Ideas - Why the 1976 novel Bear is still controversial — and relevant

Episode Date: June 30, 2026

At the surface, Bear is about a woman who develops a sexual relationship with a bear. And though the 1976 novel earned Marian Engel a Governor General's award, it's been largely forgotten. Contributor Melissa Gismondi explores its mystery, meaning and relevance today. *This episode originally aired on January 4, 2021.

This week on two blocks from the White House. It's the 250th anniversary of independence in America, but celebrating America's birthday is fraught. Between polarized politics, the ongoing war in Iran, sky high gas prices and concerns about affordability, many are not in the mood to celebrate. Join me, Katie Simpson, and my fellow Washington correspondence, Paul Hunter and Willie Lowry as we break down U.S. politics from a Canadian perspective. Find and follow two blocks from the White House wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. And note to our listeners. This episode contains explicit language and descriptions of sexual relations.

Listener discretion is advised. Did anyone tell you? He asked about the bear. And that's kind of the real launching point for the book becoming something stranger than it appears from its opening chapters. I'm Nala Ayyed, and this is Ideas. I would say that bear is the best Canadian novel of all time. In 1976, Marian Engel published a novel many considered to be one of the most controversial books in Canadian literary history. It broaches the taboo of bestiality, asking whether it's possible for a woman to have a sexual relationship with a bear.

She was a bit frightened by what the book was. Trying to describe bear is like trying to describe a unicorn to someone who has never imagined it. If you say it's a novel about a woman and a bear, people go, oh, does she have a pet bear? If you say it's a novel about a woman who has a love affair with a bear, people look cross-eyed at you and flee. If you say it is a novel about a woman and the Canadian landscape, they immediately yawn and back away, because that's one of the most boring subjects in Canadian literature. So it is almost impossible to describe it in any way, except to say that it's a strange combination of myth,

fairy tale, and critique of the way that Canadians have interacted with the wilderness. The Globe and Mail has called Bear Canada's Lolita, or Lady Chatterley's life. lover. Ideas contributor Melissa Gismondi stumbled on to the book by chance a few years ago. And like many readers, past, present, and possibly future, she was fascinated. In 2014, Bear had something of a renaissance, thanks in part to a post on the photo sharing site, Imager. A user posted a photo of an old, brazenly sexy cover of Bear with the caption, What the actual Canada?

The post included photos of text from the book's steamier scenes. It generated more than a million views and revived interest in a book many people had forgotten about or had never even heard about in the first place. When that bear walked into my life, he was very real. And I decided it was worth doing because of that, because it was such a strange idea. And then it turned out to be a classical idea, so we're all right with that. but I don't think I'm going to do an encore. There's no shortage of stories about where and how bear originated.

In some ways, the backstory to the novel has become the stuff of Canlett Legend. Speaking in 1976 to CBC broadcaster, Peter Zoski, Marian Engel cryptically acknowledged bears were something she'd been thinking about for a very long time. What fascinates you about bears? Why the bear is what I'm saying? I guess, I mean, why not a crocodile? I don't, well, I do know, but I'm not telling, okay? It's been a personal theme for many, many years,

and I know now where it comes from. But it was a theme in our family. My mother, Marion, was born in 1933 in Toronto. Charlotte Engle is Marion Engle's daughter. I'm not entirely sure where the idea of the bear came from, but there certainly have been bears in my mother's past history as a child growing up and spending a lot of time camping. And there were mythologies within our own family.

My grandmother grew up on a farm, and her brothers used to warn her. There are two bears at the top of the stairs, one at the left and one. of the right, and if one doesn't get you the other will. I mean, that story, I guess, got retold to keep my mother in bed as well. My name is Crystal Verdon. I am a professor of Canadian Studies and English. I am a big fan of Marion Engel. Crystal Verdun is also the author and editor of several books about Marion Engel. She had a really interesting life. She was born a twin. The twins were

adopted separately around the age of three, and she was adopted into the Passmore family, a working class, middle-class family. She grew up in parts of southwestern Ontario, so Sarnia Galt. And then she went to McMaster University. She did her undergrad there. She then went on to do a master's at McGill, where she completed what I think is probably one of the first critical essays on Canadian literature under the supervision of human This is late 50s. Nick Mount is the author of Arrival, the story of Canlett. Throughout the late 50s and 60s, Hugh McLennan was the most popular English-Canadian

novels in the country. They became friends. There's a collection of letters of their exchanges. I mean, I know that Hugh was a huge part of her life, and he supported her and gave her a ton of encouragement. Engle needed that encouragement. It was tough in the 1960s for women, let alone Canadian women, to become writers.

