Sinclair Ross’s As For Me and My House: Five Decades of Criticism ed. by David Stouck

Abstract

Reviews SinclairRoss’sAs For Me and MyHouse: FiveDecadesofCriticism. Edited by David Stouck. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. 238 pages, $45.00/ $16.95.) David Stouck has put together a well-conceived selection of major critical statements about one of Canada’s most respected and critically scrutinized novels. His criteria, “those that best represent certain phases of criticism” and those “outstanding for their quality as literary criticism” have admitted most essays to which scholars would want ready access. Among the seventeen critical essays, I see only three that might have been spared as synoptic, redundant, or weak, and I would have added only one or two others. The collection is effective as a book in several respects. It is held together with an introduction and headnotes situating the essays in the larger critical dialogue, it includes a sampling of reviews and opinions by such notables as Margaret Laurence and Margaret Atwood, and the selections are such that the essays do benefit from being read together and do create a sense ofprogressive development of the dialogue. In retrospect, certain essays stand out as germi­ nal. Among the early statements, for example, William New identifies the semantic ambivalence underlying the perennial dispute over Mrs. Bentley’s character, her reliability as a witness, and her candor as a narrator. In that debate, Wilfred Cude’s “Beyond Mrs. Bentley”still stands out for its attention to the text, the logic ofits inferences, and the forthrightness of its interpretations. Laurence Ricou draws attention to the metaphoric possibilities of Ross’s imag­ ery, and Robert Kroetsch makes of that imagery a basic grammar of prairie fiction based on a “horse-house” duality. As the discussion turns the novel increasingly from story to text, Barbara Godard opens more theoretical consid­ eration of the novel in relation to modernism and theories of art, and Frank Davie suggests that the ambivalences fuelling interpretive disputes result from conflicting sign systems dominating the text.Janet Giltrow offers a tantalizing sample of syntactic and discourse analysis which holds the promise of securely connecting the vagaries of interpretation to the words on the page. The essay which benefits most from the context ofthe book isHelen Buss’s “Who are you, Mrs. Bentley?” Explicitly, it says as much about Ms. Buss’s growth as a feminist reader as it does about Ross’s text, but by the point at which it appears in this collection, the interpretive disagreements in earlier essays have lent a certain 366 Western American Literature urgency to the questions of the “reading act,” and Ms. Buss offers a way of addressing that question. There is one celebrated problem ofinterpretation Stouck does not handle well. The presumed unreliability of Mrs. Bentley as narrator opens the way to conjecture about the basic events ofthe plot and the ultimate significance ofthe action in the novel. The extreme instance of such conjecture involves attribut­ ing the paternity of the illegitimate child adopted by the Bentleys not to Philip Bentley but to another character, as David Williams, for example, shifts father­ hood to the schoolteacher, Paul, in “The ‘Scarlet’ Rompers” (not reprinted). Stouck begins the discussion with an embarrassing error of fact about the criticism. Bynow he must be tired ofbeing reminded ofit, but he attributes the Paul-as-father interpretation to Barbara Mitchell, whose “Paul: The Answer to the Riddle ofAsForMe and My House”is actually a careful exploration of Paul’s value to the Bentleys in finding a resolution to their problems. Stouck goes on to present Evelyn Hinz and John Teunissen’s “Who’s the Father of Mrs. Bentley’sChild?”as a piece,ofsincere interpretation. This essay, which isin part a response to Williams, follows a line ofincreasingly tendentious reasoning past the Williams hypothesis to conclude that Mr. Finley, a local worthy hardly mentioned in the text, is the probable father. The essaycan be read as a brilliant parody ofthe interpretive excesses that lead to the Paul-as-father conclusion or, alternatively, as the most comically inept handling of textual evidence in Cana­ dian literature. (It is reminiscent of Paul Hiebert’s literary satire Sarah Binks, with its Horace B. Marrowfat, Professor Emeritus of English and Swimming at St. Midget’s College...