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The Projection of the Unconscious and the Death of a Marriage:

Mrs. Bentley In As For Me and My House

by

Guy A. Duperreault

English 357

Canadian Literature Since 1920

(Distance Education, Spring 1999)

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Mrs. Bentley refers several times to the "false fronts" of the Main Street shops. Discuss the
idea of "false fronts" in the novel. What is the relationship Ross draws between the
public and private?

As we are, so we create, both personally and socially. So it is with Mrs. Bentley. But the

power of Ross's writing is such that he leaves the story open enough that the reader brings him or

herself into the text, and, as we are, so we understand. When John Moss writes that "There are not

two realities in this novel" (140), meaning that Mrs. Bentley and Philip are a single construct of the

narrator, he is correct. But at a more fundamental level he is wrong, because he has denied the

subjective reality that exists between a text and its individual reader and its distinction from the

textual reality of the narration. Robertson Davies, who predicted, in 1941, the novel's critical

acclaim and inclusion on university reading lists (18), astutely observed that "Mr. Ross is keenly

aware of the subtleties of the human mind but he knows when to let the reader draw his own

inferences.... The book is ... deeply stimulating..." (17). With this Davies also "predicted" the

range of criticism, from Daniells' facile Mrs. Bentley as "pure gold" (2), to the mostly

disappointing feminist tract of Buss, to Cude's Mrs. Bentley as manipulative hypocrite, to a Mrs.

Bentley described by Hauser as "fundamentally simple, primitive" (14). (The extreme divergence

of both the reviews and criticism reminds me of that accorded Shakespeare's Measure for

Measure, which suggests the validity of Cude's assessment that As For Me and My House is "an

integral part of the literature of the English language" (14).) Like Cude (and others) I see Mrs.

Bentley as an unreliable witness. She is a narrator who had an hypocritical heart when she entered

into relationship with Philip and was instrumental, though not solely responsible, in fostering

hypocrisy in their lives personal and professional. The year we see in the life of this relationship is

of Mrs. Bentley struggling not to understand herself, despite unwanted glimpses of the true natures

of Philip and herself which occasionally force themselves upon her. She fails to understand her

hypocrisy and its role in the sterility of her and Philip's relationships as wife and husband, woman

and man, parent and child and as members of a community. She does not, or perhaps can not,

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break her heart's whole-hearted attachment to hypocrisy as social necessity, an attachment

Matheson described as a "compulsion to conform ... to society's expectations" (163). That she

does not learn is amply displayed in how she manipulates the events of the year so as to ensure

their new life in a book store, without realizing that her manner of achieving it was little different

than the one that had engendered her false-fronted marriage and main street life she so verbosely

despises. She does not understand that the book store's signage is going to be a front no different

than the one she hung up during their first day in Horizon.

Early in the diary Mrs. Bentley describes the disingenuous wooing of her future husband:

Before I met him I had ambitions too.... ¶But he came and the piano took second

place.... I forgot it all, almost overnight. ¶Instead of practice ... it was books.

Books that he had read or might be going to read.... ¶For right from the beginning I

knew that with Philip it was the only way. Women weren't necessary or important

to him.... I even read theology. Submitting to him that way, yielding my identity —

it seemed the way life was intended for (22).

Clearly Mrs. Bentley put on a false front in order to get her man. That she felt it to be the way of

life is perhaps understandable, but acting on feelings does not excuses, justify or negate

hypocritical behaviour. It is curious, and a measure of the extent of her mendacity, that while she

acted on her feelings of desire or love for him on the one hand, she chose not to act on her feelings

of antipathy towards religion on the other. Instead she "even read theology" with the hope of being

able to "nod comprehendingly" (22 my emphasis) as an aid to marrying "her" theology/artist

student. She put on false airs and so began a marriage with someone she understood from the

beginning as neither needing women or deeming them to be important.

Mrs. Bentley "was teaching and saving hard for another year's study in the East" (22).

This means that not only did she have at least some college education in order to be a teacher, she,

even as a woman in the nineteen-thirties, was aware that there was at least one other life choice than

attaching herself "selflessly" to a man — music. Mrs. Bentley's use of the word "seemed" in the

above quote also hints that she had come to understand, early in the diary, that her perceived "life-

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necessity" was in fact an arbitrary choice, that she could have chosen differently. But this seems to

have been merely a Jungian slip of the pen, an understanding that does not quite make it from an

unconsciously made expression into realized concrete awareness, because over the next thirteen

months she does not act on that realization, or any of the others which pop up. Instead every

choice she enacts during the year tries, and mostly succeeds, in continuing the charade of social and

religious propriety. The one exception is her "unwomanly" efforts to amass the thousand dollars.

But even this act, with its minimal risk of social censure, is discoloured by the fact that the book

store is itself a hypocritical construct, a kind of bad-marriage trompe l'oeil.

A central focus of Mrs. Bentley is that Philip is being worn down and destroyed by his

religious hypocrisy. "For hypocrisy wears hard on a man who at heart really isn't that way" (21).

