I Just Love Ethel Wilson: A Reparative
Reading of The Innocent Traveller
Misao Dean
University of Victoria
In his critical biography of ethel wilson, David Stouck gathers
evidence from Wilson’s letters and her public statements to conclude that
“the life or death of a character was often of less importance to Wilson than
the placement of a comma or the choosing of a word” (190). This statement
has haunted me since I reviewed this book in 2004. Stouck describes how
Wilson might delete characters, or add chapters, at the suggestion of her
editor, but argued passionately to defend her diction, her punctuation, the
structure of “the English sentence,” as she wrote it.1 What does it mean to
be this kind of fiction writer? The practice of close reading assumes that
every writer pays attention to every detail, yet anyone who has ever had
anything published knows that this assumption is a bit disingenuous: editors have their preferences, and often writers (at least this writer) decide to
cut their losses and submit to them. Novels like Wilson’s are rightly viewed
in the light of contemporary theory as collaborations among editors, readers, and writers, and certainly Stouck offers ample evidence that editors,
particularly John Gray of Macmillan, were instrumental in shaping Wil1 For examples of Wilson’s comments on “the English Sentence” see Stouck, Ethel
Wilson, A Critical Biography, 239 and 242.
ESC 40.2–3 (June/September 2014): 65–81
Misao Dean teaches
Canadian literature and
popular culture in the
English department
at the University of
Victoria. Her most recent
book is Inheriting a
Canoe Paddle (University
of Toronto Press 2013).
son’s career and her fiction. This is especially true of my favourite Wilson
novel, The Innocent Traveller, a book she struggled with for nineteen years,
under the guidance of several different editors.2 Yet Robert Weaver told
David Stouck that “An editor … felt more freedom to remove a character
from Ethel Wilson’s work than a comma” (Biography 121). So how did she
reconcile this willingness to change the big things in her writing with her
refusal to even consider changing the punctuation, the vocabulary, the
rhythm of her sentences, the things that seem so trivial to the lay reader?
What is it about the details of Wilson’s writing, her style, as most critics
have designated it, that she felt so compelled to defend?
These kinds of questions about an individual writer seem to me to
gain urgency from being placed in the context of recent discussions about
the discipline of English. A commentary published in November 2012 by
Albert Braz (in University Affairs) laments that even professors of English
literature don’t seem to value the literariness of literature any more. Listening to us, he says, it is difficult to believe that we love literature; we justify
our discipline in terms of job skills or declare that new media or literary
theory should be the focus of our curricula. We should love literature, he
says, and we should teach that love to our students; we should call on that
love to defend our profession from those who consider our work arcane or
trivial. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick also advocates a practice of loving literature
by suggesting that the entire tradition of critical reading inspired by Marx
and Freud is “paranoid” (126) and asking if there isn’t something we can do
with texts other than repeatedly demonstrating their complicity with the
oppressive forces of capitalism, if to only comfort and nurture ourselves
as readers and scholars. She advocates a form of “reparative” reading (128)
that could emerge not from paranoia but from “the depressive position”
(128), a reading practice of repair and reparation that would allow us to
rediscover what we can love about texts.3 Braz and Sedgwick give me the
licence to say that I love Wilson’s writing; I love her description of the
British Columbian landscape and her wisely aphoristic statements about
2 For an account of the composition of The Innocent Traveller, and especially
Wilson’s interaction with various editors, see Stouck, Ethel Wilson, A Critical
Biography 101, 106–09.
3 Sedgwick argues, rightly I think, that “to theorise out of anything but a paranoid
critical stance has come to seem naïve, pious or complaisant” (126). She uses the
language of Melanie Klein to argue that literary readers move from an actively
paranoid position to the position of the Kleinian depressive, “from which it is
possible to use one’s own resources to assemble or ‘repair’ ” one’s relationships
with objects. Central to my argument, “Among Klein’s names for the reparative
process is love” (128).
