Chapter 8 Cory Willard “Maggie’s Own Sphere” Fly Fishing and Ecofeminism in Ethel Wilson’s Swamp Angel

When I think of a fly fisher, I think of a middle- to upper-class white male with a tweed jacket or vest covered in pockets—maybe even smoking a cigar or pipe. He probably has a distinguished-looking beard, or perhaps an old-timey moustache. In North America, masculine literary figures like Ernest Hemingway have contributed a great deal to this image. Almost a century after Hemingway published his classic short story “Big Two-Hearted River,” and more than forty years after Norman Maclean published the Pulitzer Prize–nominated A River Runs Through It, the white, male fly fisher archetype endures. Statistically, this archetype has some basis in fact. According to a report from the Recreational Boating & Fishing Foundation and the Outdoor Foundation, 73.5% of fly fishers in the United States are white and 70.4% of them are male (2019, 28). Data from Fisheries and Oceans Canada suggests that trends in Canada are not much different (2019, 5).

While at first glance these numbers paint the picture one might expect, the same Recreational Boating & Fishing Foundation report also notes that in 2018, in recreational angling overall, “female participation numbers reached an all-time high at 17.7 million” (2). Female participation in angling is on the rise and fly fishing is the fastest growing form of angling. Currently, roughly 1.4 million women fly fish in the United States, which makes up 13% of all female anglers (48, 28). The increase in female anglers is part of a larger demographic shift in recreational fishing, and points to a potential watershed moment in how fly fishing—and fly fishers—can be culturally understood.

Women are not new to fly fishing. For starters, the first English-language publication on fly fishing was written by Juliana Berners. Little is known about Berners, but she is believed to have been prioress of the Priory of St. Mary of Sopwell, near the cathedral city of St Albans in Hertfordshire, England. Berners’s “The Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle,” published in 1496, features a wealth of information on angling, and fly fishing specifically, including technical matters as well as ethical ones. Furthermore, in the nineteenth century, women such as Mary Orvis Marbury (of Orvis Company fame) and Carrie Gertrude Stevens (inventor of the infamous Grey Ghost fly pattern) revolutionized fly tying in America. Marbury, for example, “was put in charge of . . . creating a book that would set the standard for name and pattern according to location. The landmark Favorite Flies and Their Histories was published in 1892. By 1896, there had been nine printings” (American Museum of Fly Fishing, n.d.). The success of this book and Marbury’s contribution to fly pattern standardization speak to the far-reaching impact of women in the development of North American fly fishing. As Jen Corinne Brown notes, “angling represented a respectable sport for Victorian women, as long as they maintained proper gender boundaries (hence the vast number of early photographs of women in dresses, skirts, and other seemingly inappropriate fishing garb). Women anglers also contributed to sporting periodicals, wrote books, and ran fly-tying businesses, giving them authority within the sport” (2015, 17).

The more recent contributions of women to fly fishing are equally impressive. In the mid-twentieth century, Joan Salvato Wulff was responsible for numerous innovations in the art of fly casting and fly fishing instruction and is personally responsible for much of the terminology and technique used in modern fly casting. In fact, her “demystification of the fly cast” earned her twenty awards as well as places in both the International Game Fish Association’s Hall of Fame and the American Casting Association’s Hall of Fame (Fogt 2017). Wulff was also a champion competition angler many times over, winning her first state championship in New Jersey at the age of sixteen, and going on to win seventeen national titles by 1960 (Fogt 2017). More recently, teenaged Maxine McCormick, dubbed “The Mozart of Fly Casting” in a 2018 New York Times article by Shelby Pope, had captured back-to-back world titles by the age of fourteen, outscoring sixty-one-year-old Steve Rajeff, widely “considered the best fly caster of all time.” The simple truth is that, while underacknowledged, the influence of women is all over the history and development of fly fishing.

