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Signs of resurgence

Mourning/Mocking Browning: The Resurgence of a Romantic aesthetics in Jane Urquhart’s The Whirlpool (1986)

Catherine Lanone and Claire Omhovère
p. 8-21

Abstract

This paper deals with the way in which Jane Urquhart negotiates cultural heritage in The Whirlpool, testing diffident forms of generic affiliation inherited from the British tradition, most prominently the Gothic novel and Romantic poetry. Urquhart’s mourning of a British aesthetics must be distinguished from its repudiation, or deconstruction, in other writings of the same period. In The Whirlpool, the resurgence of romantic motifs leads to burlesque reconfigurations which question the stability of the relation between language and context. By choosing Robert Browning as a literary reference, and opting for the whirlpool, rather than Niagara Falls, as the location of her novel, Urquhart articulates both a post-Romantic and a post-colonial ethos. While the eponymous whirlpool becomes a metaphor of intertextuality, certain objects become metonymies of hegemonic domination, whether Imperial or gendered. The vortex may be considered as a metatextual emblem of postcolonial literature, not flowing straight ahead but breaking with conformity and continuity, circling round with its “floaters,” the floating signifiers of cultural inheritance, and seeking a way out, its own direction, sideways.

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  • 1 All references to The Whirlpool will appear directly in the text preceded by the abbreviation W.
  • 2 W. H. New notes that “the Caribbean antipathy to ‘Daffodils’ is practically endemic,” and goes on t (...)

1In a special issue of Cercles devoted to the remanence of Romanticism in contemporary poetry, Joanny Moulin elaborates on the distinction between “high” Romanticism and the “downstream, post-romantic rumination” best exemplified in the later works of Tennyson and Browning (Moulin 3). The affinity of Romanticism with water imagery is indeed so persuasive that figurative language frequently seeps into critical accounts, introducing some of its fluidity into the categories of literary history. Given the prominence of water in Jane Urquhart’s The Whirlpool,1 a work in which the Niagara River serves less as setting than as primum mobile, the notion of resurgence offers another suggestive analogy to apprehend the complex intertextual dynamics, the intermittent yet persistent process, through which the novel taps into the fund of British Romanticism. In a postcolonial context, however, issues of literary transmission are often fraught with more than an anxiety of influence. Since Edward Said’s pioneering work in the late seventies, links between Romanticism, the constitution of orientalism, and the cultural sway of British imperialism have been thoroughly analysed. So, when Jane Urquhart has a group of characters realize that they are “never going to find Wordsworth’s daffodils [t]here” while gazing at a wall of “unvaried spruce, up to their hips in snow” (W 69), one has little trouble recognizing in the anecdote a rather customary dig at a legacy which, for many postcolonial writers, has thwarted the emergence of a Canadian sense of place.2 In this respect, Marlene Goldman’s article “Translating the Sublime” is typical of the initial response met by a novel primarily viewed as a reflection on the experience of postcolonial dislocation and the challenge of translating an imported aesthetics into local terms.

2But Urquhart, who began her career as a poet, introduces a subtle shift as she negotiates cultural heritage; she only deals with the sublime, as it were, at one remove. In fact, not only does she refuse to actually depict the arch-famous Niagara Falls—or the spectacular but broken suspension bridge—she chooses not to summon the authority of the flamboyant Romantic rebels, though her characters do quote Wordsworth and Shelley. Instead, the novel’s main narrative is contained within the narrow compass of a prelude and an epilogue devoted to the last days of Robert Browning—thus the novel opens in December 1889 in Venice, loops back in time to June 1889 in Canada, returns to December and death in Venice, turning the frame into a fluid circle which holds the novel in its magnetic pull. The author’s choice of Browning—a Victorian late-comer, little more than a follower by T. S. Eliot’s standards—is an intriguing one.

3The individual storylines combined in the novel’s main section rarely stray from the third person. Except in the excerpts from Fleda’s diary, the narrative does not lapse into the first person, and neither does it tend towards anything comparable with Browning’s dramatic monologues. With each short chapter involving a change in focalization, The Whirlpool relies on a kaleidoscopic vision for its effect much more than on a plurality of voices. The novel’s spatial unity is dislocated into several perspectives envisioning Niagara Falls as borderland, destination, home and, finally and most problematically, as landscape. The juxtaposition of diverging, sometimes incompatible, points of view is a well-known characteristic of the historiographical fiction of the 1980s, when Canadian postmodernists engaged in a rewriting of master-narratives that led to a twofold reassessment of the past and its relevance to the present. In The Whirlpool, however, Jane Urquhart’s reworking of the romantic intertext is rather more ambivalent than the counter-discursive attacks of her postmodern contemporaries.

