A PSYCHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE CHARACTER OF
MR. BENTLEY IN SINCLAIR ROSS’S AS FOR ME AND MY
HOUSE
To begin with, Sinclair Ross’s novel, as for me and my house deals with the
characteristic peculiarities of the protagonist Mrs. Bentley in relation to that of her husband
Mr. Bentley. The story is about Philip, a frustrated artist who becomes engulfed inside a
wrong profession, an uncomprehending and narrow society, and, perhaps, a bad marriage.
Dealt by Mrs.Bentley being the protagonist of the story, the novel ignites from her perception
of unsolidity and fragility of their marriage relation.
As a matter of fact, Philip Bentley’s life was not a highly coloured one. Although
raised by his mother as a single-parent child after his father’s dismissal, Philip grew up to be
a person who gets blindly bond to the image of his father he creates in his mind. Being called
a ‘bastard’ by others, made him more anxious of his own existence and identity in the society
he lived in. It was then he found the paper works of his father along with his paintings and
artworks that made him more anxious to know about the uncanny. As innate human manifest
to quest the truth, or to create a new realm of understanding to anything incomprehensible,
Philip tries to ‘read’ his father from the insights of his poetry and theology thereby placing
him in a stately and highly theological order. What we see here is the auto-erotic element in
the kid being attached to his ‘imaginary paterfamilias’ that makes me more or less attached
and anxious about his true oedipal factor; his mother. He becomes more attracted to his
imaginary father that he even started to hate his mother for his father’s dismay.
He always wanted himself around his father and wished to be like him, daydreaming
and desiring to be a theological aspirant just like him. This is called an acculturation gap in
, analytical psychology. Jean Piaget notes that children undergoes a developmental stage called
the ‘sensorimotor stage’ in which the child begin to imitate observed actions. This stage lasts
up to the first two years of the child. However, for Philip this stage lasts for his whole life.
This over imitation is actually the result of a situation in which the child places himself in the
image of his father considering him to be his alter ego. Here, Philip designs his whole life to
be an imitation of his father’s and wishes to have a male child who would in turn place
himself in the same position so as to get imitated by the whole row of generation thereby
letting his father’s ‘noble’ character being carried throughout.
Though he becomes initially repelled by the idea of being a priest just like his father,
he agrees to it for the sake of an agreement to pursue theological studies.After philip’s
graduation, he gets married to a music student Mrs. Bentley, but was unfortunately forced to
work for the United Church as a minister because of the expenses incurred with the birth of a
stillborn child and also the debts which actually piled up. When Mrs. Bentley exclaims about
her considerations regarding the church-“After all, could the pebbles of his disbelief do a real
harm to an institution like the Church”- we can be clear about how Philip feel towards his job
and towards the religious institutions he was forced to be a part of. Philip is in fact, worn and
tortured by his religious hypocrisy, according to his wife. However, his struggle with life is
what makes him hypocritical as a matter of fact. “ Religion and art” he says, “are almost
same thing. Just different ways of taking a man out of himself, bringing him to an emotional
pitch that we call ecstasy or rapture. They’re both a rejection of the material common sense
world for that one is illusionary, yet somehow more important. Now it’s always when a man
turns away from his common sense world around him that he begins to create, when he looks
into a void, and he has to give it life and form.” This aspect of material common sense world
being in continuous corruption with illusionary can be seen in his earlier life as he is more
close to his illusionary father figure than his mother, in reality. And, as we recall Freud, it is
MR. BENTLEY IN SINCLAIR ROSS’S AS FOR ME AND MY
HOUSE
To begin with, Sinclair Ross’s novel, as for me and my house deals with the
characteristic peculiarities of the protagonist Mrs. Bentley in relation to that of her husband
Mr. Bentley. The story is about Philip, a frustrated artist who becomes engulfed inside a
wrong profession, an uncomprehending and narrow society, and, perhaps, a bad marriage.
Dealt by Mrs.Bentley being the protagonist of the story, the novel ignites from her perception
of unsolidity and fragility of their marriage relation.
As a matter of fact, Philip Bentley’s life was not a highly coloured one. Although
raised by his mother as a single-parent child after his father’s dismissal, Philip grew up to be
a person who gets blindly bond to the image of his father he creates in his mind. Being called
a ‘bastard’ by others, made him more anxious of his own existence and identity in the society
he lived in. It was then he found the paper works of his father along with his paintings and
artworks that made him more anxious to know about the uncanny. As innate human manifest
to quest the truth, or to create a new realm of understanding to anything incomprehensible,
Philip tries to ‘read’ his father from the insights of his poetry and theology thereby placing
him in a stately and highly theological order. What we see here is the auto-erotic element in
the kid being attached to his ‘imaginary paterfamilias’ that makes me more or less attached
and anxious about his true oedipal factor; his mother. He becomes more attracted to his
imaginary father that he even started to hate his mother for his father’s dismay.
He always wanted himself around his father and wished to be like him, daydreaming
and desiring to be a theological aspirant just like him. This is called an acculturation gap in
, analytical psychology. Jean Piaget notes that children undergoes a developmental stage called
the ‘sensorimotor stage’ in which the child begin to imitate observed actions. This stage lasts
up to the first two years of the child. However, for Philip this stage lasts for his whole life.
This over imitation is actually the result of a situation in which the child places himself in the
image of his father considering him to be his alter ego. Here, Philip designs his whole life to
be an imitation of his father’s and wishes to have a male child who would in turn place
himself in the same position so as to get imitated by the whole row of generation thereby
letting his father’s ‘noble’ character being carried throughout.
Though he becomes initially repelled by the idea of being a priest just like his father,
he agrees to it for the sake of an agreement to pursue theological studies.After philip’s
graduation, he gets married to a music student Mrs. Bentley, but was unfortunately forced to
work for the United Church as a minister because of the expenses incurred with the birth of a
stillborn child and also the debts which actually piled up. When Mrs. Bentley exclaims about
her considerations regarding the church-“After all, could the pebbles of his disbelief do a real
harm to an institution like the Church”- we can be clear about how Philip feel towards his job
and towards the religious institutions he was forced to be a part of. Philip is in fact, worn and
tortured by his religious hypocrisy, according to his wife. However, his struggle with life is
what makes him hypocritical as a matter of fact. “ Religion and art” he says, “are almost
same thing. Just different ways of taking a man out of himself, bringing him to an emotional
pitch that we call ecstasy or rapture. They’re both a rejection of the material common sense
world for that one is illusionary, yet somehow more important. Now it’s always when a man
turns away from his common sense world around him that he begins to create, when he looks
into a void, and he has to give it life and form.” This aspect of material common sense world
being in continuous corruption with illusionary can be seen in his earlier life as he is more
close to his illusionary father figure than his mother, in reality. And, as we recall Freud, it is
