Grove and the Goddess: Elements of Myth and Ritual
in Frederick Philip Grove's Settlers of the Marsh
by
Robert Alan Burns, Guam

            This study examines the uses of myth and ritual as structural components of narrative discourse in Frederick Philip Grove's first novel in English.  Critics such as K. P. Stich and Robert Kroetsch have identified psychological and mythic archetypes in Settlers, and in her discussion of the uses of myth in several of Grove's later novels, Nancy I. Bailey has noted the importance of Grove's classical European education in the development of mythic archetypes in his fiction.[1] Historically, much of the discussion of Settlers of the Marsh has centered around its success or failure as a realistic novel--with a number of  critics finding serious defects in the rendering of character and setting.[2]  In 1984 Camille La Bossière turned away from the paradigm of  realism to "search through the text to discern  way of reading the novel appropriate to itself" (149).  La Bossière focuses her discussion on the language of the discourse, finding in the mind of the focal character an "entanglement of unknowing" (150) as he struggles to overcome uncertainty, confusion, ignorance, and  silence rendered "in a language of partial or complete privation" (159), what La Bossière calls "the negative semantics of Settlers of the Marsh" (157).    La Bossière's excellent analysis takes an unfortunate poststructuralist turn when she argues that the mind of Niels Lindstedt and the voice of the extra-diegetical narrator are somehow those of Grove himself, rather than textual artifacts. 

            Also in 1984 Robert Kroetsch  picked up the thread of textuality to apply a Bahktinian semiotic critical model to a comparative discussion of Settlers of the Marsh and In Search of Myself.  In both texts Kroetsch identifies patterns of binary opposition in the language of the narrative.  Kroetsch claims that "behind" these binaries is the "basic tension between signifier and signified" which can lead to the effacement of narrative coherence (68).  Kroetsch says that the way to establish or reestablish coherence is the re-telling of stories, especially the retelling of myths.  The key myth of Settlers of the Marsh, says Kroetsch, is the garden story, the search for a new Eden (69). 

            I have extended Kroetsch's discussion of  binary oppositions in Settlers of the Marsh to explore elements of Old World Classical myth and ritual which are endemic to the European psyche and which both animate and impede the protagonist's struggle for self-definition.  It will be remembered that Settlers of the Marsh is Grove's first Canadian novel, that it was begun in German (Kroetsch 65), and that it has at its heart the internal conflict of Niels Lindstedt, a new immigrant to the Manitoba prairies, struggling to overcome the limitations of his European upbringing to make a new life for himself in Canada.  What Niels does not realize is that to change his life he must renew himself by facing and acknowledging the dark primordial features of his own psychic landscape.  Hence, the novel is not so much a the story of a one-way odyssey from Europe to North America as a spiritual journey inward to achieve self-definition. 

            Central to this journey are Niels' encounters with three female figures, the Diana-like Ellen Amundsen; Clara Vogel, whose powerful sensuality suggests Astarte or Cybele; and the wrinkled face of his mother, an ancient, inscrutable image of the magna mater, which repeatedly comes to him in visions.   All of these women are presented as larger than life, manifesting the three aspects of the Great Goddess: the Maiden, the Matron, and the Crone.   Niels' interaction with these figures is presented dramatically in the language of solar myth, employing elements of fertility ritual to evoke Niels' quest.

              Much has been made of the "tragic intensity" of  Settlers, and some critics have compared it to classical Greek tragedy.[3]   Contributing to the intensity of the novel is Grove's use of mythic archetypes and the imagery of solar myth and fertility ritual to highlight the dramatization of a cluster of thematic concerns central to the novel.  This cluster is comprised of textual oppositions, or what Kroetsch calls binary pairs, such as innocence/experience, spirit/flesh, sacred/profane, and country/city.  Several  of these textual oppositions embody the conflict within Niels Lindstedt.  Others  provide a wider context within which to consider the ramifications of Niels' struggles.  The interweaving of these elements reflects Niels' connections to his past, to his future aspirations, to the Manitoba landscape, and to the other characters in the   novel.

            As J. Lee Thompson has noted,  Grove dramatizes Niels' inner conflicts through the device of the vision, which focuses the interplay of the internal and the external landscapes of the novel (66-68).  The content of his visions becomes increasingly concrete as Niels' inner conflicts become more insistent.  The faceless woman of Niels' dream of domestic bliss blurs from Ellen Amundsen through his mother to Clara Vogel as his yearning for hearth and home becomes increasingly sexual.   These three characters are presented textually as larger-than-life embodiments of the same conflicting  elements that make up the binary pairings that structure Niels' consciousness. 