66 | Dean
community, about death and the passage of time, but also I am simply
in awe of her sentences—their rhythm, their balance, their variety, and
their sound. Wilson’s sentences please me, for me they call up an involuntary laugh, demand to be said over and over, to be felt on the pulses
and sung through the veins. They almost convince me of David Abram’s
analysis of language as a “profoundly carnal phenomenon” (74), whose
joys are comprised wholly of “the way they feel in the mouth or roll off
the tongue” (75). I really, really like them, and yet I wonder if my desire
for them, in Sedgwick’s terms, merely defends against my paranoid fear
that the culture surrounding me is “inadequate or inimical to” nurture; I
want to “assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have
the resources to offer to an inchoate self ” (149), a self that is increasingly
subjected by and to the university imperative of bums on seats. Can my
pleasure in reading Wilson’s fiction mean anything in the wider context of
the university, anything other than an illusory compensation for the rest of
my professional life? And can (or should) my love of Wilson’s style become
the express content of what I communicate to students in the classroom?
Almost every critical assessment of Ethel Wilson’s fiction draws attention to her prose style: from W. A. Deacon, Desmond Pacey, and Dorothy
Livesay in the 1950s and 1960s to New, Murray, and Stouck through the
1990s, right up to Faye Hammill’s 2011 article in Studies in Canadian
Literature. Wilson’s contemporaries emphasized the “chaste, restrained
style for which Mrs. Wilson is famous” (Deacon cited in Stouck, Biography
226); they call her sentences “limpid, unemphatic, but invariably in good
taste” (Pacey 41); more recent critics use words like “elegant,” “sophisticated,” and “stylistically apt” (New, “Irony of Order” 30). All of this seems
impressionistic, at best, and lamentably vague, at worst; it implies a shared
set of standards among critics and readers, standards that rely on the
overlapping of literary style and social behaviour, “manners.” Moreover,
these descriptors all seem gendered to me, part and parcel of a certain
characterization of the author in her proper person as class conscious,
formal, shy, feminine, well mannered, an image that I object to, on Wilson’s
behalf, an image I want to defend her against. This is not what I love about
Wilson’s fiction. It seems to me to be trivializing to suggest that Wilson’s
manners are the same thing as the tone and structure of her sentences.
The pleasure I derive from reading her work is emphatically not admiration for the way she hosted dinner parties or rocked a tailored suit from
Woodwards. It is something else.
Wilson herself focused on the sentence as the basic element of her
writing. “The sentence is a never ceasing miracle and source of satisfaction,”
I Just Love Ethel Wilson | 67
she writes, and offers as examples “the complex, formal, and curious construction that bears the mark of Henry James, or … the page-long almost
baroque sentence of Osbert Sitwell, or the plain and pleasing deceptive
simplicity of Defoe or Jane Austen, the clarity of Bertrand Russell, or the
conviction of a good reporter” (“Somewhere” 84) to illustrate the neverending variety of its construction. Despite this structural variety, for Wilson the sentence has a single purpose: “The sentence is a way of communication.” Wilson’s metaphor for the way the sentence carries out its
function is the bridge: “[the sentence] is a strong humble bridge crossing
a small stream; or it is the arch supporting the temple. It may be only a
culvert or it may be a very great bridge connecting two distant shores. In
its essence the sentence is a thing of beauty (always functional and strong)
whether it appears frail, or plain, or whether it is lavishly decorated. It has
to carry its meaning” (“Somewhere” 84). This metaphor is deceptive; it
seems simple but it is really quite difficult to pin down. Like a bridge, a
sentence is constructed; like a bridge, it can be constructed in different
ways, “lavishly decorated” or “clear, un-lush and un-loaded“ (“Somewhere”
84). And like a bridge, says Wilson, it “carries,” not weight, but “meaning.”
I can’t figure this out. From where to where? From author to reader, a
hermeneutics of the text? From one part of the text to the next (“not a
sentence may be missed, for it hooks into a sentence past or to come or
it strays into the universal air and the meaning hangs there” (“Cat” 100))?
And how is the meaning differentiated from the sentence itself?
