she has gone too far: “She had broken a taboo. She had changed something” (p. 122). In believing she can make her ideal a reality, Lou has misunderstood the purpose of the ideal in human experience.

It takes a final episode with the bear to expose the true connection between the ideal and the real. Sensing that the relationship, like the summer, is over, Lou says to the bear, “You have to go to your place and I to mine” (p. 131). Ironically, it is at this point that the bear is unmistakably ready to mate, and Lou assumes the stance of a female bear only to be clawed and rejected. Nature itself draws the boundaries; the balance is righted; sanity resumes. Lou's scar stands symbolic of the pain of self-knowledge. As she prepares to leave Pennarth at the summer's end, she sees things in their true perspective:

What had passed to her from him she did not know. Certainly it was not the seed of heroes, or magic, or any astounding virtue, for she continued to be herself. But for one strange, sharp moment she could feel in her pores and the taste of her own mouth that she knew what the world was for. She felt not that she was at last human, but that she was at last clean. Clean and simple and proud.

(pp. 136-7)

Lou learns that it is not the attainment of the ideal that matters. Indeed, like falling stars, the ideal may burn, wound or destroy mankind, being, as it is, too much for man to bear. What matters is the struggle, the attempt to achieve the ideal. The impossibility of attaining it does not detract from the human growth and freedom which results from trying. Hence, as she surveys Colonel Cary's wilderness home for the last time, Lou observes that his failure is insignificant compared to the fact that the attempt was made. Returning to the “winter” world, like the heroine of Surfacing and David Staunton in The Manticore, Lou has found her authentic self, if not the realization of her dreams. The bear, as Homer has reminded her all along, is “a wild critter after all” (p. 40). For her, he has also been her dream, a dream which becomes fittingly remote in the form of the starry constellation of the Great Bear and his thirty-seven thousand virgins which accompany her as she returns to the city.

Lou's transformation, the process of self-realization, is akin to that of present-day psychoanalysis, and it is no accident that Bear is dedicated to the psychoanalyst, John Rich. To him Engel attributes the knowledge of “how animals think,” a reference more to the character of Lou than to the bear. Indeed, Engel blurs the boundaries between man and beast in an attempt to right the balance of a society which has alienated man from his primitive natural self. From the novel's very beginning, Lou is referred to in terms of animal imagery, just as, later, the bear is described as having human attributes. She is “like a mole” though she aspires to be an “antelope”; her arms are “slug pale” (p. 12); she “roots out” her camping gear (p. 17); her room is “her aerie” (p. 48); she “dog-paddles” in the water (p. 63). The bear, on the other hand, is “a middle-aged woman” (p. 36); looks “bashfully” and then “beseechingly” at her (p. 42); “looks as if he was laughing” (p. 49); sits in the water “like a near-sighted baby” (p. 54); puts his paw on her shoulder “almost lovingly” (p. 120).

The bear, of course, is actually none of these things. It is Lou's perceptions of him which change and grow, as she herself realizes: “she had discovered she could paint any face on him that she wanted, while his actual range of expression was a mystery” (p. 72). In this way, the bear's role in relation to Lou is similar to that of the analyst to his patient. The analyst, too, remains a mystery, frequently out of sight, while the patient imagines, by the process called “transference,” a wide spectrum of roles and responses the analyst is thought to be and have. It is through dialogue that these “transferences” are one by one discarded in the face of reality and the healing process is effected. The patient comes to see that the analyst is simply that—an analyst—and not mother, father, enemy, friend or child; so, Lou comes to see that the bear is really none of the things she has imagined, but “a wild critter after all.” Like the typical patient at the completion of treatment, Lou, in her last night with the bear, experiences a sense of rebirth:

That night, lying clothed and tenderly beside him by the fire, she was a babe, a child, an innocent. The loons' cries outside were sharp, and for her. The reeds rubbed against each other and sang her a song. Lapped in his fur, she was wrapped in a basket and caressed by little waves. The breath of kind beasts was upon her. She felt pain, but it was a dear, sweet pain that belonged not to mental suffering, but to the earth … What had passed to her from him she did not know … but … she could feel … what the world was for.

(pp. 136-7)

In touch with her natural feelings, able to be herself and not an extension of the Director or anyone else, capable of love, Lou returns to her “winter life” a changed woman whose growth gives hope.