Engle's first book, No Clouds of Glory, came out in 1968, though in the United States, it was released under the more provocative title Engel preferred Sarah Bastard's Notebook. Engle followed this up with another novel, The Honeyman Festival, in 1970. And after many years of writing, critics were starting to pay attention. She was received as a writer who was daring and bold. old and she was hard at work at a third novel which gave her a lot of, well, it really tried her. It was called, it is called monodromous. At the same time, her twins had been born in 1965, so she had small children.

Second wave feminism was unfolding and I think, you know, it was the end of the hippie area. It was a period in Canada of the growth of Canadian literature, so she was really involved in supporting the beginnings of the writers union. In fact, she became the first chair. By 1975, there is a Canadian literature. There is an established body of writing and a collection of writers. And not so long before that, mid-1950s, that was still an open question. So Engel arrives into a world and is writing in a world that knew there were Canadian writers, that read Canadian writers, in fact read Canadian writers with considerable more.

frequency than we do today that promoted Canadian writing. In terms of thematically or content, it's very hard, in fact impossible to characterize Canadian or any other literature over a period of that length of time within any degree of precision. People regularly reduce Canadian literature to a collection of stereotypes. You know, it's all about a dysfunctional grandmother on the prairies of wind blowing through her empty whiskey glass. That said, This particular novel does fit pretty neatly with a number of other big books, in particular from Ontario, not from Canada at this time, and that it would be books that are concerned in one way or another with the decline of what used to be called by historians, the family compact, the death of old Ontario, what's left in its wake with the ghosts that are left behind as a consequence of, rapid change of Ontario and in particular of Toronto from an older, decidedly Puritan city into something much more cosmopolitan, much different. And secondly, with the relationship that Canada and Canadian writers have to the wilderness.

So for a brief plot synopsis of Bear, here's writer and editor Emily Keeler. There is the story of a young woman named Lou who has this sort of not really exciting, not really going anywhere kind of job for a historical company that is referred to as the Institute. She gets the opportunity to go to this faraway sort of cabin type thing that used to belong to someone named Colonel Kerry. Now, Colonel Kerry was an Englishman and he moved to Ontario, northern Ontario, this weird sort of island, marshy kind of cabin country, cottage country territory in the 1800s. And she's tasked with cataloging the contents of his house, which has been left to the institute. When she arrives there, she finds that it's basically this like architectural thing that was really popular in London in the 1800s. So it's this weird octagonal house that is totally impractical for the location that it's at, and it's very, very secluded.

Now, when Colonel Kerry first got it, he maybe had these like Susanna Moodyish fantasies of roughing it in the bush. Over the years, that territory has been, you know, created. I think she actually has a, Marian Engle has an amazing line where she says that it becomes property. It's become commercial. Carrie Island, they had all found out, was no longer an isolated outpost on a lonely river. It had been transformed by automobiles, motorboats, long holidays, and snowmobiles, and cash to real estate. Colonel Kerry, in part of his fantasy of the wilderness, he for some reason started keeping perhaps, perhaps he started it, perhaps it was a little bit later in the lineage. but there is a bear that lives on the property that is associated with the Carrie family,

and there seems to have always been a bear associated with the family, so multiple bears, generations of bears. Lou is a contemporary woman. It's the 70s. She, you know, is like a young lady who's out there in the world, you know, having adventures, you know, city living. And then she moves to this place, and it's basically just her and this bear. She watched it from a distance while it gorge noisily. When it had finished, it looked up at her and licked its nose with a long, thin, ant-eater's tongue. The bear stood in the open, on all fours, and stared at her, moving its head up, down, and sideways to get a full view of her.

