Crawford and
Gounod: Ambiguity and Irony in Malcoms Katie
By Robert Alan Burns
For more than seventy years,
Isabella Crawfords critics have continued to bring forward Tennysons idylls as
possible sources for structure, plot, and theme in Malcolms Katie.1 Crawfords lack of formal education and
the obvious influence of Tennyson on her style have led critics to the easy conclusion
that her most fully realized major work reflects the mind and art of a single
master. This simplisitc view not only distorts the relationship of Malcolms
Katie to Crawfords earlier work, but it also fails to take adequate notice of
the larger cultural, intellectual, and political contexts out of which the poem
arises. The themes of Malcolms Katie, which critics attempt to trace
in Tennysons idylls, are manifestly apparent in Crawfords earlier lyrical,
satirical, and narrative verse, much of which bears little stylistic resemblence to
Tennysons work. Although the Tennysonian medley-poem may suggest in broadest
outline the structure of Malcolms Katie, none of Tennysons idylls is
more than superficially similar in either plot or form to Crawfords
poem.
Interestingly, it is Dorothy Livesay, one of those most responsible for the habitual
linking of the names of Crawford and Tennyson, who has more than once suggested another,
non-literary model for the form of Malcolms Katie and Hugh and Ion. With
what is probably more poetic intuition than scholarly deliberation, Livesay detects in
Crawfords alternation of narrative and lyric passages the operatic interplay of
recitative and aria.2 The only
known poem in which Crawford makes use of a particular opera is At the Opera,
where she integrates a gala performance of Gounods Faust with the subject
and theme of her poem.3 Crawfords
subtle, indirect comparison and contrast between the characters of Marguerite and the
central figure of her poem indicate that the poet had at least read Michel Carrés
libretto. Since Gounods Mireille was at that time as popular as Faust,
it seems reasonable to speculate that if Crawford knew Faust, she probably knew Mireille.4 Within the context of a detailed examination
of the effects of ambiguity and irony in Malcolms Katie, this essay sets
forth an argument that Gounods Mireille is a principal source for the plot
in Crawfords poem. This essay also shows how Crawford adapted and modified
lyric and dramatic elements from Mireille to enhance the complexity, irony, and ambiguity
that help to make Malcolms Katie nineteenth-century English Canadas
richest, most controversial, long narrative poem. The plot of Mireille, a
lyrically pastoral work set in rural Provence, is nearly identical with that of Malcolms
Katie.
I
In the opera, Mireille (Katie),
the daughter of a wealthy farmer named Ramon (Malcolm), loves Vincent (Max), the son of a
poor laborer. After Mireille and Vincent have pledged their love to one another (Malcolms
Katie, Part One), a wealthy cattleman named Ourrais (Alfred) enters the scene and
declares his love for Mireille. Mireille rejects Ourrais, but Ramon promises to bring
his daughter to her senses. Vincents father then approaches Ramon to request
Mireilles hand for his son. When her lovers father is angrily rebuked,
Mireille declares that she will marry Vincent and no one else. At this point, having
promised each other to meet again, Mireille and Vincent are separated. The climax of
the action occurs in Le Val dEnfer. After an argument, Ourrais strikes
Vincent and, believing he has killed his rival, drowns while attempting to escape. In the
original version of the opera, Vincent, Ourrais, and Mireille all die; but Gounod and
Carré revised both the score and the libretto to suit the vanity of Madame Carvalho, who
sang the role of Mireille at Le Théatre Lyrique in 1864. In the revised
version, Vincent miraculously survives to be reunited with Mireille, whom he discovers at
the point of death after she has made a long and difficult pilgrimage across the Desert of
Crau to pray for Vincent at the Church of Les Saintes Maries. As Mireille
and Vincent are reunited, Ramon appears, is overcome with compassion, and acquiesces in
their marriage.
Few
changes would have been necessary for Crawford to adapt the plot of Mireille to
the requirements of Malcolms Katie. First, she would have reduced the
number of major characters to four, eliminating Vincents father and sister as well
as the witch Taven. In Malcolms Katie, the rival Alfred enters the
scene after Max has left for the west, and while Alfred is not as pleasing to
Malcolm as Ourrais is to Ramon, Malcolm does accept Alfred as a serious suitor for his
daughter. Max, like Vincent, is poor and therefore unsuitable to marry a rich
mans daughter. As Ramon says to Vincents father in Mireille:
Quoi, jaurai sans repos travaillé si
longtemps ,
Pour assurer la paix de mes vieux ans,
Et laissé quelque bien a ceux de ma famille,
Et puis ton fils maudit me volera ma fille . . .5
Both Ramon and Malcolm have
worked long and hard for their wealth, which Carré and Crawford describe in remarkably
similar terms:
Les blés murs couvent la plaine
Laire bientôt sera pleine
Des grains jaune comme lor
Le divin maître du monde
Force la terre féconde
A nous livrer son trésor . . . . (p. 22)
For Malcolm, as for Ramon, it is
in the nature of things for Le divin maître to transmute the harvest
into golden treasure:
.
. . those misty, peak-roofd barns
Leviathans rising from red seas of grain
Are full of ingots, shaped like grains of wheat.
His flocks have golden fleeces, and his herds
Have monarchs worshipful, as was the calf
Aaron calld from the furnace . . . .6
Adding the allusions to the
golden fleece, the worship of wealth by monarchs, and the golden calf expands Carrés
metaphor so that the analogy between the gold colour of the grain and gold-as-wealth takes
on sinister, ironic implications.
In Malcolms
Katie Gounods Val dEnfer and Desert of Crau merge in the
Canadian wilderness, seen by Malcolm as yon unco place and by Max as so
desolate as to be an unsuitable spot to call upon the name of God. Instead, in his
confused passion Max invokes Satan for a sign to murder Alfred.7 Unlike Ourrais, Alfred survives his
flight from his wilderness confrontation with his rival nearly to drown later in his
attempt at murder-suicide with Katie. Like Vincent, Max miraculously survives, and
Crawford only slightly modifies Gounod when she allows Max to arrive at the last minute to
save both Katie and Alfred. In the final scene the presence of the child
bearing Alfreds name constitutes another minor variation from Gounods plot.
Like
musical comedy today, opera in the nineteenth century attracted a widely diversified
audience. If Mireille may be said to be a principal source for Malcolms
Katie, then Crawfords poem may represent an attempt to utilize a popular,
non-literary medium as a basis for a new poetic form in which narrative, dramatic, and
lyric materials could be presented to an expanded popular audience. The failure of Malcolms
Katie to achieve wide readership in the nineteenth century may have owed more to the
circumstances of its publication than to any fault inherent in the poem. Printed
privately under the supervision of a female neophyte in an industry dominated by
experienced men of business, Old Spookses Pass hardly could have done
better if it had been issued gilt-edged in leather binding. The problems of
distribution alone must have been enormous.
II
Among Crawfords recent
critics there continues to be considerable disagreement as to what Malcolms
Katie really is, and, as might be expected, this disagreement has contributed to a
lack of consensus on the poems literary merit. At mid-century A.J.M. Smith
praised Crawfords wilderness poems for vigor and for a boldness or
imagery unique in nineteenth-century Canadian poetry. In Malcolms
Katie, he wrote, . . . the spirit of the northern woods has passed into
the imagery and the rhythm of the verse. At about the same time, E.K. Brown
saw in the poem the best image a poet has given us of Canadian living in the years
following Confederation. Some fifteen years later, R.E. Rashley was less positive,
calling the poem a blind alley of experiment in style. More recently, Robin
Mathews has praised Malcolms Katie for its nationalism and Kenneth Hughes
has found its Marxism profound. Frank Bessai, one of Crawfords more sympathetic
readers, judges Malcolms Katie to be a failure . . . due in no small
part to the expectations which we ordinarily bring to narrative poetry in the nineteenth
century.8 Apparently, the
lack of consensus on Malcolms Katie results as much from the
predispositions of the critics as from the poems intractability to standard critical
approaches.
If
Crawford was attempting to develop a new poetic form in Malcolms Katie, an
inductive, exploratory critical method would seem to be the most likely route to discovery
and illumination. Roy Daniells and D.M.R. Bentley have suggested similar critical
approaches that respond to the unique character of Crawfords verse rather than
impose preconceived notions and values on the work.9 Daniells
delineates his method in a single, perspicacious comment: her poems . . . tend to
invite two readings a straightforward and an esoteric with very different
results. Dismissing the surface text of the poem as ridiculous, Daniells sees real
importance in the poems ability to pull raw landscape into an interior world
of passion and fulfillment.10
The significance of Daniells approach for the present discussion is that it suggests
a double reading of Crawfords poem; unfortunately, it may also lead the critic to
endorse one reading at the expense of the other, rather than to ascertain what, if any,
are the relationships between the surface text of the poem and its more serious, ironical,
and ambiguous subtext. D.M.R. Bentley speculates that the two readings invited by
Crawfords verse arise from the poets conscious desire to appeal simultaneously
to two different audiences:
In what way did her assumed or
actual audience and format modify the form, content, and even (or especially) the title of
poems . . .? Was the aim of the double title of Malcolms Katie: A Love
Story both to attract the simple-mindedly romantic reader and to alert a fit
audience . . . though few to the ironical possibilities of the poem, to the fact
that, to the end, little Katie remains daddys girl?11
Although Bentleys view of
the poem as a simultaneous appeal to opposite audiences apparently endorses one level of
meaning as more authentic or consequential, we shall see that the numerous
interpenetrations between the surface and subtext make both levels necessary for the full
emergence of the poems metaphysical centre.