4The prelude’s description of the squalid, putrid city where Browning wanders aimlessly, voices from his past intruding into his unravelling mind, is a case in point, suggesting the dialogic but problematic force of literary influences. It is only in the epilogue, with visions of Shelley’s drowned body resurging into his consciousness, that the dying Browning finally grasps the impact of his predecessor’s art over his own writing:

And now Browning understood. It was Shelley’s absence he had carried with him all these years until it had passed beyond his understanding. Soft star. Shelley’s emotions so absent from the old poet’s life, his work, leaving him unanswered, speaking through the mouths of others, until he had to turn away from Shelley altogether in anger and disgust. The drowned spirit had outdistanced him wherever he sought it. Lone and sunny idleness of heaven. The anger, the disgust, the evaporation. Suntreader, soft star. The formless form he never possessed and was never possessed by. (W 236; italics in the text)

5Urquhart’s recreation of the scene displaces Harold Bloom’s agonistic model of literary influence into an anxiety of dereliction—not a reactive defence against predecessors but a creative response to abandonment, a searching for direction. In this respect, it is significant that the legal acceptation dereliction should refer to “an accretion of dry land gained by the gradual receding of the sea or a by a river changing its course.” The term may therefore be applied to the geological history of the Niagara River and the subsequent formation of the whirlpool. As David McDougal, the novel’s historian, informs his rapt audience:

“There used to be another river here, you see [...] then the ice age came along and filled it up with rocks and soil.”
“So there used to be a fork in the river here, then, am I right? And now some of the water still wants to go that route. But, of course, it can’t because there is nowhere to go so it turns back on itself.” (
W 103)

6The coincidence between the novel’s topography and the ornate literary frame in which it is set is so boldly artificial that it calls for critical attention. Carefully tracing the influence of Browning’s poetry on Urquhart’s novel would, of course, be perfectly valid for scholars interested in the remanence of nineteenth-century poetry. In this case, the emphasis would be placed on the rhetoric of creation, and interpretation would be author-oriented. But for those concerned with the resurgence of a Romantic aesthetics, the investigation veers towards a poetics of reception reorienting interpretation towards the reader. That is the reason why this paper will not address the figure of Browning in The Whirlpool in terms of stylistic emulation, but rather analyze its inscription as a way of articulating both a post-romantic and a post-colonial ethos.

Outside: A Contextual Frame

  • 3 We are grateful for the insights about Browning’s work Bernard Brugière kindly gave us (private let (...)

7The eponymous whirlpool thus becomes a metaphor for intertextuality. For Browning specialist Bernard Brugière, Urquhart’s recreation of Browning’s end is entirely convincing, full of accurate, moving echoes3—but also, we might add, tongue-in-cheek echoes. For Browning’s last days in Venice are indeed portrayed in decidedly bathetic terms: “How had it all happened? He had placed himself in the centre of some of the world’s most exotic scenery and had then lived his life with the regularity of a copy clerk.” (W 10-11) The same mildly ironic tone is sustained throughout the opening. Browning wearing a down-to-earth night-cap longs for Shelleyan impulse and sympathy.

8A dreary, droning Italian duke in period costume forces the door to the old poet’s memory in a scene which doubly alludes to Browning’s invention of the dramatic monologue and to his four-volume masterpiece, The Ring and the Book (1868-1869), set in seventeenth-century Italy (W 12). The depiction of the city is equally self-conscious in the numerous indications that point to the artificiality of the composition:

Empty Gothic and Renaissance palaces floated on either side of him like soiled pink dreams. Like sunsets with dirty faces, he mused, and then, pleased with the phrase, he reached into his jacket for his notebook, ink pot and pen. [...] Every change in the atmosphere seemed an emotional response to something that had gone before. The light, too, harsh and metallic, not at all like the golden Venice of summer. There was something broken about all of it, torn. The sky, for instance, was like a damaged canvas. Pleased again by his own metaphorical thoughts, Browning considered reaching for the notebook. But the cold forced him to reject the idea before it had fully formed in his mind. (W 8, emphasis added)

  • 4 Of course, both Urquhart and her readers necessarily read Browning’s Venice through the additional (...)

9Even more than the contrived contrasts between “soiled” and “pink,” “sunset” and “dirty,” the recurring painterly similes make the structural function of the prelude rather explicit. Venice is seen as a mouldy monument to a heritage which, in Browning’s own fin de siècle, already referred to a past splendour preserved for the enjoyment of rich and idle tourists.4 The realistic view is troubled by its ironic diffraction into a set of imperfect copies. It is not so much a city that is on display as an aesthetics which should create spontaneous delight but merely prompts postures of mimicry. Such an elaborately-wrought frame signals to the readers that they are being ushered into a field of representation informed by tensions between what is seen and ways of seeing it.

