Swamp Angel by Ethel Wilson

First published: 1954

Type of work: Regional romance

Time of work: The early 1950’s

Locale: Vancouver and the interior of British Columbia

Principal Characters:

• Maggie Vardoe, the protagonist, an independent woman skilled in making fishing tackle
• Nell Severance, her old friend and neighbor
• Hilda Severance, her daughter
• Haldar Gunnarsen, the owner of a fishing lodge
• Vera Gunnarsen, his jealous wife
• Edward Vardoe, Maggie’s second husband, a real estate agent
• Joey Quong, a young Chinese taxi driver who assists Maggie

The Novel

Tired of her second marriage, to Edward Vardoe, and the routine of her pent-up life in Vancouver, Maggie Vardoe decides to run away to the interior of British Columbia, where she finds freedom in nature. As the novel opens Maggie watches the flight of birds outside her window, her planned escape paralleling their migration beyond the mountains. To support herself and her secret plan, she has been making fishing flies—a skill she acquired in New Brunswick during her childhood—for a year and selling them to a sporting goods shop. At a prearranged hour, she runs to a taxi driven by Joey Quong a young Chinese, and never turns back to her home. As soon as Edward discovers that his wife has left him, he visits their friends and neighbors, the Severances, but they tell him that they know nothing about Maggie’s where abouts. From that point onward, Ethel Wilson alternates plots between Maggie and Nell Severance.

Maggie continues to distance herself from her husband and her city, head ing further into the interior of British Columbia, to the village of Hope and the forested banks of the Fraser River. Fishing for her freedom, she forgets about her mistaken second marriage and remembers instead her first marriage to Tom Lloyd, who was killed in action; she also remembers her child hood in New Brunswick, where she learned the skills of fishing. Indeed, the narrative alternates between descriptions of Maggie’s past and Nell’s past, for Maggie continues to write to Nell when she reaches her destination at Three Loon Lake, where she goes to work at Haldar Gunnarsen’s fishing lodge.

Maggie succeeds in restoring Gunnarsen’s dilapidated lodge, but her very success incurs the wrath and jealousy of Vera Gunnarsen, who has never been content with her lot. While Maggie delights in her visions of osprey and eagle, the innocence of kitten and fawn, and teaches young Alan Gunnarsen about the beauty of nature, Vera explodes in jealousy but is soon calmed when Maggie informs her that she bas lost her husband and child. During, rainstorm, Maggie saves the life of an American guest, Mr. Cunningham who rewards her handsomely, but in her jealousy Vera tries to drown herself.

Back in Vancouver, Nell injures herself and decides to send Maggie her lifetime companion, the revolver called Swamp Angel. Accompanying the revolver is a letter instructing Maggie to throw the Angel into the lake after Nell’s death, for the revolver was part of Nell’s juggling circus act. In the final scene of the novel, Maggie rows to the middle of the lake with her revolver and the narrative shifts to the present tense to review past events: “The Swamp Angel in its eighty years or so has caused death and astonishment and jealousy and affection and one night it frightened Edward Vardoe on Maggie’s behalf, although Maggie does not know that, and soon it will be gone. It will be a memory, and then not even a memory, for there will be no one to remember it.” The revolver symbolizes the plot and the fictional representation of reality, and Maggie decides to do more than drop this artifact into the water:

She stood in the boat and with her strong arm she threw the Angel up into the air, higher than ever Nell Bigley of the Juggling Bigleys had ever tossed it. It made a shining parabola in the air, turning downwards—turning, turning, catching the sunlight, hitting the surface of the lake, sparkling down into the clear water, vanishing amidst breaking bubbles in the water, sinking down among the affrighted fish, settling in the ooze. When all was still the fish, who had fled, returned, flickering, weaving curiously over the Swamp Angel. Then flickering, weaving, they resumed their way.

