[In the following essay, Osachoff finds the figure of the bear in Engel's novel to be a warning against romanticizing nature.]

Bear, by Marian Engel, has been taken as the perfect example of a modern pastoral idyll of the primitive type.¹ Lou, the heroine, leaves a dull job and loveless sex with her boss in the city and goes to northern Ontario for the summer in search of a new identity. After experiencing love for a bear, she returns “clean and simple and proud,”² reborn or revitalized and ready to start a new life in the city. On a symbolic level the bear can be seen as the embodiment of Lou's repressed passion, her atrophied instinctual life, the world of nature from which she has cut herself off. After all, “passion is not the medium of bibliography” (p. 70), and Lou is a bibliographer. Apparently, like the narrator of Atwood's Surfacing, she must gain contact with this world of passion and with part of herself if she is to survive. However, what appears on the surface to be a modern romantic pastoral like Lady Chatterley's Lover—with the heroine's search for identity and sexual fulfillment in the wilderness the essence of the myth—is really an inversion or ironic treatment of such myths. When Engel turns D. H. Lawrence's gamekeeper into a bear, she paradoxically subverts the reader's romantic expectations. The reader must learn, along with Lou, the dangers of romanticizing nature and of looking there for signs and patterns that have meaning for the human mind.

Lou is an archivist for the Historical Institute, and her life consists of maps and manuscripts; they seem to define her identity, to be “her licence to exist” (p. 85), and she has cut everything else out of her life. She “lived like a mole, buried deep in her office. … She did not like cold air on her skin” (p. 11). Her chosen environment protects her from the unknown within herself and from the unknown outside: “Her basement room at the Institute was close to the steam pipes and protectively lined with books, wooden filing cabinets and very old, brown, framed photographs” (p. 11). She “loved old shabby things, things that had already been loved and suffered, objects with a past” (p. 12). Although it is a life that she has chosen, it sometimes seems grudging and grey to her, “an absence rather than a real life” (p. 19). Five years at the same job has had a bad effect on her: “When, very occasionally, she raised her eyes from the past and surveyed the present, it faded from her view and became as ungraspable as a mirage … she was … not satisfied that this was how the only life she had been offered should be lived” (pp. 19-20). “The image of the Good Life long ago stamped on her soul was quite different from this, and she suffered in contrast” (p. 12). Somewhere along the way she had given up this image of the Good Life and settled for a dull, plodding one. “This year, however, she was due to escape the shaming moment of realization. The mole would not be forced to admit that it had been intended for an antelope” (p. 12). If Lou “had been intended for an antelope” rather than for the mole she appears to be, why, then, doesn't she live up to her secret identity as an antelope? Engel never explains what had made Lou what she is; we can only assume that it was a combination of personal choice and social pressure.

The chance to escape from the city gives Lou a chance to escape her mole-like existence. As she drives north, she becomes free: “There was a Rubicon near the height of land. When she crossed it, she began to feel free. She sped north to the highlands, lightheaded” (pp. 17-18). She has been in this part of the country before and associates it with some childhood loss (p. 19) or perhaps, in true pastoral fashion, with the loss of childhood and innocence itself. Even before she gets to Pennarth and meets the bear, she feels the awakening of a new self and writes a card to the Director saying, “I have an odd sense … of being reborn” (p. 19). With such romantic expectations, she is ready for what happens to her in the wilderness. Nature is not all good and pleasant (the bugs bite her, and her garden is not a success), but it is full of “magical forms,” and she enters “the forest solemnly, as if she were trespassing in a foreign church” (p. 47). Even the negative aspects of nature, however, are things she desperately wants to romanticize: “She was trying to decide to regard the black flies as a good symptom of the liveliness of the North, a sign that nature will never capitulate, that man is red in tooth and claw but there is something that cannot be controlled by him” (pp. 71-72). The tendency to romanticize nature is a strong element in Lou, but when her leg streams blood, she is forced to admit defeat and go indoors.

Like Robinson Crusoe, Lou brings her values and ideas with her when she leaves the city for the wilderness. A large part of her mental baggage is her tendency to romanticize nature, and along with this comes a concomitant misanthropy. In this she has the examples of Colonel Cary and his grand-daughter, Jocelyn. Romantically, Lou thinks that Cary was possessed by “some big dream” and that he was “adventurous, big-spirited, romantic. There was room for him in the woods” (p. 92). Perhaps, however, his motive was simply a dislike of people and the desire for isolation and self-sufficiency. The connection between Lou and Colonel Cary is their desire to “island” their lives, to live separated from people and the problems and complications they can bring into one's life. Cary “had become attached to the idea of living on an island” (p. 15) and, in fact, lived the last forty-five years of his life in the wilderness at Pennarth on his island. His grand-daughter, too, didn't like people and lived alone at Pennarth.