10The prelude thus signals Urquhart’s awareness of, and shift from, not simply Romantic but Victorian obsessive motifs. From Ophelia to mermaids, nineteenth-century British literature and painting were haunted by hybrid figures of dangerous femininity, associating women with water in lethal fluidity. Urquhart chooses to provocatively replace the stereotype of the drowned female body, an icon of self-destructive fallen femininity, with a male drowned body, first Shelley’s body which swims round the whirlpool of Browning’s memory, in the eerily flooded, Titanic-like palaces of Venice—“He wavered for a few minutes near its crenellated peak before moving in a slow spiral along its edges to its base.” (W 237)—then the beautiful but useless body of Patrick, the would-be Shelleyan poet and Canadian artist: “The young man was beautiful [...]. The drowning had hardly affected him.” (W 232)

  • 5 “[Patrick] hated the cold, but clung to the concept of landscape and so he stubbornly persisted. Wi (...)

11Patrick is a poet and authentic copy clerk from Ottawa, who came to his uncle’s farm in Niagara County to recover from pneumonia. The reader is not told whether Patrick caught his chest infection looking for daffodils in snow banks. But the poet’s obsession with landscape and his efforts to adjust the diction of the British Romantics to the geography of the Gatineau Hills recall similar endeavours in the production of the Confederation poets, for instance Charles G. D. Roberts or Archibald Lampman.5 Although none of Patrick’s poems is cited verbatim, we know from Major David McDougal that they feature a liberal quantity of pine trees, a staple of Confederation poetry (W 119). The Major admires Patrick’s verse for its national sentiment, an allegiance he wishes he could stimulate in his wife, Fleda. But the young woman is still very much attached to the old country’s tradition: “No English poet,” she protests, “would spend a lot of time worrying about pine trees.” (W 119) She does, however, during the pensive hours she spends at the desk her husband constructed on the acre where the couple’s new house will soon be erected, on the plateau overlooking the whirlpool: “It is wonderful to sit there and read Browning … feeling as close to him as if he were a friend about to drop in for tea,” Fleda muses (W 35). The young woman’s response to the local vegetation similarly jumbles places and distances in her aspiration to connect the acre with the Mediterranean settings the Romantic poets have taught her to value:

I feel sometimes that my own special group of cedars is trying desperately to become cosmopolitan, to resemble their Italian cousin, the cyprus, and it makes me glad since I believe it to be unlikely that I would ever be fortunate enough to travel to that enchanted land. Perhaps I should speak to the Scotch pines about umbrella pines in hopes they might take the suggestion. The Haunted Poplars, on the other hand, look strange with their new leaves just beginning. They seem much less haunted at this stage and do not produce, yet, the curious sound of a long dead court lady’s skirts moving across a parquet floor. (W 35)

12Fleda’s characterization, her determination to adapt her cultural baggage to her exotic circumstances and the incongruities that cannot fail to result, create a second convergence between frame and main narrative. Like Browning searching for the perfect destination in Asolo and Venice, she is engaged in the process of adapting to a place that will let her in. Adaptation suggests an organic process, a growing and shrinking to fit in, but also a willingness to be affected by one’s surroundings, both of which require more malleability from the dweller than from the tourist whose integrity is rarely permanently challenged.

13This may account for the ironic textual mirror effects. Fleda reads Browning’s long poem The Ring and the Book, a title which connotes romance, but which actually tells the tale of the trial of a husband who murdered his wife for money. It is hard to understand why David puts his wife’s exhilarating longing for lines of flight down to too much Browning, and no wonder that he should ascribe to Browning the angel with beating wings, an expression which, as Fleda points out, actually refers to Shelley. But paradoxically, Browning who hardly ever mentions landscape may well become a better textbook than sheer Romanticism. Patrick, for instance, is lost in the Romantic fallacy; his whirlpool remains abstract, an obsession, a “vacuum,” a “neutrality” (W 222). He loves the female figure in his landscape, but hates her voice, her flesh, her actuality: “I don’t want to be this close, Fleda. I want the distance.” (W 181) He is, to borrow the terms used by Browning in his essay on Shelley, a “subjective” poet, all landscape, and not an “objective” poet, putting people in the foreground (Browning 448). The sublime merely means sexual sublimation; denying the woman flesh, Patrick’s relationship to the landscape he wishes to swim and penetrate is ultimately colonial—“Why do you always have to conquer something because it’s there,” wonders Fleda (W 118). Browning’s taste for the grotesque may therefore be more suitable to the reality of landscape, his irony may be a method which has to be transposed, appropriated, but which may well be more rewarding, in the end, than sublime subjectivity.

Inside: Intertext as a Haunting

14Urquhart’s text draws the reader’s attention to echoes, especially in the dialogue between Patrick and Maud’s autistic son, where they laugh and play and dwindle dialogue to gerunds, a sing-song of “talking,” “walking,” “stalking,” “gawking,” “shocking,” “blocking,” “knocking” (W 187-188), not quite a Deleuzian stutter, the becoming other of language, but a way of articulating the inarticulate, the resurgence of the flotsam and jetsam of lives and language, of experience and cultural inheritance, not as a significant whole, but as a whirlpool of sound. One might add to the list the implicit shift from “drowning” to “Browning”—a significant case of paronomasia, which corresponds to the partial breakthrough of characters like Fleda and Maud, as opposed to Patrick’s suicidal quest.