Like these historical and contemporary examples, Ethel Wilson’s novel Swamp Angel (1954) provides a valuable illustration of the way the “masculine” sport of fly fishing can be a productive site of personal change and fulfillment for women. The novel, set sometime in the early 1950s, tells the story of Maggie Vardoe (later Maggie Lloyd, after her deceased first husband), a woman looking for a way out of a loveless and oppressive marriage to Edward Vardoe. Fly fishing becomes central to Maggie’s escape. After saving up money earned by tying and selling flies, Maggie enlists the help of Joey, a Chinese cab driver, to get out of Vancouver and away from Edward. She ends up in interior British Columbia, at Three Loon Lake (possibly based on Loon Lake in south-central British Columbia), and begins working at a failing fishing lodge owned by the Gunnarsens. The lodge is Haldar Gunnarsen’s dream. His wife, Vera, thinks they should abandon it. Maggie, armed with her experience running a fishing lodge back east with her father, saves Three Loon Lake lodge and Haldar’s dream along with it. Maggie’s success afflicts Vera with immense jealousy—the only major conflict in Maggie’s new community. All the while, Maggie continues to exchange letters with her friend Nell Severance back in Vancouver.

Ethel Wilson has stated that she included fly fishing in Swamp Angel simply because she loved it. Fly fishing, she says, is “a marvelous thing in life, unique in the deep communion of the senses and rich in contemplation and memory” (1987, 87). Even though the term had yet to be invented, Wilson’s view of fly fishing has strong connections to ecofeminist concepts of embodiment and self-actualization. Additionally, Wilson’s words call to mind the concept of “flesh,” important to understandings of phenomenological embodiment. Jennifer McWeeny argues that “the ontological concept of flesh allows us to affirm the relationality and complexity of lived experience, which does not present beings as either mind or body, active or passive, self or other, oppressed or privileged, but as both of these aspects at the same time” (2014, 277). Considering Wilson’s view of fly fishing as something both contemplative and experiential/embodied, as something embedded in both the past and the contemplated future, fly fishing stands out as a rich site for ecofeminist theory.

The overarching concept in ecofeminist theory is that there is a connection between the oppression of women and the destructive treatment of the environment and non-human animals. Catriona Sandilands sums it up thus: “[B]roadly speaking, ecofeminism is a movement and a current of analysis that attempts to link feminist struggles with ecological struggles; the range of possibilities within this general mandate is, therefore, considerable” (1999, xvi). Ecofeminism adds to traditional feminist concerns of gender and equality a concern for the relationship between humans and nature. As Stephanie Lahar says, “ecofeminism sees as destructive not only the perceptual distancing and isolation of different peoples from each other, but also the habits of dualistic thought that separate human society from nature.” She adds that “the human/nature dualism is crucial to address and redress, since it is so fundamental, underlying and undermining our relations to the world around us and to that which is embodied and unmediated within ourselves” (1993, 96). The separation of nature from culture and human from animal creates a division that not only allows for exploitation, but also deprives us of the embodied and unmediated richness of the world. “When we set ourselves apart from nature,” Lahar argues, “we disembody human experience and sever it from an organic context,” which not only has implications on a systems level, but on an individual level as well (96).

In Swamp Angel, Maggie seeks to repair her life by connecting to, and embedding herself in, natural processes. She does this, in the first instance, by entering what Canadian literary scholars often term the “pseudo-wilderness.” Whereas Canadian settler mythology portrays the “real” wilderness as a dangerous, untamed, and uncivilized place to be conquered, the pseudo-wilderness is a place that is still more or less “wild,” but that has markings of civilization—for instance, a fishing lodge, a logging camp, or a forest/mountain/river valley that is accessible from a town or city. In “Women in the Wilderness,” Heather Murray argues that “it is the notion of the ‘pseudo-wilderness’ in both literature and popular belief, and the resultant ways of viewing the land and its values, that have facilitated the acceptance of women authors insofar as their works display themes and scenes seen as distinctly Canadian” (1986, 63). The same is true of the spaces themselves: while the “real” wilderness is, in the Canadian cultural consciousness, masculine-coded in many respects, the pseudo-wilderness, with its various trappings of Canadian character and civility, is a culturally acceptable, if not exactly typical, place for women. In many ways, the pseudo-wilderness has the effect of deconstructing the wilderness-civilization binary and complicating the masculine-feminine one because it allows women to take on masculine-coded activities.