Its nose was more pointed than she had expected. Years of corruption by teddy bears, she supposed, and its eyes were genuinely piggish and ugly. She crossed the yard and pumped a pail of water. She had set the pail down quite near it, nearer than she thought she ought to have dared, but the bear looked so passive, she could not genuinely fear it. As it turned to drink,

she got a large whiff of sh and musk. It was indubitably male, she saw, and its hind quarters were matted with dirt. After it drank thirstily, it curled up again by the barn door. It looked stupid and defeated. She hunkered where it could not reach her and stared at it.

Bear, she whispered to it. Who and what are you? And over the summer that she spends there, she develops, you could say, a comfortable relationship, but more accurately, a, like, romantic intimacy with this bear. And she becomes sort of, like, it's interesting because I feel like there isn't that much projection. Like, everyone involved under, like, reader, presumably Mary An Engel, the writer, Lou the character for sure and absolutely the bear. Everyone understands that this is a real animal, not a stand-in for a person.

And as Lou kind of learns to live closer to nature, she also learns that she likes having her entire body licked by a bear tongue. So that happens in the book for sure. To me, the real critical question about bear is, how serious is it? is this in earnest? To my mind, if it is in earnest, if it is serious, it's kind of a bad book, or not a terribly memorable, but just an odd book.

But Engle was a very witty, very funny, very smart, deeply ironic writer. Here, I'm about to make a generalization about Canadian literature, and I just said he can't do that. But one of its hallmarks, in the 60s and 70s, especially, is that it's very earnest. It was an earnest time. There were a lot of things that were very serious. Canadian nationalism, American cultural imperialism,

Vietnam. So if there's something that sets a bit apart from the pack, it's that. It's the question that is continually, I think, in any reader's mind of this book, is she kidding? Is she having me on here? What's the joke?

Is this a joke? There's a line in, I think it's the first actual sexual encounter between her and the bear where she says, eat me bear. And, you know, depending on how you read it, that is either the worst line in all of Canadian literature, or it's one of its best, like, you know, because it's making fun of that. And doing so in a provocative way. I don't know. I don't know the answers to these questions. Well, and in some ways, Bear kind of started off as a bit of a joke, right?

Yeah, so there's been many stories told about how Bear came to be. I'm not sure there's a way to reconcile the many different versions. The one that I understand is that the book was originally destined for the relatively newly formed to write Union of Canada. Marian Engle was actually one of, she was the first chair of the writers union and Margaret Atwood and Graham Gibson were putting in a lot of work. Timothy Finley was there. And they were trying to raise money.

And they came up with an idea of a book of pornography that was based loosely on a book called Naked Came the Stranger, which is a tremendously popular American literary hoax, 1969, written by 24 journalists under assumed names. It's a porn collection that just was a gangbuster bestseller. The only, they abandoned the project, which is maybe unfortunate, maybe a good thing for history. I can't really tell, actually. I would read it. But they abandoned the project.

And the only person who pursued more from that exercise was Marian Engel. She started Bear as a short story to be included in that point. pornographic collection that they were going to do as a fundraiser. So she spent, you know, the time working on the story and then it just sort of blossomed. And at the time, she was going through a lot personally and professionally, like she was in the middle of a difficult divorce. I'm not exactly sure when she started writing bear, but it was certainly after my parents' divorce. It was a stressful time in her life, but also a very creative time. And she had a lot of good friends. Marion Engle was one of those people who would only release information in small scraps.

Aretha Van Herk is a writer and professor of English and creative writing at the University of Calgary. She was also a friend of Marion Ingalls. So she was asked over and over and over again, where did you get the idea for Bear? How did you think of this? How did you come up with this? And I never asked her questions like that, but I did get you. into long complicated conversations with her about the book and its background and its invention. And the one sentence she gave me, which I kind of gulp, she said, well, I had to think about what kind of person I would like to be in love with. And so I opened the door and a bear walked in.

And I told a couple of people, and I discovered that it was a fundamental mythic idea. It was really reaching down to the sort of Jungian level of myth. Then, of course, I had to spend a long, long time working out how it could be credible as a modern novel, and how it could be acceptable to me as well. She was a great researcher, I think, and I can't be sure, because she's not here to ask her. But the bear walks in while she's writing this story for the writer's union, she starts talking about that phenomenon at various occasions and with friends and starts hearing more and more about this rich, rich mythology.

