Psyche

by Phyllis Young

  This view may have been seen as slightly old-fashioned at the time, but Brett was not the only social scientist in the 1930s to oppose the behavioural trends in psychology and the wide public support for eugenics that was eventually destroyed by Nazi German’s extreme application of its logic.15 Brett’s rigid adherence to a scholarly agenda focused on intellectual unity is a striking contrast to the independent and “natural” character of Psyche, who is “unbiased by ready-made social strictures.”16 His very public presence among Canadian intellectuals is a complete contrast to the emotional absence of Psyche’s father, whose loss is registered only through his wife’s pain. Psyche’s emotionally removed father differs from the emotionally present father expected in the postwar period.17

  It might seem that a link with Brett could be found in Psyche’s gradual understanding of her name. She is aware of her given name because it was printed on the nightshirt she was wearing on the day of her kidnapping. But the word, with its opening two consonants, is unrecognizable to her foster parents and hard for the young child to pronounce. However Psyche’s intuitive sense that the word holds a profound significance for her never wavers. She accepts the other names she is given only as a matter of necessity or as a function of familiarity, as when she answers to “Maggie” at school, to “Rosalie” at Oliver’s restaurant, or to Bel’s affectionate diminutive, “kid.” For years, she is condemned to spell rather than pronounce her own name, a limitation symbolic of the lack of information she, as victim of a kidnapping, has about herself and her personal history. Psyche’s gradual understanding of the name’s pronunciation and implications seems, at first glance, to emphasize the way in which the self develops over time and is shaped by experience, rather than springing into existence fully formed. Such a privileging of process is consistent with Brett’s own emphasis on the importance of taking into account “growth and development” in order to understand the “real activity of the mind.”18 However the novel itself emphasizes that Psyche both believes in and illustrates the way an individual’s personality can remain intact despite the vagaries of circumstance.

  Psyche also fails to conform to stereotypes of the late 1950s in its direct focus on sexuality. The 1953 publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Femaleby Alfred Kinsey et al focused public attention on the female libido, claiming that women were not different from men in seeking sexual satisfaction. Psyche’s natural and magnetic appeal to both men and women reinforces and underscores the link to Kinsey’s findings. Are there suggestions of lesbian sexuality in the sympathetic portrayal of Kathie, with her elite private school background and experiences of “an incessant warfare between mind and body”19 and “strife that had torn her apart since adolescence,”20 who seems to have an unrequited love for Bel and perhaps for Psyche as well?

  While the question of what shapes a person is a key theme, the novel’s plot revolves around a kidnapping. Modern kidnapping in North America is often considered to begin with the 1874 abduction of four-year-old Charley Ross. The mystery of Ross’s disappearance was never solved and for the next fifty years men came forward claiming to be the “lost boy.” Lost boys were not uncommon in the late nineteenth century, in both real life and in fiction. The most famous fictional Lost Boys were probably those in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Historian Paula Fass describes “lost and found” newspaper ads for children and reports that tens of thousands of American children disappeared in late-nineteenth-century cities, taken into institutions, abandoned, murdered, or abducted.21 The grieving parents of lost children worried not only about a child’s survival or safety and the abuse of innocence but also about how his or her identity would be altered by the experience. This concern for the effect on a child’s character can be seen in texts ranging from colonial “captivity narratives” to those describing the 1974 kidnapping of Patty Hearst. It is very different from Psyche’s mother’s hope, indeed the belief she clings to despite reading opinions to the contrary, “that her child could have shaped her environment to her own inherent needs, rather than allowing her environment to be the principal factor in determining the kind of person she would be.”22

  The idea of the “lost boy” was gradually replaced by the fear that children were vulnerable to harm not only from strangers and misfits but also from elite, successful, educated young men. Fass argues that by the 1920s kidnapping was the “ideal criminal form,” with the best example of this the 1924 high-profile kidnapping/murder of Bobby Franks by college students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb.23 The senselessness and brutality of the abduction and murder both shocked and fascinated North Americans. Contemporary ideas of psychology were sufficiently influential that these “abnormal” self-confessed killers received life sentences instead of death. Public opinion was that children were not safe outside the house and predators could take any form.

  The next kidnapping to become a public obsession proved that children were not safe even within their homes. The most famous kidnapping of the twentieth century is the 1932 abduction of Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. who, like Psyche, was taken from his home when parents and servants were nearby. The Lindbergh child was only twenty months old and, like Psyche, blonde and blue-eyed. His parents were wealthy and famous: Charles Lindbergh had made the first solo flight across the Atlantic. Unlike earlier American kidnapping cases, Charles A. Lindbergh Jr.’s mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, played a prominent role in the public view of the tragedy, where she was portrayed as the dignified, grieving mother.24 The fear of death and mutilation present in all child kidnapping cases was indelibly imprinted on the public mind when the toddler’s decomposed body was found over two months after his kidnapping.