Lou's love of Pennarth and the wilderness can also be seen to be connected with misanthropy. She has longed to live on an island (p. 18), and even in a city full of people she has made her life an island life that touches the lives of very few people. “She had always loved her loneliness” (p. 29) and has no friends. In the city she tried to make her life a self-contained island, and in the wilderness the environment again mirrors her psychological state. At one point she thinks, “So this was her kingdom: an octagonal house, a roomful of books, and a bear” (p. 29). She has a good roof over her head, food that is easily available, solitary work that she enjoys, and a dependable and undemanding non-human sexual companion: could there possibly be a better situation for someone who doesn't like people? Lou's island retreat supplies all the things she values, and the bothersome human element intrudes only in the occasional letter from outside and in Homer's weekly visits.

In this pastoral setting Lou thinks her old identity is slipping away and her job as bibliographer is useless. Lou had “always attempted to be orderly, to catalogue her thoughts and feelings. … She justified herself by saying that she was of service, that she ordered fragments of other lives” (p. 83). Her job seems particularly futile since her entries on index cards can't capture the truth about the Carys as Homer's stories about them do:

Here, however, she could not justify herself. What was the use of all these cards and details and orderings? In the beginning they had seemed beautiful … capable of being in the end filed and sorted so that she could find a structure, plumb a secret. Now, they filled her with guilt; she felt there would never, ever be anything as revealing and vivid as Homer's story, or as relevant. They were a heresy against the real truth.

You could take any life and shuffle it on cards … and it would have a kind of meaning; but you could never make a file card that said, “Campbell, Homer” and convey any of the meaning that Homer had conveyed tonight. She would soon have to admit that up here she was term-serving, putting in time until she died. Colonel Cary was surely one of the great irrelevancies of Canadian history and she was another. Neither of them was connected to anything.

(pp. 83-84)

Although Lou is proud of herself for not being a mere tourist in the wilderness, she is much like the Carys (with the exception, perhaps, of Jocelyn who worked a trap line to make a living) in not being “connected” to the land on which she lives. Romantically, she comes to see that the “real truth” is found in personal anecdote rather than in history and bibliography, in nature rather than in civilization. In revolt against the restrictions of her past life, Lou tends to be anti-rational and anti-intellectual.

She tries to reject her past life and make a kind of connection with the wilderness and with her inner being by loving the bear. Even though she reassures herself that “she did not believe in non-rational processes” (p. 71), she relates to nature and to the bear in a totally non-rational way. In her loneliness and longing for intimacy, Lou turns to the bear. The morning after they are intimate for the first time, “wisps of guilt trailed around the edges of her consciousness,” but then “she tested herself, pinching her conscience here and there to see if she felt evil. She felt loved” (p. 94). And later she thinks:

She knew now that she loved him. She loved him with such an extravagance that the rest of the world had turned into a tight meaningless knot, except for the landscape, which remained outside them, neutral, having its own orgasms of summer weather.

(p. 117)

She knew now that she loved him, loved him with a clean passion she had never felt before.

(p. 118)

Her love for the bear makes her want to go back to old ways such as preserving food for the winter: “she spent the afternoons … lazing in the sun with the bear, thinking of the things she would have to do if she were to stay with him all winter, thinking herself into a rugged, pastoral past that it was too late to grasp” (p. 130). She enjoys remembering fresh buttermilk, succotash, homemade soap, and flat-irons. Clearly her relationship with the wild is related to nostalgia for out-dated domestic technologies, technologies that it is too late to revive.

It appears that Lou romantically believes her relationship with the bear is the solution to all her problems, that it will cure her “gangrenous” (p. 92) soul and give her a new identity. She recalls how her autonomy was ignored by her former lover, “a man of elegance and charm” (p. 118). She remembers her relationship with the Director, which was only “a sexual connection” (p. 118), and vows never to “lie back on a desk again, not ever, ever” (p. 109). Perhaps she has learned from her feeling for the bear that loveless sex is bad. At the end of the summer she goes back to the city, seemingly a new person who will get a new job and live a new life sustained by her experience with the bear. She has changed, she says:

That [last] night, lying clothed and tenderly beside him by the fire, she was a babe, a child, an innocent. …

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. 136-37)

What has changed her primarily is the one time, the “strange, sharp moment” that she mentions, that the bear does get aroused and rakes her back with one large paw. One possible explanation for this action is that the bear has finally accepted her as female partner and the gesture that results in her wounded back is part of a male bear's “courtship” of the female. However, the pain Lou feels is an indication that she is not a fit mate for the bear. Also possible is that the bear's gesture is a warning that Lou is going too far in her relationship with the bear. She has gone, at any rate, as far as she can go; and for a romantic “extremist” (p. 132) that is far from conventional behaviour. In any case, the bear's action makes her realize that she cannot continue her pastoral life in the wilderness and must go back home. Still, she sees her experience as positive—even the wound that the bear inflicts: “I shall keep that, she thought. And it is not the mark of Cain” (p. 134). Whether she takes it as a mark of the bear's acceptance of her or as a warning that she is going too far is not clear. In any case, she chooses not to see the wound as a mark of guilt.