As Murray notes, “pseudo-wilderness may function as a ground for transcendental experience even when a true wilderness is available or accessible” (1986, 64), something that is certainly true in Swamp Angel. In this sense, most “wilderness” is pseudo-wilderness and, therefore, matches up well with contemporary views of nature. As Lahar argues,

there is not a place in the world that does not reveal the touch and bear the consequences of human hands and minds—not Antarctica, not the deepest equatorial jungle, and certainly not Tokyo or New York City. At the same time, there are no people who have not been shaped by the effects of landscape and water, the climate and natural features of the area in which they live. (1993, 91)

Swamp Angel emphasizes the power of place to influence individual consciousness in various ways. When Wilson writes of Joey’s visit to Three Loon Lake, for example, she suggests that the area imparts a very different type of energy than that of the city of Vancouver:

As he sat on the verandah, replete and still, Joey was aware of some enormous difference. This stillness. So it would be like this, would it? His restless eyes ranged the lake, the shores. Joey did not yet know Time that flowed smoothly, as in this place. In all of his life Time had jerked by with a rat-tat-tat, with the beating of a clock, with shrill cries to come to supper, with the starting up of an engine, with the slamming of doors, with the change of radio programme, with the traffic, with the voices, the fire engine, the change of the traffic lights, separately and all together. He did not think of these things, but it was their absence that made the enormous difference. (108)

While Wilson does not necessarily make a moral distinction between the serene beauty of the lake and the bustling, chaotic energy of Vancouver, she does stress the ways in which place becomes part of a person, their energy, and the way they view the world. This stress on the power of place is evident in an often quoted passage about meetings:

A first meeting. A meeting in the desert, a meeting at sea, meeting in the city, meeting at night, meeting at a grave, meeting in the sunshine beside the forest, beside water. Human beings meet, yet the meetings are not the same. Meeting partakes in its very essence not only of the persons but of the place of meeting. And that essence of place remains, and colours, faintly, the association, perhaps for ever. (75)

The places in which experiences (or meetings) occur are foundational and cannot, it seems, be separated from the developed meaning.

Along these lines, journeys into the pseudo-wilderness are often designed to encounter “the ultimate accessibility of the wilderness state of mind,” something the individual takes with them and has continual access to long after the encounter has passed (Murray 1986, 66). Maggie’s journey in Swamp Angel is certainly of this kind. In seeking to repair her life by a journey into pseudo-wilderness, Maggie repeats a pattern that David Stouck sees throughout Wilson’s work:

The recurrent story in Ethel Wilson’s fiction is that of a woman who withdraws from familiar surroundings and sets out on a lonely quest of self-discovery. This woman usually has no mother and, deprived of this intimate bond of family, must establish on her own a link with the larger human community. In isolation she discovers the world is not benign and orderly, but chaotic, ruthlessly shaped by accident and chance; that the larger vision of life’s purpose and interconnectedness is not easily achieved and must be actively sought. (1982, 6)

The narrative of Swamp Angel brings these notions of the power of wilderness and the interconnections of society and gender together through the main plot: Maggie leaving her husband and the city of Vancouver (a socio-cultural role and an urban space) for the interior of British Columbia where, through working at a fishing lodge (a pseudo-wilderness), she goes through the process of wanting to have no obligations outside of herself to wanting to be a part of a community of her own choosing.

Fly fishing is a key part of Maggie’s journey. For starters, it is through the art of tying flies that Maggie is able to save up and hide away the money required to leave her husband in the first place. Living at a time when white, middle-class women were largely homemakers, it is through this angling-related skill that Maggie escapes the economic structures that trapped so many other women. Wilson writes that Maggie “had been most vulnerable and desperate when, more than a year ago, she had taken a small box of fishing flies to the shop known by sportsmen up and down the Pacific coast” (14). When she does so, her flies are scrutinized by the shop owner, Mr. Spencer, who “looked for flaws in the perfection of the body, the hackle, the wings,” but found none (14). Despite the eyebrow-raising secrecy with which Maggie wants to come and go and receive feathers for tying, Mr. Spencer sets her up to sell flies through the shop, which ultimately sets her on the course of freedom from her controlling and loveless marriage. Through mastery in a “masculine” discipline, Maggie can escape or transcend her oppressive situation.