Perhaps I am taking this metaphor too seriously. Perhaps Wilson’s
statements about the sentence are merely performative of that very class
position she inhabited. As Roland Barthes characterizes it in The Pleasure
of the Text: “The Sentence is hierarchical: it implies subjections, subordinations, internal reactions. Whence its completion: how can a hierarchy
remain open? The sentence is complete: it is even precisely that language
which is complete“ (50). The sentence, Barthes suggests, is necessarily
ideological; it is even the emblem of the ideological, because it constructs
relationships and then completes them, freezes them in position. But
Wilson’s comments on the sentence are also socially situated; they are a
response to the hail of the academy; summoned to address convocation
at the University of British Columbia as an expert on literary writing,
“an important Canadian writer,” she responds by inhabiting that role, as
understood by her generation. She advocates a broad acquaintance with
British literary writers and with the formal grammar of written English;
she inhabits The Tradition as its spokesperson, despite her gender, her
68 | Dean
nationality, and her literary subject matter. Professors and politicians finish
their sentences, Barthes says; they have to. In this context, so does Wilson.
Barthes seems the appropriate reference here, because his Pleasure
of the Text is supremely the pleasure of style, of the sentence itself. And
despite his reliance on a Freudian conception of sexual desire as the
engine of literary pleasure (rather than the more complex and potentially
more nuanced tools provided by the Tompkinsian theory of affect cited
by Sedgwick) Barthes’s analysis of the sentence as a structure that allows
for both the assertion of hierarchical structure and its challenge through
ludic play seems particularly appropriate to the modernist practice of
Wilson’s fiction (Pleasure 51). The tension between the formal structure
of the subordinating sentence and the violation of that structure is what
fascinates me—the tension between the readerly and the writerly or, perhaps, plaisir and jouissance in Barthes’s terms. How far can she push her
sentences toward expressive anarchy, while still remaining within the
conservative guise of grammatical structure? One of my favourite passages from The Innocent Traveller displays this kind of play: the description of the Northern Lights as seen from the deck of the ship taking the
Edgeworth family to Canada.
That night the sky was lit from zenith to horizon by Northern Lights. Rachel and Topaz, niece and aunt, leaning at the
ship’s rail, saw a long and wavering luminous plume of palegolden colour ascend in the north. The light fanned out and
raced to the midmost topmost sky where a black whorl took
shape and poured forth a cataract of glowing green. Successive cataracts of light issued from the whorl and became banners which flapped in silence across half the sky made vaster
by the antics of the unexplained and ungovernable heavens.
From the left of the spreading whorl, which changed shape
and character as the onlookers gazed upon it, came a glow of
dull crimson. The crimson ran rapidly down to meet the black
ocean, changing and doubling and spreading as it ran. The
colossal performance of the Northern Lights was exaggerated
up up up, on and on, down down and across; and beyond and
behind the zenith it encroached upon the southern sky. From
time immeasurable and lost the heaven continued to ripple
and wave with light, sometimes ghastly, always incomparable,
filling the diminutive travellers beside the ship’s railing with
unprecedented awe. (88)
I Just Love Ethel Wilson | 69
This passage comes partway through the book, when the members of
the Edgeworth family are crossing the Atlantic on the way to Vancouver
from the small industrial town of Burslem in the United Kingdom. The
first sentence uses a simple noun–verb structure to introduce the topic
of the Northern Lights. This is followed by a sentence that re-names the
initial compound subject in order to emphasize both the individuality of
the onlookers (Rachel and Topaz) and their relationship (niece and aunt)
and further modifies them as “leaning at the ship’s rail”; these three short
phrases sit, solidly, in contrast to the sinuous movement of the “long and
wavering luminous plume of pale-golden colour” that describes the initial
flash of light. The passage continues with a series of parallel constructions
that emphasize speed (fanned out and raced … took shape and poured
forth), and includes a chain of two adjectives (midmost topmost) that,
in a literal sense, contradict as well as succeed each other yet in context
seem to give the impression of poetic enjambment through their juxtaposition without punctuation or conjunction. Sentence four is parallel in
structure (cataracts of light … issued … and became), but the predicate
of the second clause again gives the impression of enjambment: “which
flapped in silence across half the sky made vaster by the antics of the unexplained and ungovernable heavens”; in this clause the word sky functions
ambiguously as both the limit of the modifier “across half the sky” and as
the subject of the modifier “made vaster by the antics of the unexplained
and ungovernable heavens,” a phrase itself positioned ambiguously to
modify either “sky” or “silence.” Both the word choice (vast, ungovernable, unexplained, heavens) and the structure (a long clause that violates
the reader’s conventional expectation of a pause after “sky”) suggest the
way the Northern Lights exceed the viewers’ ability to take them in. The
next sentence beginning “From the left” varies the structure with a formal
period that suspends the main clause over the length of the sentence until
its final few words: “came a glow.” “The crimson ran rapidly down to meet
the black ocean, changing and doubling and spreading as it ran”; this sentence gains its effect of motion by listing present participles; it also evokes
dactylic metre (crimson ran rapidly, changing and doubling and spreading),
whose high proportion of unstressed syllables traditionally evokes speed.