  • 6 Maud weaves the chronicle of death; she writes in her notebook and sorts out relics, much like the (...)

15Like Urquhart’s Browning or Fleda, the character of Maud raises the question of intertext as a haunting. The return of echoes might lead the reader to expect spectral, or even Gothic resurgence, but just as she strays from Romantic intertextuality, Urquhart carefully and humorously distances herself from the Gothic. Maud’s husband Charles is a Victorian entomologist with a vengeance, collecting spiders but also letting them roam freely in his own house, so that the upper story is a cave of webs (no wonder that Dickens’s Great Expectations should stand on a shelf ). The text is less spectral than gendered: Maud is a latter-day Lady-of-Shalott, trapped in a spider’s web.6 But when she dares kill a daddy-long-legs, she becomes pregnant, as if like a certain kind of female spiders she had managed to overcome her mate’s domination.

  • 7 Maud’s character is clearly related to Tony Urquhart’s grandmother who inspired the section entitle (...)

16Charles’ death by disease forces Maud to become a female undertaker, to take the business of death into her own hands. Neither a visitor nor a newcomer, Maud Grady thus deals with permanence in ways that conjoin the literal with the figurative. She spends her two years of mourning attending to her customers’ sorrows, taking orders for funerals, dressing the deceased before the wake and the burial. In addition, the town has entrusted the young widow with the care of the bodies that find their way across the Niagara rapids into the whirlpool after an accidental drowning or, more often than not, a suicide. Maud’s ledger is the ultimate destination of the anonymous “floaters” whose physical description and material possessions the book ultimately records in entries that read like poems. The lists balance words and line-breaks in accounts that capture the stark appeal of the found object and the still life to which they are metonymically, though enigmatically, related (W 95).7

17Thus Maud’s life is ambivalent. Her husband’s death empowers her, but she is also trapped in a whirlpool of passivity, chronicling and collecting the relics of the dead. She is caught in her widow’s garb, the stiff armour which almost precludes walking and seeing (“It encased the female body, instead, in a suit of crumpled armour, tarnished to a dull black.” W 21-22). The repetition of the adjective “black”—black parasol, underwear, stockings ribbons, bonnet, veil, stationary— hammers home the sense of constriction. Rain makes the colour black bleed onto the skin, writing the female body with almost indelible ink, turning skin into a parchment dedicated to mourning: throughout the novel Maud scrapes her skin but cannot prevent the resurgence of blackish or greyish stains, merely “turning her upper torso from mottled black to spotty grey” (W 28). Maud’s mourning is institutional rather than emotional—manuscripts show how Urquhart worked on the opening lines of the novel to emphasize the commercial and colonial function of a ritual imposed upon women, creating a powerful ternary rhythm through the repetition of the adjective “secret”: “At Halstead in England, during the last half of the nineteenth century, employees at Courtauld Limited wove secret cloth on secret looms in secret factories.” (W 21) Crape is unique, because it is so stiff and so secret, embalming the woman’s body as if she should not be allowed to quite survive her husband. But it is also a tradition which is imposed upon women all over the Commonwealth, ensuring the wealth of British weavers: “[T]he whole empire could have been wrapped; a depressing parcel with a black sheen.” (W 21) The image, a dismal inversion of Christo’s Land Art, turns England into a gigantic spider secretly weaving cloth in order to wrap the female body (and colonial land) in its gloomy net.

18The representation of mourning, which stands in part for colonial domination, thus calls for fresh, healthy laughter, for liberation rather than nostalgia. And it is with some deviousness, the elegiac and the ironical blending into a disquieting combination, that the narrator intimates how the bereaved may recover from a fatal separation:

After two or three months of widowhood and strange dreams, Maud decided to have an elaborate brooch made out of a lock of her husband’s hair, his dead hair; an oval frame of gold would surround two desolate hairy willows which would, in turn, flank a hairy tombstone with his initials on it. All of this was to be placed under a bubble of thin glass; a sort of transparent barrier between that tiny hairy world of graves and weeping and the one that Maud walked around in everyday. A barrier, but one that was easy enough to see through nonetheless. (W 23, emphasis added)

  • 8 There are no willows in Poussin’s masterpiece which counts a group of three shepherds. But with its (...)