            The Diana-like, virginal Ellen combines spiritual ideality with bush-bred independence and competence.  She speaks with authority, and her manner suggests a "self-centred repose and somewhat defiant aloofness" (15).[4]  Like the idealized "lady-bright" of medieval romance, Ellen is described as tall, blond, and blue-eyed, with "a pure, Scandinavian white" complexion (15). That Ellen is meant to represent more than an eighteen-year-old Swedish farm girl is suggested by the description of her face: "hers was the face of a woman . . . There was great, ripe maturity in it, and a look as if she saw through pretences and shams and knew more of life than her age would warrant" (15).

            Ellen has the ageless quality of a perfect ideal, as well as the protean androgyny of a goddess.  When Niels  is surprised at Ellen's Diana-like (or Selene-like) ability to handle Amundsen's unruly team of horses, the giant Nelson points out that while these horses are notorious for running away, they do not run away with Ellen.  She works the farm like a man, but she handles the horses better than a man.  Niels is fascinated by her "utterly impersonal" demeanor as she moves about the farm yard doing her chores: "Clad like a  man in sheepskin and big overshoes . . . Ellen has . . . changed from a virgin, cool and distant, into a being that is almost sexless" (15, 36).  As a realistic character, Ellen has little to recommend her, but like the gods and heroes of myth, she is important for what she represents, personifies, embodies, and her actions take on significance as symbolic rather than individualized behaviour.  Even the isolation of the Amundsen homestead has a mythic dimension, reminding  Niels of "the woodcutter's houses in fairy tales" (19).

            Clara Vogel is introduced in unequivocably feminine terms: "she wore a light, washable dress which fitted her slender and yet plump body without a fold.  Her waist showed a v-shaped opening at the throat which gave her--by contrast to the other women--something peculiarly feminine; beside her, the others looked neuter. . . . But more than anything else her round, laughing, coal-black eyes attracted attention" (25-26).  Like Ellen, Clara seems larger than life.  She seems untouched by her surroundings and  by the difficulties and poverty of pioneer existence.    Immediately after his first encounter with Clara in the Lunds' yard, Niels is discomfited by a sense that "individual women were bent on replacing the vague, schematic figures he had had in his mind" (38).

            Niels' initial vision, "some small room, hot with the glow and flicker of an open

fire. . . " (9), had been induced by the ferocity of the blizzard.  By the time he and the giant Nelson have made their moonlight return trip from the Lunds' to the Amundsens', the vision has taken on added features of domestic bliss: "himself and a woman, sitting of a mid-winter night by the light of a lamp and in front of a fire, with the pitter-patter of children's feet sounding. . ."  (34).  Once Grove has introduced the device of the vision as well as two of his three most important archetypal figures, all that remains for the convergence and interplay of external and internal landscapes is the introduction of the past in the person of Niels' mother.  The failure of what Niels perceives to be the hardworking Lund family reminds him of his own hardworking mother, who died in poverty following a life of servitude to the wealthy.  From this point on in the narrative, Niels is repeatedly reminded of his mother--in his day-to-day experience, in his interaction with Ellen, and in his reaction to Clara at Nelson's and Olga's wedding.

            Following a chance meeting at the Lunds' when Niels insisted on filling Ellen's water barrels at the well, his vision would appear to have become complete: "The picture which he saw, of himself and a woman in a cosy room. . . There could be no doubt any longer; the woman in the picture was Ellen, the girl . . . " (46).  Frustrated, however, by Ellen's cool, distant reserve, Niels compares the quality of their acquaintance with his and Clara's:

How much more intimate, he sometimes thought, was his still slender acquaintance with Mrs. Vogel! . . . yet there was almost a secret understanding between them. . . But whenever he had been dreaming of her and his thought then reverted to Ellen, he felt guilty; he felt defiled as if he had given in to sin.  Her appeal was to something in him which was lower, which was not worthy of the man who had seen Ellen  . . . (46-47)

So Virgin and Whore, spirit and flesh, sacred and profane have precipitated in Niels a torturous struggle to come to adult terms with the childish innocence of his idealized vision.

