Arts and Literature in Canada:Views from Abroad, Les arts et la ...

The Jordans. Remembered and Invented Pastambivalent. Gradually, both girls begin to see ambivalence in attitudes andactions. They witness disturbing incidents in the family, more often than notdue to their parents’ gradual estrangement. Both girls recoil in embarrassmentand shame:Nelly was possessed by a more than average inquisitiveness and wasforced during her entire childhood to hide this precious trait, evenfrom herself, to the point where it was in danger of being stifled. Butshe didn’t have the slightest wish to hear anything disparaging abouther parents. She suffered when her mother’s more and more frequentmoods—more and more frequently directed against her father—werenoticed beyond the immediate family, where they could still betolerated and passed over in silence. (MC 123)Del, seeing her parents in a gesture she cannot reconcile with her ideas of“romance,” her father touching her mother in a “grieving way,” her motherturning “bewildered,” reacts similarly:I was alarmed, I wanted to shout at them to stop and turn back intotheir separate, final, unsupported selves. I was afraid that they wouldgo on and show me something I no more wanted to see than I wantedto see Uncle Craig dead. (LG 41 f.)So, gradually, both Nelly and Del learn to hide behind various forms ofcamouflage. The child Nelly “had designed secret hiding places to which shecould retreat alone” (MC 57), but will later, as the grown woman set onrecapturing her childhood-self, feel the need “to shed any protectivecoloration and become visible” (MC 158, my emphasis). Del “soaked upprotective coloration wherever it might be found” (LG 166, my emphasis).Nelly and Del enter adolescence with constant embarrassment. Both aredreadfully self-conscious about their awkwardness and confused about the(female) roles they are expected to grow into. Their mothers are an obstaclerather than a help. Charlotte Jordan has shut out “sex, which was taboo” (MC67) in her dealings with her daughter; Ada Jordan is “overcome with gloom inthe vicinity of sex” (LG 65). Nelly, “out of an exaggerated feeling ofembarrassment—which she has inherited from her mother,” flatly refuses herfather’s offers to give her “an early look at real life” (MC 10). Del comes to theconclusion that “to be made of flesh was humiliation” (LG 48).“One really must learn to control oneself!” (MC 58) says Charlotte Jordanwhenever the subject of sex arises, and “Nelly knows what is expected of her.She plays deaf and dumb” (MC 68). “Use your brains. Don’t be distracted,”(LG 147) says Ada Jordan in similar situations, but Del has become an expertat “adopting as I easily could my bold and simple façade of innocence” (LG126). Thus Nelly and Del, emerging artists both, begin to fictionalize their own71