When Maggie sneaks off and leaves her husband, all she takes with her is a canvas bag “packed to a weight that she could carry,” a “haversack that she could carry on her shoulders,” and “her fishing rod” (14–16). Considering this woman is so desperate to leave her husband that she would carry out a meticulous plan to sneak off unannounced with so few possessions, it is telling that her fishing rod would be one of the essentials. Repeatedly throughout the journey, before finally taking her role running the lodge at Three Loon Lake, numerous men and women inquire if she is “going fishing,” so much so that we begin to understand they find it surprising for a woman to do so. Yet Maggie always responds pleasantly that indeed she is. In “The Gendered ‘Nature’ of the Urban Outdoors: Women Negotiating Fear of Violence,” Wesely and Gaarder argue that outdoor “sport is an institution through which hegemonic masculinity (Connell 1987) is maintained, and its significance lies in the fact that ‘masculinizing and feminizing practices associated with the body are at the heart of the social construction’ of gender identity” (2004, 646). They note that “as children, a powerful mechanism through which boys learn to perform masculinity is by using their bodies in skilled, forceful ways, while girls learn to circumscribe their movements and limit their strengths” (646). These are the types of social forces that women fly fishers, including Maggie, struggle against. Engaging with fly fishing can become an embodied form of self-empowerment: a contemplative and embodied outdoor activity that is relatively accessible to women who have been socialized in such ways and that can help them see possibilities beyond these social expectations. In the film Stepping into the Stream (Klutinis 2010), Jean Williams ponders the physical side of fly fishing, noting that it is “a very sensual sport. It engages all of your senses as far as taste, touch, smell, hearing, sight, but there’s also a part of it that’s very much a primitive, instinctive part of your soul.” She adds that “you can come to this sport at any time of your life. Part of the aesthetic of the sport is, really, anyone can do it,” and perhaps part of the value of fly fishing as an element of personal growth is this promise of rich, embodied sensuality without the need for extensive athleticism.

Fly fishing serves to prepare and purify Maggie for the transformation she is about to undergo in the pseudo-wilderness. During the journey that ultimately ends up at Three Loon Lake, Maggie has the bus driver let her off on the side of the road near the Similkameen River. The first view of the Similkameen River—a real river in south-central British Columbia—provides the opportunity for one of Wilson’s evocative landscape descriptions:

When she first saw the Similkameen River, the dancing river with the dancing name, it was a broad mountain stream of light blue that was silver in the bright morning, and of a silver that was blue. There was a turn in the road, and crowded sombre jackpines hid the Similkameen River. There was another turn, and the river flowed laughing beside the road again. Across the rapid moving river was the forest of lodge-pole pine. Shafts of sunlight smote the first trees and they stood out against the sombreness and denseness of the forests behind them. Maggie looked at, but she could not look into the pine forest, for it was sealed in its density and blackness. The Similkameen River, of fairly uniform breadth, ran blue and silver and alive, level and life-giving past the forests. (37)

The shafts of light and light-giving waters of Wilson’s description echo with religious significance. These landscapes become important because, as many Canadian writers at the turn of the twentieth century believed, the Canadian wilderness has the power to shape human character. Different ways of relating to the wilderness shape people in different ways—and perhaps even have the ability to break down oppressive dichotomies that organize their understanding of the world.

It is with Maggie alone, during this encounter with the “dancing river with the dancing name” that is “level and life-giving,” that we get the first scene of fly fishing in the novel. Immediately before the stop at the Similkameen, Maggie worries about being overtaken by her husband Edward Vardoe. Up to this point, Edward has loomed over her in the “endured humiliations and almost unbearable resentments” that began soon after their marriage as she lay “humiliated and angry” (13, 16). While it is not explicitly stated that her sexual experiences at the beginning of her marriage with Edward Vardoe were forced or violent, it is abundantly clear that they were not desired or pleasurable. However, “in the pleasure of casting over this lively stream she forgot—as always when she was fishing—her own existence” (38). Once Maggie begins the embodied act of fly fishing, things begin to change for her. As Wesely and Gaarder note, “at the very least, being physically active allows women to be in their bodies in ways that can be qualitatively different from the traditional sexual and reproductive constructs of female physicality” (2004, 647). As Maggie begins to take self-assured control of her own body by stepping into the natural system of the Similkameen River, the language surrounding her experience of the world begins to change. As she fishes, no longer fretting about potential miscalculations in her escape,

