This paper examines how Sinclair Ross's As For Me and My House and W.O. Mitchell's Who Has Seen the Wind employ the Canadian prairie landscape as a literary device to externalize the inner emotions and thoughts of their characters. The analysis explores how Mitchell uses nature — particularly weather and light — to reflect young Brian O'Connal's spiritual wonder and confusion about life, death, and God, while Ross deploys relentless wind and dust storms to embody the oppressive despair felt by the Bentleys in small-town Horizon. Drawing on textual evidence, literary criticism, and Mitchell's own foreword, the paper argues that the deliberate use of the surrounding environment is central to both novels' thematic meaning and emotional impact on the reader.
A number of similarities exist between the novels of W.O. Mitchell and Sinclair Ross — who wrote Who Has Seen the Wind and As For Me and My House, respectively. Both works deal with theological issues of religion and faith and contain a fair amount of skepticism toward these concepts. The novels also mirror one another in their use of the environment and the surrounding landscape as a tool to illustrate a variety of feelings experienced by their respective characters. The tendency to use the outer surroundings of the natural world to explicate the inner thought processes and emotions of human nature is one characteristic of a significant body of Canadian literature (Bordessa 58). As such, both Mitchell and Ross have used the impact of landscape and environment on their characters to demonstrate a definite focus on the Canadian prairies, illustrating how the beauty and loneliness of that environment creates a powerful feeling for the reader.
In many instances, both novelists render the surrounding environment in a way that magnifies the internalizations their principal characters deal with. This tendency is particularly evident in Who Has Seen the Wind, in which the outer manifestations of the natural world frequently symbolize and mirror the thoughts and emotions of Brian O'Connal, a young boy who learns much about the power of God.
In the following quotation, in which Brian is disappointed that he must give his new puppy to a friend, Mitchell uses rain to magnify the heart-rending emotions the child feels: "Brian watched the drops gather and slide, slowly at first, then faster, down the pane. The sky over Sherry's low house was the color of lead; the sodden leaves of the hedge were dripping. He felt inexplicably sad… He had not seen his dog for three days."
Mitchell deliberately employs imagery of a melancholy nature to show the reader that Brian is in a sad state. The references to the sky's leaden color and to the water-soaked leaves, described as "dripping," portray images commonly associated with sadness and provide a tangible quality to the sentiments and subsequent thoughts Brian is enduring at the present loss of his puppy. Such imagery offers an apt example of Mitchell's inherent capability to show sentiment rather than explain it. The fact that he uses nature — which functions throughout the book as a motif for the sublime nature of the divine — as the principal means of doing so in this passage indicates the importance he attaches to the environment's ability to depict loneliness.
Mitchell's work offers further examples of this technique, giving the author opportunities to display the beauty and wonder of a child's first-hand experiences of the natural world. In the following quotation, Brian is drawing a picture of God with all the innocence and speculation of a boy his age: "He made a yellow God, yellow for the round part, and green legs, and purple eyes, and red arms, and that was God… As he drew, the curtains on the open window bellied gently out; from the high den window dropped staining light, the beveled glass breaking it up into violet, blue, and red. Brian laid down his crayons and stared at the colored patch on the rug."
This passage depends clearly on the outer, surrounding Canadian environment to project the sensations Mitchell's character is experiencing. Brian's musings about the various colors of a divine entity are conveniently reflected in the sunlight's filtration through the stained-glass window. The fact that the same colors depicted in Brian's drawing — the red and violet/purple hues — are now shining through his window serves to reinforce the accuracy of his intuitions, if not in actuality, then certainly in his mind. Mitchell strongly suggests this by having Brian end the passage by pondering the colors now present in his room. The simplicity, beauty, and even the transcendent effervescence of such an innocent moment are all underscored by Mitchell's reliance on nature to evoke the feelings of wonder and awe his character is experiencing.