Among
those who have judged Malcolms Katie a failure, perhaps the most emphatic
has been Desmond Pacey. Paceys remarks reveal the difficulties that can arise
when a critic confines himself to a straightforward reading of the poem:
Malcolms Katie . .
. conducts a group of pasteboard characters through a wildly improbable sequence of
events. Violent deaths and fortuitous rescues occur on almost every page, and the
dialogue is stilted and unnatural.12
In light of Paceys
modernist perspective, some of his objections are understandable. With the exception
of Alfred, all of the characters are one-dimensional; the speech is declamatory, and the
action is melodramatic. All of these elements reflect the poems operatic
origins. But no one dies in Malcolms Katie, violently or otherwise,
and there are exactly two fortuitous rescues (three, if we count separately
Maxs rescues of Katie and Alfred) in a poem of over 1,300 lines. Since it is
not likely that Pacey would purposely distort the truth, his inaccurate description of Malcolms
Katie, persisting through the second revised and enlarged edition of Creative
Writing in Canada, may indicate his unconscious reaction to something in the
poem. The main plot of the poem may be readily summarized: true love triumphs over
enormous difficulties; nation-building continues; everyone becomes rich and lives happily
ever after. This is Daniells straightforward reading, the stuff of popular
romance. Paceys comments seem to reflect simultaneously his conscious
rejection of this surface text and his unconscious reaction to the subtext, which presents
a vastly different view of the world. Nearly a third of Malcolms Katie over
four hundred of the roughly 1,300 lines is saturated with highly charged, intensely
kinetic imagery, evoking a vibrant, restlessly animate landscape that becomes devastated
by mankinds violence. This could be the turbulence that Pacey senses
on almost every page.
Malcolms Katie becomes more amenable to explication to the critic who uses
Daniells and Bentley as points of departure, taking into account the milieu in which the
poem was written, its implied audiences, and Crawfords earlier work. Among the
more persistent fictions obscuring the poets life and work is a sentimental view of
Crawford as a reclusive young genius who, although subjected to poverty and repeated
deaths in her family, exhibited in Malcolms Katie and other poems an
irrepressible spirit of optimism. This attractive portrait, popular among critics
and biographers, is reinforced by two false notions: first, that Crawford was all but
unknown as a writer during her lifetime and, second, that Malcolms Katie was
the product of her young womanhood. The myth of Crawfords obscurity was
originally perpetrated by Ethelwyn Wetherald, W.D. Lighthall, and Hector Charlesworth and
has been passed along without critical scrutiny by A.J.M. Smith and Desmond Pacey.13 If they can be taken at face value,
however, Crawfords obituaries in the Evening Telegram, The Globe, The
Week, and Arcturus indicate that the poet enjoyed considerable recognition
in her home city.14 Furthermore, her
death notice in Frank Leslies Illustrated Weekly Newspaper, a very popular
weekly among American middle-class women, suggests that she had attracted an international
following. Printed in the Death Roll of the Week on February 18, 1887,
the item reads as follows: February 14th [sic] in Toronto, Canada, Isabella
Valancy Crawford, the well-known authoress. More than three years before she
died, Crawford had been well enough known for Leslies to use her name to advertise a
forthcoming double holiday issue of the paper.15
Since the evidence clearly indicates that Crawford was known in Canada, well-known in the
United States, and well-reviewed in Britain, it seems reasonable to disregard the myth of
her obscurity.16
The
tradition that assigns the writing of Malcolms Katie to Crawfords
youth (25 years old or younger) originated in a unsubstantiated assertion by Maud Miller
Wilson that was handed on by John Garvin and has been kept current by Dorothy Livesay,
Catherine Ross, and James Johnson.17
If, as Kenneth Hughes avers, Malcolms Katie is the poetic expression
of MacDonalds National Policy, the poem could not have been written before the
election year of 1878.18 It is
likely that the poem was written after August, 1879, for Maxs radical portrait of
Commerce is an elaboration of the one adumbrated in War.19 Moreover, a case can be made for placing
the completion date of Malcolms Katie after October, 1883. Textual
evidence proves that Crawford wrote Hugh and Ion by incorporating previously
published lyrics into the narrative text.20 Similarly,
in Gisli, the Chieftain, published in Old Spookses Pass in
1884, several lines are added to the original newspaper version of The Song of the
Arrow to incorporate the lyric into the text of the longer poem. If Crawford
followed the same procedure in Malcolms Katie, then the poem was not
finished before June 1, 1883, the date upon which The Blue Forget-me-not, a
lyric from Part Five of Malcolms Katie, was published in the Toronto Evening
Telegram. Since The Song of the Arrow appeared in the same paper on
October 9, 1883, it appears that Crawford may have been working on Gisli, the
Chieftain and Malcolms Katie at about the same time. From the
general level of artistic maturity, it seems fair to conjecture that all four of
Crawfords published longer narratives, Malcolms Katie, Gisli,
the Chieftain, The Helot, and Old Spookses Pass, were
written in the two-year period immediately preceding their publication. In any
case, there is no reason to belive that Malcolms Katie was written before
1878, at which time Crawfords writing career was well underway.
At
twenty-eight Crawford was a tough-minded professional, supporting herself and her mother
by writing popular romances. By Victorian standards she was already advanced into
spinsterhood, and so in order to make her living, she became a master of romantic
illusion, which she served up copiously in short stories and serial installments to the
magazine-and-newspaper-reading publics of the United States and Canada. Her serial
novels were published in Canadian newspapers such as the Toronto Evening Globe and
The Fireside Weekly, and her stories are known to have appeared in The
Popular Monthly, Frank Leslies Illustrated Weekly Newspaper, and St.
Nicholas, the latter three of which were American publications.21 Since Crawford claimed to have
written largely for the American press, it is reasonable to suspect that much
of her published work remains undiscovered in nineteenth-century magazines and newspapers.22
Crawford
emerges from the stark, fragmentary record of her life as the embodiment of the
artist-as-survivor, trudging doggedly from one editorial office to another, rejected first
by The Week and then by Arcturus. After being brushed aside by
editor Charles G.D. Roberts, she showed her practical determination by returning to the
offices of The Week following Roberts resignation from the
magazine. Apparently, on her second visit, she was informed by Mrs. Harrison that The
Week did not pay for poetry.23 True
to her professional attitude, Crawford did not give her work away. And Crawford was
both a professional romance writer and a serious poet. Since she depended on her
writing for her living, she was forced to publish her poetry where she would be paid for
it in the daily and weekly newspapers. Here, she maintained her artistic
integrity by indirection, double-entendre, and irony. In 1885, using such
devices of literary concealment, she was able to write immensely popular verse praising
the courage of volunteer soldiers, battlefield nurses, and medical corpsmen while
indirectly criticizing the campaign to suppress the Metis in the Northwest. The
two readings identified by Daniells, then, are conscious effects of
simultaneous presentation, as conscious in Malcolms Katie as in The
Red Cross Corps, The Gallant Lads in Green, and Nurse
Miller. As Bentley suggests, Malcolms Katie is designed to appeal
simultaneously to two diametrically opposite audiences. On the vulgar level the poem
presents a popular romance, contrived to attract a wide readership so that the
tough-minded professional could make money. On the serious level irony and ambiguity
complicate and often contradict the surface text so that Crawfords more serious
readers are able to witness the destruction that may be wrought in the names of love and
National Policy. By the time the serious reader has completed an examination of
Crawfords often disturbing and bleak vision, the subtitle of Malcolms
Katie has taken on almost unbearably ironic implications. For from the first
line to the last, Crawfords poem encourages ambiguous and ironic reading.
III
For readers familiar with
Crawfords artistic development, the first four lines of Malcolms Katie exhibit
a complex array of countervailing impulses:
Max placd a ring on little Katies
hand,
A silver ring that he had beaten out
From that same sacred coin first well-prizd wage
For boyish labour, kept thro many years. 24
On the romantic surface there is
here the sentimental appeal of the gift that has been crafted by the giver himself, an
effect enhanced by the more obvious implications of the adjective sacred as
well as by a possible echo of the beaten gold in Donnes A Valediction
Forbidding Mourning. Obviously, Max is ambitious, hardworking, frugal, and
religious in his devotion to Katie. Yet there is nothing of the ethereal delicacy of
Donnes gold to ayery thinnesse beate in the harsh, almost brutal, image
of the ring that he had beaten out. The hammer foreshadows the axe.
Furthermore, Maxs regard of the coin as sacred suggests that the
foundation of his sense of values may be similar to the suitors in A
Wooing, where love is debased to the level of the marketplace. Crawfords
cynically satirical treatment of courtship in A Wooing provides revealing
correspondences with Part One of Malcolms Katie.25
Beneath
the romance of Maxs having engraved his and Katies first initials in the
silver of the ring in such a way,/ That M. is part of K., and K. of
M., Crawford seems to imply that money compromises the basis of the bond that
holds Katie and Max together a pledge redeemable in cash and property as soon as
Max has hacked his fortune out of the wilderness.26 As
though aware of the ambiguous significance of the ring, Max inveigles reassurances from
Katie in order to assay the mettle of her feelings:
Yet tell me, dear, will such a prophecy
Not hurt you sometimes when I am away?
