Psyche (2 page)

Valerie Argue (Phyllis Brett Young's daughter), early 1960s. Courtesy Valerie Argue

By not providing explicit dates, the author is free to play with the timeframe of the novel. A few clues - in particular, the fact that as a World War II veteran the kidnapper would have been eligible for generous government grants (
page 12
) that were not available after World War I - suggest that Psyche is probably stolen around 1945 and that her story moves forward, through
a compression of time, into the 1950s, with her flight from the city at age nineteen occurring sometime before March 1954, when Toronto's streetcar service to its northern limits (
p. 281
) was shut down in favour of the new subway. Along the way there are flashbacks to 1930s Depression-era phenomena, such as hoboes riding the rods (
chapter 3
), and premonitions of dramatic changes in a city whose population has already exceeded one million (
p. 133
). By not providing dates and not giving the places in her novel any names, even fictitious ones, the author contrives to draw the reader in and to create a more enclosed fictional world for Psyche's timeless story. That the technique is deliberate can be seen in the novel's opening description where, in the front hall of Sharon and Dwight's home, a shaft of sunlight hitting the chandelier scatters a shower of prismatic colours over a maid's black-and-white uniform, “transforming it momentarily into motley out of place in time and locale.”

If Psyche captured the hearts of millions of readers, it was probably in no small part due to the fact that she also captured the heart of the author. Before starting to write a novel, my mother would live with her characters for up to a year, until they took on a life of their own - propelling the plot. In the case of Psyche, I think she must have fallen in love with the beautiful child she created and rejoiced in her remarkable courage and resiliency.

Valerie (Brett Young) Argue
March 2008

PSYCHE
is a terrific read. A captivating view of popular psychology in the 1950s, it sweeps readers into a fictional world of crime, suspense, and romance. But the novel is more than a popular romance or mystery since it both uses and queries the conventions of those popular forms, just as it scrutinizes some of the most hotly debated topics of twentieth-century psychology.
Psyche
is a thoroughly modern novel, with a fiercely proud and independent heroine who experiences life on her own terms. Published in 1959, the same year as Hugh MacLennan's
The Watch that Ends the Night
and Mordecai Richler's
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
, Phyllis Brett Young's
Psyche
has largely disappeared from public consciousness. This new edition of the novel allows us to reintroduce a work set in mid-century Canada and to suggest ways in which it sheds light on its place and time.
Psyche
speaks to the age-old tension between nature/nurture and to questions about the influence of heredity and environment. It also challenges generalizations about postwar democratic and egalitarian values as well as those surrounding Canadian literature and popular genre literature at the end of the 1950s.

Psyche
is out of step with the stereotypes of democratization and egalitarianism associated with postwar Canada. The post World War Two years are generally characterized as a time of rapid social change in which social attitudes about class, ethnicity, and gender were transformed, with Canadians
beginning to internalize the ideals of international human rights protocols that led in the 1960s to the end of previous restrictions on immigration and elitist educational and legislative impediments to equality of opportunity.
Psyche
, however, speaks to the tenacity of older values surrounding class, elitism, and heredity.

The innate intelligence of the novel's heroine, Psyche, is a central theme throughout the novel. While postwar psychology was preoccupied with personality development or the effect of obsessive mothering, Psyche is remarkable for how little she changes - she was confident and self-assured as a little girl and is just the same as a young woman. Rather than being over-mothered, her surrogate mother, Mag, although kind, leaves her pretty much alone. Mag teaches by lived example and “perfect” Psyche provides few instances for reprimand, so explicit moral training on fundamental matters such as honesty and feminine virtue amount to a brief warning about how theft would lead to a “stomache-ache [sic] created expressly by the Lord” or vague admonishments “to be a good girl.”
²