And as she's writing, because she wrote many versions of the novel, as writers often do, she is researching and looking into all of these different mythological sources and enriching, I guess, her own sense of how she wants the bear to work in her own novel. The book is scattered with mythological references to bears, which the protagonist discovers in the library that she's investigating as an archivist. For example, the one that all the critics seem to quote, and the one that leaps out in my mind, is the finish one about an offspring between a woman and a bear becomes what a hero?

Twin heroes. Twin heroes. Was that parallel to like Romulus and Ramos or anything? No, but it's a very, it might be parallel with Romulus and Remus, but I don't think twin heroes ever went off and founded a city. They saved their tribe in the West Coast Indian legends. The bare legends in the West Coast are fascinating. I was still very shaky about the book.

I was almost through the first draft and very upset about it and worried. worried more about this book. I did it faster and worried more about it and anything else I've ever done. I was at a party and I ran into Bill Reed, the Haida Sculptor from the West Coast and I was talking to him. And at the same party I opened in Arts Canada and there was a sort of beautiful golden salt seller he'd done of the bare mother with her twins. And I was talking to Bill and he said it doesn't look as if you've got. the story quite right. I think you've missed out Mouse Woman. Go back to Barbeau. So then I went and read the Barbeau Bear Legends.

And he was right. I don't know about Barbo and Barbo. Barbo collected West Coast Indian legends, right? Marius Barbeau. Marius Barbeau, the Canadian folklorist. I didn't know that. And he had three versions of the Bear Mother Legends that I was

finally able to get. And they were almost the same story. they usually involve kidnapped princesses. But I realized that I had run into a legend in my own head. Now that fascinates me. She did talk about the detail of the bear mother or the bear woman, although I had a longer conversation with her about mouse women. Now, I do not pretend to be any expert on indigenous mythology, but the presence of Lucy, who is,

the indigenous woman in the novel and who is really the bear's spirit protector. I think signals that Marian did some careful research on that and really wanted to acknowledge and pay homage to a whole world with bears that has nothing to do with European settlers. You know, the novel pulls so many direct snippets from other sources, and yet it doesn't use, as far as I remember, any direct snippets from the Bear Princess. Tanya Aguilewe teaches Canadian literature at the University of Toronto.

It's more that the novel itself is a kind of retelling of that original story, which had already come to Engel in a mediated form because it was recorded by a settler ethnographer, right? So there is the sense that the original indigenous story of the bear princess is lost, not just to Lou, but to angle herself, right? I would have to think more about this, but I do wonder about the extent to which the novel is subtly wrestling with its own kind of, if not appropriation, and at least, you know, sort of potentially problematic reworking of an indigenous story. which is a practice that is so prevalent in Canadian writing, right?

Like the sort of use of indigenous stories and indigenous quote-unquote myth as inspiration. At first, Bear was rejected by publishers who pointed to the book's, quote, extreme strangeness. But it eventually found a home at McClellan and Stewart. When the book hit shelves in early 1976, it had a plain white cover that simply said, Bear, a novel by Marion Ingle. Readers would be in for a surprise, and Marion Ingle, she was scared. You know, someone said to me, maybe you should publish it under another name. And then I thought, no, you stand behind whatever you do.

And I'm frightened that it's going to change a lot of things for me in all the wrong ways. but it's a risk-taking kind of book, and I feel you have to take risks, just as you have to walk over that trestle and galt and walk right back again and get under those moving trains. You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on SiriusXM, in Australia on ABC Radio National

and around the world at cbc.ca.ca slash ideas. You can also download ideas on your favorite podcast app and the CBC listeners. I'm Nala Ayyad. What up, Canada? It's your boy, Andrew Fung. Gavin Crawford is taking a break, so I'm jumping into the host chair

for the season finale of Because News. With me on the panel are comedians Brandon Ash Muhammad, Jan Karawanna, and Rebecca Kohler. We'll be talking about the new social media band that's got teens crashing out, the Cowboys Tent in Alberta that's got everyone beefing, and can Canada go all the way in the

