The Equations of Love by Ethel Wilson

First published: 1952

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: Mid-twentieth century

Locale: Vancouver, other parts of British Columbia, and Toronto

Principal Characters:

• Myrtle Johnson, a wife who is not easy to please
• Mortimer (“Mort”), her husband
• Victoria May Tritt, a spinster who is living an arid life
• Lilly Waller, also known as
• Mrs. Walter Hughes, among other aliases, an unmarried mother
• Eleanor, her illegitimate daughter

The Novel

The Equations of Love is composed of two parts, or novellas. In the first novella, “Tuesday and Wednesday,” the action covers two days in the lives of a middle-aged couple, Mortimer and Myrtle Johnson, who live in Vancouver. She does part-time domestic work for Mr. Lemoyne; he does gardening jobs, currently for the Dunkerleys. Mrs. Dunkerley makes a fuss over him until her businessman husband returns, a change which deflates Mort. Stopping for a beer, Mort meets an old friend from the trenches of World War I. They go to the mortician’s, where the man works, and he gives Mort some flowers for Myrtle. Myrtle, however, is angry at Mort for drinking and starts an argument with him, from which she is diverted by the intrusion of a stray cat that she decides to keep.

They begin the next day in a pleasant mood. Myrtle manages not to be too disparaging about the handbag Mrs. Lemoyne has been given for her birthday, and Mort, in quest of a job at a nursery garden, chances to meet Eddie Hansen, a logger and an old friend. Eddie has been drinking and, as they walk along the dock, he falls into the water. Mort tries to rescue him but Eddie pulls him under and they both drown. When the police bring the news to Myrtle, she is furious because she assumes that Mort has met a disgraceful death as a drunk. Her cousin Victoria May (“Vicky”) Tritt arrives and, although she was in church when the disaster occurred, creates a story of how heroic Mort’s death was, thereby mollifying Myrtle.

The second novella, “Lilly’s Story,” also begins in Vancouver. Lilly Waller had a difficult childhood, having been abandoned by her parents after they were divorced. She is now working as a waitress, but after discovering that the Oriental Yow has been using a stolen trousseau to fund the attentions with which he pursues her, she flees to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. There she lives with a Welsh miner, Ranny Griffiths. She becomes pregnant but decides to leave him. For a respectable cover, she acquires another alias as Mrs. Walter Hughes, widow.

Later, taking her daughter Eleanor with her, she moves to Comox and takes a position as a maid for Major and Mrs. Butler, retired from China. She easily deflects a pass by the major but decides to move because, in their house, her daughter will always be merely the maid’s child. She goes to work in a small hospital in the Fraser Valley, where she rejects the attentions of the hospital board chairman and overcomes the passion she feels for the hospital handyman.

She is aware that she is growing dowdy and that her limitations are becoming apparent to Eleanor, whose mind is opening to art and beauty. Eleanor marries a lawyer. While recognizing the love Eleanor and her husband feel for each other, Lilly finds visits to them and her grandchildren empty. Suddenly, Yow turns up to work at the hospital, so Lilly runs away to Toronto. After a complete beauty make-over, she goes to work as a chambermaid. J. B. Sprockett, a widower on business in Toronto, succeeds in dating her, coaxing a partially true account of her life out of her and by the third day getting her to accept his proposal of marriage.

The Characters

Amusingly and with understanding, Ethel Wilson presents the Johnsons as a working-class couple whose humdrum marriage is marred, though not violently disrupted, by misunderstandings and petty arguments. They live on the surface of life, unable to articulate their deeper feelings. These are occasionally presented as pronouncements by their attendant angels, a rather awkward authorial device.

In contrast to the Johnsons, whose lives seem characterized by friction, Myrtle’s Aunty Emblem exudes a “golden effulgence” that is derived from her plump prettiness, self-satisfaction, and popularity. Myrtle finds her aunt’s visits trying, especially when her aunt, twice widowed and once divorced, advises her about how to keep a husband satisfied. Yet even this gregarious and maternal figure-an emblem indeed-has come to enjoy most that time of day when she is alone in bed reading the personals columns in the newspapers, as if having “discovered the joys of privacy [she] does not wish to lose them, for at least she now owns herself.”

In stark contrast to Myrtle’s aunt is Myrtle’s cousin Vicky. A timid spinster, she lives alone in a boardinghouse, in a room lit by a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling; her sole indulgence is to read one film magazine a week. Aside from going to her job as a shop assistant and to church, her only outings are to visit Myrtle, who characteristically finds her trying but tolerates her. Yet Vicky is the one who invents the story of Mort’s heroic death, thereby allowing Myrtle to recover her equilibrium.

In the second novella, Wilson cleverly underscores the paradoxes of Lilly. To the outside world, especially her various employers, she is a hardworking bringer of order. Within, however, she is in a constant state of uncertainty and dread. As a child, she was innocently involved in trafficking in stolen goods and is haunted by the police interrogation she underwent. Her involvements with men have been unfulfilling. The assumed identity of respectability and the various aliases she adopts leave her vulnerable to exposure; whenever it threatens, she flees to a new location. She is trapped within the lie she has chosen to live. Yet she is doing so for the admirable motive of providing her daughter with the respectable, integrated life that Lilly has not had. Ironically, when Mr. Sprockett proposes to her, she tells him that she has deceived him: She confesses to wearing a wig, though in fact she is not.

Lilly is the center of her story, which is seen through her eyes; the other characters are peripheral.

Critical Context

The Equations of Love was reputed to be Ethel Wilson’s favorite among her books. Appearing in the middle of the decade 1947-1956, in which all of her novels were published, it certainly reflects her recurrent themes and mature technique.

Orphaned early, she was the daughter of a Methodist minister, and she was long and happily married to a Vancouver physician who was elected president of the Canadian Medical Association. With that background, the roles, attitudes, and destinies she gives some of her female characters are surprising, especially at the time she wrote her books. She could be regarded as a sotto voce and subtly effective exponent of some of the concerns of the subsequent women’s liberation movement, provided that to describe her thus is not taken as a polemical or restricting classification.

Bibliography

McMullen, Lorrain, ed. The Ethel Wilson Symposium, 1982.

Pacey, Desmond. Ethel Wilson, 1967.