If the novel is read as pastoral fairy tale with the bear in the role of gamekeeper or other “primitive” man, the implications of Lou's experience with the bear can be seen. Maybe she has learned that to be over-civilized (like Beau Brummell “who would not touch reality with a barge-pole” [p. 57] and so ended up dying dirty and insane) and cut off from nature, both inner and outer, is not good; but surely Engel doesn't mean that such an insight depends on a sexual encounter with an animal. The trouble seems to be that Lou's relationship with the bear is not presented in symbolic terms but realistically, and Lou is not mad like the narrator in Surfacing so we are more likely to accept her ideas at face value. Her experience seems to be presented in lyrical terms as a most positive one, but should the reader think of it as a desirable one? The answer will depend on how one judge's Lou's perception and expectations of the bear.

To Lou, the bear is the unknown, both within her and outside her. Before she meets him, she thinks, “maybe I'll start on the books first, work from the known to the unknown” (p. 32) and later, “a bear is more an island than a man, she thought. To a human” (p. 60). Therefore, knowing a bear is more of a challenge than knowing a man: “There was a depth in him [the bear] she could not reach, could not probe and with her intellectual fingers destroy” (p. 119). Homer warns her, “Don't forget, however human it looks, it's a wild critter after all. Don't get soft with it” (p. 40). Lou does forget; and she seems to be much more concerned with finding her new identity and in the process neglects to respect the bear's identity. From the beginning she anthromorphizes the bear:

It had small, sad eyes.

(p. 34)

It looked stupid and defeated.

(p. 35)

Not at all menacing. Not a creature of the wild, but a middle-aged woman defeated to the point of being daft.

(p. 36)

Then, in the water, [he] sat like a near-sighted baby placidly enjoying the return to liquid existence.

(p. 54)

She expects to see in him emotions that she can label: “She watched his face as his bowels moved, half-amused at herself to be looking for emotion, and there was none” (p. 71). If he has no emotion when performing such a simple physical act, then she would probably be wrong to expect any emotion in him during more complex activities involving her. When he rakes her back and she turns around to look at him, “she could see nothing, nothing, in his face to tell her what to do” (p. 132).

She seems to expect him to have and show emotions as if he were a human being, and yet she doesn't want the numerous problems that a human relationship would entail. “She had discovered she could paint any face on him that she wanted, while his actual range of expression was a mystery” (p. 72). She can't do this so readily with people, and maybe that is one reason why she prefers the bear to a man. He is even less demanding a lover than is Joe in Surfacing. From all the details that we are given, the bear can be judged as the most satisfactory lover that Lou has had, and yet “it struck her when she opened the door to him that she always expected it to be someone else” (p. 89). She seems to want the bear to turn into her Prince Charming who will rescue her from her problems and from her dull life. It seems that she, like the narrator of Surfacing, does not want a relationship with either an “average” man (when she has sex with Homer, “she felt nothing with him, nothing”—p. 126) or with a real bear but rather with a bear that transforms into a prince, an ideal lover in a fairy tale world. At one point she asks, “Bear, make me comfortable in the world at last” (p. 112). She asks for too much; no one can do that for another person except in the context of the magic of fairy tales or wishful thinking.

At the end Lou “remembered the claw that had healed guilt. She felt strong and pure” (p. 140). If the claw heals guilt and the pain is expiation or penance, what is the “sin” then? Her sin might be the denial of the instinctual life within her, but equally possible is the interpretation that her sin consists of seeing the bear as a person and reading human qualities into a non-human creature. The bear's wounding of Lou, then, could be defence of his own identity. She has been as guilty as all other people who anthropomorphize animals or nature in general. The first time Lou sees the bear she thinks, “Everyone has once in his life to decide whether he is a Platonist or not. … That is a bear. Not a toy bear, not a Pooh bear, not an airlines Koala bear. A real bear” (p. 34). She seems, here, to decide to be a kind of Platonist and regard this bear as being nearer to what Plato might call Real Bear than those other copies of Bear that she mentions. However, she gradually forgets the “bearness” of bear; she infringes on his identity and makes him her “lover, God or friend” (p. 134) or Canadian archetype.³