Perhaps the most unconventional use of language comes in the second
sentence from the end “up up up, on and on, down down and across; and
beyond and behind”; here the string of prepositions draws attention to
itself, requiring the reader to mimic the action of following an unpredictable chain of actions. The subjects of the sentences shift from the viewers
(Rachel and Topaz) to the light itself (the light fanned out, light issued)
70 | Dean
to a component of the light (crimson, crimson ran), to the performance
as a whole, finally targeting the viewers themselves as the objects of the
lights’ action (filling the diminutive travelers). And the simple verbs that
denote the actions of the light (issued, raced, ran) become the more complex and drawn out verbs applied to the “performance”: “was exaggerated”
and “continued to ripple and wave.” The passage ends with a balanced and
conventional complex sentence that opens with a prepositional phrase
(from time immeasurable and lost) that introduces a clear main clause (the
heavens continued to ripple and wave with light) modified by two parallel
phrases (always, sometimes) and completed by a participial clause that
crashes down with a sense of completion, “unprecedented awe.”
This passage—its appeal to sound (luminous plume) and rhythm (not
just dactylic but also trochaic and iambic), as well as its (almost) violation
of the rules of syntax in the repetition of “up up up, on and on, down down
and across” and “sky made vaster” marks this passage with the ludic play
described by Barthes. The enthusiasm and awe of the viewers is conveyed
by the way the passage struggles to represent the excess of pleasure:
Two edges are created: an obedient, conformist, plagiarizing
edge (the language is to be copied in its canonical state, as it
has been established in schooling, good usage, literature, culture), and another edge, mobile, blank (ready to assume any
contours), which is never anything but the site of its effect:
the place where the death of language is glimpsed. These two
edges, the compromise they bring about, are necessary. Neither culture nor its destruction is erotic; it is the seam between
them, the fault, the flaw, which becomes so. (Pleasure 6)
The sentences in this passage represent that seam, where the structure
of the generic sentence comes into contact with energy, and exuberance,
and light.
Another section from The Innocent Traveller that gives me goose
bumps is the description of the landscape as it spreads before the travelers looking north from the cpr into Alberta.
In the gullies of the little hills through which they now passed
there were aspens and birches whose leaves the early frost had
turned from green to gold. The birches with their white maidenly stems and honey-yellow leaves shone against the dark
conifers. Far to the north of them, but still east of the Rockies, east of Jasper House, the Athabasca River flowed widely
through a land that was all gold. Golden golden golden shone
I Just Love Ethel Wilson | 71
The sentences
in this passage
represent that
seam, where the
structure of the
generic sentence
comes into
contact with
energy, and
exuberance, and
light.
the birch trees in that northern land from north to south, from
east to west, spiked here and there by dark conifers. Few travellers along the brave steel way had ever heard of this golden
world. But here, as the train hurried towards the mountains,
Rachel looked up at the railway cutting and saw, for one
moment, poised alone against the blue sky, a single slender
white-stemmed aspen tree whose golden leaves trembled and
shone and sang in the sunshine. It was there. It was gone. It
was hers. (103–04)
This section is stitched together by imagery of gold, contrasting with dark
green: “green to gold; honey-yellow leaves against dark conifers; all gold;
Golden golden golden … spiked with dark conifers; golden world.” In
approximately 160 words, the word “gold” is repeated seven times and
evoked twice more in the related images honey-yellow and sunshine. The
sentence structure emphasizes the colour imagery, by suspending meaning
through multiple subordinate clauses:4
In the gullies
of the little hills
through which they now passed
there were aspens and birches
whose leaves the early frost had turned from green to gold.