Another fundamental similarity between the works of Mitchell and Ross is the landscape itself which the authors choose to render. Canada's dry, wind-swept plains play an important role in each story and can almost be considered a crucial, unspoken character. Whereas Mitchell fundamentally employs such scenery to represent the potential and beauty of a divine being, Ross uses it for a decidedly different purpose: emphasizing the dreary, enduring existence of small-town life that his protagonists, Mr. and Mrs. Bentley, continually feel oppressed by in their recent move to the provincial town of Horizon. The greater part of Ross's story is characterized by a relentless, overbearing wind that blows dust and drought throughout much of the town, which the author uses to symbolize the useless, unconquerable nature of small-town life that both protagonists dislike and long to escape. The following quotation, in which Mrs. Bentley writes in her journal about the potency of the wind, clearly indicates this point:
"The wind keeps on. When you step outside its strong hot push it is like something solid pressed against the face. The sun through the dust looks big and red and close. Bigger, redder, closer every day. You begin to glance at it with a doomed feeling, that there's no escape" (p. 73).
Although Mrs. Bentley is literally describing the wind and its powerful effects on the dust of the plains, she could very easily be describing the draining effect of Horizon's small-town mentality — and even smaller ambitions — on both herself and her husband. The reference to the "doomed feeling" with which there is no escape certainly applies to this interpretation, since one of the principal themes of the novel is the despair that both Mr. and Mrs. Bentley feel at having forfeited their cosmopolitan desires for such a parochial existence. Ross chooses to emphasize this motif through the oppressive, overbearing manifestation of weather patterns so common to the country and towns these characters deplore, readily indicating that the use of landscape is an effective means of depicting the loneliness and inner emotions of his characters.
The potency of the Canadian landscape and its effects on characters are not limited to awe-inspiring passages. Much of the use of the Canadian prairies in As For Me and My House evidences the opposite end of the beauteous depictions Mitchell offers. Mr. Bentley's prime aspiration in life was to use his talent as a draughtsman and painter to become an artist — and thereby escape the small-town environment he grew up in. To his considerable disappointment, he failed in his artistic endeavors and is largely miserable to find himself instead a middle-aged preacher, one who does not even believe in the power or word of God, in just such a small-town location. The following quotation, in which Mrs. Bentley describes one of her husband's recent illustrations since they settled in Horizon, demonstrates how Ross emphasizes this fact by having Bentley's artwork drastically influenced by the oppressive weather patterns of the Canadian landscape:
"It's a little street again tonight, false-fronted stores, a pool hall and a wind. You feel the wind, its drive and bluster, the way it sets itself against the town. The false fronts that otherwise stand up so flat and vacant are buckled down in desperation for their lives. They lean a little forward, better to hold their ground against the onslaughts of the wind. Some of them cower before the flail of dust and sand. Some of them wince as if the strain were torture" (p. 43).
Ross's choice of diction demonstrates how potent an effect the Canadian landscape has had on Bentley, his artwork, and on the town in which he lives. The effects of the wind on storefronts are described as "torture" and "onslaughts," which evoke connotations of pain, battle, and defeat. This quotation is even more significant because the depiction of a small town is a recurring theme in Bentley's artwork. Yet earlier in the novel, before the wind storms began in earnest, the failed artist's work was described by his wife as romanticizing provincial townships. At this later point in the novel, however, Bentley's depiction echoes his own internalized feelings of defeat — caused not only by the weather, but also by the consequences of being trapped in the very environment he once longed to escape. Even in his character's artwork, Ross uses the Canadian environment to oppress his protagonists and to isolate and depict the loneliness they feel.
"Critics and Mitchell himself confirm landscape's centrality"
"Mitchell's Saskatchewan sketches shaped the novel's nature focus"
Bordessa, Ronald. "Moral Frames for Landscape in Canadian Literature." A Few Acres of Snow: Literary and Artistic Images of Canada. Edited by Paul Simpson-Housley and G. B. Norcliffe. Dundurn Press, 1992.
McLay, C. "Crocus, Saskatchewan: A Country of the Mind." The Journal of Popular Culture, 14.2 (Fall 1980): 333–349.
Ross, Sinclair. As For Me and My House. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Limited, 1966. Print.
Mitchell, William. Who Has Seen the Wind. Toronto: MacMillan of Canada, 1961.
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