The Whirlpool

Jane Urquhart set her slender first novel, The Whirlpool (1986; US rpt., 1990), in Niagara Falls, within shouting distance of the US border.  The year is 1889, and while Robert Browning lies dying in Italy--the poet's last days bookend the narrative--four Canadians test the border between life and death.  Patrick, an unsuccessful poet, dreams of swimming the titular, and very deadly, whirlpool; David McDougal, a historian obsessed with the War of 1812, plods away at his history without quite processing the reality of either warfare or his wife, Fleda; Fleda, McDougal's Browning-obsessed wife, yearns to escape her dull, constricted life; and Maud, the undertaker, avoids life (including her apparently autistic son) by retreating to the business of death.   By the novel's conclusion, everyone will have passed through the maelstrom of both literal and figurative whirlpools, to be rewarded with the faint promise of either death or rebirth.

Some of the novel's formal and thematic elements work better than others.  Fleda's narrative is, perhaps, the least successful: her vaguely New-Womanish rebellion against both Victorian femininity and an oblivious husband--neatly summed up in her preference for the supposedly dangerous Browning over the more appropriate Coventry Patmore--treads some rather familiar ground.  Moreover, while the Browning quotations sometimes felt too pat, somehow, Browning's symbolic role as a character was intriguing.    The dying Browning angrily rejects Shelley's poetry, only to finally concede that Shelley had something he himself lacks: "Shelley's emotions so absent from the old poet's life, his work, leaving him unanswered, speaking through the mouths of others, until he had to turn away from Shelley altogether in anger and disgust" (213).  While both Fleda and McDougal identify Browning's poetry with passionate, potentially threatening intensity, Browning ruefully admits to leading "a fairly conventional life" (4); his rage at the long-dead Shelley partly derives from his discovery that Shelley's poetry haunts his mind, even mediating his perceptions of Venice (9).  This struggle between two different kinds of poetic life and language concludes with Browning's decision to emulate Shelley's final silence (212)--a decision that implicitly enshrines Shelley as the greater poet, but that also distinguishes true utterances from the merely conventional. 

Significantly, Fleda's decision to abandon her husband comes accompanied by her unspoken decision to abandon Browning: in her anger, she first retreats into childhood hymns, then stops quoting poetry altogether. Browning embraces silence to acknowledge the power of Shelley's poetic language, and thus tacitly capitulates to his predecessor (there's something very Anxiety of Influence about all this); Fleda, by contrast, escapes by depoliticizing her own predecessor's route.  The predecessor in question is the Canadian heroine Laura Secord, whose memory obsesses McDougal.  As McDougal confesses to Patrick, "My wife is very much like Laura Secord.  I think that may be one of the reasons I married her, though God forbid she know that.  It's not that she has the pioneering spirit or anything like that, but physically she resembles the Laura Secord that came to me in my dream" (74).  McDougal's desire to find Secord somehow reincarnated in his wife extends even to erotic fantasies, as though he yearns to copulate with the essence of Canadian-ness.  For McDougal, a passionate Canadian nationalist, Secord represents Canadian femininity in its purest form; his wife, he has to admit, has "never had one single authentically Canadian dream" (88).   While we're obviously supposed to interpret McDougal's dual obsession with Secord and Canadian nationalism in a humorous light, it's nevertheless clear that both halves of McDougal's fantasy resist the sheer messiness and mutability symbolized by that omnipresent whirlpool.  As Henry James might say, McDougal tries to "fix" his wife.  Her departure, however, rejects his version of Secord: "She followed Laura Secord's route but she carried with her no deep messages" (211).  Like Browning, Fleda chooses silence, but this silence transforms Secord's political journey into a quest for personal liberation.

While the whirlpool itself is sometimes too obvious a symbol--some readers may be alarmed when the characters start explicating its meaning--it's more intriguing when set next to many of the characters' passions for fixed spatial arrangements.  Maud neatly catalogs and orders the effects of the anonymous drowned men who wind up in her shop; McDougal resents the battlefield's reabsorption into the commercial and domestic landscape; Patrick desires the landscape itself, ideally without people.  By contrast, Fleda rages at the men, who "keep wanting to build things; to order lumber, hire workmen, draft plans, take measurements.  They keep wanting to deliver concrete messages and plan battles."  In her own version of Laura Secord, "[i]t wasn't the message that was important.  It was the walk.  The journey" (197; ital. in original).  On the one hand, we have the desire for control, embodied in everything from nationalist politics and warfare to domestic architecture and personal relationships; on the other, we have the process, the quest without a necessary goal.  Thus, Maud's son precipitates her return to life by literally reorganizing the house and, in a sense, disenchanting its contents: "Now the child had caused all the objects that surrounded her, all the relics she had catalogued, to lose their dreadful power" (193).  By recontextualizing the objects, the child inadvertently forces Maud to confront her self-imposed imprisonment behind death's walls.  McDougal, however, last appears contemplating wartime artifacts in a museum, "comforted by the sight of these objects carefully arranged on fabric, safely catalogued and housed" (208); unable to contemplate the collapse of his world after his wife's disappearance, he retreats to the world of historical relics. 

What about Patrick? Patrick's death in the whirlpool might appear, at first glance, to be an embrace of fluidity--finding life in the encounter with unpredictable death.  In fact, however, Patrick embraces the fatal desire for order with more passion than anyone else in the novel.  Remembering a nightmare in which a house's contents stop corresponding to its rooms, Patrick realizes what it has been trying to tell him:  "Keep the sequence of fear, of quest, of desire in logical order--compartmentalized and exact.  Try not to bring one with you into the other.  Do not confuse fear with desire, desire with quest, quest with fear.  Otherwise the world scrambles, becomes unidentifiable, loses its recognizable context" (170).  Patrick's desire for a sharply-defined, perfectly contained world prompts him to refuse any real connection with humanity; most seriously, it leads him to reject Fleda.   Like Browning and Fleda, Patrick embraces silence, hearing in the whirlpool "a negative sound, the sound of the silence where the crowds have disappeared; a vacuum of sound...neutral, harmless" (200).  Yet, in different ways, Browning and Fleda choose silence as an act of homage, a personalized tribute to a greater power.  When Patrick chooses silence, he deliberately disengages himself from humanity.  His death by drowning parodies Shelley's death--the death that, at the end, Browning allows to enter the "dream architecture" (213) of his own dying consciousness.  In Patrick's case, silence truly is synonymous with death.