The main clause (in italics) is completely innocuous; the information to
be conveyed is in the subordinate clauses. The same structure prevails in
the next sentence:
The birches
with their white maidenly stems and honey
yellow leaves
shone
against the dark conifers.
4 I have laid out the sentences in order to highlight their grammatical structure
according to the format used by Richard A. Lanham in Analyzing Prose (London:
Continuum, 2003).
72 | Dean
And the next:
Far to the north of them,
but still east of the Rockies, [and] east of Jasper House,
the Athabasca River flowed
widely
through a land
that was all gold.
The repetition of “golden golden golden” (recalling the “up up up” of the
previous quotation and similarly inserted with no appropriate punctuation) expresses the exuberance of the speaker and introduces the main
clause, again innocuous as to its content (the birch trees shone golden)
but employing inversion to emphasize the colour. This passage leads up
to the longest sentence in the paragraph:
But here,
as the train hurried towards the mountains,
Rachel looked up at the railway cutting,
and saw
for one moment, poised alone against the blue sky,
a single slender white-stemmed aspen tree
whose golden leaves trembled and shone and
sang in the sunshine.
Again the section provides a strong sense of closure by shifting from a long,
complex sentence to three short, simple sentences that convey Rachel’s
momentary glimpse of the golden light of the tree and her appropriation
of this memory into her sense of self. The main clauses in each of these
sentences are often motivated by versions of the verb “to be”: there are, it
was. The exceptions employ verbs that imply a kind of passive action: “the
birches … shone” “the Athabasca River flowed.” So when “Rachel looked
… And saw” the contrast is clear, between the static scene and Rachel’s
active appropriation of its beauty.
This section perhaps can clarify Wilson’s sentence-as-bridge metaphor;
the very minimal and unadorned main clauses of these sentences (the
birches shone, the Athabasca flowed, Rachel looked and saw) are dwarfed
I Just Love Ethel Wilson | 73
by the ornamental subordinate clauses, whose adjectives glow with the
images of colour and contrast that hold the passage together and constitute its meaning. Perhaps this is what Wilson means by the sentence as
bridge carrying meaning; the short and almost inconsequent independent
clauses become the structure upon which hangs the significance of the
passage itself.
But can an analysis like this sufficiently account for the pleasure these
sections evoke in me? While I derive joy from writing it, I am aware that
I am indulging myself; close reading is one of the “many ways selves and
communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a
culture—even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to
sustain them” (Sedgwick 150–51). I know the previous paragraphs have
likely evoked boredom and irritation in all but the most sophisticated and
determined reader. Can my pleasure in this text be evoked in students
through a demonstration of close reading? Rita Felski suggests that these
“intensities of affinity and involvement are conjured out of the bare bones
of intonation and modulation, ways of speaking, timbre and tonality, the
tempo of style” (63) and thus are dependent upon variables of personal
history and background that are not easily transferred. In other words, I
strongly doubt it. I can describe how the effects are created; I can analyze
the various sentences and teach the vocabulary of prose analysis. But what
can I do in the classroom to convey my wonder and pleasure except say,
wow, see what I mean?