World Cup? The answer is yes. Yes, we can. So, join me and my funniest friends as we wrap up the season of Because News. Follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and anywhere you download your podcast for free. In 1976, a controversial novel hit the shelves. Bear, written by Toronto author Marion Engel, tells the story of a woman's erotic relationship with a bear over one summer in Northern Ontario. But the book was about so much more than sex, as critics and readers quickly realized. A note to listeners, this episode contains explicit

descriptions of a sexual nature. Listener discretion is advised. Here's contributor Melissa Gismondi. McClellan and Stewart agreed to publish Bear, thanks in part to enthusiastic readers' reports by famous Canadian writers, including Robertson Davies. Davies admired Engel's courage in writing the book, but he had some concerns. Here's what he wrote to Engel in a personal letter. What I wrote to Jack about your book was sincerely meant, but it was not all that I had to say. I am fearful that the book might not be taken as seriously as it is intended,

and that you might be exposed to comment and criticism of a kind which, in the long run, would not be helpful to you. Robertson Davies to Marion Engle, January, 1976. I do believe that my mother did receive some angry letters, and certainly the publisher got letters. I mean, it's kind of incredible that the book came out at all. At the time of Margaret Lawrence was, you know, the book was being banned by the library board, or sort of the libraries all across Ontario. The Diviners was banned by many school boards and libraries.

So, I mean, Bear was never taught in high school. So I think my mother avoided some sort of censorship across Canada. She was quite lucky to avoid some of that. William French and the Globe wrote one of the longest and most serious reviews of. He called it a serious piece of fiction. The best thing she's done, challenging and provocative. The only person who wasn't terribly impressed with it was Barbara Amiel and McLean's. She thought the writing was wasted on a small soul Lou and a silly story.

It got a great review in the New York Times, and it sold really well. I mean, it was on the Toronto Star's bestseller list throughout the spring of 1976, spring and summer of 76, up until August. I think a lot of people would be surprised after hearing what this book's about to know that it had the, you know, esteem in the literary circles to win the Governor General's Award. in 1976. The committee that year was Margaret Lawrence, Mardkeye Richler, and Alice Monroe. And then the following year, after that it was reprinted. And that cover is the one that most people think of when they think of bear because it's got this pretty racy cover picture of a woman naked from the waist up.

I guess it was a seal bantam book, which was one of the first paperbacks in Canada meant to sell on racks at drugstores. And they gave it a really trashy cover with a woman wearing a caftan and her tits all out. You know, very 70s, very fantasy, very like, you know, sexy cavewoman vibe where it's this, you know, white lady and she's got long black hair and she's got like a bear's paw covering her breast and she's in like the throes of power. passion. Like it was a very, um, it was a choice for sure. And my mother was, you know, horrified because, you know, she thought the book was, you know, had much more value, um, intellectual value anyways. But the book, I mean, I think it did sell because of that cover. I think there

was definitely more sales because of this racy cover. I think I, uh, my brother and I were, I think around 12 when Bear came out. And, um, um, my brother and I were, I think around 12 when Bear came out. And, um, And then when it made a big splash, I think we were 13 years old in junior high. And that was not a particularly great time. I mean, we were happy that my mother had some acclaim and a little money. The Governor General's Award was a big deal. But we did get teased at school. We had a lot of questions, obviously.

Did your mother sleep with a bear? questions. I still get people coming up to me asking stupid questions, but they also tell me stories about how they hid bear under their pillow or under their bed or under the mattress because they were stealing it from their parents and reading the dirty pages. One word was used again and again to describe bear. Strange. Lou uses it herself. After one of her first sexual encounters with the bear, she says, what a strange thing to do, to have done, to have done to one. When asked about the book's meaning by CBC presenter Joyce Davidson, Marian Engel had this to say. Well, every person's experience is unique. I think writers try to

universalize their experience by opening it up and letting other people in. The thing I like about bear is a novel, is partly because I got some historical material. I'd been researching for a radio play, I think, into play in that book. And I think I did that rather well. But also, I think that that in some ways was an empty enough book so that it left enough for other people to interpret. I don't know whether I'm expressing this well. So other people entered into that book. Some people said it was a disgusting idea.