In conclusion, the opposition of a “winter” world of order and a “summer” world of anarchy places Bear in the tradition of a midsummer madness which, though temporarily chaotic, leads to a higher sanity. The general pattern of such celebrations presents action as “a release of shaping fantasy which brings clarification about the tricks of strong imagination.”¹² Traced back to its folk origins,

Midsummer Eve appears to have been regarded as a period when the imagination ran riot, and many a curious superstition was associated with this season. … Midsummer was formerly thought to be a season productive of madness. Thus Malvolio's strange conduct is described by Olivia in “Twelfth Night” (iii. 4) as “a very midsummer madness.” And hence, “A Midsummer Night's Dream” is no inappropriate title for the “series of wild incongruities of which the play consists”. … A proverbial phrase, too, to signify that a person was mad was, “Tis midsummer moon with you”—hot weather being supposed to affect the brain.¹³

When the novel is viewed in this context, Scott Symons' deterministic reading of it as an example of unresolved “gangrene of the soul”¹⁴—a “life failure”¹⁵—is inadequate. Far from being, as he puts it, a demonstration of “sheer poverty of life, of living, of being, of soul,”¹⁶Bear shows the integration of an alienated personality through contact with a vital natural world beneath the social order. As such, its theme is that of the spiritual quest explored recently by Francine du Plessix Gray in her article placing Atwood's Surfacing in the larger context of feminist literature;¹⁷Bear shows a protagonist, like Atwood's, who “undertakes a journey whose purpose is to attain a new relation to cosmic power, to some manifestation of transcendent deity.”¹⁸ To accomplish this, Marian Engel turns not to the predominantly male cast of Judeo-Christian mythology, as did Symons in Place d'Armes, but to the primitive mythology of animal worship and the pagan tradition of midsummer madness. As in Surfacing, the final revelation is “naturalistic” and represents “a refuge from the patriarchal order.”¹⁹ Lou's “summer life” with the bear at Pennarth effects a transformation which is at once physical, emotional and spiritual. Returning to the “winter” world, Lou will cope as an integrated human being.

Notes

1. Marian Engel, Bear (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, Ltd., 1976), p. 21. Subsequent references will be in brackets immediately following quotations.

2. Northrop Frye, “Conclusion,” Literary History of Canada, ed. Carl F. Klinck (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), p. 826.

3. Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (London: Wildwood House, 1973), p. 162.

4. Margaret Atwood, “Progressive insanities of a pioneer, II,” The Animals in That Country (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 36.

5. Lou's physical transformation is reminiscent of the change wrought by her life in the “bush” on the persona of Susanna Moodie in Atwood's Journals of Susanna Moodie. In “Looking in a Mirror,” Mrs. Moodie finds her English gentility destroyed—her “heirloom face” is “crushed,” her Indian shawl “decayed,” her “stiff lace” “rotted.” Instead she sees how her skin is “thickened/with bark and the white hairs of roots” and she is “stained” by the sun's “barbarous colour.” [The Journals of Susanna Moodie (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 24].

6. Robert Kroetsch, “Unhiding the Hidden: Recent Canadian Fiction,” Journal of Canadian Fiction, III: iii (1974), pp. 43-5.

7. Ibid., p. 43.

8. Scott Symons, “The Canadian Bestiary: Ongoing Literary Depravity,” West Coast Review, XI: iii (January 1977), pp. 3-16.

9. Ibid., p. 7.

10. For a full analysis of this aspect of Place d'Armes see E. Cameron, “Journey to the Interior: the Journal Form in Scott Symons' Place d'Armes,” Studies in Canadian Literature, II: ii (1977).

11. Engel's exploration of female rebellion against what are seen as life-denying males is similar to that found in Atwood's Surfacing where the heroine's rebirth revolves to a much greater extent on the significance of abortion.

12. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedies (N.Y.: Meridian Books, The World Publishing Co., 1966), p. 124.

13. Rev. T. F. Thistleton Dyer, Folk-Lore of Shakespeare (N.Y.: Dover Publications, Inc., 1966), pp. 299-300.

14. Scott Symons, op. cit., p. 8.

15. Ibid., p. 7.

16. Ibid., p. 9.

17. Francine du Plessix Gray, “Nature as The Nunnery,” The New York Times Book Review (July 17, 1977), pp. 3 and 29.

18. Ibid., p. 3.

19. Ibid., p. 29.