[s]uddenly came a strike, and the line ran out, there was a quick radiance and splashing above the water downstream. At the moment of the strike, Maggie became a co-ordinating creature of wrists and fingers and reel and rod and line and tension and the small trout, leaping, darting, leaping. She landed the fish, took out the hook, slipped in her thumb, broke back the small neck, and the leaping rainbow thing was dead. (38)

Through fly fishing and its attendant embodiment, Maggie is removed from a state of psychological stress to a lively state of sensuous embodiment. Richard Twine argues that “embodiment is of fundamental importance to ecofeminism. Historically, the human body, as a constant reminder of our organic embeddedness, has been the location of the intersection between both the mastery of nature and nature-associated peoples” (2011, 32). This passage emphasizes the bodily nature of fly fishing, but also involves what Alexandra Collins calls a “vengeful moment” where Maggie enacts “rituals of self-purification” (1982, 65–66). In considering the impact of this scene, Murray writes that “to herself and to the narrator she is dead as Maggie Vardoe, and henceforth will be known as ‘Maggie Lloyd’ or simply ‘Maggie’” and refers to what is to come as a “resurrection” into a “new life” (1985, 243). Fly fishing allows Maggie to translate the stress, anxiety, and anger of her marriage (destructive feelings) toward the useful action of obtaining food and exercise (productive feelings) in preparation for starting over.

The value of fly fishing is related to place—the river—in which fly fishing occurs. The river, Swamp Angel suggests, is a sacred place: “Maggie walked down to the margin of the river as in an enchantment. The pine-needle earth felt soft. She set down her things, gazed up and down the stream, sat down, and then lay down, looking up at the sky. . . . She gave herself up to the high morning” (37). Purged of her anger and fear through the killing of the trout, and perhaps symbolically killing her past self (or her oppressive husband), Maggie can now enter a state of calm. After catching and killing the first fish, “Maggie drew in her line and made some beautiful casts. The line curved shining through the air backwards forwards backwards forwards, gaining length, and the fly dropped sweetly. Again she cast and cast. Her exhilaration settled down to the matter of fishing” (38). This “matter of fishing,” as Wilson dubs it, calls to mind the transcendental or meditative quality writers often give to fly fishing. The repetitive and ritualistic motions, coupled with the necessary attention, seem uniquely capable of putting the practitioner in a Zen-like flow state, in the realm beyond words. Through fly fishing, practitioners experience what Sandilands calls a “web of relations and experiences so complicated and diverse that it defies linguistic appropriation and can only be experienced as strange and wonderful” (1999, 200). Achieving this meditative state where the self seems to melt away is what often inspires writers to put fly fishing in religious terms, and yet it just as easily fits Sandilands’ notions of wild nature as beyond human language.

The only other activity that seems to have the same transcendental quality for Maggie is swimming alone in Three Loon Lake. Wilson introduces another spiritual element, writing that Maggie’s avatar, a divine presence, “tells her that she is one with her brothers the seal and the porpoise who tumble and tumble in the salt waves” (99). This creates a connection to both embodied animality and to the crisis of meaning in life that Maggie is attempting to solve. Through the swim, Maggie works through her resistance to society, asking, “Who would not be a seal or porpoise? They have a nice life, lived in the cool water with fun and passion, without human relations, Courtesy Week, or a flame thrower” (100). In swimming, Maggie is transformed. It is specifically because she is a strong swimmer that she realizes she can endure. She is resilient. Just like the transcendental moments of fly fishing where crises of both past and future flow away in the current, Maggie swims “strongly out into the lake, forgetting past and future, thrusting the pleasant water with arms and legs” (100). In this forgetting, Maggie realizes “[s]he is not a seal. She is a god floating there with the sun beating down on her face with fatal beneficent warmth, and the air is good” (100). It is in the embodied moment of swimming, taking in the world through the senses and becoming one with the water, that Maggie is able to further recognize her own inner strength—her godliness.