Will you not seek, keen-eyd for some small break
In those deep lines to part the K. and M.
for you. . . . (p. 40)
Owing perhaps to her eagerness to
placate Maxs anxiety, Katies elaborate response is unconsciously equivocal:
If hearts are flowrs, I know that
flowrs can root
Bud, blossom, die all in the same lovd soil,
They do so in my garden. If I am a bud
And only feel unfoldment feebly stir
Within my leaves; wait patiently; some June,
Ill blush a full-blown rose, and queen it, dear,
In your lovd garden. (p. 41)
Hearts, Katies trite
metonymy for love, may Bud, blossom, die. To this note of transience,
Katie unintentionally and ironically adds a hint of uncertainty as she attempts to
characterize the potential growth in her feelings for Max. Consequently, Max replies
that he is not altogether satisfied with Katies answer to his questions: Yes
crescent-wise but not to round, full moon.
There is
a two-fold irony in the running together of the letters in the engraving of the
ring. Katies father has the same initials as her fiancee, and Malcolms
wealth acts simultaneously as a bond between father and daughter and as an obstacle to be
surmounted by the lovers. The situation is presented straightforwardly in Mireille,
where Vincents father shouts at Ramon: Garde ton trésor, vieil
avare,/ Cest ton orgueil qui les sépare.27 Katies position is far more
ambiguous than that of Mireille, for it is the future wealth represented by the ring that
will enable Maxs claims on Katie to supersede those of Malcolm. The ambiguity
of Katies position is underlined with subtle irony by her preference for the unique
design of Maxs engraving over the more traditional double hearts motif.
No one is
more sensitive to, or covetous of, Malcolms orgueil than is Max, whose
regard for the outward and visible signs of wealth, particularly Malcolms wealth, is
everywhere apparent in his speech. Max perceives and describes Malcolms
husbandry of nature in the imagery of one who dreams of treasure. Looking at a
hillside field next to a lake, he sees a lover king":
In cloth of gold, gone from his bride and queen
And yet delayed because her silver locks
Catch in his gilden fringes. . . . (p 42)
With obvious envy, Max imputes
the Midas touch to Malcolm, whose barns contain not grain but ingots, whose flocks are
fleeced in gold and whose herds provoke worship like the calf/ Aaron calld
from the furnace. The allusion to Aarons furnace summons up the
iconography of Moloch, in which Crawford employed similar imagery with
relentless irony.28
Maxs
envy of Malcolm is not confined to possessions but comprehends the older mans
accomplishments as well. When Katie points out that Malcolm has worked for all that
he owns, Max concedes, revelling in the violent details of what he imagines Malcolms
battle with the wilderness to have been like:
They drew the ripping beak through knotted sod,
Thro tortuous lanes of blackend, smoking stumps;
And past great flaming brush heaps, sending out
Fierce summers, beating on their swollen brows. (p 42)
This is the first glimpse that
Crawford gives her readers of the ruined landscape hidden beneath a screen of romantic
illusion throughout the poem. As a pioneer himself, Max describes Malcolms
hot conflict with the soil as less glorious but more honourable than the
incursions of Commerce, with her housewife foot upon/ Colossal bridge of
slaughterd savages, in collusion with Church and imperial state, despoiling
and exploiting natural resources and aboriginal peoples: In one sly, mighty hand her
reeking sword;/ And in the other all the woven cheats/ From her dishonest looms (p.
43). However much Max insists upon the distinction between chopping down trees and
cutting down savages, his description of the previous generation of pioneers
as warriors of the Axe to whom accrue outspreading circles of increasing
gold convinces the serious reader that, for Crawford, the sword and the axe are
one. The last line of the narrative text in Part One is Katies prayer,
God speed the axe!", a prayer that seems at once an innocent expression of a
young womans longing and an ironic conjuring of a blighted landscape.
(It is
worth noticing that Maxs position in relation to Malcolm can be seen as analogous
with that of John A. MacDonalds Canada to the imperial monarchy that had settled
British North America in previous generations. Even though the goal of National
Policy was to build a nation, it should be remembered that MacDonald considered himself a
British subject, whose government provided Canadians with the political advantages of a
parliamentary monarchy extending from England. Just as Max shares Malcolms
values and hopes to emulate the older mans achievements, so MacDonald sought to
enlarge the Dominion by the imposition on the west of a preconceived pattern of settlement
and development. In Malcolms Katie, Max may be seen to embody the
vanguard of pioneering activity resulting from the implementation of National Policy.)
Maxs
perception of the settled landscape in terms of wealth reflects the Scots Calvinism of his
background, which, in the nineteenth century, equated natural with fallen and
motivated the puritanical settler to destroy the wilderness and its inhabitants, making
way for the building of a new Earthly Paradise and the concomitant acquisition of private
wealth, the outward sign of Election. The narrative text of Part One ends with Max
and Katie putting the final touches on their plans, which specify in what sounds like
contractual terms what each of them will do to achieve their common goal. As Katie
plies Malcolm with her kisses, so Max will ply the bush with his axe.
Katies
God speed the axe! is followed immediately by a romantic love-lyric, whose
positioning reinforces its ambiguous content. A comparison of the lyric with its
counterpart in Mireille illuminates the ironic use to which Crawford put this and
other lyrical sequences occurring in the first five parts of Malcolms Katie. Mireilles
first arriette is a waltz-song added to the first-act score to show off Madame
Carvahlos vocal brilliance. Entitled O légère hirondelle,
the song is Mireilles apostrophe to a swallow to carry her message of love to
Vincent.
O légère hirondelle, méssagère fidèle ,
Vers mon ami vole gaiment
Et conte-lui mon doux tourment.
Parle-lui pour moi-même,
Et dis-lui que je laime!
Vincent peut croire à mon serment!
Vole, vole gaiment!
This song occurs at the beginning
of Act One, serving to introduce the love-interest and to bring the lovers
together. Like the swallow, the song itself acts as a vehicle of communication
between Mireille and Vincent. In Part One of Malcolms Katie, Katie
and Max are already together, about to venture forth upon an enterprise that, while it
will separate them temporarily, will ultimately pay considerable dividends for their
investments of time and effort.
In the
nineteenth century the name hirondelle was applied to small steam-driven river
boats, perhaps of the same sort that plied the Otonabee River near Crawfords home in
Peterborough. Given the poets knowledge of French, a transition from O
légère hirondelle (O light swallow or O light river
boat") to the more appropriately Canadian image of O light canoe should
have been natural and easy.
O light canoe, where dost thou glide?
Below thee gleams no silverd tide,
But concave heavens chiefest pride.
Above thee burns Eves rosy bar;
Below thee throbs her darling star;
Deep neath thy keel her round worlds are!
Above, below, O sweet surprise,
To gladden happy lovers eyes;
No earth, no wave all jewelld skies! (pp. 44-5)
In O légère
hirondelle the swallow is a means by which a message is to be carried to a
destination specified in the second line of the song. In O light canoe a
vehicle of comrnunication becomes a vessel of communion, an image of containment whose
destination is uncertain: where dost thou glide?" The very medium through
which the canoe moves is ambiguous (no silverd tide") and illusory
(No earth, no wave all jewelld skies!). To Max and Katie the
canoe behaves more like the bird than the boat, floating aimlessly through the skies, its
passengers experiencing a delightfully confused state of romantic illusion that will
continue for Max throughout the remaining six parts of the poem.30
Part Two
of Malcolms Katie brings Max to the convergence of the Canadian forest
wilderness and the great western prairie. There he will try his axe on the virgin
timber covering the slopes where he plans to build his homestead. Crawford dramatized
the destruction of the forests in a poem entitled The Ghosts of the Trees,
where all of nature recoils at the devastation.
The silver fangs of the might axe,
Bit to the blood our giant boles
It smote our breasts and smote our backs,
Thunderd the front-cleard leaves
As sped the fire,
The whirl and the flame of the scarlet leaves,
With strong desire
Leaped to the air our captive souls.31
The poem is narrated by the trees
themselves or, more properly, by their newly released souls, which report the surprise
expressed by the surrounding air that the trees should possess spiritual, as well as
corporeal, natures:
While down our corpses thunderd
The air at our strong souls gazed and wondered;
And cried to us, Ye
Are full of all mystery to me! (p 130)
Similar sentiments are registered
on behalf of the animal kingdom by the personified eagle, who evokes his airborne
point-of-view in Crawfords typically arresting figurative manner:
I downward swept, beguild
By the close-set forest gilded and spread
A sea for the lordly tread
Of a Gods war-ship
I broke its leafy surf with my breast;
My iron lip
I dippd in the cool of each whispering crest;
From my leafy steeps,
I saw in my deeps
Red coral the flame-necked oriole
But never the stir of a soul
Heard I in ye
Great is the mystery! (pp. 131-132)
As the eagle represents the
animal kingdom, so the river symbolizes the range of power and substance in the physical
environment, stunned by the revelations of the axe. After a ninety-two-line
Whitmanesque catalogue of the effects of the waters on the physical world, the river adds
its own note of astonishment to those of the air and the eagle:
I
listning heard
The soft-songd bird;
The beetle about thy boles.