But by Mrs. Bentley's own words there is an ambivalence to that hypocrisy. For example, within

the April 14th entry, of which the above quote is an early item, she describes her surprise, if not

awe, at Philip's having been able to maintain his belief in a supreme being:

And here's the strange part — he tries to be so sane and rational, yet all the time

keeps on believing that there's a will stronger than his own deliberately pitted

against him. He's cold and skeptical towards religion. He tries to measure life with

intellect and reason, insists to himself that he is satisfied with what they prove for

him; yet here there persist this conviction of a supreme being interested in him,

opposed to him, arranging with tireless concern the details of his life to make certain

it will be spent in a wind-swept, sun-burned little Horizon (24).

But four paragraphs later she writes "There are plenty of others ... who at best assert an easy,

untried faith, but that's no solution for him. His guilt is that emphatically he does not believe. His

disbelief amounts to an achievement" (25 my emphasis).

What are we to make of these contradictions within one day's entry? I suspect that Mrs.

Bentley is not even fully aware of them, as she insists on ascribing to Philip what is without doubt

her own hypocrisy. As Cude points out (10), it may well be this hypocrisy, the hypocrisy of his

wife, which is the most enervating in his life. But I think that there is more to it than that. Perhaps

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the best indicator of it, and a clue to the nature of Philip's struggle with life, comes when he

describes the meaning of art.

"Religion and art," he says, "are almost the same thing anyway. Just different ways

of taking a man out of himself, bringing him to an emotional pitch that we call

ecstasy or rapture. They're both a rejection of the material, common-sense world

for one that's illusory, yet somehow more important. Now it's always when a man

turns away from this common-sense world around him that he begins to create,

when he looks into a void, and has to give it life and form" (148).

This is one of the few quotations Mrs. Bentley makes of Philip, and is thus significant in

understanding both Mrs. Bentley and Mr. Bentley because it suggests the nature of Philip's

struggle with God and contradicts Mrs. Bentley's perception of Philip.

Philip sees religion as a means to take him to "an emotional pitch we call ecstasy or rapture"

and it is a "rejection of the material, common-sense world". Yet what kind of life is he leading?

He is struggling with the material poverty of the dust bowl, scratching nickels and dimes from

farmers who haven't had a crop in five years. In his life and sermons he is struggling with Job's

God, the mighty struggle between a supposedly just God and His world with the human world

filled with injustice and cruelty. The struggle that Mrs. Bentley describes as Philip's struggle with

his hypocritical lack of faith is simply the projection onto him of her struggle. And no wonder he

struggles to write his sermons! How can he babble compassion and trust in God when all he sees

about himself is a malevolent supreme being, acting on, or at least not interfering with, a world

which is arbitrary and cruel? This struggle is compounded by being burdened with a woman who

is contemptuous of his faith and the people whom he earnestly, if ineffectively, strives to help.

As for Mrs. Bentley, the reason she felt his "religion and art" statement worth quoting is

that it jars against her construct of him as an atheist struggling with the hypocrisy of his lack of

faith. That she does not appreciate what he is saying is made evident in the next entry, July 30th, in

which she notes that Philip winced when a farm woman who was being starved out by "his

compassionate" God accused him of having the soft life of a country preacher. In that entry Mrs.

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Bentley did not make any reference to Philip's struggle with the justification of that accusation in

his eyes, even though the entry bluntly contrasts Philip's sermons of a compassionate God with

dust-bowl starvation (149). Instead Mrs. Bentley elaborates on material concerns and Steve. It is

she who is the atheist, who recognizes that she is the devil citing scripture (81), who sees within

humans the need to ascribe vacuous meaning in life (131), who can acknowledge her own heresy

(123). So although she easily admits to her own superficial hypocrisy, she is ignorant of just how

deep it is (123) and continues to see it, greatly magnified, in Philip.

The extent of how unaware Mrs. Bentley is of herself is well described by Cude in his

sharp insights into how Mrs. Bentley's relationship with Paul could be seen by others, especially

her husband (4). It also suggests a bias in Mrs. Bentley's reporting because her entries regarding

Paul avoid any possibility of sexual impropriety in either thought or deed despite the suggestion of

"innocent" flirting.

Mrs. Bentley puts in motion the means to get her and her husband out of Horizon and the

ministry. Her stated motive is to "get him out of [the Church]..." (141) with the hope of giving him

back his artistic creativity. That she makes this decision without consulting him and has assumed

that she was his bane by keeping him in the church and will now be his saviour by expunging him

from it displays both her hubris and condescension. But it is not a driving ambition in him

(178-9), although he does actively participate once the plan continues to develop (209-10). And

when she writes that she does not want to "be one of those domineering females that men

abominate" (210) she seems unaware that she has dominated the relationship from before the

marriage, and that her husband does, by her own frequent entries, abominate her! And she seems

to have forgotten that she wrote "It's a woman's way, I suppose, to keep on trying to subdue a man,

to bind him to her..." (85).