The embodied oneness of the swim is an ecologically important realization. As McWeeny notes, “We are always already immersed in bodily relationships with one another. We are always already affecting and being affected, sensing and being sensed, touching and being touched. . . . However, this relationality is not homogeneity; that one’s flesh is the material site of infinite and varied configurations of relation makes it radically particular” (2014, 277). While every living thing may be entangled to some degree, the entanglement of Maggie with Edward Vardoe through the bonds of marriage was stifling. Becoming one with aquatic systems through fly fishing and then through swimming, however, is not. This entanglement allows Maggie to move beyond her trauma into a more productive web of interconnections:

There was this extra feeling about the swim: Maggie’s life had so long seemed stagnant that—now that she had moved forward and found her place with other people again, servicing other people again, humouring other people, doing this herself, alone, as a swimmer swims, this way or that way, self-directed or directed by circumstance—Maggie thought sometimes it’s like swimming; it is very good, it’s nice, she thought, this new life, servicing other people as I did years ago with Father; but now I am alone and, like a swimmer, I have to make my own way on my own power. Swimming is like living, it is done alone. . . . I will swim past obstacles . . . because I am a strong swimmer. (99)

Fly fishing allows Maggie to banish the horrific feeling that Edward might be pursuing her. Similarly, this swim allows her to gather the resolve necessary to enter and navigate a web of human relationships by choice—an extension of the environmental and ecological themes Wilson introduced previously through Maggie’s purification process of fly fishing.

For Wilson, the character, or notion, of the fly fisher is just as uniquely situated within the realm of environmental experience as the act of fly fishing itself. Wilson draws upon the necessity of experience and the power of communing with place to explain the relationship between fly fisher, fly fishing, and the more-than-human world. The second fly fishing scene centres not on Maggie but on a seventy-five-year-old American man named R. B. Cunningham who ventures off alone onto the lake “according to his own private system” (133). Wilson’s narrator illustrates this episode through a rumination on fishing and fly fishers:

There is a mystique in fishing which only the fly-fisherman (a dedicated sort of person, or besotted) knows anything about. All fly-fishermen are bound closely together by the strong desire to be apart, solitary upon the lake, the stream. A fisherman has not proceeded far up the lake, not out of sight of the lodge, before he becomes one with the aqueous world of the lake, of a sky remarkable for change, of wind which (deriving from the changeful sky) rises or falls, disturbing the water, dictating the direction of his cast, and doing something favourable or unfavourable to the fish. (133)

While this passage is about Cunningham setting out on the lake alone, the language is also general, indicating qualities applying broadly to fly fishers. Maggie’s journey is also one that is undertaken alone through private moments fly fishing on the Similkameen River and swimming in solitude on Three Loon Lake. Beyond solitude and personal resoluteness, this language of unity and directed attention is not unlike the episodes of Maggie’s fly fishing and swimming earlier in the novel. When Maggie fly fishes, she is so overcome with her “matter of fishing” that she able to put aside deeply held traumas. When she goes swimming, she goes beyond psychological unity or attention and quite literally enters “the aqueous world” and its web of interconnections. Fly fishers, the novel suggests, have this ability to transgress the human-nature boundary and dissolve into interconnection with the environment, an ecological existence.

Wilson furthers this notion in her description of Cunningham’s outing:

He is sometimes aware of the extraordinary beauty, majesty, of the clouds, white or angry, which roll up in that weather breeder, that sky not far above, which caps the lake and him. . . . He does not look too long (for he is fishing) but the green and the greens, the blue, the sombre, the white, the deceptive glamour of the lake surface enter into this mystique of fishing and enhance it, and they enter into him too, because he is part of it. There is no past, no future, only the now. (133–34)

Due to the contemplative nature of fly fishing and the attention paid by the fly fisher, it is not long before the boundaries of place and individual begin to erode. While the fly fisher surely enjoys the aesthetic beauty of Three Loon Lake, or any other beloved place for that matter, Wilson suggests that through the act of fly fishing—through the repetition, the solitude, the attention paid—one becomes “part of” the place. The power of the lake does not simply please Cunningham; it enters him and is a part of him. Of particular note is the dissolving of time into a single, embodied moment: “no past, no future, only the now.” This description of Cunningham’s inner fly fishing experience stresses the power of fly fishing as an embodied practice that values connection. For both Cunningham and Maggie, fly fishing casts a person beyond the aesthetic or the Other. There is a moment of convergence between person and place that renders purely rational conceptions of time, individual, human, and non-human fluid and embodied, likely leaving both person and place changed.