Another approach to my love for The Innocent Traveller might emphasize not the sentences in themselves but what they represent. Wilson
remarked that she was thinking through two famous books while working on The Innocent Traveller: Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and
Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale. Both look back to an earlier era,
Proust to his childhood in France and Bennett to the simpler past of his
Five Towns, which was also the childhood home of Wilson’s subject, her
Aunt Eliza (represented in the novel as Topaz). The Old Wives’ Tale takes
place in the town of Burslem, in the “pottery” district, which is also where
The Innocent Traveller begins, with the toddler Topaz embarrassing her
father by crawling under the family dinner table while he is hosting an
important guest, the poet and cultural theorist Matthew Arnold. The novel
continues to follow Topaz as she grows into an adult unmarried sister who
travels with family members to make a new home in Vancouver in the
early decades of the twentieth century. Like Remembrance the novel revels in the homely details of life in these nostalgically evoked chronotopes,
the expressions, the sounds and tastes, the routine of life in middle-class
74 | Dean
Burslem and in early Vancouver. Barthes is also useful here, describing his
pleasure in reading “certain novels, biographies, and historical works” for
their “representation of the ‘daily life’ of an epoch, of a character … schedules, habits, meals, lodging, clothing, etc.” This pleasure is not, Barthes
speculates, “the hallucinatory relish of ‘reality’ (the very materiality of
‘that once existed’)”; it is not necessary to actually remember the place
and time evoked, for “The pleasure of representation is not attached to
its object.” Instead he reads these books to experience the bliss of those
“minor hysterics (these very readers)” who wish to imagine “a singular
theatre” in which they can take their place, “not one of grandeur but of
mediocrity” (Pleasure 53). Perhaps because these “mediocre” human needs
for food, shelter, human contact, custom, and ceremony do not change
they remain of interest, they continue to please, is another of his ways of
accounting for the pleasure of reading novels like The Innocent Traveller.
The Innocent Traveller definitely provides this kind of pleasure for me:
it evokes the “classic realist novel” as described by Catherine Belsey in
its detailed representation of the materiality and the cultural mores of
middle-class life at the end of the nineteenth century. The book takes
place in domestic households and is redolent of the atmosphere of ladies’
organization meetings, descriptions of clothing, household rituals, relationships with servants, customs around meals, and food and household
budgets. The book even includes a recipe for “milk jelly,” a dessert represented as symbolizing the household, in that it is economical, sparkling,
pure, and tart, a description I can endorse because I have made the recipe
and served it to my classes, allowing the joy expressed in the minute and
the particular detail of language to cross over the representational mise en
abyme and enter our material, sensual mouths. The novel creates a moral
system that allows each of these details to take its place as expressive of a
“whole way of life,” a culture, as Raymond Williams would have it (Culture
and Society 11–12), that I recognize as underlying my own. But the pleasure
in my recognition of this familiar cultural terrain is even less possible to
convey to the students today than it was when I started teaching; what
was then condemned as the snobbery and culpable reticence of the wasp
is now rightly criticized as Anglocentric, racist, or simply unintelligible.
The communal sense of Canada that George Elliott Clarke laments in his
essay, “What was Canada,” is even less accessible to the contemporary
student in Western Canada than to those Clarke teaches in Toronto and
parts farther east. Recognition, as described by Felski, is primarily an
individual practice of self-fashioning (23­–26); while as an instructor I can
foreground the “historical context” that makes The Innocent Traveller
I Just Love Ethel Wilson | 75
The Innocent
Traveller offers
many examples
of this
shifting
challenge to
realist
technique.
realist, I cannot convey my feeling of visceral connection to the world of
the text that makes it so important to me.
But as many critics before me have noted, the model of classic realism
is insufficient to account for the complex handing of time and point of
view in The Innocent Traveller. Indeed, David Stouck suggests that it is the
way the point of view varies and slides throughout Wilson’s novels that
makes them pleasurable. Instead of keeping the narrating voice and the
narrated story separate, Wilson’s prose “approximates stream of consciousness, dispenses with the lexical and grammatical markers distinguishing direct and indirect speech” (Biography 201). Instead of providing the
pleasure of a stable subject position, however “mediocre,” for the “minor
hysteric” reader to take up, Wilson’s narrative is constantly mixing voices
and thereby “altering the boundaries of the realist novel” (202).
The Innocent Traveller offers many examples of this shifting challenge
to realist technique. The second chapter introduces what seems to be an
omniscient narrator but one who contradicts that status by referring to
Topaz as a toddler and as Great Aunt Topaz, and to Joseph Edgeworth
as father, as Grandfather Edgeworth and Great-grandfather Edgeworth.