And other people said, oh, but he's the perfect lover. And they took out of the book what they wanted to take. There are many elements into the novel that I think are deliberately put there to raise the reader's eyebrows and even make us laugh out loud. But I think if we think about the novel as a whole, I do think it's a novel that we are meant to take seriously. I do think that it is a sincere, if rather, unstable exploration into sort of the central anxieties and desires that. permeate the settler colonial imaginary in Canada. I do think that the novel is genuinely concerned with the question of, you know, is it possible for the settler subject to claim belonging in this landscape? What does the settler subject do with the guilt that they might carry over the history of

indigenous dispossession and violence against indigenous peoples in Canada. Lou is literally sent to this island to trace an ancestry that might help legitimize settler presence in northern Ontario. As she begins to catalog the contents of the Penarth estate, what she encounters is a home filled with books and artifacts. She was presented with a sharp and perhaps typical early 19th century mind. Encyclopedias, British and Greek history, Voltaire, Rousseau, geology and geography, geophysical speculation. The more practical philosophers, sets and sets of novelists.

She wondered where else there was such a perfect library for its period. This failed search for historical ancestry. prompts Lou to question her own sense of belonging and eventually forces her to concede that, in her own words, quote, Colonel Kerry was surely one of the great irrelevancies of Canadian history, and she was another. Neither of them was connected to anything. So I think there's an argument to be made that Lou sublimates the feelings of displacement and settler colonial guilt that she increasingly begins to harbor, as she learns about the history of Penarth, by aligning herself with bear, by aligning herself with this wild creature

whom she regards as indigenous to the northern Ontario landscape. I think it's a book that speaks to a lot of conversations that are happening in Canada, in the current moment. Conversations, you know, long-overdue conversations around the legacies of settler colonialism, the continuing dispossession of indigenous peoples, the question of settler appropriation of indigenous cultures and identities. Often when those questions are raised, people think that they're just a manifestation of contemporary woke culture. But, you know, reading something like Bear reminds us that that question of appropriation

and the sort of settler colonial desire to possess indigenity has long been a part of Canadian culture. Lou's relationship with Bear begins innocently enough when the animal sneaks into her bedroom in the middle of the night one day. And initially, Lou allows Bear to explore her body. on his own terms. But as the novel unfolds, she begins to crave a kind of incorporation of bear's flesh into her own. So at this point, we begin to get a sense that Lou is instrumentalizing bear as a vehicle of what the critic Terry Goldie has famously referred to as settler's self-indiginization, or the settler colonial impulse to claim a connection to the land, by incorporating an object, image, plant, or animal that is associated with indigenous people

or is believed to somehow embody the quality of indigenity. In the novel, Bear is very closely associated with a character named Lucy, who is an elderly indigenous woman who lives in the area and has been acting as Bear's caretaker for many years. When Lou first arrives in Cary Island, Lucy transfers their responsibility for taking care of the bear to her and also shares important knowledge of how to cultivate a close relationship with this wild animal. There on the stoop sat an old, old woman. She was babbling and crooning to the bear. She was an old Indian woman.

She looked like the woman who used to peddle bittersweet, on the street when Lou was a kid, a toothless old Indian crone in many cardigans and running shoes, 10 cents a bunch. And Lou bought it and her mother said it was a waste of money, a form of begging. She was babbling to the bear

who lay half in, half out of his shed, watching her closely. One of his eyes winked once. Lucy Lourourouroult looked round, almost at once. Hello, she said, holding out a withered hand, smiling with toothless guise.

thumbs? She was totally withered. Lou imagined the body under the old pinned clothes, imagined its creases and weatherings, the old thin dugs. I will be like that, she thought. But the woman's eyes were alive as oysters. She held out her hand. New lady, she said, New lady, good bear, good bear. I didn't hear your boat. Lucy grinned unnervingly, still holding on to her hand. Good bear. Good bear. she said, good lady, take care of bear. I don't think I really know how to take care of him, she said, modestly citified. Lucy's live eyes crinkled.

Good bear, she said. Bear your friend. I was a young girl once. I came from Swift Current. Married a man, came here. Now I live on Nebish. He's a good bear. I am 100 years old.

I can read. I went to the mission school. And the bear? Lucy's face crinkled with some inconceivable merriment. She did not look 100 years old, only eternal. She said, with a bear, she said. He like you then. Morning, you sh-he-she-bear lives by smell.

