Victoria, BC author Jane Cawthorne talks to AW’s Debbie Bateman about her debut novel.
DB: Patterson House, the home that gives its name to your novel, is more than a building or the furniture it contains. It is a character as powerful as any other in the novel, demanding a level of loyalty comparable to marriage, a bond not easily broken. I formed a tender attachment to this house. At times, it seemed even as if the house experienced trauma, grief, and other complex feelings. What were you most conscious of as you shaped this important character? Would you like to share your thoughts on giving emotions and other human qualities to objects in a work of fiction?
JC: I love odd houses. I wonder what it is like to live in a place with stories whirling around it. What people think they know about the house is extended to what they think they know about its inhabitants, and vice versa. Patterson House has a strange reputation, a birth, a life, and a death. In all these ways, it is like a person. The reader knows it mostly in its old age when it is dilapidated. Alden would love to keep the house up, but she can’t afford to. Neglect is a form of abandonment, and many of the human characters experience abandonment too. There is a lot of projection possible between the house and other characters. The house works as a character but also as a metaphor. My thought was not that I was giving the house human emotions, but that they would be projected on to it.
DB: Set in Toronto in the early 1900s, Patterson House confronts the social norms of the time from a feminist perspective. Alden, and her adopted daughter, Constance, push against and defy the social order of their times. When did you realize the novel could explore the role of women and girls? How did your research into the history of the times impact your thoughts on women’s rights?
JC: I always knew Patterson House would explore the rights of women and girls. This theme is always part of my work. My research did not significantly impact my thoughts on women’s rights, but it did bring me to read up on prohibition and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), an organization that I had not thought a lot about before. The WCTU appears conservative (and this would appeal to Alden), but the members were very progressive in their thinking. They were interested in peace and bringing an end to domestic violence. Although the suffrage movement might seem like a more obvious environment for Alden’s initial efforts to break free of family and home, the WCTU suits her character better.
DB: It would have been an easier choice to place distrust of the feminine firmly within the minds of men. Instead, the lead female characters harbour their own version of misogyny, and we witness the harm this brings to their lives. Can you comment on internalized sexism within the context of your novel?
JC: While it might have been easier to have only male characters be misogynist, it would be too simplistic. That’s not how misogyny works. Patriarchy teaches women that we are inferior, and that our secondary status is natural and deserved. To believe that there is something inherently wrong with oneself, to internalize this misogyny, is a deep psychic wound. Although Alden senses her strengths, they are understood by those around her as flaws and she comes to see them that way too. She is continually thwarted in her efforts to break free of limits placed upon her. At the same time, she also longs for acceptability. These are contradictory goals. She ends up doing exactly what she didn’t want to do—keeping a house. Breaking free of internalized sexism is the only way Alden can transform and grow. She learns to believe in herself and her own capabilities.
DB: Throughout the novel, readers gain an audience with the ghost of William Patterson, a man who took his own life and has remained trapped in the house built by the fortune he lost. He is powerless to intervene. Although we hear from him infrequently in brief outbursts, he never really goes away. How did the presence of this ghost feel to you as the writer? How did his presence help to shape the larger narrative of the novel?
JC: The novel begins and ends with William Patterson. He has the first and last word. He would like that. His voice offers a counter-narrative and adds some crucial information that no one else has. But I think the reader understands that far from being omniscient, Patterson’s view of events is completely unreliable.
Patterson’s explanations of his own life allowed me to give the reader an understanding of how Alden came to be the person she is—a person who cares so much about what others think. It is wrong to say it is “in her genes,” but her concern about what others think is as deep in her as it was in her grandfather.
I admit it was a bit cheeky of me to make William Patterson, the patriarch, utterly powerless. But it was a good way for me to turn patriarchy on its head.
DB: Was there a specific incident that inspired this piece of work?
JC: In part, the work is inspired by my aunt Constance. My aunt was an unusual woman. The last time I saw her I was about four years old. She wore her black hair short and slicked back like a man. She had thick black glasses. She always wore a men’s white dress shirt with a thin black tie, a black blazer, and a matching black A-line skirt with black Oxford shoes. To be honest, I don’t know much about her. I believe she had a difficult life. She was ostracized by my mother. I wondered how her life might have been better if the world (or even her own family) offered her support at crucial times, if it held her hand instead of slapping it. Maybe I was trying to write her a better life. But the only fact the two Constances share is the year of their birth—1916.
