Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1993. [Vol. 1.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 21)

STUDIES - Anna Jakabfi: Regionalism and the Surgeon Figure in Hugh MacLennan's Fiction

Angus Murray overcomes his feeling for Penny too by rationalizing his thoughts about her as if setting up a diagnosis of Penny

—thus once again the mind of the doctor takes over and is always in control as far as his emotions are concerned: "He faced her with as much detachment as he could. God damn people like Penny with that tense calm like still water under pressure! The idea that he might have married her appalled him now. That calm, that potential energy in the girl would annihilate him if he ever had to live with it. A stubborn, imaginative, violent man like Neil MacRae would be just the sort to make her do whatever he wanted, make her forget to think, force her into the pattern of his own life without even knowing he was doing it. The next time he thought of getting married, Murray decided, he'd hunt someone capable of hysterics."

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5 Daniel Ainslie was keeping his emotional distance from his wife, Margaret. Instead he reads the Greek classics in the original, it is a feeling which lifts his spirit above the everyday routine sufferings he has to witness. It is an activity which makes up for the warmth, the tenderness he cannot show his wife for fear of giving away his fallibility as a human being who craves love and understanding. Each Man's Son other doctor figure, Douglas MacKenzie attributes this to the puritanic past, the Protestant innate guilt feeling. I believe that it goes deeper than that. It goes back to what traditionally society expects of man: to be rock that the woman can lean on, be the dominant sex, the tower of strength in the family. This expected role is underligned by the fact that Daniel Ainslie is doctor, an authority not only in the operating theatre, but outside it in the local and very close-knit community of Broughton. If he lets himself go, he cannot go back to the role of the strong man, and he falls victim to his own fallibility. As long as he closes in himself, he does not betray his strength, he does not have to give himself away and thus become victim to the woman, his mate in life. It is obvious that he can give himself away, be sincere only to the older and much respected colleague Douglas MacKenzie, and also to a certain extent. They communicate verbally up to a 1

5 Cf. op. cit pp. 2, 193—4 54