The calling breeze
In thy crests, O Trees
Never the voices of souls! (p. 135)
Crawfords ability to
animate the landscape has become a commonplace in the discussion of her work. Using
personification and intensely verbal imagery, she keeps the features of the physical
universe in constant motion, often as much a part of the dramatic foreground as her more
naturally animate human characters.32 The
Ghosts of the Trees sets forth the view that the entire universe is both physically
and spiritually alive, even though its spiritual character may become apparent only after
its corporeal destruction. To Crawford, then, the cutting down of the forests may
have seemed an act of murder on a massive scale. In both The Ghosts of the
Trees and Malcolms Katie, the poet seems purposely to imbue
the landscape with energy, vitality, and diversity to enhance the tragic effect of its
ruin. More than two-thirds of the narrative text in Part Two of Malcolms
Katie 240 of 358 lines is devoted to the evocation of the immense
vitality of the Canadian wilderness. In the last third of the narrative text, Max
Gordon eradicates that vitality.
Borrowing
the figure of the South Wind from Longfellows borrowed Ojibway pantheon, Crawford
opens Part Two by personifying the beginning of autumn at the time of the first
frost. After fourteen lines the poet temporarily sets aside the personification to
allow for more natural sources of movement to animate the landscape, in this case a
prairie sunrise rendered in a series of progressively metamorphic images modulated through
fifteen decasyllabic lines. Here, as elsewhere, the poets source may be The
Backwoods of Canada, a work whose author was known personally to Crawford during the
time that they both lived in Lakefield. Mrs. Traills original describes the
first appearance of a uniquely Canadian landscape to the eye of a newly arrived European:
Sometimes the highlands are
suddenly enveloped in dense clouds of mist, which are in constant motion, rolling along in
shadowy billows, now tinted with rosy light, now white and fleecy, or bright as silver, as
they catch the sunbeams. So rapid are the changes that take place in this fog-bank,
that perhaps the next time I raise my eyes I behold the scene changed as if by
magic. The misty curtain is drawn up, as if by invisible hands, and the wild, wooded
mountains partially revealed, with their bold rocky shores and sweeping bays.33
Crawfords version transfers
the scene from the Saint Lawrence River valley to the Canadian prairie, superimposing the
imagery of waves, mist, and surf onto a vast ocean of bison:
At morn the sharp breath of night arose
From the wide prairies, in deep struggling seas,
In rolling breakers bursting to the sky
In tumbling surfs, all yellowd faintly thro
With the low sun in mad, conflicting crests
Voicd with low thunder from the hairy throats
Of the mist-buried herds; and for a man
To stand amid the cloudy roll and moil
The phantom waters breaking overhead
Shades of vexd billows bursting on his breast
Torn caves of mist walld with sudden gold,
Reseald as swift as seen broad, shaggy fronts,
Fire-eyd and tossing on impatient horns
The wave impalpable was but to think
A dream of phantoms held him as he stood. (pp. 45-46)
Through the dynamic fusion of
prairie mist, bison herd, and sunrise, Crawfords poetic method transforms a
pleasantly stirring scene into an explosion of surreal movement wherein the eye of the
observer is never allowed to rest on a single, stationary feature of the
terrain. Instead, the viewer witnesses a constantly changing pattern of shape and
colour, highlighted by sound and movement from the mist-buried
herds. These lines are usually quoted to illustrate the mythopoeic character of
Crawfords verse, and they certainly do reveal the poets ability to combine
European and North American elements in such a way as to force the reader to look at
something in a new way, to see, in effect, what a prairie sunrise does, rather
than what it is. The seemingly modernistic quality of the sequence arises
out of the way the poet handles movement. More than any of her older or younger
contemporaries, Crawford employs verbal imagery to generate, modulate, and expand
metaphor. Here, in just fifteen lines of blank verse, she utilizes twenty-three
verbs, verbal modifiers, and nouns derived from verbs to evoke unceasing motion
accompanied by vivid changes in shape and colour.
Following
the prairie dawn sequence, Crawford turns her readers eye to the forest in Indian
summer, where she reverts to Ojibway myth to personify the forces of nature. Again,
she alternates personification with natural animation to dramatize the change of colour in
the autumn foliage and to describe the effects of frost and cold in the encroachment of
winter.
Into the
fullness of the wilderness autumn strides the impercipient Max, and in twelve short lines
the labourer and lover blithely chops down the tallest and most ancient trunk
in the forest. Max is assisted by a half-breed lad, cheerfully but unwittingly
helping to bring his people to a pass similar to that of the mossy king of all the
woody tribes. In this almost malicious application of Tennysonian periphrasis,
Crawford appears to link the fates of the boy, his people, and the forest. By
personifying both the individual tree and the forest as a whole, the poet intensifies the
effect of the violence with which the lover attacks the wilderness:
. . . the bright axe cleavd moon-like
thro the air,
Waking strange thunders, rousing echoes linkd
From the full, lion-throated roar, to sighs
Stealing on dove-wings thro the distant aisles.
Swift fell the axe, swift followd roar on roar,
Till the bare woodland bellowed in its rage
As the first-slain toppled to his fall.
O King of Desolation, art thou dead? (p. 50)
To Max the wilderness is
Desolation, fallen and worthless, to be burned clean to make way for the building of the
New Eden. As she described the destructive effects of the axe and slash-fire,
Crawford may have remembered Mrs. Traills bitter observations for the previous
generation:
. . . the axe of the chopper
relentlessly levels all before him. Man appears to contend with the trees of the
forest as though they were his most obnoxious enemies; for he spares neither the young
sapling in its greenness nor the ancient trunk in its lofty pride; he wages war against
the forest with fire and steel.34
Throughout the remainder of Part
Two, Crawford presents the stark contrast between Maxs idealized dreams and the
reality of their fulfillment. Now that Max has begun the work of transforming the
landscape, he can experience first-hand the soldierly exhilaration that he had earlier
attributed to Malcolm in describing the older mans hot conflict with the
soil":
Soon the great heaps of brush were builded high,
And like a victor, Max made pause to clear
His battle-field, high strewn with tangld dead.
Then roard the crackling mountains, and their fires
Met in high heaven, clasping flame with flame.
The thin winds swept a cosmos of red sparks
Across the bleak, midnight sky; and the sun
Walkd pale behind the resinous, black smoke.
And Max card little for the blotted sun,
And nothing for the startld outshone stars. . . . (p. 51)
Obsessed by his ideal of love,
Max has blotted out the sun and stars, traditional sources of vitality and
aspiration. At this point Crawford introduces the cosmic daffodil, meant, I believe,
to be an incongruous, outrageously excessive image, which is appropriate and ironic as an
embodiment of Maxs idée fixe:
For love, once set within a lovers breast,
Has its own Sun its own peculiar sky,
All one great daffodil on which do lie
The sun, the moon, the stars all seen at once,
And never setting; but all shining straight
Into the faces of the trinity,
The one belovd, the lover, and sweet love!35
It is probably not accidental
that Crawford uses the word peculiar to characterize the daffodil sky and its
omnipresent light of love, greater than all of the natural sources of light, shining
directly Into the faces of the trinity, blinding it to the surrounding
devastation. In The Roman Rose-Seller, Crawford mentions the
daffodil that blows all about the earth.36 The
daffodil is an import from Europe and, as such, in the context of Malcolms Katie,
becomes an appropriate symbol for the pervasive influence of European culture and the
British Empire as foreign and colonial as the preconceived sense of order that Max
imposes with fire and steel upon the North American wilderness.
Crawford
frames the illusion of the daffodil sequence with the reality of the ruined
landscape. The next line is simple and declarative: It was not all his own, the
axe-stirrd waste. Along with Max, National Policy has attracted to the west an
array of failures and social misfits, whose children quickly learn to emulate the violent
behaviour of their parents:
So
shanties grew
Other than his amid the blackend stumps;
And children ran with twigs and leaves
And flung them, shouting, on the forest pyres,
Where burnd the forest kings. . . . (p. 52)
On the heels of the lean weaver
and the pallid clerk come smooth-coated men, men of commerce and industry, who
add the power of advanced technology to the work of the axe and the
slash-fire. Crawfords repeated criticism of business and industry provides a
background against which to examine the process of industrial expansion as it is
dramatized in Malcolms Katie.
. . . mills to crush the quartz of wealthy hills;
And mills to saw the great, wide-armd trees;
And mills to grind the singing streams of grain;
And with such busy clamour mingled still
The throbbing music of the bold, bright Axe
The steel tongue of the Present and the wail
Of falling forests. . . . (pp. 52-53)
In this obviously equivocal
celebration of progress in the building of the new nation, the mechanized violence of the
verbs crush, saw, and grind is contrasted dramatically
with the natural fullness and vitality of wealthy hills, wide-armd
trees, and singing streams of grain. By substituting arms for limbs
of trees, Crawford provides a measure of cruelty to the lumber-saw, since, blended with
the clamour of industry and the throbbing of the axe, one may yet
detect the wail of dying forests.
The final
narrative sequence of Part Two contrasts Maxs dreams of his future with Katie and
the present bleak reality. There, he tells his neighbors, shall be
our home / On yonder slope, with vine leaves about the door!" The last
two lines of the narrative supply an ironic commentary on Maxs effusiveness:
And the black slope all bristling with
burnd stumps
Was known amongst them all as Maxs House.
