As for Me and My House by Sinclair Ross

First published: 1941

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: During the Great Depression

Locale: Horizon, a fictional town on the Canadian prairie

Principal Characters:

• Mrs. Bentley, the narrator, a small-town preacher’s wife
• Philip Bentley, a United Church minister tormented by artistic ambition
• Paul Kirby, a local schoolteacher who befriends the Bentleys
• Steve Kulanich, a homeless boy adopted by the Bentleys
• Judith West, a member of the church choir whose illegitimate infant the Bentleys adopt

The Novel

The narrative of As for Me and My House takes the form of Mrs. Bentley’s diary. The diary entries, spanning two springtimes during the Great Depression, recount a year in the lives of a small-town preacher and his wife in a drought-stricken prairie community. The United Church parish in Horizon is Philip Bentley’s fourth ministry in twelve years. For Mrs. Bentley, the new parish is yet another in a series of communities to which she has had to adjust over the twelve years of her childless marriage. Caught in the inexorable grind of economic dependence, the Bentleys live a life of controlled despair. The dominant mood in the household has taken its toll on their marriage; communication and affection between husband and wife have been reduced to awkwardly formal gestures.

Mrs. Bentley’s defensive reserve is penetrated by Paul Kirby, the local schoolteacher, who becomes a regular companion and dinner guest. Paul amuses the Bentleys with philological trivia, which breaks the oppressive silence of their home. He also introduces them to Steve Kulanich, a motherless boy abandoned by a profligate father. When the Bentleys adopt Steve, Philip begins to shake off years of spiritual emptiness and physical inertia. Philip’s elation, however, is short-lived, for two months later, two Catholic priests come to claim the boy on religious grounds, and they take him to their orphanage.

Once Steve has left, the Bentleys’ spiritual health deteriorates further, and Mrs. Bentley eventually becomes so physically ill that her friend Judith West must perform the duties of nurse and housekeeper in the Bentley home for a few days. Acutely uneasy about this domestic intrusion by a woman who is infatuated with Philip, Mrs. Bentley believes that her fears of her husband’s infidelity have been confirmed when one night she hears Judith’s laughter coming from the shed at the back of the house. Overwhelmed by anxiety, Mrs. Bentley does not dare to verify her suspicions, but she is not surprised to discover later that Judith is pregnant. Judith retreats in disgrace from Horizon to her family’s rural home, refusing to disclose the identity of her lover.

During the winter, the Bentleys become more estranged, both husband and wife harboring resentments which ultimately affect their closest companions. In her loneliness, Mrs. Bentley cultivates two new friendships which increase the distance between her and Philip. El Greco, an adopted stray hound, accompanies her on the long, desperate walks she takes to escape the tension at home. Paul becomes more attentive to Mrs. Bentley as her loneliness becomes more apparent. El Greco’s fate stands as an allegory of Paul’s. Having learned from his mistress the habit of walking to the edge of town, El Greco makes the walk alone one night only to be devoured by wolves. As loyal and ingenuous as the family dog, Paul falls deeply in love with Mrs. Bentley, unaware that she is using his companionship merely as a diversion and perhaps even as a ploy in the emotional games she is playing with her husband.

Late in Judith’s pregnancy, the Bentleys devise a plan to escape their unhappiness. Without consulting Judith, they decide to adopt her baby when it is born. With the money that Mrs. Bentley has managed to save, they intend to buy a secondhand bookstore in a nearby town. Their plans revive their optimism; Philip will finally be able to leave a vocation for which he is temperamentally unsuited, and the baby will provide their marriage with the focus it has lacked for many years. Yet when Philip tells Judith of the plan, she is driven to some desperate wandering of her own; the baby is born a month premature, and Judith dies the next day. After Judith’s death, the Bentleys take the baby and prepare to leave Horizon for a new life in a new town.

The Characters

The Bentleys’ contempt for Horizon and its provincial values is the social expression of their private despair. Philip, an aspiring but unaccomplished artist, has become a clergyman not out of religious conviction but simply in order to make a living, while Mrs. Bentley, a moderately talented musician, has given up dreams of a musical career to play the organ in her husband’s church on Sundays. Philip’s unhappiness expresses itself in his rejection of all social intercourse; he habitually retreats to his private study, where, instead of writing sermons, he sketches the bleak landscapes and false-fronted towns which reflect the desolation and hypocrisy he feels. Mrs. Bentley is plagued by guilt. Believing that marriage has thwarted her husband’s artistic ambition, and feeling sensitive about his disappointed desire for children, she takes extraordinary pains to humor Philip’s eccentricities. Occasionally, how ever, her excess of guilt and resentment explodes outward in angry tirades against him; unable to bear the emotional burden alone, she must sometimes force him to share it.