He like you. Lou goes on to follow Lucy's advice, and the more they develop their relationship, the more she starts to feel a closer, connection to the land through her association with bear. But of course, this attempted incorporation of bear and of bear's indigenity is short-circuited at least momentarily by the difference that bear manifests as Lou's advances become more and more aggressive. She looked down at him. He did not move. She took her sweater off and went down on all fours in front of him in the animal

posture. He reached out one great paw and ripped the skin on her back. Bear strikes Lou with a violence that jolts her out of her fantasies of incorporation and reminds her, both her and us as readers, of his irreducible alterity as a wild animal. So given the ending in mind, how the book ends, which you just touched on, given the the theme that you just laid out of this kind of settler search to find some way of kind of appropriating or becoming indigenous in the landscapes. Do you think this is something that the book is very self-aware and critiquing of? Or is it just kind of perpetuating that storyline, those ideas, those attitudes, that you can find in not just Canadian literature,

but also many important works in American literature as well. Absolutely. And that's a question I've gone back and forth on along the years. And I think we have to put this in the context of, you know, the interpretation that Lou comes to impose on the gash that Bear leaves on her back after he strikes her. and she comes to read the gash as a kind of purifying wound, right? And so I'll read the passage where she basically expresses how she interprets this wound that she now carries. She remembered evenings of sitting by the fire with the bear's head in her lap. She remember the night the stars fell on her body and burned and burned.

She remembered guilt and a dream she had had where her mother made her write letters of apology to the Indians for having had to do with a bear, and she remembered the claw that had healed guilt. She felt strong and pure. So by the end, the novel seems to have recontained all the questions about settler guilt, that it initially set emotion, and it seems to present this gash that Lou now carries as a sign that her guilt has been absolved, that her or her or her or, original sin. I mean, this is a novel also that frames settler guilt as a kind of manifestation of the biblical original sin. So we get a sense that her original sin has somehow been erased.

So in that sense, I think the novel does replicate that arc of the settler subject who embarks upon an identity quest and is eventually able to make themselves at home. by incorporating some element of indigenity. There's no getting away from that. But we need to keep in mind that we as readers aren't necessarily meant to accept lose interpretation of events. She feels as though she has been healed, made innocent. But, you know, I think any critical reader,

by the time you reach this point in the novel, you're already kind of inclined to take Lue's declarations and take her interpretation of things with a grain of salt. So I think the novel ultimately does ironize that feeling of wholeness that Lou leaves with as she goes back to the city. I think that what she's looking at is that idea of, you know, connection. So when she says that like Carrie, she's historically insignificant and she's not connected to anything, there's all this ample evidence in the book that she really feels that way.

Like she has relationships with men that make her feel alone. Once briefly, she had as a lover a man of elegance and charm, but she had felt uncomfortable when he said he loved her, felt it meant something she did not understand, and indeed it meant, she discovered, that he loved her as long as the socks were folded and she was at his disposal on demand, when the food was exquisite and she was not menstruating,

when the wine had not loosened her tongue, when the olive oil had not produced a crease in her belly. There's evidence that the way that she feels like allows the bear to provide physical pleasure is, I mean, there's a reading of the book where that doesn't even really happen, you know, like, where that's like a mental thing that shows her time kind of away from the world of people and, like, figuring out what it means to be in a body and what it means to be alive. And, like, she's spending that time all the while investigating the history of, like, this guy, this probably nobody, this probable nobody. And,

And that is part of the question that I think Marian Engle is asking for herself and for the reader is, what does it mean to be a woman and to know that like history is about men and to have your own personal relationships and your own personal history? There's a part in the book where she's dreaming and this is like another way that I think it's fair to say that not only is a joke, but it's all deadly serious. serious as art anyhow. There's a part where she has this dream, and the devil visits her in the dream. And the funny thing the devil says is the trouble with you Ontario girls is you never acquire any kind of sophistication. So that strikes me as very funny. I'm from Alberta, by the way. But there's also that the devil then does this sort of like itemized lists of all the ways she isn't special.