19The shading of mourning into mocking results from the distance the narrator introduces between the facts and their account. Within the novel’s diegesis, Maud’s brooch indexes the penetration of the Victorian taste for hair jewellery into the far reaches of the Empire. But the realism of the description is undermined by the word “hair” that ceases to be descriptive with its first recurrence, and becomes decidedly grotesque in its adjectival combination with various emotions and objects. In terms of reception, the artefact is likely to arouse mixed feelings. At once hilarious—in its vague semblance to Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego8and equally repulsive—in its insistently material corporeality—Maud’s spidery brooch leaves the reader rather uncertain as to how to value the loss it symbolizes. Such ironic reverberations entice the reader to look into the metafictional recesses of the literal anecdote. Beyond its referential function as part of a widow’s mourning garb, the jewel may well point to a mise-en-abyme of the compositional devices through which containment and mastery over the remains of the dead may be achieved.

Aside: Mimicry

20Straying from the “ironic compromise” Homi Bhabha calls “mimicry” (Bhabha 86), Urquhart drastically chooses to cut, and warp her material. The replica inside the glass bubble is perhaps the most complete and self-contained landscape to be found in The Whirlpool. Everywhere else, the narrator’s cropping of the visual field draws attention to the limits constraining the characters’ vision. Just like the American factories across the river, the Falls are confined to the periphery of narrative. They are alluded to through incidental comments on the “garish tourist attractions” surrounding their booming fame (W 46; see also 108, 164, 195, 221). As early as the first chapter, their magnitude is drastically scaled down in the depiction of “a very young couple [...] giggling over a photograph of themselves in front of a very bad reproduction of the waterfall” (W 31). The cheap print stands in implicit contrast with the life-size landscape that fascinates the characters. The Niagara whirlpool lies at the bottom of the river gorge just below “Whirlpool Heights,” the property the McDougals purchased on the plateau. Although nothing in the novel’s topography would forbid the frontal prospect, or commanding view one usually associates with picturesque sceneries, very little is done to satisfy the reader’s expectancies. Instead, the narrator insistently points out the presence of circumstances hindering the characters’ visual perception. What with the weepers that hang from her bonnet and are blown across her opaque veil, Maud endures a “partial blindness” during most of her mourning (W 28). As for Fleda, indications abound—a cloud of cigar smoke (W 32), exuberant spring foliage (W 34, 144), or even the “mesh of netting” (W 129) covering her tent’s window—suggesting that, no matter how closely she wishes to approach the landscape, impalpable but persistent barriers keep her away from it.

21The effect is reinforced through frequent references to the texts which screen external space even as they mediate its appreciation as landscape. Fleda seeks solace in her compulsive reading during the uneventful days she spends on the acre, waiting for her husband to return from his study. The character’s emotional dependence on books evokes a form of colonial bovarysm manifest upon her first appearance in the novel:

Under her arm, near her heart, she cradled a copy of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, The Ring and the Book by Robert Browning, and Patmore’s Angel in the House. She had brought the books along in order to read them in a suitable setting; a setting that she hoped was about to cause the spiritual marriage of romance and domesticity in her life. (W 30)

  • 9 “A small, portable mirror backed with dark foil, it was named for the French painter who most perfe (...)
  • 10 Urquhart’s views on the evolution of Romanticism towards an increasingly formal, almost rigid aesth (...)
  • 11 The hair motif also connects them.

22Although she strives to escape from her husband’s wish to turn her into both the Angel in the House and a fetishist surrogate of Laura Secord, Fleda’s choice of Whirlpool Heights for her afternoon reading is not a Deleuzian line of flight but is reminiscent of the trick the Claude-glass performed for the art amateurs of the previous century.9 In the present case, the contrivance through which aesthetic emotion is aroused is rather more elaborate because not one but several intertextual frames are imbricated in the distancing that turns indifferent space into a suitable setting (Roger 27). In this respect, Fleda’s book selection points to the cultural mise-en-abyme which causes actual space to recede infinitely through the successive framing that fashions a clump of cedars into a bucolic grove, a romantic bower and a post-Romantic shrine to Nature’s feminine profusion. Cutting her hair in a gesture of defiance which merely feeds Patrick’s fetishism, Fleda’s double exposure to the proper texts and right setting—the romantic élan slowing into post-romantic pose stiffening into colonial conformism10—produces nothing but more of the same conventions. No sooner does Patrick chance upon the pastoral scene than he becomes infatuated with the composition itself. The predictable love affair between the nymph and the bird-watcher peters out when Fleda realizes that both the conventions of romance and the poet’s expectancies force her into a rather uncomfortable space: “She looked out at her acre now from behind the walls of a bubble of glass that had grown around her.” (W 159, emphasis added) It is significant that identical terms should relate Fleda’s confinement in convention to the miniature landscape of loss encapsulated inside Maud’s brooch.11 Although the two women live in the same location, they do not inhabit place in the same way. Nowhere is the contrast sharper than in their relation to the whirlpool.

23As David McDougal pointedly remarks about his wife:

“[W]hen I explain [the site’s geology] to my wife she perceives it as a metaphor or some such thing. Talks about interrupted journeys. As if the river were Ulysses or something.” [...]
Patrick’s idea of the woman was beginning to solidify. She was a dreamer, living in the open, perceiving whirlpools as metaphors. How easy the landscape seemed to be for her. Awake, she watched and lived inside it. Asleep she dreamed it. Perhaps the woman
was the landscape. Patrick was attracted to this idea of her. He wanted to become a part of the impression. (W 103)

24In McDougal’s positivist view, his wife’s partiality for metaphor is both endearing and slightly silly. But beyond the Major’s condescension, the reference to Ulysses as the figure of displacement par excellence impresses that Fleda, as long as she stays there, cannot see the whirlpool for what it is on account of everything it stands for. The same holds for Patrick who, like Browning in Venice, is falling for an alluring image much more than for the woman it refers to. In either case, the imperfect metaphors—the river qua Ulysses or the woman qua landscape— index a crisis in a poetic language which strives but fails to configure anew the romantic encounter between man and nature.

25Nowhere is this more visible than in descriptions of the whirlpool. The geological amphitheatre is primarily a site of representation where avatars of the romantic encounter circulate endlessly:

And even though the June foliage had thickened in earnest, she could see it clearly: the giant whirlpool—a cumbersome, magnificent merry-go-round on which a few large logs were seemingly permanent passengers. The awkward, ceaseless motion of going nowhere, the peace of it seen from above. (W 32, emphasis added)

26Echoing the noisy attractions upriver, the metaphor of the “merry-go-round” unfurls into a simile connecting the human with the non-human. Yet the conceit’s festive connotations do not quite balance the disquieting overtones attached to the troping of nature into a machinery, the circular motion of the current being translated into an absurd, endless repetition. Metaphoric displacement introduces further slippage between semantic categories, encouraging the grotesque association of the senseless logs with inert bodies. The evocation unexpectedly becomes real when the river stunts resume their seasonal danse macabre with the rapids (W 48). The depiction of the mangled corpses is another occasion to test the shifting limit between the ghastly and the ludicrous. Far too demure to join in the carnival, Fleda refuses to go and “watch a man who killed animals kill himself inside an animal” (W 119). Yet a subtle mirth tinges the phrasing, the bouncing syntax mimicking through its redundancies the looping trajectory that takes the Mighty Moose, not towards the intensity of some kind of becoming-animal, as he’d hoped, but down the rapids, round the whirlpool and into the undertaker’s “meat wagon” (W 47).

  • 12 See Atwood’s/Survival/ and her “Death by Landscape.”

27All the novel’s characters, much like Fleda, live “with a whirlpool on [their] mind” (W 31, 174). As a result the fantasmatic Romantic communion with nature goes through a wide spectrum of generic modulations. The aesthetic covenants that regulate the valuation of geographical space as landscape lack firmness; their adequacy is constantly questioned through bathos, or undermined by the grotesque excesses that Niagara has never ceased to inspire in fiction as well as in real life. When Patrick drowns in an attempt to swim the whirlpool, what comes to the fore is not a Shelleyan fusion with the elements but a repetition of the regressive topos of death by landscape famously identified by Margaret Atwood, stressed by the way the line fishing the body is hooked to his belt buckle, like an umbilical cord (W 226).12 But Urquhart does not follow the Canadian formula to the letter. Her poet’s body does not disappear but ultimately drifts to float along with Fleda’s birch bark reproductions in the same (literary) current:

Little white vessels departing from the shore, set adrift on a long tour of the whirlpool. Like people, just like people. A complete revolution would be a long, long life. Not many are able to go the distance. Those that do I am unsure of. Have they moved around the full circumference or have they doubled back somehow on an unknown current? [...] I have begun to mark my boats in some way, making each one different from the others. And I have begun to give them names, like real ships. “Adonais,” “Dreamhouse,” “Warrior,” “Angel.” [...] Then I launch my small craft from the shore and pick up Browning in order to read while I wait for them to return. (W 60)

  • 13 Both Away and The Underpainter develop on a wider scale the reflection on the artialisation of land (...)

28Urquhart’s choice of “Adonais” is a clear nod to the elegy Shelley wrote after Keats’s death while the other names evoke other favourites of Fleda’s, from Swinburne to Patmore. The launching therefore encourages the reader to reconsider the cultural ruptures that supposedly occurred with each fresh departure to the New World, the journey taking them along more unpredictable currents, causing more unforeseen forms of resurgence than the staunch supporters of Canadian nationalism where ready to acknowledge, either among the novel’s characters, or in the literary climate that prevailed when The Whirlpool was first published. The old River Man puts Fleda’s occupation in perspective when he thoughtfully considers: “But you never really lost anything in the whirlpool forever. Eventually it came back around again. All it took was time, patience and a new hook,” (W 226) or, one feels tempted to add, a new book.13

  • 14 Jenny Iles in the context of World War One calls “thanatourism” (Iles 236) a fascination with “the (...)
  • 15 The autistic child descends in a way from the Wordsworthian myth of the child as seer, like the Idi (...)
  • 16 Patrick’s mistaken idealism also recalls Conrad’s flawed idealist in Lord Jim, and Stein’s advice t (...)

29The whirlpool may be seen as a metatextual emblem of postcolonial literature, not flowing straight ahead but breaking conformity and continuity, circling around, with its “floaters,” the floating signifiers of cultural inheritance, and seeking a way out, a new direction, its own direction sideways. Browning’s musing, as he heads home at the end of the prelude, expresses postcolonial disorientation and attempt to find its own way: “All the way back across the city he murmured, ‘Where have you been, where have you been, where did you go?’” (W 18) The ending of the novel puts an end to mourning, whether it be the ritual imposed upon women by colonial England or postcolonial cultural nostalgia. No longer enticed by landscape and poetry, Fleda simply walks away, offstage, standing on her own two feet, taking her Browning with her, leaving no note for her husband, ignoring the dead body of Patrick, whom she will never see and never mourn. Just as Maud had dragged her child out of his cave of silence, forcing him to face the sun by pushing his eyelids open, forcing him to speak—or scream—“sawn” (i.e. sun / son), she too is forced to undergo the Platonic process of leaving the realm of shadows and illusion to enter the painful but benevolent light of truth. In the end, the child destroys his mother’s carefully preserved relics, by re-allocating a random place to each of them, according to a configuration he has mysteriously devised. He picks up all the objects of the dead men which she had carefully preserved and labelled, and redistributes them spontaneously. Instead of Kant’s sublime, the infinite accumulation of relics referring both to the magnetic pull of the sublime attempt to transcend death by water and to its degraded correlation, Niagara Falls and the society of spectacle, what Jenny Iles calls “thanatourism,”14 the child points to mathematical infinity (a random accumulation of relics), so that things, whether buttons, watches, collars, teeth, rings or shoelaces, simply dwindle into what they really are, mere objects, nothing more. After being silenced, uttering a few words, parroting and repeating entire conversations (just as Browning in the prelude was haunted by Shelley to the point of total recall), the weird child demystifies rituals of repetition and breaks the logic of mourning, he becomes creative in his own way, turning objects into exhilarating arrangements, still lifes.15 In a way, like postcolonial literature, he may have come of age, found self-expression. When Patrick’s corpse is brought in,16 the child utters his epitaph, “man,” “swim,” but Maud, wearing a bright yellow, sunny dress, pulls him towards her, choosing life, not death. On this side of the Atlantic, far away from Browning’s island of the dead, lies, not a Shelleyan Suntreader, not a boat coffin, but the postcolonial chrysalis.

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Bibliography

Atwood, Margaret. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Fiction, Toronto: Anansi, 1972.

Atwood, Margaret.“Death by Landscape,” in Wilderness Tips, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1991: 109-129.

Bentley, D. M. R. The Gay]Grey Moose. Essays on the Ecologies and Mythologies of Canadian Poetry 1690-1990, Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1992.

Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture, London / New York: Routledge, 1994.

Bloom, Harold. A Map of Misreading (1975), New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Browning, Robert. Robert Browning’s Poetry, James F. Loucks, ed., New York: Norton, 1979.

Conrad, Joseph. Lord Jim (1900), Thomas C. Moser, ed., New York: Norton, 1996.

Gallet, René. “Romanticism and Postromanticism: From Wordsworth to Pater,” Cercles 12 (2005): 18-25.

Goldman, Marlene. “Translating the Sublime: Jane Urqhuart’s The Whirlpool,” Canadian Literature 150 (Autumn 1996): 23-42.

Iles, Jenny. “Death, Leisure and Landscape: British Tourism to the Western Front,” in Mark Dorrian and Gillian Rose, eds., Deterritorialisations… Revisionning: Landscape and Politics, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2003: 234-243.

Kroetsch, Robert. “Seed Catalogue,” Completed Field Notes: The Long Poems of Robert Kroetsch, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1989: 32-51.

Moulin, Joanny. “Remanent Romanticism in Modern Poetry,” Cercles 12 (2005): 1-13.

New, W. H. Grandchild of Empire. About Irony, Mainly in the Commonwealth, Vancouver, C: Ronsdale Press, 2003.

Poussin, Nicolas. Et in Arcadia Ego, 1637-1639, oil on canvas, 185 x 121 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Roger, Alain. Court traité du paysage, Paris: Gallimard, 1997.

Said, Edward. Orientalism (1978), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991.

Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory, London: HarperCollins, 1995.

The Collins Dictionary of the English Language, 1986.

Urquhart, Jane. False Shuffles, Victoria, BC: Porcépic, 1982.

Urquhart, Jane. The Whirlpool (1986), Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997.

Urquhart, Jane. Away, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993.

Urquhart, Jane. The Underpainter, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997.

Urquhart, Jane. The Stone Carvers (2001), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.

