Dunstan Ramsey's Growth as a Product of His Relationships with Women in His Life

Carlos Perez

Mrs. Larm

ENG 4U1

11 April 2016

Dunstan Ramsey’s Growth as a Product of his Relationships with the Women in his Life

        As human beings, love and happiness seem to be bound to each other indefinitely. Whether one spends time with loved ones, or spends time doing the things they love, the final result of both activities mentioned is a sense of happiness and belonging. To some, these things may seem trivial, but to many, these things are difficult to recognize; the search for this love is what one may refer to as a search for identity or search for self-worth. Correspondingly, Aristotle even includes this in his own idea of what it means to be happy as he describes that a happy person is one who is content with their contribution to the community and sees their life as a life well lived. In Fifth Business, a novel by Robertson Davies, the narrator and protagonist, Dunstan Ramsey recounts the events of his life story in some detail including some of his personal character development in attempt to show that his life is indeed a life well lived. Throughout most of the plot, he is aided by several different women that contribute greatly to the development of his self-image and the maintenance of his happiness by providing him with different kinds of love. The happiness Dunstan Ramsey finds in many major parts of his life can be largely credited to his relationships with three women: Mary Dempster, Diana Marfleet and Liselotte Vitzliputlzi.

        Not only is Mary Dempster one of the most important people in Dunstan’s life, but she has helped Dunstan maintain happiness and composure in the toughest of times by modelling through her own fearlessness, and has ignited his passion for hagiography. As a child, friendships are some of the most important relationships one can have. It is evident that Dunstan “regarded her as [his] greatest friend, and the secret league between [them] as the taproot that fed [his] life” (45), as he spent most of his time talking to her and tending to her needs as directed by Mrs. Ramsey. Neglected by his own mother, it is quite clear that Dunstan sees Mary Dempster as his source of motherly love. The way he describes her supposed wisdom as a “breadth of outlook and clarity of vision” (44) can be compared to the blind admiration of a young child to a parent in thinking that they are omnipotent and omniscient. Dunstan also describes Mary Dempster as having a “lack of fear” (44) and is asked by her to promise her he will not have fear. This is important because although Dunstan did experience much fear in the war, just before he lost consciousness he hallucinated and saw Mary Dempster’s face on a statue of the Virgin Mary. This, perhaps serving as a placebo of some sort, may have contributed to his survival of the war. Moreover, this can also be seen as another contribution to sparking the passion of what Dunstan has dedicated most of his life’s work to; Dunstan says that writing about Saints has brought him great joy, as he compares himself to “a happy goat who had wandered into the wondrous enclosed garden of hagiology”(113). It is not unreasonable to say that Dunstan Ramsey’s obsession with saints may be a product of him witnessing a saint (or what he believes is a saint) first hand. This is to say that because Dunstan Ramsey witnessed Mary Dempster perform the miracles of supposedly reviving Willie from death, serving as a revelation to Joel Surgeoner by having sex with him willingly as a tramp and appearing to Dunstan before loss consciousness in the battlefield as a statue of mother Mary, Dunstan Ramsey believes that Mary Dempster should be considered a saint and is extremely interesting in saints because of this. To conclude, Dunstan Ramsey found happiness as a child in his friendship with Mary Dempster, as well as finding some pleasure in hagiography as an adult due to his adamant consideration of Mary Dempster as a saint.

        Next, much of Dunstan’s sense of dignity, independence and freedom is a result Diana Marfleet’s nurturing in his time of need and her contribution in his transition into manhood. Most superficially, Diana is seen to help Dunstan regain strength and teach him certain tidbits of British etiquette that Dunstan does not have due to his Canadian ethnicity. More importantly however, he gains a sense of dignity and confidence due to his experiences with Diana. One of these experiences is the loss of his virginity, or what he refers to as “the completion of that manhood which had been thrust upon [him] so one-sidedly in the trenches” (76). It can be noted that when Dunstan received letters from Leola, he questioned himself as to why he got himself “mixed up with such a pin head” (80). It is evident that Dunstan’s standards have raised from his utter realization that his infatuation with Leola was foolish. One can speculate that Diana has replaced Leola’s importance in Dunstan’s life, since Dunstan’s infatuation of Leola was purely physical, while Diana offered him more physical love in addition to her friendship, nurturing and romance. Another trait of Dunstan’s development due to his time with Diana is his sense of freedom. This is apparent when he is informed by Diana of the death of his parents. He described his feeling towards this information as “relief... [He] was glad that [he] did not have to be [his] mother’s own dear laddie any longer” (72). In a person who’s going through their early 20’s, a sense of freedom is a very important and archetypal feeling; it is what many refer to as the best years of their lives. Dunstan, as a man in his 20’s, craves this freedom. Diana, who is in love with Dunstan, recognizes this and decides to let him go and be free even though she had intentions of marrying him eventually. Furthermore, to accent his freedom and to welcome the start of his new life, he renames Ramsey from Dunstable to Dunstan, of which he takes a liking to because “it suggested new freedom and a new personality” (83). To summarize, Diana helps Dunstan develop in freedom, dignity and independence; all traits that contribute to a well-rounded and happy individual.

        Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Liselotte Vitzliputlzi, most commonly known as ‘Liesl’, gave Dunstan the chance to relive aspects of his childhood and helped him become self-actualized. Liesl is the co-owner of the carnival that features the magician ‘Magnus Eisengrim’, a magician who Dunstan identifies to be Paul Dempster. Liesl, knowing of Dunstan Ramsey as a “distinguished hagiographer” (196) hires him as the writer of Eisengrim’s autobiography. Intentional or not, this puts Dunstan in an environment that offers experiences similar to those he had in his childhood; he is reunited with his interest in magic and illusion, he has become infatuated with a pretty girl like he was with Leola, and “[his] imagination had never known such glorious freedom” (201), of course, due to the fact he was writing a fictional autobiography in contrast to most of his non fictional works. It is quite apparent through the enthusiasm of Dunstan’s writing that this was very pleasurable to him, especially since at the end of the book his post script indicates that he wrote it from the carnival in Switzerland Liesl invited him to visit, meaning that he must have liked his time at the carnival enough for him to want to visit it again. Secondly, and most importantly in Dunstan’s character development is the way Liesl assisted him in recognizing his identity and being introspective. As Liesl does not have any bias towards the events in Dunstan’s life, she can comment on all of what Dunstan discloses to her, solely on her opinions and values. Since Dunstan has always been secretive, he never really got the chance to analyze some of his darkest memories through another perspective, making Liesl a very valuable asset to Dunstan in terms of discovering his identity and role in life. In the end, Liesl recognizes Dunstan as Fifth Business, a character in European opera that “you cannot manage the plot without” (214). Once Dunstan recognizes this as his role in the ‘plot’ of Boy Staunton’s death and confesses to Paul Dempster of his involvement in ‘robbing’ Mary Dempster of her sanity, he finds peace of mind in releasing his longtime held guilt. Perhaps this culminating moment of his life was symbolized by the heart attack he suffered as soon as he learned Boy was murdered. To reiterate, this all would not have happened if Liesl had not helped Dunstan discover who he was; this ultimate self-discovery Dunstan experienced can teleologically be credited to Liesl’s advice.