Young's decision to go against the tenets of the time in creating her heroine reminds us that there was less consensus of opinion in the 1950s than we often think and suggests that she was well aware of the various aspects of complex questions about psychological development and values. Although it would be inappropriate to focus exclusively on her father in thinking about why she structured the novel as she did, given his role as a prominent public intellectual, he cannot be ignored. George Sidney Brett was one of the most influential English-language philosophers in Canada during the first half of the twentieth century. A 1902 Oxford graduate in Classics and Humanities, he arrived in Canada after four years teaching philosophy in Lahore, India (now Pakistan).
³
While in India, Brett learned to speak Hindustani and read Sanskrit and Arabic and, according to historian Michael Gauvreau, continued to write about India in the 1920s and 1930s, disagreed vehemently with Gandhi and the Congress nationalists, and “was an advocate of the princely states.”
⁴
While this may have been the
result of his Britishness and allegiance to the Empire, this elitism was out of step with his liberal contemporaries. Brett came to Trinity College, University of Toronto, in 1908, first as librarian and lecturer in Classics. Almost immediately, he was promoted to professor of ethics and ancient philosophy and soon moved “temporarily” to the university Philosophy Department to “shore up its psychology subfield.”
⁵
At the time, psychology was a branch within philosophy and in 1912 Brett had published the first volume of his most important scholarly work,
The History of Psychology
. The appointment in philosophy and psychology became permanent and full-time in 1921 with the publication of the second and third volumes of
The History of Psychology
. At the same time, Brett was named the university's director of psychology. Brett understood psychology as the “science of the soul.” He believed the discipline required a humanist tradition as “History alone, can adequately unfold the content of the idea denoted by the word ‘Psyche' or explain the various meanings that have from age to age been assigned to the phrase ‘science of the soul.'”
⁶
This was not the direction the discipline was taking, however, and from the time of his appointment he advocated that psychology be made a separate department, a step the university took in 1927.
⁷
Brett's support of the partition of psychology from philosophy reflected his opposition to the evolution of the discipline. He was opposed to all forms of behaviourism in psychology, an approach that was becoming dominant in the United States in the 1920s. Behavioural psychologists rejected the study of consciousness, focusing instead on what could be observed, predicted, and controlled.
⁸
In Canada, behaviourial psychology was dominated by the mental hygiene movement, which emphasized heredity and adopted a eugenicist framework toward both “bettering the race” and preventing its degeneration. One of the tenets of this set of beliefs, which came to dominate English Canadian social reform in the 1910s and 1920s, was a belief in innate intelligence and the “overriding influence of heredity upon capacity.”
⁹
Through the Canadian National Council for Mental Health (1918) and later the Toronto-based
Eugenics Society of Canada (1930), prominent citizens, academics, and social reformers influenced immigration policy and public understanding of the issue.
¹⁰
Mass intelligence testing and the educational experiment surrounding the Dionne quintuplets captured the public's imagination. The Dionnes, born in 1934 and legally stolen from their parents when they were made wards of the Province of Ontario, became part of the twenty-four hour a day psychological developmental program of Dr William Blatz of the St George's School for Child Study and the expanding Psychology Department, University of Toronto. The young girls were not only Ontario's most important tourist attraction but were also seen as an extraordinary research opportunity for exploring the impact of nature/nurture: as the girls were believed to be genetically identical, differences between them had to be explained by environment.
¹¹

Even after Brett moved away from psychology, he maintained links with the discipline. In 1926 he was appointed to the Board of Directors of the St George's School for Child Study, operated by Dr William Blatz and funded by the Canadian National Committee for Mental Health.
¹²
In 1927 he was one of the founders, with Carl Murchison and Edward Titchener, of
The Journal of General Psychology
. Brett also maintained an interest in nature/nurture debates. Philosophy 1A, his course on “Introduction to Ethics” instituted in 1931-32., was described as a study of “The basis of morals in human nature; the influence of heredity and environment; standards, motives, and sanctions of conduct; application to the problems of personal conduct and social relations.”
¹³
Ultimately, however, Brett believed in education and culture. Michael Gauvreau has described him as concerned that “modern civilization was the fruit of a fine balance of humanistic and scientific knowledge; here was the high road between freedom and determinism. At stake was the question of how to preserve that freedom in the face of the knowledge that much of human behaviour was determined by biological and environmental forces.” For Brett, who rejected psychological behaviourism, “philosophy and history assured the possibility of rational action.”
¹⁴

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