Ironically, although neither husband nor wife is happy, Mrs. Bentley derives a perverse security in their sharing of unhappiness. This security is shaken when Paul Kirby introduces them to Steve. The Bentleys adopt Steve in spite of the murmured protests from the townspeople that Steve comes from a bad family and, worse, that the boy is a Roman Catholic. Projecting onto Steve the indignation he still feels toward his own boyhood humiliations, Philip defends Steve passionately against the opinion of the town. Mrs. Bentley’s attitude toward the boy is ambivalent: “I like Steve, and at the same time I resent him. I grudge every minute he and Philip are alone together.” Mrs. Bentley’s resentment is twofold. Steve’s intrusion interrupts the domestic routine which has become the sole basis of intimacy in her marriage, but more significant, the child’s presence arouses her ancient guilt: “guiltily again I remembered the boy of his own that I haven’t given him.”

Mrs. Bentley is rescued from her isolation when Paul Kirby invites the family to take a holiday on his brother’s ranch. At the ranch, everyone is rejuvenated. Steve gets his own horse and develops self-confidence; Philip immerses himself in fresh scenery, which he can paint uninterrupted by clerical duties; and Mrs. Bentley, in a relatively carefree evening at a town dance, feels momentarily young again. The Bentley household is cast into emotional turmoil once more, however, when Steve is taken away. The Bentleys’ habitual resentment of small-town bigotry returns when they suspect that “someone went to the trouble of sending word to an official of the Roman Catholic Church that he was living in a Protestant home.”

During the long winter of Judith’s pregnancy, Mrs. Bentley conceals her suspicions of her husband’s infidelity. Instead of confronting him, she tests him by insisting he pay Judith a pastoral visit. Mrs. Bentley sends with Philip a gift of oranges. Judith’s response to the gift is ambiguously tearful, but it evokes Philip’s sympathy: “She cried when I told her they were from you—all afternoon, one in each hand, as if that could help.” Although it is difficult to discern whether Philip’s outrage is feigned or sincere, he retaliates against his wife for the guilt she stirs in him by accusing her of indiscretion in her friendship with Paul. Philip is rather more aware than his wife is of the younger man’s infatuation, and he resents her insensitivity to the consequent awkwardness which has arisen between him and Paul.

The birth of Judith’s baby brings the complex of relationships to a crisis, which ultimately resolves itself in hope. Judith’s death offers the sacrificial atonement which allows Mrs. Bentley to forgive her husband’s infidelity. The child provides the familial bond which has been missing from the Bentleys’ marriage. Paul can more easily withdraw his amorous affections from Mrs. Bentley once she takes on a maternal role with her new baby, and Philip, whose own guilt had led him to accuse his wife of infidelity, is finally released from the destructive cycle of guilt and blame when she intimates that she knows his guilty secret and has forgiven him.

Critical Context

In the tradition of the Canadian prairie winter, Ross explores the connotation of the individual with hostile nature and social alienation. In his short stories, originally published in journals between 1932 and 1952, he developed the narrative voice of the farm wife which he refined in As for Me and My House, his first novel. Ross’s less well-known novels, The Well (1958) and Whir of Gold (1970), deal with the clash of contemporary urban and rural values, while Sawbones Memorial (1974), his most formally innovative novel, returns to the historical setting of the Saskatchewan prairie during the Depression years.

Although it was ignored by Canadian reviewers and readers alike when it was first published in the United States in 1941, As for Me and My House finally received the recognition it deserved after its publication in a Canadian paperback edition (1957). Since then, it has become a Canadian classic, praised by critics for its complex characterization, its compressed, metaphorical style, and its depth of human insight.

Bibliography

Chambers, Robert D. Sinclair Ross and Ernest Buckler, 1975.

McMullen, Lorraine. Sinclair Ross, 1979.

Mitchell, Ken. Sinclair Ross: A Reader’s Guide, 1981.

Ross, Morton L. “The Canonization of As for Me and My House: A Case Study,” in The Bumper Book, 1986. Edited by John Metcalf.

Stephens, Donald, ed. Writers of the Prairies, 1973.