Temples and Tabernacles: Alternative Religions in the Fictional Microcosms of Robertson Davies, Margaret Laurence, and Alice Munro

Some of greatest Canadian novelists are regionalists who convey Canadian identity through developing fictional microcosms. Robertson Davies, Margaret Laurence, and Alice Munro follow tradition of novelists such as Walter Scott, Thomas Hardy, and William Faulkner, who created their fictional kingdoms of Waverley, Wessex, and Yoknapatawpha County. Laurence, Davies, and Munro each create a fictional microcosm Manawaka, Deptford, and Jubilee--based on their actual hometowns of Neepawa, Manitoba, and Thamesville and Wingham, Ontario, respectively--that encapsulates miniature what they see as defining features of a typical Canadian community. Davies, Laurence, and Munro all convey social stratifications of their microcosms through a delineation of their respective town's religious denominations: Davies's Deptford Trilogy--Fifth Business (1970), Manticore (1972), and World of Wonders (1975)--and Laurence's Manawaka cycle---The Stone Angel (1964), A Jest of God (1966), Fire-Dwellers (1960), A Bird House (1970), and Diviners (1974)--as well as Munro's novel Lives of Girls and Women (1971), which Munro develops microcosm of Jubilee introduced The Peace of Utrecht, first published 1960 and collected Dance of Happy Shades (1968). (1) Interestingly, all these texts were published within decade of 1964 to 1975 roughly frames Manawaka cycle, when Canadian writers were intent on defining a national identity. These three authors--who were all awarded Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction for one of these novels--focus on their communities' Christian churches order to identify their cultural conditions. While there have been valuable studies of religion, especially works of Davies and Laurence, by critics such as Dave Little (2) and Elizabeth Potvin, (3) to name just a few, no one has yet addressed parallels use of churches--both architecture and decor of buildings and cultural composition of congregation--by these three authors to characterize Canadian identity. (4) To begin with Davies's Deptford Trilogy, Fifth Business (1970), Dunstan Ramsay delineates denominational demographics of Deptford succinctly: We had five churches: Anglican, poor but believed to have some mysterious social supremacy; Presbyterian, solvent and thought--chiefly by itself--to be intellectual; Methodist, insolvent and fervent; Baptist, insolvent and saved; Roman Catholic, mysterious to most of us but clearly solvent, as it was frequently and, so we thought, quite needlessly repainted. (5) This skeleton outline of ecclesiastical, social, and financial stratifications of society of town provides a prelude to Ramsay's fascination with saints and miracles, investigation of hagiography, and acquaintance with Jesuit Boliandists of Europe, whose journal, Analecta Bollandiana, he publishes his research--a crucial fact that ineffable jackass Lorne Packer (FB 6) neglects to mention his idiotic piece published in all its inanity Colborne's College Chronicle with fatuous title FAREWELL TO THE CORK (FB 5). Initially, Dunstable's determination never again to be his mother's own dear laddie (FB 30)--after she is transformed by his wit and experiments prestidigitation into a screeching fury (FB 30) who flogs him with a pony whip--inspires his escape from Deptford by enlisting Canadian Army during First World War. His miraculous salvation by Little Madonna with face of his Fool-Saint Mary Dempster at Passchendaele--and his renaming as Dunstan, after saint who twisted Devil's nose, by Diana Marfleet, whose devoted nursing facilitates his rebirth from his coma--inspires his study of hagiography, which, turn, provides an opportunity to pursue mysterious, seductive forbidden faith of the Scarlet Woman of Rome (FB 36) company of Jesuit Bollandists, like intriguing Padre Blazon, on Continent. …

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