The Characters

Maggie Vardoe displays independence of spirit, generosity, and good common sense in everything she undertakes, except in her decision to marry Edward Vardoe. Her sensitivity to nature is revealed in the opening paragraph when she follows the flight of birds toward the mountains in the distance. In all of her activities, she approaches perfection: Her fishing flies are flawless her plan to leave her husband is perfectly executed, and all of her work at the fishing lodge is almost godlike. Yet her life has been flawed by the deaths of her first husband, their child, her father, and her second marriage. She displays remarkable self-control and presence of mind whether in leaving her husband, in confronting an antagonistic Vera Gunnarsen, or in saving Mr. Cunningham: “Her pleasures were very few, and were not communicable and she had long formed the habit of seeking and finding, where she could private enjoyment of the sort that costs nothing but an extension of the imagination.” Hilda Severance remarks that Maggie is calm and placid; she is associated with a divine state of being—“[I]t takes God Himself to be fair to two different people at once”—and she is described as a “god floating” in the water. Nell Severance writes her about the “third dimension that includes perception and awareness of other people”—a third dimension that portrays the development of both women. Nell also writes that “no one can write about perfect love because it cannot be committed to words even by those who know about it.” The omniscient narrator, perfect Maggie, and narratively omnipotent but physically crippled Nell know about love, language, and their limitations.

Nell possesses a more forceful will than Maggie and inflicts it on others around her as she also takes command of situations. She manages her daughter’s marriage and takes control of Edward Vardoe after Maggie leaves him. When the old crippled woman first appears, she confronts Edward without speaking yet fixes her gaze upon him and picks up her revolver with a melodramatic flourish. “Mrs. Severance twirled the Swamp Angel as if absent-mindedly, then like a juggler she tossed it spinning in the air, caught it with her little hand, tossed it again, higher, again, higher, spinning, spinning.” As her actions imply, she is adept at juggling human relationships; as her name implies, she also attempts to heal severed relationships such as the Vardoes’ or to unite her daughter with Albert Cousins in marriage. When Hilda accuses her of being a wicked old woman in her twirling of Swamp Angel, she replies that it was a sweet bit of melodrama. Later, the powerful, willful old woman tells Edward Vardoe how to rearrange his life; by opening vistas, she saves him, in effect, from murdering his wife, but the effort is tiring. Although Hilda loves her mother, she hates her somewhat for being so powerful and for having left her as a child when she had to travel with the circus. Like Maggie, Nell Severance displays godlike powers in her success with salvation, yet she desires the “human touch.” Hilda accuses her worldly unworldly mother of playing God from her chair, which is both constricted and universal as she views the human scene with a mixture of compassion, contempt, and entertainment.

Where Maggie and Nell are three-dimensional characters, complementing each other in their godgames, the one outdoors, the other indoors, two other women in the novel offer contrasts in their straightforward characterization. Hilda is good-natured and lives in her mother’s shadow, while Vera Gunnarsen is jealous and out of place in the natural setting of British Columbia. Their weaknesses stand in contrast to the strengths of Maggie and Nell. Similarly, the men in the novel occupy secondary positions and are almost impotent against the domination of the two major female characters. Edward Vardoe is a shallow man who has never understood his wife; Albert Cousins is a suitable husband for Hilda, but it takes Nell’s “fall” to act as a catalyst for their union; Haldar Gunnarsen cannot survive without Maggie’s assistance; and Maggie saves Mr. Cunningham and plans the futures of Joey and his brother. The omniscient narrator offers exactly the right amount of detail for bringing all these characters into sharp focus.

Critical Context

Swamp Angel, regarded by most critics as Wilson’s finest achievement, follows from her first novel, Hetty Dorval (1947), also an accomplished work dealing with a girl growing up in the British Columbia hinterland. The Harper edition of Swamp Angel, published in the United States, was substantially different (containing two additional chapters and an additional paragraph at the end) from the Macmillan edition published in Canada and England, where the reviews were more positive in their praise of Wilson’s style and characterization. Her novels set on the Pacific rim contributed to the development of a distinctive West Coast literary sensibility.

Wilson’s novels concern common themes such as the failure of love, hope and despair, and fear and courage. Her portrayal of strong female characters paved the way for other major Canadian writers such as Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, and Alice Munro. In Swamp Angel and her other fiction, Wilson combines a Victorian or Edwardian sensibility with a contemporary ironic attitude in a subdued yet seductive prose style, with its economy of words and lack of pretentiousness. In 1961, Ethel Wilson was among the first recipients of the Canada Council Medal; in 1964, she was awarded the Lorne Pierce Medal; and in 1970, she received the Order of Canada Medal of Service.

Bibliography

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

Pacey, Desmond. Ethel Wilson, 1967.