  After the 1930s, kidnapping of children for ransom became less common. Fears now focused on sexual exploitation. The non-familial abduction of children, while tragic, was relatively uncommon in the United States, but its possibility loomed large in the imagination of anxious parents. Fass has written that the possibility of “kidnapping threatened the physical and emotional integrity of the family and the sanctity of child life, which was the modern family’s central responsibility.”25

  In the 1950s, Fass argues, kidnapping was transformed from a crime to an American “fixation” as “some of the psychological currents stirred up in the 1920s were attached to general uneasiness about sexuality and gender and a recharged familialism.”26 Babies and adolescent girls were regarded as particularly vulnerable. Psyche, both as an infant and an adolescent girl, reflects this anxiety. The significant deviation in Psyche’s story, however, is that her mother expresses no fear that her identity might be permanently altered.

  Although not intended to be interpreted too literally, the context of the novel evokes a particular time and place. Young acknowledges the novelist’s responsibility to “catch our way of life now” before it is lost to memory.27 The maid wears a proper black and white uniform and refers to her employer as “the master.” Coffee is not “to go” but drunk at a counter out of a proper cup. Radio and television have not flattened out local accents, and the author writes the northern Ontario working class rural accent in dialect. Unemployed, itinerant men are described as “Hoboes” moving from “jungle” to “jungle” where transients congregated and camped. A wrapper was a house dress, loosely cut and designed for hard domestic work, even if little of this actually happens in Mag’s shack. Fanny Fanner’s Boston Cook Book, first published in 1896, was the most popular American cookbook, so it is not surprising that it and the Bible share the distinction of being the only books in Mag and Butch’s home. Although never stated explicitly, it is difficult not to associate the slag surrounding the mines with Sudbury, Ontario, the city with Toronto, and the location of Oliver’s Restaurant with Muskoka towns such as Gravenhurst or Huntsville.

  That Phyllis Brett Young attended the Ontario College of Art (OCA) during the 1930s not only accounts for some details in descriptions of the city in the novel but also provides clues about the artistic context in which readers might situate the novel’
s heroine. Still today, on Grange Park in Toronto, you find the University Settlement and the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), the latter bearing a resemblance to the gallery in Psyche and known for buying and displaying the work of Ontario artists during the time period of the novel. The novel’s artist figure, Nick, is certainly reminiscent of those who taught Young at the OCA, spending their winters working from sketches done during the summer months in the wilderness north of the city. Charles Comfort, for example, who taught at the OCA in the late 1930s and produced both landscapes (including of the country surrounding the mines) and portraits, might have been the model for Young’s artist.28 While the artistic context is certainly Canadian, the title of Nick’s portrait of Psyche - “The American Venus” - signals the artist’s desire to move outside national paradigms. That title, in addition to conjuring echoes of the great masters and their renderings of mythic figures (Venus being closely associated with love and classical beauty29) might have evoked other connotations in the minds of Young’s readers. The 1926 silent film The American Venus, about a Miss America beauty pageant and starring Louise Brooks, was very popular at the time of the book’s release. (Ironically, given the significance of the mother-daughter relationship in Psyche, contemporary audiences may be more familiar with the 2007 film The American Venus, which focuses on a dysfunctional mother-daughter dynamic that contrasts sharply with the idealized relationship depicted in Young’s novel. Like Psyche, the film also involves the daughter’s absence from her mother - but where the novel focuses on the kidnapping of the young child, the film involves her escape from her demanding mother.30)

  For the most part, the novel privileges the deep structures of plot - the complication and resolution of the trajectories of archetypal quest and popular romance - over the socio-economic specifics of mid-twentieth century Ontario. Psyche, as its title suggests, is the archetypal story of an individual’s search for herself. Vladimir Propp’s influential Morphology of the Folktale appeared in English only in 1968, but Young’s novel, published almost a decade earlier, amply illustrates its primary finding: stories draw their momentum and force from the specific configuration of a limited set of fundamental plot elements. While the number of particular narrative elements varies depending upon different accounts - Propp identifies twenty-one in the Russian folk tale, for example, Janice Radway identifies thirteen in the popular romance31 - such approaches share a sense that readers experience a certain catharsis when encountering familiar narrative paradigms and following them through the various stages of complication and resolution. How then can we account for Young’s placing specific details within a novel that seems, at one level, to discount the significance of detail? Why does Young insist on capturing the cost of fuel, a pair of shoes, or a second-hand car, when working in a genre that seems to dismiss such detail as trivial? Analyzing the popular romance of the twentieth century, Lynne Pearce provides a useful distinction between the general category of “romantic fiction” and that of “popular romance,” arguing that the former seems to have an interest in “creating rather ‘loosely observed’ locations (spaces and places that are recognizable and yet not).” By contrast, “it is clear that popular romance also has an interest in making its ‘scene-setting’ more precise: an interest that might, indeed, be seen to distinguish the ‘popular’ from the ‘classic’ and ‘middle-brow’ and which is probably best understood as the genre’s more explicit commodification of romantic love. In other words, while the more classic romance may be seen to use its ‘romantic locations’ to prompt or fulfill the desires and ‘expectant emotions’ of the lovers, popular romance tends to make them into a ‘lifestyle statement’ which is (in part) the undisguised object of the romance.”32