Crawford follows this pointed
irony with what has become one of her most famous lyrics. The long and continuing
popularity of O, Love builds on the azure sea suggests that, if it had been
given a chance, Crawfords attempt at simultaneous presentation to popular and
serious audiences might well have succeeded; for, of all the lyrics in Malcolms
Katie, this one responds most fully to Roy Daniells two readings.
O, Love builds on the azure sea,
And Love builds on the golden sand;
And Love builds on the rose-wingd cloud,
And sometimes Love builds on the land.
O, if Love build on sparkling sea
And if Love build on golden strand
And if Love build on rosy cloud
To Love these are the solid land.
O, Love will build his lily walls,
And Love his pearly roof will rear,
On cloud or land, or mist or sea
Loves solid land is everywhere! (pp. 53-4)
The double entendre of
this poem is apparent on the face of it. Straightforwardly, the lyric says that love
needs no support from the outside; it is the self-sustaining vision of the
daffodil-trinity. The parallel ironic reading indicates that love so deludes the lovers
that they are unable to discriminate among such features of their surroundings as cloud,
mist, air, land, sea, or sand. Love is an illusion with lily walls and
pearly roof whose solid land is everywhere. The reader is
left to attempt to reconcile the parallel readings, and there is no reason to believe that
Crawford preferred the first over the second.
In Part
Three Crawford introduces Malcolm and Alfred, both of whom exhibit complexity and
ambiguity. Malcolm Graeme is an exemplar of success through hard work, self-discipline,
and faith. In late middle-age he is a man in whose character opposing elements
complement, rather than contradict, one another. Reflective and enterprising by
turns, Malcolms thought alternates between reminiscences on past accomplishments and
plans for the near future, a process in which he involves Katie:
His seldom speech ran thus two diffrent
ways:
When I was but a laddie thus I did;
Or, Katie, in the Fall Ill see to build
Such fences or such sheds about the place;
And next year, please the Lord, another barn. (pp. 54-55)
To Max Gordon the taciturn
Malcolm seems an immensely forbidding presence, mighty . . . Self-hewn from rock,
remaining rock through all (p. 42). While Katie uses similar imagery to
describe her fathers strength of will, she realizes, as Max does not, that
Malcolms grim, grey, somewhat stern exterior camouflages a doting parent
who has provided his daughter with the benefits of education from city schools
[where she] had learnd the city ways. In addition to yielding to Katie
the sovereignty of the household wherein she wields her sceptre . . . queenly,
Malcolm has taught his daughter the principles of farm management.
And Malcolm took her through his mighty fields,
And taught her lore about the changing crops;
And how to see a handsome furrow ploughd;
And how to choose the cattle for the mart;
And how to know a fair days work when done;
And when to plant young orchards; for he said,
God sent a lassie, but I need a son
Bethankit for His mercies all the same. (p. 55)
Because of her city education,
her experience in housekeeping, and her practical training in running the farm, Katie
would seem to be ideally suited to become the wife of a pioneer who could fill the place
of the son that Malcolm feels he needs. Katie wants Max to become that filial
surrogate, but she understands and shares enough of her fathers intransigence not to
broach the matter prematurely. Katie is willing to wait for Max to earn her hand by
his toiling alone for years to prepare a suitable home for a woman who has been nurtured
in wealth and comfort. Even though she may burst spontaneously into song in praise of
true love, she is apparently unwilling to forsake her comfortable position in her
fathers household for the rigours of the unsettled west. And while she has
promised to do her part by softening her fathers resistance to their marriage, it is
clear that Katies is by far the easier half of their lovers bargain, a pledge
that she pursues none too assiduously:
.
. . she had too much
Of the firm will of Malcolm in her soul
To think of shaking that deep-rooted rock
But hopd the crystal current of his love
For his one child, increasing day by day,
Might fret with silver lip, until it wore
Such channels thro the rock, that some slight stroke
Of circumstance might crumble down the stone. (p 56)
Katies patient hope that
the current of his love will eventually bring Malcolm around to her
point-of-view is confidently based on her frequent success in manipulating her
fathers affection. In Part One, when Max asks her how she will move her father,
Katie replies, Ill kiss him and keep still that way is sure . . . I
have often tried (p. 44). Time works in Katies favour, for while her
father grows more doting, Max has sufficient opportunity to prove himself worthy to join
the family as husband and son-in-law. In the meantime, while Max chops away at the
wilderness, Katie may amuse herself with her new suitor, who, although encouraged by
neither Katie nor her father, continues to enjoy Malcolms hospitality and his
daughters company.
Crawfords
initial portrayal of the suitor Alfred suggests that the poet might not have altogether
shared the generally negative opinion of him held by her critics, whose descriptions of
Alfreds character range from a stereotypical villain of a melodrama to a dark
satanic force . . . the antithesis of all that is truly human.37 Between these extremes, critical
portraits of Alfred exhibit a gamut of metaphysical, moral, political, and economic
peccability. To one commentator he is the Angel of Death . . . anti-love and
anti-progress.38 Another
sees him as a crafty counsellor, an atheist, and a sensualist,39 while a third perceives in Alfred the
allegorical embodiment of the evils of capitalism.40 Frequent repetition by critics of epithets such as
rapist, sensualist, devil, satanic, and
villain has the effect of reducing Alfreds character to an aggregate of
metaphysical and moral simples and, moreover, encourages facile, superficial judgments
over close examination of Crawfords text.
Alfred is
a complex mixture of obliquity and virtue, and, when she introduces him, Crawford puts
especial emphasis on his attractiveness moral as well as sexual:
.
. . the azure eyes
And Saxon-gilded locks the fair, clear face,
And stalwart form that most women love.
And the jewels of some virtues set
On his broad brow. With fires within his soul
He had the wizard skill to fetter down
To that mere pink, poetic, nameless glow,
That need not fright a flake of snow away
But if unloosd could melt an adverse rock
Marrowd with iron, frowning in his way. (p. 56)
The details of Alfreds
physical appearance imply the opposite of villainy. He is blond, handsome, muscular,
and powerful. If anything, he is the male counterpart to Katie herself, right down to the
azure of his eyes. While he possesses only some of the virtues available
to the ideal romantic hero, Crawford suggests that his broad brow contains
ample space for additional gems of goodness. To complement Alfreds implied
potential for moral growth growth which he in fact achieves by the end of the poem
the poet provides him with a Heathcliff-like capacity for great passion, upon which
he exercises the wizard skill of self-control.
Even
though Malcolm has misgivings about Alfred, the older man acknowledges that his daughter
and her new suitor make a bonnie pair and that, since Alfred knows the
ways of men and things, an eventual match between the two is not altogether out of
the question. Katie, of course, will not be moved in her devotion to Max, and so
Alfreds assets and liabilities as a possible husband are not at issue in her
mind. Alfred takes her implied refusals with inward protestations of equanimity,
revealing in his first interior monologue that it is love of Malcolms money rather
than passion for Katie that motivates him to persist in his courting. He expresses
his indifference with considerable eloquence:
O, Kate, were I a lover, I might feel
Despair flap oer my hopes with raven wings;
Because thy love is givn to other love.
And did I Love unless I gaind thy love,
I would disdain the golden hair, sweet lips
Air-blown form and true violet eyes
Nor crave the beauteous lamp without the flame;
Which in itself would light a charnel-house. . . . (p. 57)
Even as he asserts his immunity
to love, he acknowledges both Katies outward attractiveness and her inward
beauty. Furthermore, Alfreds thinking vacillates on the question of
Katies love, for although he says he is willing to settle for lesser treasure
than the whole, he realizes that Katie is neither a diamond lacking
flame nor a rose with all its perfumes cast abroad. Rather she is a
bright consummate blossom, reminding him of others he was once capable of
loving.
.
. . Gone, long gone, the days
When love within my soul forever stretchd
Fierce hands of flame, and here and there I found
A blossom fitted for him all up-filld
With love as with clear dew they had their hour
And burnd to ashes with him. . . (p. 58)
With the discovery of loves
pain and transience, Alfred lost his faith in any sort of immortality, and so with
fatalistic logic, he now seeks comfort in the inevitability of oblivion: There is no
Immortality could give/ Such boon as this to simply cease to be! (p.
58). Alfreds pessimism reflects both his personal experience and the spirit of
an age in which the Higher Criticism and the discoveries of science were eroding the
doctrinal foundations of religious faith. In late nineteenth-century Canada this
tendency would be offset somewhat by the emergence of the social gospel; but in Europe
writers were pointing the way to the development of literary Naturalism with its
deterministic account of universal processes. Alfreds world view, like
Hardys, is essentially tragic, and, in at least one instance, Alfreds diction
assumes a distinctly Hardian character:
What was blindly cravd of purblind
Chance
Life, life eternal throbbing thro all space,
Is strongly loathd and with his face in dust,
Man loves his only Heaven six feet of earth! (p. 59)
Brooding, eloquent, passionate,
and attractive, Alfred is presented less as an arch-villain than as a disillusioned
romantic idealist, whose villainous behaviour results from a dislocation of moral values
in an age of social, intellectual, economic, moral, and religious turmoil. An
intellectual and spiritual déracinée, Alfred is descended from figures such as
Richardsons Lovelace and Byrons Manfred, and he is related to Stendahls
Julien Sorel, Lermantovs Pechorin, and Turgenevs Bazarov.41 However, unlike the typical
superfluous man of the nineteenth-century continental novel, Alfred remains salvageable;
for beneath the morbid rhetoric with which he characterizes his treachery, his better
impulses often work against his conscious motives, in one instance prompting him to
heroism.