However, she is not so totally involved in her experience with the bear that she doesn't occasionally pass judgment on herself and, by implication, on the way she sees the bear and creates an identity for him. The devil in her dream says, “The trouble with you Ontario girls is you never acquire any kind of sophistication. You're about as interesting as an ottoman: as you, in fact” (p. 124). After the bear rakes her back, Lou thinks, “he ripped me. … That's what I was after, wasn't it, decadent little city tart?” and “I am a fool” (p. 133). When the bear is taken away to hibernate safely for the winter, he “did not look back. She did not expect him to” (p. 138). Maybe Lou has learned that much at least: not to expect the bear to be a human being and have human qualities and not to expect him to serve as a symbol. By the time she leaves Pennarth she has stopped seeing the house as a “symbol” of Canadian history and can see it as an “entity”: “the white house behind her stood frail and simple too: no longer a symbol, but an entity” (p. 137). Perhaps she can stop seeing the bear as a “sign” or “symbol” of nature, or of human nature, and simply see him as an “entity”—bear. She comments on her feelings for the bear: “She stood in the doorway of the bear's old byre and inhaled his randy pong. Really, she thought, really” (p. 140). Perhaps those last words can sum up a reader's reaction to Lou's experience and her assumption that it has changed her identity and made her ready for a new start in the city. If she has indeed stopped seeing nature in romantic and symbolic terms, however, she has learned something that could drastically change her life.

That Lou returns to the city after her experience in the wilderness is important when considering the pastoral elements of Bear. There may be something valuable to be gained by leaving the urban world, even if only temporarily, and escaping to the wilderness or, more positively, searching for one's identity there. The fact, however, that Lou returns to the city rather than trying to make some sort of life for herself in the bush, as Jocelyn Cary did, shows that Engel sees that an experience of wilderness and all that it entails is necessary but not sufficient for psychic health.⁴ In addition, it is likely that Engel wants us to read about her heroine's experience with a sense of the irony that is inherent in that experience. While we are reading the lyrical descriptions of nature and love, our constant thought must be that Lou's perfect companion is a real animal. We compare this actual situation with what we expect and desire in conformity with a romantic pastoral pattern. That pattern requires a man—a very “natural,” anti-technological man—but what we get is a shabby old bear. This contrast between the implied ideal and the actual situation sets up ironic reverberations that extend beyond this particular novel so that we can never read any romantic pastoral (or literary work that seems to be one) again in the same way. When we encounter Joe, that silent buffalo-like man in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing, or any of Robert Kroetsch's “natural” men or think again of D. H. Lawrence's Mellors, for instance, we will recall the bear in Marian Engel's novel and his warning against romanticizing nature.

Notes

1. See reviews of Bear by Anne Montagnes, Saturday Night, 91 (May 1976), 71; Barbara Amiel, Maclean's, 89:7 (April 19, 1976), 64; Joyce Carol Oates, Canadian Forum, 56 (May 1976), 35; Martin Knelman, Weekend Magazine, 26 (June 19, 1976), 3; Anthony Appenzell, Canadian Literature, 71 (Winter 1976), 106; Alan Kennedy, Dalhousie Review, 56 (Summer 1976), 390-91; and Michael Taylor, Fiddlehead, 110 (Summer 1976), 127. Elspeth Cameron's recent article on Bear is the most thorough study of the novel thus far. She, too, sees the bear, as well as the wilderness environment as a whole, as “the means of salvation” for Lou and claims that Lou's 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” (“Midsummer Madness: Marian Engel's Bear,” Journal of Canadian Fiction, 21 [1977-78], 86, 87).

2. Marian Engel, Bear (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1976), p. 137. Further references to the novel are to this edition.

3. Knelman says that “when Lou tries to consummate her liaison with the bear, Engel seems to be suggesting that ultimately there are barriers that can't fall. The romantic yearning for a return to nature is an impossible wish.” Not only is it impossible, but Lou's “yearning” and subsequent attempt to “return to nature” in this way is an imposition on the bear's identity. Taylor suggests that “the omission of the definite article in the title [Bear] suggests a Platonic essence or a Canadian archetype” (p. 128). Perhaps Lou, faced with seeing the bear as Platonic essence or as Canadian archetype, soon abandons the first option and chooses the second.

4. The turning or returning to the city is a theme in Canadian literature from Susanna Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush and Stephen Leacock's Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town to Raymond Knister's White Narcissus, Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese, and Sinclair Ross' As For Me and My House and to the more recent fiction of Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro.