March 29, 00

Landon Sealey

The Swamp Angel:

A Canadian Symbol

The very beginning of the book Swamp Angel by Ethel Wilson shows the main character, Maggie Vardoe, going through a deliberate and crucial change in her life. In this way, the author throws us into the midst of the plot (or life) in progress - namely that of a middle aged woman who, having lost a child, father and husband to death, "had tried to save herself by an act of compassion and fatal stupidity" (16); she had married her present and soon to be left husband, Edward Vardoe. Ethel Wilson allows us to follow the consequences of Maggie's decision to separate from her husband, both upon herself and her good friend, Nell Severance. In this way, the author asks the question, "how much do our circumstances make us, and how much to we make our circumstances?" Since the answer to such a question is bound to be a process and not a fixed characteristic of character development it will, of necessity, call for the aid of a symbol - a symbol that, ironically, proves to be as impermanently concrete as life. It is this play between function and structure (in person and symbol) that leads the swamp angel gun from symbol to metaphor.

This subtle transition from the human to the heroic, the concrete to the mythical, Wilson describes in one of her many authorial asides:

There is a beautiful action. It has an operative grace. It is when one, seeing some uneasy sleeper cold and without a cover, goes away, finds and brings a blanket, bends down, and covers the sleeper because the sleeper is a living being and is cold. He then returns to his work, forgetting that he has performed this small act of compassion (91).

This is concrete because it involves an easily identifiable human need and action, along with concrete objects, a body, a blanket and an all too logical action. This is mythical simply because we are watching it, because it is so blatantly literal and supremely figurative at the same time - it is true and real even as it is imaginative and distant (it could not be more so). Ethel Wilson herself states that this action is "a beautiful action which is divine and human in posture" (91). I point this out now because Ethel Wilson makes a habit of shading the area between the figurative description and the real experience(the experience of describing). She very much wants us to feel the experience of writing with her even as she is conveying the experiences of her characters. Therefore, I find that how she does this is as much a pertinent subject of this book as the subject of symbol. Specifically, what makes a symbol a symbol? Especially since, as Wilson brings her own voice in and out of the structure of the text, so too does she move the symbol of the gun from specific representation to metaphorical movement (how the gun moves through the plot in synergy with the main characters and the added meaning in attains as it does this). It is fascinating how this technical innovation allows Ethel Wilson's characters to write the book even as she herself is taking the authorial liberty of intruding into the text such as in the above quote. The added relevance that I garner from this I can only describe as mythical or timeless. For this author, everyday actions are divine and their telling and reading is an act of myth. If I may suppose that Ethel Wilson has an existential streak, I will wager to guess that she would agree that we, in some way, are all writing our own lives even as life's circumstances write us.

The first indication in the story that the Swamp Angel is a symbol is after Nell Severance's encounter with Edward Vardoe. Nell's daughter, Hilda, enters the room just after she has dispensed with the irate Mr. Vardoe. Referring to her mother, Hilda remarks, "people should not be so powerful" (49). Her attention is then drawn to the Swamp Angel, laying in its customary place in the parlour, and the reader is given a glimpse of the contrasting functions this revolver plays for both Hilda and her mother (and perhaps also for the reader).

When Hilda sees her mother toying with gun, we are told, it induces a specific mood which is, in Hilda's thoughts, "an emanation from the Angel and from many years" (50). It is a mood of memory "often recalled" (50). The reader is then taken into a description of Hilda's memories as a child at school, memories in which she was taunted because her mother, Nell, was a juggler. As well, she remembers both her mother and father leaving her for long periods of time while they travelled. Unlike her, "the revolver went everywhere" (51). For Hilda the gun is a symbol of memory and anguish, while it also draws "the past into the present" (50). Therefore, through Hilda, we see that the Swamp Angel is a symbol for the relationship between Hilda and her mother, the relationship between the past and the present. Foreshadowed in the brief reverie described at this point, is the process whereby the Swamp Angel unites memory, imagination, and human relationship. In this way, the gun is, at this point, close to being a metaphor for love as Ethel Wilson sees it as operating both along lines of memory and time as well as the literal, immediate, and the concrete - the relevance of memory to the moment, both this moment in Hilda's life and this moment on the printed page. That is, the Swamp Angel declares a meaning beyond the concrete (memory) while it also clarifies this abstraction as it is relevant to the love Hilda has for her mother. The text states that Hilda "loved her mother dearly and hated her a little" (49).