Wordsworth, William, and S.T. Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1798), New York: Routledge, 1991.

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Notes

1 All references to The Whirlpool will appear directly in the text preceded by the abbreviation W.

2 W. H. New notes that “the Caribbean antipathy to ‘Daffodils’ is practically endemic,” and goes on to cite an impressive list of works going back to V. S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street (1960 [New 88]). Similar colonial resentment can be found in Canadian letters, from Isabella Valency Crawford’s Malcolm’s Katie (Bentley 178) to the long list of absences informing Robert Kroetsch’s “Seed Catalogue.”

3 We are grateful for the insights about Browning’s work Bernard Brugière kindly gave us (private letter, 29 January 2008).

4 Of course, both Urquhart and her readers necessarily read Browning’s Venice through the additional filter of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1913).

5 “[Patrick] hated the cold, but clung to the concept of landscape and so he stubbornly persisted. With numb fingers he recorded his observations in his notebooks waiting sometimes months until he moulded them into poems. Some of them had been published in one small magazine or another south of the border, and finally in a slim collection he had paid for himself.” (W 69) Mentioning the notebook and the numbing cold creates an explicit convergence between Patrick’s attitude and Browning’s in Venice. A good selection of Confederation poetry is available on the website of the University of Toronto Library: http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1191.html.

6 Maud weaves the chronicle of death; she writes in her notebook and sorts out relics, much like the unknown woman who sewed the quilt depicting death and tombs, a quilt which Fleda sees in the museum (W 173). Her burial of angelic children, like dolls, also recalls the Victorian fascination for photographs of dead children (see for instance Julia Margaret Cameron’s 1872 photograph, Deathbed Study).

7 Maud’s character is clearly related to Tony Urquhart’s grandmother who inspired the section entitled “The Understaker’s Bride” in Jane Urquhart’s early collection of poems, False Shuffles (1982).

8 There are no willows in Poussin’s masterpiece which counts a group of three shepherds. But with its two trees framing an inscribed tombstone, Maud’s brooch mimics the basic composition of the painter’s comment on the transience of all things human.

9 “A small, portable mirror backed with dark foil, it was named for the French painter who most perfectly harmonized classical architecture, leafy groves, and distant water. If the view in the mirror approximated to this Claudian ideal, it was judged sufficiently ‘picturesque’ to be appreciated or even drawn.” (Schama 12)

10 Urquhart’s views on the evolution of Romanticism towards an increasingly formal, almost rigid aesthetics during the Victorian period is implicit in the novel’s epilogue when Browning slips into unconsciousness dreaming of a siren-like Shelley. Narratorial focus then abruptly shifts and stops on the gondola waiting to take the poet’s remains to San Michele cemetery: “All that cool white marble in exchange for the shifting sands of Lerici.” (W 237)

11 The hair motif also connects them.

12 See Atwood’s/Survival/ and her “Death by Landscape.”

13 Both Away and The Underpainter develop on a wider scale the reflection on the artialisation of landscape initiated in The Whirlpool.

14 Jenny Iles in the context of World War One calls “thanatourism” (Iles 236) a fascination with “the ever-present detritus of death” (Iles 242).

15 The autistic child descends in a way from the Wordsworthian myth of the child as seer, like the Idiot Boy in Lyrical Ballads.

16 Patrick’s mistaken idealism also recalls Conrad’s flawed idealist in Lord Jim, and Stein’s advice to follow the dream usque ad finem and immerse oneself in the destructive element.

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References

Bibliographical reference

Catherine Lanone and Claire Omhovère, Mourning/Mocking Browning: The Resurgence of a Romantic aesthetics in Jane Urquhart’s The Whirlpool (1986)Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 31.1 | 2008, 8-21.

Electronic reference

Catherine Lanone and Claire Omhovère, Mourning/Mocking Browning: The Resurgence of a Romantic aesthetics in Jane Urquhart’s The Whirlpool (1986)Commonwealth Essays and Studies [Online], 31.1 | 2008, Online since 30 December 2021, connection on 15 January 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ces/9002; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ces.9002

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About the authors

Catherine Lanone

Université de Toulouse, UTM, CAS

Catherine Lanone is a professor at Université de Toulouse 2. She is the author of several books, on E.M. Forster, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, and The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene. She has also written articles on Jane Urquhart and Margaret Atwood, alongside her publications on the Brontës, Forster, Woolf, and Dickens. She is currently investigating the travel diaries of John Franklin, and the representation of Franklin’s expeditions in British and Canadian literature.

By this author

Claire Omhovère

Université de Montpellier

Claire Omhovère is a professor at Université de Montpellier. She has published articles in French and Canadian journals on the novels of Robert Kroetsch, Jane Urquhart, Rudy Wiebe and Alistair McLeod. She is the author of Sensing Space: The Poetics of Geography in Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction (2007). She is currently engaged in a research project on representations of the void in Canadian literature and iconography.

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.

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