Sinclair Ross Ones a Heifer - Book Report/Review Example

A Psychological Analysis of Sinclair Ross’ Short Story ‘One’s a Heifer’ One’s a Heifer’ (1944) is Sinclair Ross’ moving, and in some ways, a disturbing tale of psychosis, isolation, and twisted love. From a seemingly simplistic plot, Ross weaves a tale with strong moral and psychological connotations. Right from the beginning, an environment of foreboding is purposefully built through a repeated emphasis of the sparseness and the isolation of the prairies. The short sentences and the diction, which operates through a repetition of conjunctives, denoting a limitation in vocabulary itself, emphasize a world of sparseness: ‘Still no one had seen them, still it was cold, still Tim protested what a pool I was’. Here, the sheer power of language as a medium of truthful representation is questioned and deconstructed right at the beginning of the story. The boy, in search of the lost heifers, is the narrator of the story. He tries to analyze the vast world around him through an almost obsessive employment of personifications: ‘The cattle round the straw stacks stared as we rode as if we were intruders. The fields stared, and the sky stared’. However, it also transports us to a surreal world, where man, animals and natural elements appear to be bound by some hidden and mysterious force of logic that defies linguistic representation. This feeling of intrusion even on common property highlights the strong moral make-up of the boy. This moral dilemma will be one of the biggest psychological struggles that the boy will undergo during his stay with Arthur Vickers: ‘It didn’t seem right, accepting hospitality this way from a man trying to steal your calves, but theft, I reflected, surely justified deceit’. From such an acute moral sense, guilt remains only a step away. Coupled with a fertile imagination, this guilt returns to haunt him even in the dreams that visit him in the middle of his disturbed sleep. And it is as much this sense of guilt that stops the boy from executing his plans to steal the heifers away by night, as his sense of the impracticality of the act. Still half in his sleep, the boy reflects: I looked and they were there all right, but Tim came up and said it might be better not to start for home till morning. He reminded me that I hadn't paid for his feed or my own supper yet, and that if I slipped off this way it would mean that I was stealing, too. The boy’s meeting with Arthur Vickers takes the dimension of the first encounter between innocence and evil. Ross uses a wide range the literary conventions and traditional images to heighten the palpable sense of evil one can associate with Vickers. Death and staleness seem to dominate the world of Arthur Vickers. The skins of coyote drying in the porch, the owl with a broken wing that is fed on rabbit meat every morning by Vickers’ own hands, the sick and nervous colt, even the food is stale: all emphasize the evilness of the character. The night itself heightens the sense of horror: The wind whistled drearily around the house. The blankets smelled like an old granary. It is in against this dreary background that the Vickers raves about his isolation and subsequent fall to insanity. The boy is alone with Tim, both move along a landscape that is sparse, and Vickers has this overwhelming sense of isolation. He continually raves about the girl who stayed with him, one he could probably have married, but left. Vickers’ isolation is structurally a culmination of the isolation that pervades the entire setting of the short story. Much of the attraction of the story comes from the mystery associated with the stall-box. The raging question is what lies inside the stall box. The most common interpretations deduce that the stall box may contain a corpse – the corpse of the woman: Vickers’ companion whom he may have killed or hidden there. It can also be the space where he has kept the girl hidden, live. This is not a surprise, because obsessive love has been a recurrent theme in Sinclair Ross, much like childhood steeped in wonder and imagination. However, there is no evidence in the story to prove it. On the other hand, such an interpretation summarily rejects the psychological complexity that the story instills where the woman is nothing more than a projection of Arthur Vickers’ psychotic mind. (Moss, P. 17) Often this girl is thought to be more of a projection of Vickers’ psychosis, a schizoid projection of his desires, and without palpable presence. The girl is an identity that Vickers makes out of his mind, an identity that he uses as an ‘other’ to try and keep his ‘self’ together. His desire to build a home for himself, his craving – of physical and psychological companionship from a ‘woman’ has gone unfulfilled. In the world where he is alone, this depravation has contributed to form the most disturbing kind of obsession in his mind. In his loneliness, he imagines a partner, plays with her – an image whose only presence is in his mind. This interpretation, though popular, does not account much in explaining the closed space of the stall-box. The question may therefore, be restructured, and one may ask ‘what is the stall-box’, rather than what lies within it. Post-Freudian psychoanalysis, particularly the school of Lacan does emphasize the ‘imaginative’ phase of the human mind. Kristeva calls it the chora – the unexplained ‘semiotic’ level of the human psyche, which can never be accessed through the ‘real’ or ‘symbolic’ levels of human performance in society. It lies beyond the scope of language, it denies representation. The stall box, that Vickers keeps hidden from the boy, is that unexplained, inexplicable space in the human psyche, which must always be closed, be unrevealed: the unsaid, unrepresented absence underneath the presence of the distinguishable. The boy imagines the heifers to be locked and hidden there, only to find out that they do not really exist there. The meaning that he tries to accord to this meaningless mass of darkness, the presence with which he tries to explain the absence fails. There is no presence there, nothing, no-thing, it resides solely in the world of dreams. However, even there it remains impenetrable, as the owl watches over, and the boy is forced to retrace his steps. One can here also stress on the ‘eyes’, the dominant imagery of the short story. The boy’s description of Arthur Vickers is always focused on his eyes. Eyes serve two symbolic purposes. On a moral plane, it is the light of the inner self, a representation of the one’s moral concerns. Similarly, at a second level, it is also the psychoanalytic trope of penetration, of psychosexual violence and aggression. Both these levels come together in the boy’s dream, when lights actually transform into the owl’s eyes, preventing him from stealth: a great juxtaposition of the psychological and moral connotations of the symbol. The darkness of the box-stall thus remains something that even the eye of rational enlightenment, reason/ morality, or even the subconscious faculty of dream of memory cannot penetrate. It remains the unexplained, the absence behind the façade of presence, the chora, the womb. Reference Moss, John, From the Heart of the Heartland, University of Ottawa Press, Ottawa, 1992 Read More