This telescoping of time is a frequently remarked element of the narrative, as the narrator includes in scenes from Topaz’s childhood remarks
upon them by the elderly Topaz and comments on scenes from Topaz’s
old age from a perspective years after her death. The narrator becomes a
modernist “I” on page 9, picking her “way unsurely through the wreckage
of our time,” and then a comfortable “we” who pokes fun at the unshapely
noses of the long dead. In a letter written to Alan and Jean Crawley while
she was working on The Innocent Traveller Wilson claims, “Each time I
return to The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett, the fleetingness of time
flows past (I hear it whistling in my own ears) as the book progresses from
now till the end and then—no more. I do not know of any other novel that
excels it in the simple and complicated flow and structure of life, time, and
place” (“Letter” 221). Yet The Innocent Traveller’s telescoping shift from
now to then and back, from “she is” to “I am” to “We are“ in these sections, seems much more challenging than Bennett’s conventional realist
narrative. These are the techniques that demonstrate why Alice Munro,
in an interview with J. R. Tim Struthers, after discussing how much she
admired Wilson’s handling of point of view, declared, “I read for pleasure,
really for intoxication” (36).
The fact that Wilson’s handling of point of view and of time is so different from Bennet’s in The Old Wives’ Tale suggests that however nostalgic
Wilson was about Bennett’s Five Towns, and however much she felt she
76 | Dean
drew on them in her portrait of Burslem, this connection is really a misdirection. In her famous essay, “The Bridge or the Stokehold,” her musings
about the relationship between real people and their portraits in Proust’s
Remembrance of Things Past leads to a more fruitful lead:
A novelist may be exposed to the temptation of portraying
some tantalizing intimately known person. If the novelist
yields to this temptation and turns this person loose into his
book, he may produce a better book than he could otherwise
have done, but at the high cost of peace of mind. Not so, naturally, if the work is planned as a commemoration of love, or an
explanatory or affectionate commentary. There is a temptation which I can only describe as excruciating; for truth is far
stranger than fiction or may be much more interesting, and
who knows the temptations? I do. (105–06)
This paragraph seems to be referring to The Innocent Traveller, the portrait
of Wilson’s real life Great Aunt Eliza, and to the other family members
that people the novel with which Wilson struggled, striving to get the tone
right and the portraits of family members right. The representation of an
“intimately known person” is a gamble for the author, Wilson says, because
the reader holds the author to a different, perhaps more personal, standard.
But her novel is planned not to ridicule but as a “commemoration of love,
or an explanatory or affectionate commentary.” For like Remembrance,
The Innocent Traveller is neither an essay nor a novel, a biography or fiction, “but a ‘third form’ in which order is made disordered, resulting in a
‘rhapsodic’ text,” a form that according to Roland Barthes depends upon
“disorganization of Time (of chronology)” in favour of a alternative organization, Time Remembered. In Proust, as in Innocent Traveller, the structure of the narrative is a “system of moments [that] succeed each other, but
also correspond to each other” (“Longtemps” 282) spoken by a narrator
who is both an adult and a remembrance of herself as a child, “a singular
being, at once child and adult, puer senilis, impassioned yet wise, victim
of eccentric manias and the site of a sovereign reflection” (“Longstemps”
283). The book stands as an elegy for a loved family member and of the
world she inhabited, a “commemoration of love” from the perspective of
the child who grew up under her gaze. And its primary tone is one of loss.
How can such a text evoke pleasure? For me, it evokes what Barthes
calls a moment of truth: “suddenly literature (for it is literature which
matters here) coincides absolutely with an emotional landslide, a ‘cry’; in
the body of the reader who suffers, by memory or anticipation, the remote
separation of the beloved person, a transcendence is posited: What Lucifer
I Just Love Ethel Wilson | 77
created at the same time love and death?” (Pleasure 287). This “truth” has
nothing to do with realism, with fidelity to the material world or with the
detailed evocation of a personal situation; instead it “implies a recognition
of pathos in the simple, non-pejorative sense of the term” (287). The Innocent Traveller is a text that would “say whom I love” and “not say to them
that I love them (which would be a strictly lyrical project)” (288): which
would express the sense of love that is both agape and eros, eschewing the
restraint of modernism and creating “an affective order” (288). But this
is a pleasure of longing, of loss, of the knowledge of the finality of death
that is only available to some, at some times of life. This is not something
easily shared with an undergraduate class, nor is it something they would
necessarily recognize as pleasure. And it reminds me that Barthes wrote
The Pleasure of the Text at age fifty-seven, exactly my age, and that it is
often associated with his mature reaction against the limitations of his
earlier structuralist analyses. As Wilson says about Proust, The Innocent
Traveller “has to do with our universal master and servant Time, and with
people moving in Time” (“Bridge”105), something to which the young in
one another’s arms are notoriously immune.