When
Katie falls beneath the logs floating in her fathers mill pond, Alfred leaps without
thinking into the pond, dashes aside the barkd monsters, and pulls her
to the surface by her hair. In rescuing Katie, Alfred becomes trapped and seriously
injured in the log drive. All of his care, however, is for Katie, whom he holds
toward the warming rays of the sun in order to bring her to consciousness. As he
attempts to revive her, his thoughts more closely resemble those of a passionately
concerned lover than of a calculating fortune-hunter:
Dead, dead or living? Why, an even
chance.
O lovely bubble on a troubd sea,
I would not thou shouldst lose thyself again
In the black ocean whence thy life emergd,
But skyward steal on gales as soft as love,
And hang in some bright rainbow overhead
If only such bright rainbow spannd the earth. (p. 62)
Whatever he may say to convince
himself otherwise, it is obvious that a man who blurts out O Kate!/ And
once again said, Katie! is she dead? feels more than a mere proprietary
interest in the object of his solicitude.
Ironically,
Katies near drowning is caused by her spontaneous impulse to gather the lilies that
symbolize the love she shares with Max. Singing a markedly erotic
lily-song written for her by Max, Katie is lured by the white
smiles of the silver lilies onto the log drive, which she crosses by
hopping barefoot from one of her fathers brown-scaltd monsters to
another. When she reaches the last great log of all, she falls into the
pond beneath the drive. The irony of the situation is manifold. Blinded by
illusions of love and security, Katie miscalculates the mortal danger inherent in what she
clings to most tenaciously: her fathers wealth, as embodied in the logs bearing his
(and Maxs) initials, and Maxs love, symbolized by the ironic
lily-song. She is saved, temporarily at least, by Alfred, whose vision is
unclouded by illusions of security and enduring love. Alfreds later attempt to
take advantage of their altered relationship may as well be motivated by the unconscious
feelings he inadvertently reveals during the rescue as by the cupidity he so readily
confesses:
So, Katie, tho your eyes may say me
Nay,
My pangs for gold must needs be fed,
And shall be Katie, if I know my mind. (p. 59)
In fact Alfred is no more greedy
than Max, only more straightforward about coveting Malcolms wealth. Maxs
avarice is more pernicious because it is unconscious, surfacing in the iconographic
imagery with which he describes his dreams and aspirations. Max wants to transmute
the base metal of the wilderness into an alloy of wealth and power, and he will cheerfully
destroy the face of nature to achieve his goals. By contrast, Alfreds ambition
may be self-serving, self-indulgent, and even selfdestructive, but it poses little threat
to the world around him. Unlike the social-sould Max, Alfred is an
isolated, alienated individual, fully conscious of his own insignificance in the face of
the powerful forces that shape the destinies of men and nations. At his villainous
worst, he is a failure as the results of his abandonment of the injured Max and the
attempted murder-suicide with Katie amply demonstrate. Both of these failures
illustrate the individuals helplessness before the inexorable working of destiny,
embodied in the figure of Max, the deluded, self-righteous, and virtually indestructible
instrument of history. The conflict of reflective, agnostic consciousness and the
active, credulous will to power and wealth is dramatized in the wilderness confrontation
between Alfred and Max.
At the
beginning of Part Four, Crawford juxtaposes the personified North Wind, an object of
mockery who fights with squaws, takes the scalps of babes, and
slays the dead with Max, wielding his axe against the helpless forest. As
Northrop Frye has noted, Maxs song, Bite deep and wide, O Axe, the tree,
encourages an ironic reading in the context of the devastation that Crawford has rendered
so graphically.42 As such,
Crawfords placement of Maxs song parallels her treatment of lyric sequences in
the first three sections of the poem. Alfreds profound and eloquent rejoinder
to the boastful and superficial optimism in The Song of the Axe has been noted
by both Frye and George Woodcock.43
Woodcock sees Alfreds speech as the more telling account of the
condition of men and nations.
Below the roots of palms, and under stones
Of younger ruins, thrones, towrs and cities
Honeycomb the earth. The high, solemn walls
Of hoary ruins their foundings all unknown
(But to the round-eyd worlds that walk
In the blank paths of Space and blanker Chance). . . . (p. 66)
Drawing inferences from geology,
biology, astronomy, paleontology, archeology, and the Higher Criticism, Alfreds
argument reverberates with literary echoes from the Renaissance to the nineteenth-century,
foreshadowing similar treatment of similar ideas in Hardy, Yeats, Eliot and others. Closer
to home, the content and texture of Crawfords verse in Alfreds speech and
elsewhere in Malcolms Katie impinge upon the work of two of her younger
compatriots, Charles G.D. Roberts and Duncan Campbell Scott:
Wrecks plunge, prow foremost, down still,
solemn slopes,
And bring their dead crews to as dead a quay:
Some city built before that ocean grew,
By silver drops from many a floating cloud,
By icebergs bellowing in their throes of death
By lesser seas tossd from their rocking cups,
And leaping each to each; by dew-drops flung
From painted sprays, whose weird leaves and flowrs
Are moulded for new dwellers on the earth,
Printed in the hearts of mountains and of mines. . . . (p. 67)
While Alfreds perspective
is geologic, reducing to futility and insignificance the human details of growth and
decay, Maxs sense of time is conditioned by his involvement in the present
moment. Alfred meditates on time; Max functions in it, defining it
in terms of action. To Max, time is subsumed by history, and history is a dynamic
process of growth to which he can sense with exhilaration the contribution he is making by
his labours:
See friend, he cried to one that
lookd and smild,
My axe and I we do immortal tasks
We build nations this my axe and I! (p. 66)
As he labours, time and history
merge for Max in an eternal present, wherein the task of building is continuously
performed. This eternal flux is transcended only in the cosmic stasis of Maxs
daffodil vision, his ideal of love through which he believes he can Possess the
world and feel eternity (p. 69)
From his
position of detachment, Alfred sees Maxs sense of himself as a builder of eternal
nations to be the delusion of a man trapped in the present. Alfred is able, as Max is
not, to perceive that building and destroying are the simultaneous effects of a single
act, eternally repeating itself in the blind dialectic of history. At the centre of
Alfreds cosmology is the figure of Time, personified as a winged female, who forgets
what has occurred as soon as it is past. One after another, civilizations rise and
decline, simultaneously created and destroyed by oblivious Time:
Still she forgot her molderd thrones
and kings,
Her sages and their torches, and their Gods,
And said, This is my birth my primal day!
Again she hung her cities on the hills,
Built her rich towers, crownd her kings again,
And said, I build for
Immortality! [As]
Her vast hand reard her towrs, her shrines, her thrones;
The ceaseless sweep of her tremendous wings
Still beat them down and swept their dust abroad;
Her iron fingers wrote on mountain sides
Her deeds and prowess and her own soft plume
Wore down the hills! Again drew darkly on
A night of deep forgetfulness. . . . (p. 68)
It is Alfreds winged figure
of Time, not Maxs cosmic daffodil, that supplies the controlling metaphor for a
serious reading of Malcolms Katie. The entire text of the poem
comprises a simultaneous presentation of contrarieties: the illusion of permanence in the
mutability of the temporal, creation as destruction, love as death. In his failure to
recognize his own destructiveness, it is Katies Max, not Alfred, who takes the side
of the devil. This alliance surfaces when Alfred challenges Maxs faith in
himself and in Katie. Faced with Alfreds powerful argument and apparent
evidence of Katies inconstancy, the desperate Max calls upon Satan for a signal to
kill his tormentor. Ironically, it is God, not Satan, who responds by striking Max
down.
In her
apparent adaptation of the confrontation scene in Mireille to the requirements of
Malcolms Katie, Crawford temporarily reverses the roles of the two
principle players, assigning an important speech of the suitor Ourrais to Max and the
position of the lover Vincent to Alfred. In Mireille Ourrais warns his rival
to go away before he, Ourrais, loses his temper and kills Vincent:
Ourrais
Tu veux donc que ma main te ploie
Et te brise comme un roseau,
Et te jette comme un proie
Aux loups affamées de la Crau . . .
Va-ten; nexcite pas ma rage
Je te déteste, je te hais.
Votre amour mirrite et moutrage,
Cest toi quelle aime, et je laimais.
Par le ciel si tu tiens à vivre,
Séparons nous éloigne-toi.
Un transport furieux menivre,
Je ne suis plus maître de moi. . .
Vincent
Quel transport furieux tenivre?
Séparons-nous, éloigne toi.
Demain si je cessais de vivre
Mireille mourrait avec moi.
Ourrais
Va-ten vaten!
Malheur à toi.
[Ourraise strikes Vincent with his trident.]
Vincent
O Mireille! je meurs pour toi! (p. 19)
Maxs parallel speech
responds both to Alfreds argument and to his claim that he, Alfred, now enjoys
Katies favour. It is in the latter focus, however, that Maxs speech most
resembles that of Ourrais:
Stand back a pace a too far reaching
blow
Might level your false head with yon prone trunk
Stand back and listen while I say, You lie!
That is my Katies face upon your breast,
But tis my Katies love lives in my breast
Stand back, I say! my axe is heavy, and
Might chance to cleave a liars brittle skull.
Your Kate! your Kate! your Kate! hark, how the woods,
Mock at your lie with all their woody tongues.
