As For Me and My House
by Sinclair Ross
It's still the same -- to keep from him that I know. Somehow it's so important that my shoulder doesn't even hut. There's a high wind, and the rain beats down in hissing scuds against the windows. Like one of the clinks of drip from the ceiling into the pail, as sudden and clear and cold and meaningless, it comes into my mind that what has happened is adultery -- that he's been unfaithful to me, that I have a right now to be free.
But I just sit here numb and still, with a kind of dread that I won't be able to keep from him, that when he looks at me again he'll see I know. I don't know why it's that way. You'd think I couldn't stand him near me, that I'd be crying and storming now, saying the bitterest things I knew. But instead I'm uneasy, afraid, as if I were the guilty one. My rights as a wife somehow don't matter. Like another clink I know I can't be free.-----
As to Judith -- she was there, that was all. I know I'm right. The man I see in the pulpit every Sunday isn't Philip. Not the real Philip. However staidly and prosily he lives he's still the artist. He's racked still with the passion of the artist, for seeking, creating, adventuring. That's why it happened. He's restless, cramped. Horizon's too small for him. There's not adventure here among the little false fronts -- no more than there is with a woman he's been married to for twelve years.
Cheery stuff, huh? WOO! As For Me and My House tells the story of Philip Bentley, a small town preacher on the prairies during the depression. The story is told in the first person, through the character of Mrs. Bentley, the devoted wife of Philip, whose first name is never granted to us. Mrs. Bentley's entire identity is wrapped up in Philip -- hence her namelessness -- and her existence is based around making him feel worthwhile. The crux of the conflict in this novel is that Philip and Mrs. Bentley are atheists... Or at least, they don't believe in the Christian message, though the extent to which they deny or question God seems to shift throughout the book. As a result, Philip fears he is a hypocrite, and takes his rage and discomfort out on his wife, who is the only person who knows his secret. The fact is, Philip is a failure. He became a preacher because he failed in his dream to become an artist (a dream his father had failed at before him, with the same end result), he has failed to keep up his art in any meaningful way, and he fails regularly at the role he has taken on, that of the small-town preacher. Mrs. Bentley regularly wishes that Philip could come up with a sermon that could provide the least amount of comfort to people, but he can't, because he's not just a bad preacher, he's a bad liar. He can't tell people what they need to hear for comfort, because he doesn't believe it himself. As a result, he fails not only his wife and himself, but he fails every town he preaches in. He never remains the minister for more than four years in any community.
What makes this novel so hard to read for me, I think, is the fact that Ross really does write quite effectively from the perspective of a woman -- but it is the stereotypical 1930s woman whose perspective she has. That is, despite her own abilities and options, she endures him because it is her duty. But even though I understand that that would be the normal result for the time period, I desperately wanted to see more of a struggle on her part to keep things together. We have her perspective here, and I wanted it to be used to challenge the ideas and assumptions of the time -- but while minor things become battlegrounds (the town doesn't think she should do heavy work, but Philip is useless at it, and she resents her banishment to the kitchen occasionally), the major issues are never even remotely called in to question. And there are incidences, such as his affair as above, that stress her out tremendously, but the resolution she always comes to is a focus on what is best for him, not for her.
The fact is that Mrs. Bentley is trapped in an emotionally abusive relationship, where she lives on tenderhooks, never knowing what Philip's mood will be. She judges his affection and emotion by how distant his touch is on her arm -- and this is the only emotional connection the two really share. He is not in tune with her to the degree that she is with him, because while her survival depends on his emotional health, he in turn seems to consider himself an island. Mrs. Bentley allows herself to be the blame for everything because the son she tried to bear him was stillborn twelve years previously -- she seems to feel that her inability to produce the son he so desperately wanted is what stifled his creativity, in the end. He allows himself to blame her, too, but he believes she doesn't know it. But the emotional gaslighting that Philip engages in not only forces Mrs. Bentley to remain in the relationship, but it destroys her ability to objectively view situations. So when Philip cheats on her -- and when she has the money set aside to leave him, and no children to potentially damage -- she can't leave, and stays by him convinced that what would destroy the marriage would be her mentioning his affair (_not_ the affair itself, which he of course couldn't help because of his artistic passions). And when the affair results in a child, the mother of the child is handily killed off (again, this is placed at the feet of Mrs. Bentley, because she determined that she and Philip should move away and the mother dies of grief or something equally stupid), and Mrs. Bentley selflessly adopts the child.
The whole thing is kind of sick.
The problem here is not with the writing of the novel. It's a well-written book, and it contains some passages of real beauty. The problem here is Ross' unwillingness to challenge received notions of what womanhood is, and as such the character of Mrs. Bentley becomes quite an infuriating one to read. Her choices are maddening and inexplicable at times, and her long-suffering nature is cute for about ten seconds before I wants to strangle her. The other problem is that there is no hope in this novel; until the last pages, there seems to be not a glimmer of a chance that either Philip or Mrs. Bentley will find happiness. Philip even quashes Mrs. Bentley's only real friendship by accusing her of an affair with her confidant, Paul. And while it appears clear that Paul would love to take Mrs. Bentley away from this life, it's equally clear that she would never let that happen. She has a resigned contentedness in her misery that is so frustrating, because it destroys any chance at true happiness or resolution for the characters. Even when they save up enough money, and the harlot is dead, and they have the baby, and they're ready to move out of town... I don't think any reader would really believe that they successfully make a go of their new life, because nothing has really changed. They still don't communicate, she is still at the whim of his emotions, and he clearly loves the new baby more than he loves her. Where is the hope here?
The message of this novel seems to be: don't be an atheistic minister on the prairies during the depression. And I'm pretty sure I knew that already anyway.
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