As They Really Were: Women in the Novels of Grove

Abstract

A S T H E Y R E A L L Y W E R E : W O M E N IN T H E N O V E L S OF G R O V E ISOBEL MCKENNA University of Ottawa Frederick Philip Grove, according to his own account,1 was from a cultured background, with the education and tastes of a young gentleman of late nineteenth-century Europe. In his circles social superiority meant cultural superiority, and women's accomplishments were given opportunity to develop and shine, though rarely outside of the group. It was not just money that made this possible, but men's agreement that women could and should do so. Grove brought this fairminded attitude to America, where women were all too often considered cheap labour above all else. Grove's innate sense of justice enabled him to view the society of the new continent with a fresh objectivity. In his long years in the Canadian west, he saw, time and again, what the harsh pioneer life was doing to many of the women. He saw far beyond the horizons of his Canadian contemporaries, but when he attempted to write about what he had come to know firsthand, critics were dismayed. His frankness in Settlers of the Marsh (1925) disturbed readers,2 who felt that it was not genteel to point out the cruel enslavement that many western pioneer women had endured. Grove's thoughtful and observant temperament found a dreadful fascination in the cruelly determined men he saw in the raw North American west, but the person he really pitied, as his prairie novels demonstrate, is the wife of such a man. He explains his attitude towards these women in In Search of Myself (1946), written subsequent to his novels: I have been told that, in my books, woman plays a subordinate part; that in fact, woman is represented as the obstructress in the debate of life ... for the most part, it is the fact in pioneer countries; There [sic], woman is the slave ... a pioneering world of the steppes, is a man's world. Man stands at the centre of things; man bears the brunt of the battle; woman is relegated to the tasks of a helper; It [sic] is an unfortunate arrangement of nature that the burden of slavery, for such it is in all but name, should be biologically aggravated ... But it is not to be imagined that my sympathies were with the men. Quite the contrary. My sympathies were always with the women.3 Grove strove for truth rather than mere tale-spinning, and the critics in the English Studies in Canada, ii, 1, Spring 1976 110 E n g l i s h S t u d i e s i n C a n a d a east understood little of the west that Grove described in his prairie novels. They did not see that he had presented them with unpalatable truths, not with an attitude towards women which called for criticism. To see truths objectively usually requires an outsider, and Grove had come as a stranger to the west. He found a prevailing puritanism and a harsh peasant mentality which intrigued and disturbed him. The types of people he met engrossed him, although Grove said that the real challenge lay in "recording that struggle of man with nature,"4 the attempt to describe the wilderness and its taming. His first published books, Over Prairie Trails (1922) and The Turn of The Year (1923), displayed his close observation of detail, which is often more rewarding when applied to nature than to humanity. But the method is the same in his novels, where he presents character with a calm impartiality that notes everything. In so doing, he goes far beyond contemporary Canadian novelists in his empathic portrayal of women. From his own experience Grove understood completely the hardships of the prairie farmer. What he also recognized was that their very will to conquer and achieve overrode everything else, even human considerations. In In Search of Myself Grove noted that "untamed land is a hard taskmaster": For the purpose of the pioneer conquest of nature certain qualities are needed in...