Summary
Chapter 5
Birdsong awakes the narrator and she watches Joe sleep fitfully. She is sometimes afraid to touch him like this since he might mistake her for one of the enemies from the war. She is trying to decide if she loves him; it is best to know before a man asks. She did agree to live with him and would rather have him around than not, but she does not think he means more to her than that.
She is in what used to be her old room. There are pictures she’d drawn of what she thought were glamorous women but now they seem off. Her mother’s old leather jacket is also there at the end of the bed.
Anna is putting on makeup and the narrator tells her she does not have to do that since there is no one here to look at her. Anna replies that David does not like to see her without it, but then contradicts herself and says he does not know she wears it.
The narrator starts cooking breakfast. David and Anna act playfully as if for an audience but Joe is off in his head again. The narrator thinks of how in French all the bad words are religious but in English they are all about the body, which is apparently even worse. When she was young, they told all the schoolyard children about sex and they told her about a scary man in the sky, but she was the one who got in trouble.
She tells the others she wants to search the trail that runs along the shore, where her father might have gone to get wood. He cannot have left the island since the canoes and the aluminum motorboat are there and the gas tanks are empty. She wonders if someone picked him up and took him to the village, but thinks he has to be on the island or in the lake. It is not uncommon for people to disappear here in the bush, but her father was too careful so it would be unlikely.
It is an overcast day as they set out. David carries a machete and Joe a hatchet as they traverse the trail. The narrator’s husband pops back into her memory briefly, as he always does. He said he loves her, and she will never trust that word again. It amazes her that when they separated she was the offending party because he wanted a child and she did not.
The narrator asks Anna how she and David keep their marriage working. Anna replies that they have to tell a lot of jokes, and then says they make an emotional commitment, and that you cannot see what is happening in advance but you have to let go. The narrator listens but does not quite understand. Anna tells her she is lucky she did not have kids because of the separation, and the narrator nods. She has not told them about her child and she will not.
There is no sign of her father or of the searchers, who clearly did not make it this far. No branches are chopped or broken. She says that they must be done and they can go back. It now seems impossible to search this island—it would take so many people, and he could be hiding and easily evade searchers.
As they walk back she looks for any sign of anything human and sees nothing. It was like when they played hide-and-seek as children—when they were inside it was fine, but outside the spaces to hide were endless, and when her father emerged from behind a tree there was the fear he could be someone else.
Chapter 6
She knows she should give up on her father and file something official; she is just waiting and wants to go back to where there is electricity and distraction. Evans is coming tomorrow and she is relieved.
The others are trying to amuse themselves. It is as if David and Joe are her brother and father, Anna her at sixteen, bemoaning being away from the city and the boyfriend she’d gotten to prove her normality.
The narrator is a commercial artist, an illustrator. She was going to be a real artist but her husband had laughed and said she should do something commercially viable since there had never been any good women artists. Right now she is working on Quebec Folk Tales, which is not her territory but she needs the money. The stories are like the German ones, only not as disturbing.
She draws a princess for the tale of the Golden Phoenix but for the others, no images form. It seems impossible for people up here to know these stories. It would be better to have a bewitched dog or malevolent tree. Yet she never really knew what the villagers talked about since her parents cut the children off from them. She wanted to go to Sunday School like everyone else, but her father had left Christianity and did not want her to go to church. She was able to when she was older, but it did not make much of an impact.
Her thoughts turn to Joe. She mostly likes physical aspects about him, the rest being unknown or disagreeable. His temperament is surly and gloomy, but she also decides she likes that he is kind of an artistic failure—his ceramics are not appealing–and thinks that has some purity to it.
Anna comes over and makes conversation about the drawing and wanting to be a princess when she was younger, then asks the narrator what her father was doing up here. She shrugs but then says he was living. This satisfies Anna, who leaves.