As much as the Swamp angel bridges the past with the present it is also a symbol of that which hinders the reconciliation of the past to the present. At the end of chapter 10, it is clear that the gun is Hilda's silent gift to her mother because she does not let her mother know how much it makes her angry. Therefore, it is a meaningful symbol for Hilda but it is not a shared symbol. Something must happen in order of it to be so. In this way, the relationship between Hilda and Nell Severance subtly foreshadows that the gun, like the characters (and especially Maggie Lloyd) are to go though some sort of transition, a learning of how to make description (in terms of the assignation of value to symbol, time place or person) or sentiment relevant to one's self and one's life - the characters in Swamp Angel are learning how to love and the gun itself is a metaphor for this process, which for Ethel Wilson, appears to also be the growth of the awareness of this process as it resonates with the process of reading and writing. She is undoubtedly influenced by the post-war era in which she wrote, or has allowed herself to be so influenced.

Of the symbolic, the figurative, the literal and the mythical, Ethel Wilson is clearly in favour of the latter two. After a humiliating fall upon her front walkway in which she almost loses the Swamp Angel, Nell Severance declares "The Angel must go . . . because it is a symbol and too dear" (79). The gun, having become too vulnerable to loss or mutability, must go. In this way, the symbology of the gun is transferred to the person or even body of Mrs. Severance and, broadly speaking, to literary character. Ironically, the symbol that must go becomes, again, a metaphor for the human condition as it relates to human relationship, a symbol of human character.

Mrs. Severance obviously keeps the gun because it is an important part of her past as a juggler. The way she waves it in front of Edward Vardoe the night Maggie leaves him shows that it is a symbol of her power. That she has decided that it must go indicates that gun is not that which it symbolizes. It has become a concrete thing suggesting only vulnerability and the need to let go of the past. In Nell's words, when she fell on the sidewalk, "she who was private had lost all privacy" (79). She further states that "The terror was not in the fall, but in that instant when she had heard the word 'gun!'" (79). To further emphasize, Wilson adds (we might guess) that "She [Nell] had almost forgotten that the Angel was a gun" (79). This abrupt transfer to the literal mirrors many of the narrative transitions of the novel, the most obvious being the quick cuts in time and place that take play at many chapter beginnings. Here, though, we see an abrupt cut between the literal, the figurative and the symbolic nature of the Swamp Angel. This is a figurative description given the meaning Hilda attaches to the gun: the gun as it refers to memory and her relationship with Nell. It is also figurative because it makes us question what the "Angel" was or is. It is not just a gun because both Hilda and Nell see more meaning in it than that. On the other hand, it is just a gun because the shared past of Nell and Hilda as it has molded their relationship as mother and daughter supercedes the importance of the gun. That Nell is now becoming aware of this love ( or her ability to effect the relevance of the past or memory to the present circumstances of their life) is evidenced by the fact that she knows that the gun must also go "for some other reason" (79). As it turns out, Nell decides to contact Albert Cousins, future husband of Hilda Severance. The "other reason" also becomes figurative since it indicates a prescience of a theme of the entire novel; she also decides to send the Angel to Maggie.

Nell Severance's decision to send the Swamp Angel to Maggie is a pivotal moment in the story. It is Nell's one act of sentiment, but it is also a mythical act because it is extraordinarily relevant to what has happened in Maggie's life since she left Vancouver and travelled east to Three Loon Lake. Moving, as does the gun, between these two plot-lines, Maggie is a heroic figure in the sense that she has shown an incredible self-reliance and ability to adjust to a new environment. Nell Severance is now a symbol of strength from Maggie's past. By sending the gun to Maggie, Nell has preserved some permanence to her being; Nell has made a symbolic and literal sacrifice. Therefore, the symbolism of the gun is played down at this point (it can no longer be trusted as a symbol) while the heroism of person is played up in the characters of both Maggie and Nell. However, the process of this transition and the opportunity of learning about identity it affords is so abstract that the gun is still necessary, as a metaphor, to clarify Ethel Wilson's intent. Maggie may be free or becoming free from the past but we, with our knowledge of the circumstances exterior to Maggie's sense of reality, are not. That is, the author has created a temporal and thematical dissonance that can only be resolved by Maggie's quest for home, identity, and love, which now becomes both mythical and literal as it becomes symbolized by her natural and human environment, animal and human bodies/characters that surround and are a part of Three Loon Lake - her everyday experience becomes a nexus of past and plot that leaves us where we started, in the middle of time or plot or life with, like the Swamp Angel, our "own properties" and "small immortality" (156). What Ethel Wilson might like us to call our own authorial/metaphorical abilities to clarify reality, an ability that, like many of the characters, are often taken for granted.

Work Cited

Wilson, Ethel. Swamp Angel. Toronto, McCLelland and Stewart Ltd, 1962.