WOMEN WHO DREAM LARGER
Gwen Tuinman's historical novel Unrest uncovers female rage as a major driver of change in gritty 19th century Bytown
Unrest
Gwen Tuinman Random House
When Gwen Tuinman was researching her robust historical novel, Unrest, it seemed entirely natural that she should check out early 19th century weaponry.
“I was able to learn how to load a weapon with a ramrod and drop in a musket ball and fire it,” she says enthusiastically. Still, her stamina was tested when it came to keeping the firearm steady. “The barrel was five feet long. I have good upper body strength, but after several minutes your arm just starts to go!”
Tuinman writes with similar authority about slaughtering a hog (the famed Foxfire books were her source here) and chopping down a tree. She cites visits to Ontario's Algonquin Way Cultural Centre — “I had such a wonderful time” — and the Loggers Day celebrations in Algonquin Park, where the art of tree felling was on full display.
Such background material was essential to the gritty, grimy, shockingly violent culture of Ottawa when it was still known as Bytown. “I think we Canadians have an images of ourselves as strong and decent, with all the beliefs we hold dear about being Canadian,” she says with a laugh.
Unrest challenges that illusion, so any reader preferring a romantic sanitized version of our national capital's early history should look elsewhere.
Tuinman is also interested in how societies work — and in giving special attention here to the place of women in such an often unforgiving male-dominated culture, she comes through with sharply detailed portraits of feminine resilience. So, among other things, Unrest is an edgy adventure yarn about women's freedom.
It's a thoroughly Canadian novel, yet it has the flavour of the Wild West transplanted to the Ottawa River Valley in 1836. Class and privilege have already put down their ugly roots, with the Rideau Canal forming a dividing line between the wealth and entitlement of Uppertown and the poverty and squalor of Lowertown. Lawlessness is rampant and Bytown is terrorized by an Irish rebel gang known as the Shiners, who see nothing unseemly in placing the bodies of two murdered prostitutes on display outside a tavern.
When you ask Tuinman what upset her most during her research, she pauses a moment. “The unbridled violence of the Shiners was very shocking to me,” she says from her home in Ontario's Kawartha Lakes region. “Those corpses — that was something they did to shock people.” Indeed, anyone perceived as an enemy was in
jeopardy. A pub owner might see of the people and their motivations his premises burn down. A newspaper and how they deal with their experiences office might be destroyed. in that area — for example, “The leader of the Shiners was a where do they fall under the class man named Peter Aylen who was system? And at the same time, I quite violent and people were terrified wanted lots of action that would of him,” Tuinman points out. keep the story moving along.”
“He wreaked havoc.” Ultimately, the human dimension Aylen is one of the novel's real-life prevails as the novel focuses characters, and it's an irony on the domestic drama wracking of history that in later years, he one immigrant Irish farm household would acquire sufficient respectability — and how its tentacles connect to have his Richmond Road with the social and cultural home declared a National Historic fabric that is the novel's territory.
Site by the Canadian government. At the heart of the story you find In Unrest, however, his presence is Mariah, awkward and isolated, her formidable and frightening. face scarred by a vicious dog attack The contradictions in Aylen's back in Ireland, her sense of selfworth personal story point to the complexities Tuinman notes. “For example, fragile despite her reliability facing any novelist I believe the Corktown area was as a farmhand working alongside plunging into the shifting waters built on a swamp that of course her soft-natured brother-in-law of social history. Easy, simplistic would be unpleasant and stagnant, Seamus, with whom she's quietly judgment calls were not an option ripe with odours and a mosquito but painfully in love.
in the writing of this book. population that carried the threat Mariah is the household's unwelcome “The Irish in particular were being of malaria.” spinster aunt, a continuing relegated to areas that would Tuinman attempts a balancing irritant to her sister Biddy, who have been deemed undesirable for act with Unrest. “I think it's a story carries her own bundle of bitterness economically advantaged people,” that really explores the interior life and grievance stemming not only from the challenges of daily survival but from a secret related to the family's oldest child, the restless and increasingly rebellious Thomas. In actuality, he is the unacknowledged son of Mariah, and the unexpressed love she bears for him is tearing her apart.
The moment will come when Mariah will break loose, determined to claim her rightful place in a hostile culture and reveal to Michael his true parentage. But will she be in time, given that Michael is also seeking to flee the smothering coils of family even if his actions land him in a criminal universe?
There is more than one portrait here of a women in a state of anger and revolt against circumstance. In addition to Mariah, who will demonstrate astonishing courage and tenacity in salvaging her life, and Biddy, whose fury over what life has dealt her will reach self-destructive proportions, there is an unexpected wild card in the character of a prostitute named Peg, who has managed to find independence in this world.
If, in fact, women had a prescribed role to play in 19th century pioneer communities, here is a novel that two centuries later provides a sharp reminder of what this entailed.
In an author's note at the end of her book, Tuinman writes that “women were responsible for child rearing, nursing the sick, laundering, sewing and mending clothes, caring for the dairy and chickens, gardening, food preservation, maintaining the hearth fire, and cooking three meals each day.”
The list seems endless — and Tuinman cites it now to explain what was going through her mind as she wrote about the women in her novel.
“I left myself a lot of room for these characters to show me who they really were. I don't necessarily set out to make a particular point — I just write. And what I was looking at was female rage — the frustration, the slow simmering resentment ...”
Now, as she considers the finished book, she argues that anger can have a liberating effect: when harnessed, female rage can be used to change an individual's life positively and families, as well. “I do believe it's a means to progress.”
Tuinman has written previously about the challenges she faced personally in exiting an abusive relationship. “I had a difficult period in my own life, and I'm sure that when I was writing Unrest, there was an injection of myself in the story.”
So she hopes readers will relate to “the courage of women who dream larger. We are shaped by circumstance but not defined by it. We are authors of our own story. We can change direction and rewrite ourselves.”