DB: What books were you reading when you wrote this? Are there any books that you had to keep visiting for inspiration when writing this book?
JC: I wrote this over so many years I couldn’t possibly list all the books I read during this time. I read dozens and dozens of books about Toronto, about the times, about the city, its history, and its people. I also took two classes called “Reading Toronto” through the Academy of Lifelong Learning in Toronto, each of which studied ten novels set in Toronto. That novel study gave me many examples of how other writers conveyed a sense of the city.
I enjoy reading epic multi-generational family stories. Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall On Your Knees is a book I revisit often, as is Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries. Both books offer excellent examples of how one can structure this kind of potentially unwieldy work. The Stone Diaries is a master class in using multiple points of view.
DB: Are any characters in the book based on people that actually exist in the world as we know it? Can you talk a bit more about the compositing process you followed in selecting and accumulating character traits from real people that may have inspired the fictional characters?
JC: Patterson House mentions Prime Ministers and bishops, and well-to-do Torontonians and their families. It is my hope that these anchor the piece in time and place, and offer authenticity. Mr. Newton Wylie, a secondary character in Part One, was a real-life leader in the prohibition movement. But other than his name and position, he is completely fictionalized. It might have been better to change his name, but it is such a perfect name that I hated to give it up. A character like Mrs. Schiffley, the butcher’s wife, is someone everyone knows. Every neighbourhood has a Mrs. Schiffley. She has a heart of gold and quietly helps others without expecting any acknowledgement. That Alden misunderstands her for so long, and thinks of her as a gossip and potential adversary says more about Alden than Mrs. Schiffley.
DB: What were you most conscious about in dealing with the backstory?
JC: Often, I’ll encounter a person and wonder, “How did they get to be like that?” I’m always wondering about backstory. I wondered about how a woman like Alden came to care so much about what others think about her. Then I built a story to explain that. The backstory, the story of her grandfather and what happens to him and of the house and its place in the neighbourhood is really part of Alden’s story. I was conscious of making the backstory part of the story’s present because too much backstory can really bog a story down.
DB: Other than finding the most effective way of telling the story, were you conscious of any particular literary ambitions such as developing a distinctive voice or narrative style, or disrupting standard reader expectations of the genre?
JC: When I was almost finished Patterson House, I was in a car accident and sustained a brain injury. For more than three years, I could not work. When I learned to read again and could get back to work, my voice had changed. Voice is one of those things that is hard to define. My thoughts went together in new ways. My syntax was different. That meant that when I edited what I had written in the past, what felt right to me before did not always feel right anymore. It was hard to know if it was wrong or simply different. But the bigger problem was making sure that the voice in the part of the book that was finished before my brain injury matched the voice in the part that was finished after. My literary ambition, then, was simply to present a consistent writerly voice.
DB: What was the most satisfying aspect about writing this book (other than perhaps the satisfaction of finishing it)?
JC: Strangely, I found writing the death scenes extremely satisfying! Maybe that is why I wrote so many. I wonder about death and what happens when we die. Do good people have good deaths? What does a person think about when they die? I imagine that often they are not thinking about what is going on in the moment, but about something they were stuck on in their life or some great unresolved issue. Maybe they are thinking of the people they love.
Author Bio
Jane Cawthorne writes about women on the brink of transformation. Her first novel Patterson House (Inanna, 2022) is set in Toronto, the city in which she grew up and which is close to her heart even when she lives elsewhere. She is the co-editor of two anthologies with E. D. Morin–“Impact: Women Writing After Concussion,” and “Writing Menopause.” Her work is often anthologized, most recently in “You Look Good For Your Age” (Rona Altrows Ed.) and “(M)othering Anthology” (Anne Sorbie and Heidi Grogan Eds.). She earned an MFA from the Solstice MFA program in Boston in 2016. http://www.janecawthorne.com