David, Joe, and Anna must all think it strange that this old man stays here, ten miles from anywhere, but this is logical to the narrator. Her parents always intended to move here permanently when he retired; her father loved isolation and found people irrational. Her parents were pacifists and her father said war was irrational and Hitler’s ascendance was due to the failure of reason. The family split their time between the city and the bush, the bush being as remote as possible, lacking even a road when they were younger.
The narrator riffles through a stack of papers. There are strange drawings there of creatures and odd humanoids, and she realizes he was up here making these unintelligible drawings. Maybe he went insane, and if he was insane, perhaps he is not dead. It is as if the narrator has opened a closet and found something that is not supposed to be there.
Chapter 7
After supper, David decides he wants to go fishing so the narrator digs for worms near the compost heap. Anna wants to stay behind and the narrator is nervous about this, wondering if her father will be attracted by the light and come back. She lies and says she needs Anna in the canoe for extra weight.
They push off and the shore recedes, though they follow its line. A blue heron croaks and rises into the sky. David is not catching anything so the narrator takes out a frog that she uses for such an occasion. Anna calls her cold-blooded but it works, and David catches a fish and the narrator brains it. They are joyful and the narrator takes the fish and feels a little sick since she has killed something but she decides that is irrational, since it is okay to kill some things like food and enemies and mosquitos.
David wants to keep fishing but is having no luck. They hear a big powerboat and see it round a corner, roaring with a big American flag in the front and back. There are two “irritated-looking businessmen with pug-dog faces and nifty outfits” (63) with Claude from the village.
One American yells out to see if they caught anything and she says no. They grumble. The narrator says it is time to leave because if the Americans catch one they will be here all night and if they don’t, they’ll roar away and their boat will make too much noise. They all used to think Americans were “harmless and funny and inept and faintly lovable, like President Eisenhower” (63), but no longer.
The narrator is relaxed since she is leaving tomorrow. Her father can have the island to himself for his private madness. She respects that, and she will burn his drawings before they go because they are “evidence of the wrong sort” (64).
Chapter 8
In the morning, the narrator and Joe have sex, and then she makes the fish for breakfast. David films it as a “random sample” and says they ought to stay up here longer. Anna feebly protests but David prevails. The narrator is a little irritated and says they will have to pay Evans anyway, but it is settled for them to stay for a week.
When Evans comes the narrator goes and hides in the outhouse, which is where she goes to avoid explanations. When she was a child she was socially inept and her brother was the same, and he was often beaten up. Finally their mother said her brother could fight back if someone else started it. The narrator did not last long at Sunday School because she prayed to be invisible and when she was not, she knew she had the wrong god.
Turning back to her present life, she wonders how she lasted for so long in the city since it is unsafe; here it never felt, or feels, unsafe. But then her inner voice comes out and says that is untrue, since sometimes she was terrified here. She decides she has to be careful about her memories, making sure they are her own and not “the memories of other people telling me what I felt, how I acted, what I said” (70). If the events were wrong then her feelings would be wrong, and then she would start inventing memories and no one could help her. She runs over the memories of her life and they seem good, but then there is static and she loses the track and wonders what her exact age is at the moment. If she has the past and not the present then it means you are senile, she concludes.
Later the narrator decides to go for a swim even though it is cold. She finds the place where her brother almost drowned. Her mother had saved him, and he did not remember it even though the narrator did. She asked her mother where he would have gone if he had died and she said she did not know; her father explained everything but her mother did not, and she assumed her mother had the answers but did not want to say.
Moving into the water she remembers how she would dive and coast along the bottom of the lake, turning over and looking up. Now she doubts she could do that.
Analysis
The narrator’s forays into her memories about her girlhood are filled with traditionally patriarchal, heteronormative beauty standards—all of which Anna upholds in the present day. The narrator looks at the images in her bedroom, ladies “in exotic costumes” (39) that she believed were exemplars of glamour, imitations of “the paper dolls they had in the city, cardboard movie stars, Jane Powell, Esther Williams” (40). Right after she contemplates these mementoes of her past, she sees Anna applying makeup, and Anna confides that “He doesn’t like to see me without it” (41). When the narrator looks at her childhood scrapbooks, there are the ladies again, “all kinds: holding up cans of cleanser, knitting, smiling, modeling toeless high heels and nylons with dark seams and pillbox hats and veils” (91). This is the same sort of image the narrator uses when she describes Anna a few days later: “[she] is a seamed and folded imitation of a magazine picture that is itself an imitation of a woman who is also an imitation, the original nowhere, hairless lobed angel in the same heaven where God is a circle, captive princess in someone’s head” (169).