And of her methods, the dissembling and blackmail are a work of creative artistry, as Cude

describes them (6). She hypocritically pretends for a long while that his infidelity did not happen

so as to keep him and her marriage (178), despite its lifelessness. Then with the pregnancy of

Judith by Philip Mrs. Bentley is able to keep him by blackmail, which does engender some

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motivation from him for the store. These actions suggest a level of deep hypocrisy, because for her

the marriage's false front is more important than the shabbiness of what exists behind that front.

It is also significant that her stated goals do not include herself, a person to whom getting

out of Horizon has immense importance, given her stated hatred of false-fronted towns (7). She

sees herself and her need to be creative as somehow less important than it is for Philip, despite the

pleasure and satisfaction it gave her to practice and play before the marriage and for the play/Philip

in Horizon. When she imagines herself in the book store she argues herself into a back corner

teaching music, but not for herself and her need to be creative, or even for pleasure. Instead she

does not want to embarrass Philip because she has better business sense than him and might be

able to earn a few extra dollars so as to make the venture more viable without threatening his

masculinity (210).

And as to the state of her marriage, there are two different passages which indicate that she

seems to have an unconscious awareness of its death, even as she has begun to repaint its false

front. The first is implied when she writes about her imagined role in the business venture "I'm

convinced that Philip would be better without me" (210). The second comes with her insistence

that the infant be named Philip. She has transferred her creative energy to a new object of desire,

one subdued at birth and who will be, at least for the first years, incapable of resisting her need "to

possess him, to absorb his life into mine" (84).

Mrs. Bentley began her marriage by putting on false airs and denying her own creative

energy. Despite indications that she is aware of the implications of that in herself, Mrs. Bentley

does not ever come to understand that the hollowness of her marriage and friendships is largely

because she has erected her own personal main street false front. Instead, she uses her creative

energy and happenstance to manipulate and coerce her husband into being a bookseller/artist. She

is not aware that in her drive to achieve this goal she was re-enacting the process which engendered

their sterile marriage and social life in the first place. The degree of self-ignorance on her part can

be seen in how she imagines her relationship with Philip. She sees herself as a hidden away in a

dark corner quietly teaching piano, with her energies devoted to "absorbing" into her life the infant

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Philip. This is a sad book, but one that is, as Davies said, "deeply stimulating" because Ross has

brilliantly capture the unconscious psychological dynamics within an empty marriage.

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WORKS CITED

Buss, H.Mrs. Bentley "Who are you, Mrs. Bentley?: Feminist re-vision and Sinclair Ross's As
For Me and My House", from Canadian Prose of the 20th Century: Additional Readings,
ed. Carol Gerson. Burnaby: Simon Fraser University Distant Eduction — English 357-5,
1998.

Cude, Wilfred. "Beyond Mrs. Bentley: A Case Study of As For Me and My House", from
Engl432 - Modern Canadian Fiction: Supplementary Readings, eds. Carol Gerson,
Douglas Cronk, Laurie Ricou. Burnaby: Open Learning Agency, 1992, in association
with Simon Fraser University Distance Education (English 357).

Daniells, Roy. "Introduction to the 1957 NCL Edition" from Engl432 - Modern Canadian
Fiction: Supplementary Readings, eds. Carol Gerson, Douglas Cronk, Laurie Ricou.
Burnaby: Open Learning Agency, 1992, in association with Simon Fraser University
Distance Education (English 357).

Davies, Robertson. "As For Me and My House" from "Caps and Bells," Peterborough Examiner,
26 April, 1941; from Sinclair Ross's As For Me and My House: Five Decades of
Criticism, ed. David Stouck. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991, pp. 16-18.

Franz, Marie-Louis von. Projection and Rec-Collection in Jungian Psychology: Reflections of the
Soul. LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court Publishing Co. 1990.

Hauser, Marianne. "A Man's Failure" from New York Times Review of Books, 2 March 1941;
from Sinclair Ross's As For Me and My House: Five Decades of Criticism, ed. David
Stouck. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991, pp. 13-14.

Jung, C.G. "From The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious", from The Basic
Writings of C.G. Jung, ed. Violet de Laszlo. New York: The Modern Library, 1959, pp.
105-82.

Jung, C.G. "From 'The Shadow'" from The Essential Jung, ed. Anthony Storr. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1983, pp. 91-3.

Matheson, T.J. "'But do your Thing': Conformity, Self-Reliance, and Sinclair Ross's As For Me
and My House" from Sinclair Ross's As For Me and My House: Five Decades of
Criticism, ed. David Stouck. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991, pp. 162-177.

Moss, John. "Mrs. Bentley and the Bicameral Mind: A Hermeneutical Encounter with As For Me
and My House", from Sinclair Ross's As For Me and My House: Five Decades of
Criticism, ed. David Stouck. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991, pp. 138-148.

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