  Young’s novel would thus be a “popular romance,” rather than “romantic fiction,” with the potential to act as a powerful rhetorical vehicle for a particular view of life. But to what end? Certainly, few would disagree that the novel makes a case for nature over nurture, the trumping of environment by heredity. The heterosexual romance plot seems to centre first on the obstacles imposed by economic circumstances, next on the peril posed by a wealthy mine owner’s immoral son who sees himself above the conventions of civilized behaviour, then on the injustice of seduction and adultery, and, finally, on the possibility of a happily-ever-after ending with an honest man. That most of these characters remain flat reinforces the reader’s sense that their significance is as character types, not as complex individuals; Psyche, in other words, is not a work of psychological realism. It is a novel centred on plot rather than character, more the descendent of the novelistic tradition of Henry Fielding than of Samuel Richardson, an observation implied by the text on the cover of the 1964 Lancer Books edition, where Psyche is described as a female Tom Jones, referring to the titular hero of Fielding’s picaresque novel.

  The novel raises readers’ expectations of a plot common in popular romances - the story of a beautiful heroine whose quest for love and happiness is thwarted by villains and socioeconomic hardships. At one level, those expectations are rewarded. But the novel also “unwrites” the popular romance plot, systematically raising and challenging readers’ expectations. Most important, Psyche seems far more motivated to find the truth about herself than to establish a strong and lasting connection with a love interest. She is driven to better herself and sees the men she encounters largely as a means to that end. From the school inspector, for example, she receives a dictionary. From Nick, she learns how her own powers of observation fit within the context of the history of visual art, as well as how to speak eloquently, in a subplot that shares much with the popular musical My Fair Lady, a smash hit on Broadway when it appeared in 1956.33 From the journalist, Steve, she receives the greatest assistance of all.

  The significant bond between mother and daughter also challenges the conventions of popular romance. Psyche’s quest for self-knowledge is ultimately a quest to find her way home to her mother.34 In turn, Psyche’s quest is paralleled by her mother’s search to find her daughter. As the narrative shifts from the perspective of the mother to that of the daughter and back again, it is apparent that their thought patterns mirror one another. Their unrelenting search also allows Young to show that love - and maternal love in particular - is a powerful force in human interaction. Sharon and her fortitude, the practical and endearing Mag, and the generous Bel are ultimately what sustain Psyche and allow her to weather the storms of her various encounters with men.

  The presence of so many men is another way in which this novel undermines popular romance’s focus on the development of a relationship between a heroine and her love interest. Psyche, whose beauty attracts a number of potential suitors, finds herself subject to violence and seduction. Some of the dangers she encounters are clearly a function of the reduced circumstances in which she finds herself as the foster child of a couple living in poverty on the outskirts of a poor mining town. This is very different from the exotic locales that provide popular romance readers with leisurely escape. Instead, Young’s readers are made aware of the lack of beauty in the slag-heaped environment in which Psyche is raised. Glimpses of Sharon’s blue delphiniums or the field of wild flowers surrounding Nick’s studio come as a welcome change of scenery and serve as contributing elements to readers’ sense of catharsis at the novel’s conclusion.

  Psyche’s natural appreciation of beauty and Sharon’s more cultivated understanding of aesthetic principles signal at least one other aspect of the novel. Young, a trained visual artist herself, creates characters who situate themselves in a world in which the aesthetics of modernism exert a considerable influence. Psyche is able to see that the scenery around the shack she shares with Mag and Butch is replete with a whole prism of colours. This vision, so startlingly at odds with common assumptions about the wasteland aesthetics of the slag-heaped landscape, emphasizes Psyche’s sophisticated artistic eye despite her lack of education. Small wonder then that, under Nick’s tutelage, she is able to absorb the rudiments of art
history during the course of one summer, inhaling knowledge as though in a single deep breath. What she comes to understand is akin to the argument expressed by T. S. Eliot in his watershed essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” - that works of art engage in a dialogue with one another, benefiting and building upon the insights of earlier works of the “Tradition” as well as reflecting the outside world. Such an insight is distinctly modern and suggests that the novel should be read as speaking to and about aesthetic traditions.

  One of the remarkable insights of this novel is its valorization of the appreciation of beauty, whether natural or cultivated. Even those characters the novel judges harshly, such as the mine owner’s son, have an aesthetic sense. Psyche comes by her appreciation of beauty naturally, never having had the opportunity to visit an art gallery or admire the works of the great masters during her childhood. Sharon is keenly attuned to her daughter’s natural preference for the colour blue, not coincidentally the colour of Sharon’s eyes. There is one notable exception, however - the kidnapper’s environment is clearly ugly and he lacks any interest in rectifying the situation. Against this bleak portrayal of a individual devoid of human sympathy and aesthetic sensibility, Young’s other characters, moral and immoral, appear colourful and engaging.