And one of the ways she isn't special is by having sex with a bear. Like the devil literally is like you could have at least chosen something interesting, like an armadillo. Like that's what's going on in this woman's psyche and in this woman's mind. Like to me, it shows that the questions aren't just about like, oh, you know, the freedom of an erotic body or what turns you on or things like that. Like the questions are, those are implicated in it, but the questions are what is it to be alive now? What is this woman who is literally working at a historical institute? How does she feel her place in this world and in its history?

The novel is actually a wonderful critique of the extent to which Canada has been shaped by Victorian thinking. We may not believe that's true anymore. But in fact, our history, our literature, all of the ways that settlement has encoded what we think we are, even if it's not what we are at all, is one of the elements that the novel sends up so beautifully. There's one point in the novel where she says, oh, the only reason that this house and its contents are valuable is because it would have early Canadian. You don't go to the backwoods of Ontario to learn about Victorian or 19th century London. And then she stops herself and thinks, well, why not? The library in many ways encodes that. And that is the library that has governed our political structure, our social structures, our literary structures, our historical structures.

So it is a very funny unpacking of what we think we believe or what we think we know or what we think Canadian is or how we read our own reading of ourselves, how we read our own development. I mean, there are so many funny parts in this novel, not least of which is the erotics. Is that reflected in how matters? matter of fact, the writing is it's very clean, it's very simple, there's not a lot of euphemisms, it's his cock, his tongue, it's the real words for the real things. Is that what makes it erotic but also funny and so real? Angle's use of very direct language. She doesn't hesitate at all to name the parts of the body. And the encounters between the women and the bear are very

straightforward. You cannot mistake what is happening. He is indeed performing a sophisticated kind of convalingus on her and she enjoys it. Okay. Now, see what I've done? I've intellectualized that, which is what we stupid humans do. But in fact, that the erotic exchanges are well handled because they are very calm, objective. There's no, oh, my goodness, and there's no over-the-top harlequin gasping at all so that you get a very strong sense of the physicality of this encounter. The physicality of Lou, the physicality of the bear, and the fact that we all have needs and desires,

and the bear apparently enjoys using his tongue. and she enjoys having him use his tongue. So were the sexual descriptions swaddled in cotton batten and over-described or eluded, they would not work nearly as well. And indeed, one of the reasons it is funny is because it's so straightforward. And there's a point to it too, right? Because it's Engel reminding us to, as you were saying, connect to the inner animal, their first moment of connection is Lou taking her morning poop next to his shed.

Lucy gives her the best advice. Homer says to her, be really careful, it's still a bear. It might be a tame bear, but it's still a bear. But Lucy says, shit with the bear. It's great advice. And of course, this is the way that Lou discovers that the bear looks at her. She is another animal. She looks at the bear, he is another animal. We are all animals. We are all animals in that country, and we may try to convince ourselves that we are sophisticated and intellectual, but in fact, within our bodies, we are all animals.

And that's one of the elements of the novel that is so beautifully presented, and yet it isn't, although that is a word that has been used about the novel, bestial. One of the reasons that people pay attention to it is every once in a while it seems to rise to the surface and then they read it as if it were smutty or erotic or shocking. But that is not why it has enduring value.

It has enduring value because it teaches the reader, all readers, every reader, to re-examine their own preconceptions about women, about nature and about Canada itself. And it teaches us as readers to ask questions. This is not a book about what happens. It is a book about process, about how

a situation develops and the light that it sheds. And that means that I think it will last for hundreds and hundreds of years. And however much it may be neglected by scholars

or readers or critics, I think it's going to outlive all of us. Marion Ingle died in 1985 when she was just 51 years old. What lives on are Marion Engle's words, both on the page and sometimes off of it. What were you writing about then? What were you after? I'm always about writing prose when I'm writing. But actually word by words. Oh, that's a cop-out.

What was I doing? Is that a cop-out? Yeah. What was I writing about? I guess I was writing about my, all right, my own desire to be loved. Right? And all I could think of in this was a bear. The documentary, A Woman and a Bear, was brought to us by contributor Melissa Gismondi. For more information and some photos, please head to our website, cbc.ca.ca.

Ideas. Special thanks to Tina Verma, Keith Hart, Jeet here, Kathleen Gary, Marjorie Fee and Anna Porter. Lisa Ayuso is our web producer. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Nikola Luchic is the senior producer. The executive producer of ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.