In the end I’m not sure that pleasure or “why we love literature” is
something we can teach to students, or that we should even try. Close
reading may convey the complexity and intentions of a text, but it will only
please those students who are already predisposed to be interested. And
I know that if I try to convey my own pleasure, I actually alienate some
students; in my experience, the more enthusiasm I show for a text, the less
inclined some students are to like it, or even discuss it. They anticipate
being told simply that if they don’t like it, they’re wrong. (Who did this to
them?) How can I reveal the sources of the pleasure I find in reading—and
the ways I find it can compensate for hours of mind-numbing grading and
the boredom of teaching the comma splice one more time—open my heart
to them, and invite them to scorn my joy?
Refocusing my teaching on love of literature also seems risky to me in
another way. Barthes cautions, “No sooner has a word been said, somewhere, about the pleasure of the text, than two policemen are ready to
jump on you: the political policeman, and the psychoanalytic policeman:
futility and/or guilt, pleasure is either idle or vain, a class notion or an
illusion” (Pleasure 57). Pleasure is something our culture has traditionally
opposed to work, an opposition that modernism reinforces in rejecting the
pleasures of popular reading in particular.5 While adherents of the current
5 See Frost, especially “Introduction: The Repudiation of Pleasure.”
78 | Dean
administrative regime may believe that teaching students to love literature
will resolve the problems of an impending slump in enrolment, I do not
see how a contemporary provost could justify a English department on the
grounds that literature is pleasurable, even if I, and my colleagues, find it so.
My title is a variation on the title of Wilson’s first published work “I
Just Love Dogs,” a short story about human behaviour on a Vancouver
street. A crowd of passers-by gather around a dog lying on a sidewalk,
collectively deploring the actions of an owner who would leave the poor
dog to die on a city street. One elderly woman repeatedly pokes the dog’s
body with a stick and suggests that someone do something about the sad
spectacle of the presumably dead, yet valuable and beautiful dog. Various
members of the crowd, including the narrator, attempt to bring the matter
to the attention of the authorities, until finally “the woman in the purple
hat” feeling “very important” indeed resolves to contact the local traffic
policeman. But while she is hoofing it up the street to get his attention, the
crowd hears a whistle, and the dog obediently hops up and jumps into a
waiting car. All of these people “just love dogs,” but no one has ascertained
that the dog actually is in need of help.
As the crowd melts away into the cityscape, the narrator laments that
by leaving she missed the fun of the awkward explanations when the constable eventually arrived. But her husband offers a slightly different ironic
perspective: “all he said was for me to cultivate that dog’s disposition. He
said that dog had fine qualities” (84), most important, presumably, the ability to mind its own business. Perhaps this is a personal, or even a cultural
reticence, to allow students the freedom to like or dislike as they will and
in the interim to keep my own counsel about what literature I love; but
pace Albert Braz, I think it rather unseemly of me, as well as of dubious
benefit to the students, to presume to “teach them to love literature.” I
do love Ethel Wilson, but I can’t demand that the students do the same,
and, as far as I am aware, there are no pedagogical outcomes (yet) that
measure love of literature. When I teach The Innocent Traveller, I can only
perform the rituals of care, as I have done in this paper, and, unlike love,
these rituals can be taught: analysis, research, thinking, writing. When I
teach Ethel Wilson, I think it is enough to say that these are what I teach.
Works Cited
Abrams, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a
more than Human World. New York: Vintage, 1996.
I Just Love Ethel Wilson | 79
When I teach
The Innocent
Traveller, I can
only perform
the rituals of
care, as I have
done in this
paper, and,
unlike love,
these rituals can
be taught.
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———. “Writing Here.” bc Studies 147 (Autumn 2005): 3–27.
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———. “The Bridge or the Stokehold?” In Stouck, ed. Ethel Wilson, Stories,
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———. “Letter to Jean and Alan Crawley.” August 1962. In Stouck, ed. Ethel
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