O silence ye false echoes! not his Kate
But mine Im certain I will have your life!
Well, strike, mad fool, said Alfred, somewhat pale;
I have no weapon but these naked hands.
Aye, but, said Max, you smote
my naked heart!
O shall I slay him? Satan, answer me
I cannot call on God for answer here.
O Kate ! (p. 70)
In Mireille Ourraiss
speech is the direct expression of his jealous anger over Mireilles love for
Vincent. Crawfords handling of the confrontation scene complicates the situation
through Maxs refusal to acknowledge his doubt of Katies devotion. The
effect of the jealousy is similar, however, as Crawford transforms Ourraiss Va-ten!
into Maxs Stand back, I say!" The final result of the confrontation
is altered in Malcolms Katie by divine intervention, a device that allows
Max to return to the lovers position as the recipient of a potentially fatal
blow. Vincents final O Mireille! is echoed in Maxs
cry, O Kate !"
Alfreds
first reaction to Maxs accident is intellectual, reasoning that if there were any
justice any reason for faith he, rather than Max, would have been the one
struck down. Up to this point, apparently, Alfreds doubt has not altogether
hardened into disbelief. Now, however, Alfred appears to become convinced of the absence
of design or purpose in the development of events: This seals my faith in deep and
dark unfaith. Interestingly, even as he discards his remaining teleological and
moral baggage, he nevertheless retains the imagery of the Christian cosmology in his
musing. His unfaith is dark, and he compares his dedication
to the goal of deceiving Katie into marrying him with that of a fabld devil to
the soul/ He longs for with the heat of all hells fires (p.
71). While some readers may detect evidence of diabolism in this inflated language,
Alfred maintains his intellectual integrity and the spirit of the Higher Criticism by
providing a gloss for his own text: These myths serve well for simile I see
(p. 72).
No sooner
has Alfred claimed to abandon skepticism for utter faithlessness than his better nature
prompts him to behave in a manner contradictory to his thinking. Over a passage of
twenty-six lines, he struggles with the impulse to rescue Max, and, even though Alfred is
given to hyperbole, the tone of his internal discourse indicates that his abandonment of
Max is by no means easily accomplished:
. . . Down, Pity! knock not at my breast,
Nor grope about for that dull stone my heart;
Ill stone thee with it, Pity! Get thee hence,
Pity, Ill strangle thee with naked hands. . . . (p. 72)
Alfreds villainy is
cultivated over an impulsively generous nature that continues to rebel against his will
despite the wizard skill of his self-control. In this situation
similar as it is to Katies mishap in Part Three he can hardly control the
Samaritan reflex:
Down, hands! ye shall not lift his
falln head
What cords tug at ye? What? Yed pluck him up
And staunch his wounds? There rises in my breast
A strange, strong giant, throwing wide his arms
And bursting all the granite of my heart! (p 72)
Finally, ambition overcomes
compassion, and Alfred leaves Max to die.
In the
first three parts of Malcolms Katie, the ironic presentation of the dark
and destructive side of human nature is achieved by arrangement of ambiguous texts within
contexts that at once allow for straightforward readings and invite ironic interpretations
of the same material. Crawfords handling of the love-lyrics in the first three
sections, for instance, encourages simultaneous contradictory readings that shift almost
imperceptibly from positive to negative in a manner resembling the interrelation of figure
and ground in a Japanese line drawing. So, a given lyric may contradict the surface
plot even as it appears to support it. In Part Four, The Song of the Axe
receives similar treatment.
Crawford
handles the lyric sequences differently in Part Five. Here, there are two short
lyrics framing a dramatic interchange among Malcolm, Katie, and Alfred. The first of
the poems is a love-song sung by Katie, the second a lyric commentary on the relationship
of love and death. Both poems contain ironic elements, but their irony is intrinsic
and plot-related it does not arise out of the relationship of the lyric with
its immediate context. Katies song, Loves Forget-me-not, is
sung in praise of the constancy of love through the vicissitudes of circumstance. In
the second stanza she appears to describe her own situation without realizing that she is
doing so.
Love plucks it from the mosses green
When parting hours are nigh,
And places it loves palms between,
With many an ardent sigh;
And bluely up from grassy graves
In some lovd churchyard spot,
It glances tenderly and waves
The dear Forget-me-not! (p. 75)
The reader believes, as Katie
does not, that Max is dead, and so the readers delusion becomes the context in which
the ironic poignance of the last four lines is allowed to blossom. This poignance is
intensified in the second poem as the link between love and death is expanded to the point
of contradicting Katies thesis. After Katie finishes her song, Malcolm asks
Alfred if, during his recent sojurn in the west, he had met Maxwell Gordon.
Malcolms question indicates that he associates Katies song with Maxs
absence and causes the reader to suspect that Katies father may have been aware from
the outset of the connection between his daughter and Max. This suspicion is
confirmed when Malcolm leaps to the erroneous conclusion that when Alfred refers to
Maxs wife, he must be talking about Katie.
Despite
the evidence of Alfreds false revelations, Katie persists in her belief in
Maxs faithfulness. While Katie remains firm, Alfred is betrayed by his own
passionate nature, for by the conclusion of Part Five, it is apparent that he has fallen
in love:
O Katie, child
Wilt thou be Nemesis, with yellow hair,
To rend my breast? for I do feel a pulse
Stir when I look into they pure-barbd eyes
O, am I breeding that false thing, a heart? (p. 77)
To Alfred, a heart is a
false thing in that it betrays to an illusion of emotional fulfillment and
spiritual transcendence his sense of the vacuity and evanescence in reality. Once
again, his nature contradicts his opinions, for the man who believes himself no longer
capable of love has begun to feel affections reawaken. Rather than suffer the pain of
either love or conscious, Alfred vows to extinguish sensation in what he terms the
soft embrace of the Nothingness beyond death (p. 78).
Crawford
ends Part Five with a lyric poem that acts as a commentary on the relationship between
love and death in general and, in particular, on the effect on Alfred of his growing
affection for Katie. The second lyric contradicts both Katies
Loves Forget-me-not and Maxs ideal of immortal love as an
eternally blossoming, self-sustaining daffodil. True love, says the concluding
lyric, is neither eternal nor self-sustaining; it blossoms in the company of cold truth,
pain, pity, and death:
But with Loves rose doth blow
Ah,
woe! ah, woe!
Truth with its leaves of snow,
And pain and Pity grow
With Loves sweet roses on its sapful tree!
Loves rose buds not alone,
But still, still doth own
A thousand blossoms cypress-hued to see! (p. 79)
The ramifications of this complex
view are pushed wider in the subsequent blank-verse sequence with which Crawford
introduces Part Six. The passage is set off by quotation marks, creating a sense of its
being spoken by an omniscient commentator, similar to choral speeches in Greek
tragedy. Sorrow says the voice, a Dark matrix, supplies nourishment to
strengthen the developing human soul, which may not achieve transcendence Without
the loud, deep clamour of her wail/ The iron of her hands, the biting brine/ Of her black
tears (p. 79). Since sorrow is described as a dark mother from which the
soul achieves its last birth, it seems reasonable to conclude that the dark
side of human nature and experience comprise essential and integral features of the
universe adumbrated in Malcolms Katie.
On the
surface Malcolms Katie ends on a note of optimism and hope, but
Katies final speech is not without elements of equivocation. The final scene of
the poem is pastoral and idyllic and features a gathering of Malcolm, Max, Katie, and
little Alfred (named for one who sinnd and woke/ To sorrow for his sins)
on the trellisd porch of their new home. Encouraged to speak by
Malcolm, Max compares the homestead to Eden, Katie to Eve, and, by implication, himself to
Adam. In her turn, Katie contradicts what Max has said, suggesting, again by
implication, that her husbands view is deficient. While she obviously means to
compliment Max, she manages instead to reveal his intellectual weakness:
O Adam had not Maxs soul, she
said
And these wild woods and plains are fairer far
That Edens self. O bounteous mothers they!
Beckning pale starvelings with their fresh, green hands,
And with their ashes mellowing the earth,
That she may yield her increase willingly.
I would not change these wild and rocking woods,
Dotted by little homes of unbarkd trees
Where dwell the fleers from the waves of want,
For the smooth sward of selfish Eden bowers
Nor Max for Adam, if I knew my mind! (p. 85)
Here, Katie recapitulates the
major themes of the surface-text, connecting romantic love with progress and the building
of the nation. Katie is able, as Max is not, to conceptualize a way of life that
integrates husbandry with preservation of the wilderness so that the new pioneers may
enjoy both the harvest of the earth and the beauty of these wild woods and
plains. Katies vision is not without qualifications, however, for not only
does her final phrase, if I knew my mind, inject a note of ambiguity at the
very end of the poem, but it also recalls the now-reformed Alfreds earlier use of
the same phrase to punctuate his determination to achieve his own way with Katie and her
fathers fortune. Crawfords application of the same phrase to only these
two characters may have been intended to invite comparisons. If Katie, like Alfred,
does not know her mind, then her entire final speech may be read ironically.