As an illustrator (the man she “married” told her that “there has never been any important women artists” [49], so she turned to commercial illustration) the narrator cannot get away from such stereotypical images of women. For Quebec Folk Tales, she draws a princess, “an ordinary one, emaciated fashion-model torso and infantile face” (51). She tries to draw another one, but “this time she’s cross-eyed and has one breast bigger than the other” (51). Finally, “no pictures form” (51) and she wonders “what’s the alternative to princesses, what else will parents buy for their children?” (54)—she is creatively exhausted by the fakeness she is supposed to produce.
There are other revelations about the narrator’s childhood. We learn her parents were atheists and pacifists, her father in particular virulently opposed to organized religion, especially the Catholicism that dominated in the “bush.” Susan Fromberg Schaeffer explains what the narrator’s stunted relationship with religion means in terms of her larger childhood: “on the island, the narrator is an outsider; in the city, with her belief in religion, garnered from the island children, she is equally outcast. Her need for security becomes abnormally great (she fears there is a machine, similar to toilets and vacuums, which can make people vanish) as does her need for immortality, for belief in an all-protecting god, some kind of hereafter. Her father cuts off the emotional force of the wish with his logical unacceptable answers. People are not onions, he tells her; they do not sprout in the spring. It is reasonable for wolves to kill deer when they grow old; it is the natural way. But, as the narrator complains, when you tell your children there are no gods, they have to believe their parents are the gods. And to the narrator, her parents were gods.”
In this section the narrator discovers the drawings her father did, assuming they are from his own addled mind (and later finding out that he is, in fact, sane, and the drawings are of indigenous rock paintings). She becomes fearful that her father is out there somewhere and her friends are in danger, though she does not quite explain why he would be a danger. She also becomes increasingly concerned that she must protect the sanctity of her own mind, and, in the following passage (in which she is thinking about how she always felt safe here at the cabin at night but then corrects herself that that wasn’t actually true) gives the reader the first major red flag that perhaps we ought not to fully trust her: “I have to be more careful about my memories. I have to make sure they’re my own and not the memories of other people telling me what I felt, how I acted, what I said: if the events are wrong the feeling I remember about them will be wrong too, I’ll start inventing them and there will be no way of correcting it, the ones who could help are gone” (70). This foreshadows the narrator’s later revelation that her marriage and the birth of her child did not happen (more in subsequent analyses).
The narrator’s presence in this wilderness causes her to be more reflective about the interaction between humans and the natural world. At this point in the narrative, she is still willing to put worms on hooks and use frogs as bait, rationalizing with herself that although she feels sick, “I know that’s irrational, killing certain things is all right, food and enemies, fish and mosquitos” (62). Besides, she isn’t an American, the term first used as a geographic distinguisher and later coming to stand for all that is selfish, rapacious, and consuming. It will take time before she can consider her own complicity in violence and suffering in a more nuanced way.
Part I comes to an end with the narrator reluctantly submerging herself into the lake, and as Josie P. Campbell suggests, it is “an image that serves as a metaphor to reveal the protagonist's incipient descent into the self to discover within her psyche the split between the head and feeling,” and in Part II, “the novel initiates the protagonist into the mysterious realm of the self where the possibilities of reintegration of the two halves can be seen. If she can find her father, she believes, he may have the answer to dispel the ‘illusion’ that body and head are separate.” Roberta Rubenstein agrees, noting that the last two parts of the novel feature a “journey towards wholeness” that “involves a Jungian rejoining of the radically severed halves of the narrator's self.”