When, at Nelson's wedding, Niels notices Clara, his thoughts again revert to Ellen before he responds to the gay widow's unspoken summons from across the room.  Unlike his previous summary descriptions of Ellen, Grove's revelations of Clara's character are more gradual, more contextual, more dramatic.  Prior to Nelson's wedding, Niels has seen Clara twice, once as the belle of the Sunday afternoon gathering at the Lunds' and once several days later in the Lunds' yard.  Flirtatious and attractive,  she stands out from her surroundings in what seems to Niels to be almost super-human detachment.  Now, at Nelson's wedding, Clara's thoroughgoing sensuality is revealed in her comments on Niels' maturation over a three years' period: "You are changed altogether.  You are a man with a future.  Your shoulders have broadened.  Your lips have become straight and firm.  You have grown a moustache.  I felt sure only a woman could have worked the change. . . " (54).  Much later, during their final, dramatic quarrel, Clara will use similarly physical terms to describe her former love for Niels: "Even such as I do fall in love, you know.  I admired your strength of body, your build, your steely eyes, your straight mouth" (184).

          As the wedding-reception conversation develops, Clara becomes increasingly suggestive, and Niels grows increasingly terrified.  Feeling  that his chastity is under attack, he flees from Clara, yearning for his mother's comforting touch.  He sees his mother's face: "a wrinkled, shrunk little face looking anxiously into his own . . . what tormented him, he suddenly knew, had tormented her also; she had fought it down.  Her eyes looked into himself, knowingly, reproachfully.  There was pity in the look of the ancient mother. . ." (59).  By now the image of the crone mother has assumed mythic dimensions of the magna mater, an ancient and compelling force associated in Niels with feelings of vague longing and unfulfilled Oedipal yearnings.  After seeing his mother's face, his recurrent vision of domestic bliss returns, but with important differences.  There are no signs of children; the wife/mother place has been filled by Clara, and Niels has assumed the posture of a religious supplicant, "crouching on a low stool in front of the woman's seat. . . " (59).

            Following the death of Amundsen and Niels' subsequent attempts to communicate with Ellen, Niels returns to his claim, despite his bitterness and disappointment, to build the homestead which he had hoped to share with Ellen.  The bulk of the work is accomplished during May and June in the evenings after the regular farmwork of daytime.  Grove describes the transition from spring to "the brief saturnalian summer of the north" as "intoxicating" to Niels, "whose work developed into an orgy" (73).  At this point old Sigurdsen, a spirit father-figure to both  Ellen and Niels, suggests that Niels and he pay a visit to Ellen to procure permits for haying.  En route they glimpse Ellen ahead of them, driving her team, her wagon loaded with water barrels.  Niels mistakes her for the boy Bobby Lund until Sigurdsen corrects him.  When they arrive at Ellen's, she greets them from within the house, instructs them to come in and to light the lamp on the kitchen table.  After Sigurdsen lights the votive  lamp, Ellen appears, transfigured, wearing a light print dress.  To Niels, she seems taller, more girlish, younger-looking in what is now her exclusive domestic ambiance.  Obviously, Grove intends that the reader share Niels' excitement in this metamorphosis from a seeming boy into an alluring young woman.  Grove underscores the effect by describing Ellen in supernatural terms: "For the first time she had smiled and even laughed.  She had stepped down from her pedestal and walked among humans . . ." (76).     

            Returning to his claim, Niels imagines his house as a palace, constructed to harbour Ellen.  Their friendship develops as Niels and Sigurdsen respond to Ellen's request for help with the haying.  Invited to join her in her "bower of bliss" in back of her house, Niels assumes the posture of a votary by sitting on the grass at Ellen's feet, a position which becomes habitual during a long series of visits.  Again, Ellen seems ageless, ever young, perennially mature:

He noticed that her abundant, straw-yellow hair was no longer so severely brushed down.  It had little waves and ripples in it; a looser way of doing it up had given it freedom to follow its natural bend.  He remembered how, as a girl, she had seemed to him singularly mature; now that in age she was a woman, she seemed almost girlish. . . . (82)

In their conversation Niels reveals his ambition that his house should be more than simple shelter, "a house of which the farm is a part. . ." (82).  Ellen responds with attention, not only to Niels' personal ambitions, but also to his thoughts on the effects of frontier life on pioneer men and women.  Picking up this thread of the conversation, Ellen develops her own analysis of the role of pioneer women.  Her comments are eloquent and weighted with the authority of independence and simple integrity--credible, but nevertheless far more penetrating than one would expect from a person of her age and circumstances.  The reader accepts the wisdom and authority of Ellen's statements despite her youth and lack of education because Grove has delineated her character on the scale of a mythic archetype.  Years later, after Niels has returned from prison, Ellen's face has retained its ageless quality: "Now as then it was the expression that held him: hers was the face of a girl, not a woman; it was stern, to be sure, but in sternness lay hidden the dream, the unfulfilled, uncompromising dream of a virgin child. . . " (257).