According
to Robin Mathews, Malcolms Katie is a moral and optimistic poem
about love. It is about romantic love, familial love, love of work and virtue, love
of the land, love of power and wealth, and love of nation.44 If, as David West avers,
Mathews main argument is incontrovertible,45 it is valid only on the vulgar level, for Crawfords subtext
constitutes a serious qualification and complication of Mathews thesis. At
best, Mathews is only partially correct, for Malcolms Katie is also a poem
about destructiveness, self-deception, exploitation, greed, and the futility of human
aspiration and endeavour, all of which contribute to the dark, ironic undercurrent of the
poem.
Notes
See Lawrence J. Burpee,
Isabella Valancy Crawford, in his Little Book of Canadian Essays (Toronto:
Musson, 1909), p. 2; E.K. Brown, On Canadian Poetry (Toronto: Ryerson, 1943), p.
42; Dorothy Livesay, The Documentary Poem: A Canadian Genre, in Contexts
of Canadian Criticism, ed. Eli Mandel (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971), pp.
270-71, and Tennysons Daughter or Wilderness Child? The factual and literary
background of Isabella Valancy Crawford, JCF, 2, no. 3 (Summer 1973), p.
165; Roy Daniells, Crawford, Carman and Scott, in Literary History of
Canada: Canadian Literature in English, 2nd ed., ed. Carl F. Klinck, et al. (Toronto:
Univ. of Toronto Press, 1976), I, 424; Fred Cogswell, Feminism in Isabella Valancy
Crawfords Said the Canoe, in The Crawford Symposium, ed.
Frank M. Tierney (Ottawa: Univ. of Ottawa Press, 1979), pp. 79-80; and Elizabeth
Waterston, Crawford, Tennyson and the Domestic Idyll, in The Crawford
Symposium, pp. 71-75. See also Crawford, Malcolms Katie, MS,
Lorne Pierce Collection, Queens Univ. Archives, p. 2. Crawford was apparently aware
of the superficial resemblences between Malcolms Katie and The Princess,
for she deleted the phrase sweet and low from one of Maxs speeches in
Part I. It seems that Crawford was conscious of Tennysons influence and was
striving to overcome it.[back]
Livesay, The Hunters
Twain, Can. L., no. 55 (Winter 1973), p. 76, and The
Life of Isabella Valancy Crawford, in The Crawford Symposium, p. 6.[back]
Published in the Toronto Euening
Telegram, 27 October 1882.[back]
See Donald Jay Grout, A Short
History of Opera (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1947), I p. 335; and Rene Dumesnil,
Histoire illustrée du Théatre Lyrique (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1953), p. 150.[back]
Libretto, Mireille,
by Michel Carré and Charles Gounod, ed. M. Variol (New Orleans: M. Variol, 1891), p.
16. Plot synopsis and most quotations are from this text.[back]
Crawford, Malcolms
Katie, in Old Spookses Pass, Malcolms Katie and Other Poems (Toronto:
Thomas Bain and Sons, 1884), p. 42. All quotations from Malcolms Katie are
based on this text. [back]
Malcolms Katie,
p. 70.[back]
Smith,
Introduction, The Book of Canadian Poetry (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1943), p. 15; Brown, p. 42; Rashley, Poetry in Canada (Toronto: Ryerson,
1958), p. 43 Mathews, Malcolms Katie: Love, Wealth, and Nation
Building, SCL, 2, no. 1 (Winter 1977), p. 60; Hughes, Democratic
Vision ofMalcolms Katie, CV III, I, no. 2 (Fall 1975) p. 44; and
Bessai, The Ambivalence of Love in the Poetry of Isabella Valancy Crawford, Queens
Quarterly, 77 (1970), 417.[back]
See Daniells, p. 424; and
D.M.R. Bentleys review of The Crawford Symposium in Letters in Canada
1979, UTQ, 49, no. 4 (Summer 1980), pp. 453-455.[back]
Daniells, p. 424.[back]
Bentley, p. 454.[back]
Creative Writing in
Canada, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Ryerson, 1961), p. 70.[back]
Ethelwyn Wetherald,
Introduction, Collected Poems of Isabella Valancy Crawford, ed. J.W.
Garvin (1905; rpt. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1972 with additional intro. by James
Reaney), p. 16; W.D. Lighthall, Introduction, Songs of the Great Dominion,
ed. W.D. Lighthall (London: Scott, 1889), p. xxvi; Hector Charlesworth, The Canadian
Girl an appreciative medley, The Canadian Magazine, 1 (March-October 1893),
p. 190; Smith, p. 14; and Pacey, p. 68.[back]
"A Reporters
Diary, Toronto Euening Telegram, 14 February 1887; A Talented Lady
Dead, The Globe (Toronto), 14 February 1887, p. 8; Seranus, Isabella
Valancey [sic] Crawford, The Week, 4 (24 February 1887), pp. 202-3; and
Editorial, Arcturus, 19 February 1887, p. 84.[back]
Frank Leslies
Illustrated Newspaper, 18 February 1887, p. 6, and December 8, 1883, p. 242.[back]
Seranus, p. 203; and
Reaney, Introduction, Collected Poems of Isabella Valancy Crawford,
pp. xxii-xxix. [back]
Maud Miller Wilson,
Isabella Valancy Crawford, The Globe (Toronto), Saturday Magazine
section, 15 and 22 April 1905, p. 8; Garvin, Whos Who in Canadian Literature:
Isabella Valancy Crawford, Canadian Bookman, 9, no. 5 (May 1927), p. 132
Ross, Narrative II the unpublished long narrative poem, in
The Crawford Symposium, p. 107; Johnson, Malcolms Katie
and Hugh and Ion: Crawfords changing narrative vision, Canadian
Poetry, no. 3 (Fall/Winter 1978), p. 56.[back]
Hughes, p. 45.[back]
The Toronto Evening
Telegram, 4 August 1879.[back]
See Robert Alan Burns,
The Intellectual and Artistic Development of Isabella Valancy Crawford, Diss.
Univ. of New Brunswick, 1982, pp. 186-7.[back]
I discovered one of
Crawfords childrens stories entitled The Good-Natured Bear, in St.
Nicholas: Scribners Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls, 4 (December 1876),
pp. 135-8.[back]
See Elsie M. Pomeroy,
Isabella Valancy Crawford, Canadian Poetry, 7 (June 1944), p. 36.[back]
See Pomeroy, Sir
Charles G.D. Roberts: a biography (Toronto: Ryerson, 1943), p. 50, and Katherine
Hale, Biographical, in Isabella Valancy Crawford, Makers of Canadian
Literature, gen. ed. Lorne Albert Pierce (Toronto: Ryerson, 1923), p. 10.[back]
Malcolms Katie,
p. 40. Also see MS, Lorne Pierce Collection. Crawford revised youthful in
the MS to well-prizd in the published poem, enhancing the readers
sense of Maxs cupidity.[back]
For the text of A
Wooing, see Isabella Valancy Crawford, in Canadian Poetry, vol.
1, ed. Jack David and Robert Lecker, New Press Canadian Classics (Toronto: General
Publishing and ECW Press, 1982), pp. 43-45.[back]
Malcolms Katie, p. 40.[back]
Mireille, p. 16.[back]
The Daily Mail (Toronto), 6 November
1874.[back]
Michel Carré et Charles
Gounod, Mireille, opéra tiré de poéme de Frédéric
Mistral, partition chant et piano (Paris: Choudens, 1901), pp. 31-8.[back]
See MS, Lorne Pierce
Collection. In the published version, Crawford revised a simpler, more
straightforward second stanza, thus enhancing the effects of illusion and
ambiguity. Following are the lines from the MS: Above, below, Eves rosy
bar / Above, below her darling star / No ripple his bright flame to
mar.[back]
Old Spookses Pass p. 130.[back]
See Hughes, p. 38, and
Margo Dunn, The Development of Narrative in the Writing of Isabella Valancy
Crawford, MA thesis Simon Fraser 1975, p. 19.[back]
Catharine Parr Traill, The
Backwoods of Canada: Being Letters from the Wife of an Emigrant Officer, Illustrative of
the Domestic Economy of British North America (1836; rpt. Toronto: Coles, 1971), p.
13.[back]
Traill, p. 197.[back]
See Brown, pp.
44-5. Brown characterizes the extravagance of the daffodil image as utter
lawless wildness. See also James Reaney, Isabella Valancy Crawford, in Our
Living Tradition, 2nd and 3rd series, ed. R.L. McDougall (Toronto: Carlton Univ.
Press, 1959), pp. 277-84. Reaney takes the daffodil out of context, making it more
grotesque by attributing the meaning of the poem and indeed of all Crawfords work to
this single image. Reaney does, however, acknowledge the dark side of
Crawfords meaning.[back]
For the text of The
Roman Rose-Seller, see David and Lecker, pp. 40-41.[back]
Reaney, p. 285; and Hughes, p. 40.[back]
Bessai, p. 416.[back]
Mathews, p. 56.[back]
Hughes, p. 44.[back]
Bazarov is a
nihilist. See David S. West, Malcolms Katie: Alfred as
nihilist not rapist, SCL, 3, no 1 (Winter 1978), pp. 137-41.[back]
Frye, The Bush Garden:
Essays on the Canadian Imagination (Toronto: Anansi, 1971), p. 134.[back]
Frye, pp. 151-2; and
Woodcock, The Journey of Discovery: nineteenth-century narrative poets, in Colony
and Confederation: Early Canadian Poets and Their Background (Vancouver: Univ. of
British Columbia Press, 1974), p. 40.[back]
Mathews, p. 60.[back]
West, p. 141.[back]
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