Bear, Naked Lady

Of course I’d heard about it. CanLit’s dirty little secret. Is that the one where . . . she has sex with a bear? I was expecting titters. I was expecting to make jokes about how at least it wasn’t a porcupine. What I wasn’t expecting was a strikingly forthright exploration of freedom and passion, sexuality and literature. I came for the notoriety; I stayed for the intense expression of what it is to be alive.

Marian Engel’s Bear was a chance find in a Little Free Library in my neighbourhood, a glistening island among the usual rubbish. And not just any copy: a 1977 Seal edition with the original illustrated cover. That cover. The controversial one, where a bare-breasted woman, barely dressed in floaty pink fabric, leans against her shaggy lover. A decade ago, this image was dug up by internet foragers alongside the caption “You have some explaining to do, Canada.” The popularity of the post prompted McClelland & Stewart to issue a reprint. Sadly, though, the new cover art is rather limp by comparison.

How does woman meet bear? Lou, a twenty-seven-year-old bibliographer at the Historical Institute, is restless and lonely, convinced her life has a grudge against her. Assigned with cataloguing the vast library of the Cary estate — an octagonal house on a remote island in northern Ontario — she packs her tatty camping gear and leaves behind her mole-like existence in the city. She drives through the countryside hectic with spring growth, past lakes and shores she visited as a child. “I have an odd sense,” Lou writes to the institute’s director, with whom she shared a lacklustre liaison, “of being reborn.”

There has long been a bear on the property, the man who runs the general store upriver informs Lou. The first Colonel Cary — eccentric, adventurer, wilderness invader, however he may be classified — was enamoured of Lord Byron. As the great poet kept a bear, he kept one too. The creature is chained in a shed in the garden. It is semi-tame. An old Cree woman, Lucy Leroy, and her nephew have been looking after it since the last colonel’s death, feeding it dog chow. Lucy tells Lou to shit beside the bear in the mornings so it will like her. So she does.

Each is wary of the other at first. Lou thinks the bear has sad eyes. One morning, she unclips its chain and takes it to the river to swim. It soon becomes he. The scent of his musk is intoxicating. He splashes around her, playing. His long, ridged tongue catches the droplets on her back. She nestles into the embrace of the island’s solitude, with her task, her texts, and her companion. It is close to perfect. Together, they sit at night beside the fire as Lou sips whisky and reads a memoir by Edward John Trelawny, the man who burned Shelley’s body and saved the heart, who dared turn back Byron’s shroud to peek at his lame foot. Lou contemplates how it is all connected: Cary, Trelawny, the bear, the handwritten notes that flutter out of books describing legends and folklores, in which the offspring of ursine and woman become heroes. There is some “unfingerable intimacy among them, some tie between longing and desire and the achievable.” Tenderness blossoms. When that muscular tongue eventually finds her secret places, she weeps.

The mistake is to think of this as fifty shades of bear or as constituting some screwball metaphor for our relationship to nature. The book is neither. It is about a young woman venturing to the very edges of herself — those that call for oblivion — and returning. “Bear,” Lou cries. “I love you. Pull my head off.” What she had thought of previously as a life is revealed to have been an absence. Too long she has suppressed the roar of discontent within her. Alone and untethered, she yearns, she falters, she worships the beast for being so acutely itself. There are no lessons to be taught in Bear, which is why modern interpretations that consider settler relationships with the land generally fall flat. The central courtship is literal and authentic. Sometimes a creature shows gentleness and a woman, wildness. “What had passed to her from him she did not know.” But it is not magic or the seed of heroes. When the animal claws her back, Lou’s shame is healed. By the end, she feels simple and clean.

At times, our virtues can be overly purifying, our identities too chained. Maybe we could all do with loosening the collar of the good. Maybe we should confront the hard realities and complexities that lurk outside in the shed. Maybe someday we’ll face those sad eyes and lead them to the river, jump into the freezing water to splash and shiver and be ourselves.