            After Niels has finally maneuvered Ellen into his newly completed house, he squirms in anticipation as he works in the yard: "Would she go upstairs?  To see the rooms there, half joined, half parted by a little landing?" (88).  That the rooms have been separated by a landing suggests that Niels has prepared a temple to house a goddess, a temple with an elevated sanctum sanctorum that she may even sleep above him.

            By the following spring Niels' and Ellen's friendship is flourishing, as does Niels' farm.  He purchases "a team of pure-bred Percherons, an enormous gelding, a mare for breeding, with filly and in foal. . . " (92).  Horses, Joseph Campbell tells us, are sacred to Diana (155), and later in the novel one of the Percherons, the gelding,  will be sacrificed as Diana's new moon of midsummer is setting.[5] Sensing that Niels is preparing to speak to her of marriage, Ellen begins to show more reserve toward him.  By winter Niels is becoming increasingly despondent, and as Sigurdsen's health fails, the old man's wild, orgiastic visions stir sympathetic enthusiasms in the frustrated younger man.  Their passions reverberate in the tempestuous winter weather.

             Immediately following a premonitory passage describing the arrival of spring  and foreshadowing the imminence of "something dreadful," Niels meets Clara Vogel in town.  The effect of the meeting on Niels is disturbing but exciting, and the contrast between Clara and Ellen is made dramatically apparent in Clara's frank declarations to Niels during their dinner at the hotel:  "Do you know, Niels, how often I have thought of you during these years in the city?. . . You are a conqueror, Niels;  but you do not know it.  With women you are a child.  A woman wants to be taken, not adored" (100).  Niels feels alienated in town, impatient with sophisticated repartee and the guile of shopkeepers and bankers.  He yearns to return to his own land;  but he yearns, as well, for the voluptuous Clara.  Hence, the tension, within Niels, between country and city.[6]

            In the city Clara has been a Cybele, surrounded by votary castrati, writers and artists whom she despises as "weaklings."  Twice during the description of the wagon ride to her country place, the narrator refers to Clara as "an artful woman."  En route they rest, and Clara invites the unwilling Niels to lie down with her.  As she sleeps, he notices that the artificial character of her beauty is "half stripped away; she looked like a relic of ancient temptations. . ."  (104).  Just as Ellen seems to possess eternal youthfulness, so Clara's cosmetic art conceals a face devastated by years of dissolution.  Indeed, just before she and Niels  arrive at her country cottage, we discover that the Cybele of the city may have been a Circe of the bush: "Niels noticed a pig coming out of the tattered screen door of the house, grunting. . . a second pig was contentedly lying behind a dirty couch.  On a sheetless bed, covered with grey blankets that lay in a heap, there reposed the enormous girth of the man" (106).  As Circe's charms transform Ulysses's men, and then figuratively Ulysses, into swine, so Niels' subsequent degradation is foreshadowed in the pigs and the pig-man on the bed.  Swine, it will be remembered, are sacred to Astarte.

            In moving into the house that Niels built for Ellen, Clara transforms the temple into a brothel, trying to recreate in the puritanically simple country house the luxuriance of her city lodgings.  Niels, of course, is repulsed by the exotic decor as well as by the "strange, ardent, erratic" sexual appetite of his new wife.  No sooner has Clara become domiciled than the marriage begins to disintegrate.

            Niels' growing disgust is reflected in the emphasis in the text on Clara's use of cosmetic art.  What Niels had noticed in the face of the sleeping Clara en route to her cottage becomes the main focus of his later perception of his wife:

                        Not only the colour of her hair was artificial, but the colour

                        of her face as well . . . she used powder . . . in the morning

                        her lips had looked pallid; now he noticed a greyish, yellowish

                        complexion in her face. . . . From behind the mask which still

                        concealed her face, another face looked out at him, like a death's

                        head: the coarse, aged face of a coarse aged woman, aged before

                        her time. . . the face of decay. . .  (156-7)

            With the failure of her marriage, Clara's interest turns back to the city, and she uses a toothache as the excuse to make the first of three visits to her former home.  Each of her visits coincides with those times of the year associated with turning points in the solar calendar, periods during which primitive fertility cults attempted to propitiate the forces of nature to bring about bountiful growing seasons.  Clara's first visit to the city takes place during the harvest, the autumnal equinox.  After her departure, Niels begins the fall plowing, musing on his and Clara's mutual isolation, catching a glimpse of Ellen Amundsen through the smoke and flame of a marsh fire.  With Clara's return from the city, their mutual alienation reasserts itself.  However genuine Niels' desire to understand his wife's point-of-view, he continues to think of his attempts at conciliation as making "the best of a bad bargain. . ."  (166).

            Clara's second trip to the city occurs at the winter solstice, when the ancient fertility cults celebrated the renewal of the growth cycle  in the birth of the god of the waxing year.  When his wife leaves for the city, Niels vows to offer to her the next trip at Easter, the vernal equinox.  The pattern of Clara's periodic visits to the city and her subsequent returnings to isolate herself in the recesses of her sanctum sanctorum functions independently, or seemingly so, of Niels' pattern of life in operation of the farm.  And so Niels' dream of his house becoming central to the life of the farm has faded. The house and its silent occupant are closed off from the farm and those who work it.  Niels  seldom enters the house after Clara's return from her Easter visit.

            In the summer the arrival of drought and the consequent failure of a promising crop coincide with Niels' prevention of Clara's midsummer visit to the city, suggesting the consequences of  failure to propitiate Cybele by allowing her to enjoy the full benefit of ritual observance.   Accused by her husband of deceit, it now is her turn to be eloquent and authoritative.  Implicit in her frank and honest account of herself are criticisms of male dominance, of the hypocrisy of puritan sexuality, and of the destructiveness of mindless innocence.  Despite Niels' recognition of the validity of much that his wife has said, he is unable to transcend his sense of having been betrayed by her infidelities.  He refuses to allow her to leave him, and so she vows to "get even" with him.  After the confrontation, Niels takes up residence in the bunkhouse with Bobby, seldom entering the main house. Watching the house, he continues to nurse his sense of betrayal:  "It never occurred to him yet not to blame his wife for doing what it was her nature to do; not to judge her and to find her guilty . . ." (191).

            By early winter Clara has become a recluse, leaving her room only to partake of the larder, the diminution of which is the only indication to Niels of his wife's presence in the house.  Then, shortly before Christmas, Niels and Clara meet by chance.  Again, he is struck, repelled by Clara's face: "For a fraction of a second he had thought it was the face of a perfect stranger.  It had been that of an aging woman, yellow, lined with sharp wrinkles and black hollows under the eyes, the lips pale like the face . . .  She had been without her makeup . . ." (195).    Following Christmas there is another meeting, another glimpse of the ravaged face.  Then begins a series of incidents during which Clara stands by the woodstove, exposing her naked face and body in mute statements as frank and honest as had been her verbal account of herself the previous summer. 

            Grove's most effective use of myth and ritual to reinforce the dramatic intensity of his narrative occurs in the long passage describing Bobby's return from the hayfield to the farmyard on the night of the murder.  Here Grove turns to advantage his considerable talent for reflecting emotional states in landscape details.  Fusing the immediacy of particularized detail with the compelling inevitability of tragic action, the passage begins with a focal shift to Bobby.  While reflecting on Niels' absence, Bobby is overcome by a sense of dread.  In the trip from the slough to the farm house, the landscape seems to be animated by his sense of foreboding.  It is difficult to excerpt quotations from this passage, characterized as it is by narrative economy in which nearly every phrase contributes to the overall effect:

The bush stood silent, motionless. . . The creaking and rattling of the wheels echoed back to the driver who sat hushed on the load. . .

Now and then the horses snorted. . .

Even here no sound except the desultory, almost hesitating bumps and screeches of the rack. . .

Low in the west, the waxing sickle of the moon was hanging. . . a little curve of light about to set.  There was no wind: but the leaves of the aspens were rustling softly. . .

  To defend himself against a feeling of dread, the boy began for a third time to

   whistle.             

                     Again he stopped.  The sound seemed a profanation of something. . .  (216-17)

Again it is midsummer;  the "waxing sickle of the moon" is about to set on a scene of ritual murder, the sacrifice of sensuality to chastity, Cybele to Diana, mother/whore to mother/virgin.  One need only remember the sacredness of horses to Diana to understand the effect of Niels' subsequent sacrifice of the Percheron gelding.  The Percherons had been the embodiment of Niels' dream, purchased to adorn the temple that Niels now perceives as defiled.  The sacrifice of the gelding, which Kroetsch has called "the symbolic death of the unmanned man,"(70) Niels completes the ritual obliteration of his dream by symbolically cutting his connection to Ellen, which has been defined by mute service, as readily and chastely compliant to Ellen's will as the horse had been to the pull of its master's reins.  The effect of the murder and blood sacrifice has been to free Niels from the psychic trap of Old World myth and create for him, after a period of ritual cleansing in prison, the possibility, at least, for a spiritual and psychological rebirth.

[6]For an early discussion of "town and country" see Keith 28-9.