Cunningham is portrayed in the novel as enterprising, masculine, and well-respected. Haldar Gunnarsen says, “that old fella” possesses “fearlessness,” and for the narrator, his trip out on the lake alone represents his indifference to “opposition from man, market, or weather” (133). Despite Cunningham’s rugged masculinity—an aspect of the classic fly fisher archetype—it is Maggie who plays the proverbial role of hero to the damsel in distress when Cunningham, exhausted and hypothermic, is struggling to row his way back to shore. In this moment, Maggie recognizes him not as “the Mr. Cunningham” that everyone at the lodge so reveres, but only as “someone in need” (136). Cunningham, “[a]s independent as a mountain” (136), is not used to asking for help, but knows that, despite his status, “he had been near the point where Being touched Non-Being, and that if the wharf had been fifty yards farther off, he would no doubt have died—unless, of course, this Mrs. Lloyd,” that is, Maggie, “had come for him” (137). In an attempt to repay Maggie for saving his life, Cunningham sends her some fine china and a lucrative job offer away from Three Loon Lake. Maggie accepts the china but declines the job. She does not need rescuing; she is a “strong swimmer” that can “swim past obstacles” (99), and she has dedicated herself to her chosen place in spite of them.

Ultimately, in Swamp Angel, fly fishing functions as a path to female independence and a way to productively interact with place and other people. In the novel, as Heather Murray argues, “the wilderness aids comprehension and mastery of the self, but it also holds out the dangerous and attractive lure of a selfless existence to those who choose to enter the wilderness permanently rather than contact and then leave it” (1985, 244). For Maggie, it is through leaving her unhappy marriage in urban Vancouver and travelling to the pseudo-wilderness of Three Loon Lake in interior British Columbia that she is able to gain independence and self-assurance: the “tormented nights of humiliations between four small walls and in the compass of a double bed” are now gone, “washed away by this air, this freedom, this joy, this singleness and forgetfulness” (96). She does not choose a selfless existence, but instead re-enters a meaningful community of her own choosing. In the liminal space of this pseudo-wilderness, “the camp’s simultaneous isolation and community provide the setting and motivation for Maggie’s resolution of the responsibility of self to others” (Murray 1985, 244).

The novel also uses fly fishing as a means for Maggie to her assert a mastery of self through coordinated embodiment. What she enacts, effectively, is an escape from a hierarchical version of gender and the body to a more democratic and ecological one. This is further shown in her interactions with Cunningham, another fly fisher, seen by other men as a paragon of masculinity. In saving him, Maggie asserts her value and capability, qualities she has already demonstrated many times. It is through fly tying that Maggie secures the economic means to leave her husband Edward Vardoe. It is through her knowledge of fly fishing and fishing lodges that she establishes herself as indispensable to the Gunnarsens and their guests.

The one conflict that stands in Maggie’s way is the jealousy of Vera Gunnarsen, who is envious of Maggie’s ability to turn the business around and afraid that Maggie will steal her husband Haldar (even though Maggie has shown absolutely no desire to do so). In reality, it is not only Vera’s jealousy, but her inability to see beyond gendered expectations that causes such a rift between her and Maggie. Maggie’s friend Nell suggests that Maggie sever ties with the Gunnarsen’s over this difficulty and take Cunningham up on his job offer: “Leave these tiresome people. Go to that man Cunningham’s. Are they really your affair?” To this question, Maggie simply responds, “Yes” (152). Although she would have been justified in taking the opportunity to run from her troubles at Three Loon Lake, Maggie faces the conflict head-on. As an attempt at reconciliation, she creates a new variation of a Coachman fly, which she dubs the “Little Vera.” Unveiling this fly gives Maggie a chance to be vulnerable with the Gunnarsens and share more about her past. In the long run, this makes it possible for Maggie to remain an important member of her community.

Sandilands articulates a big-picture argument that I see as relevant to big-picture thinking about fly fishing and works of fly fishing literature like Swamp Angel: “[T]o heal the wounds between nature and culture, between men and women, between mind and body, between reason and emotion, it is necessary to challenge dominant dualistic traditions of Western thought and to replace them with a more integrated or holistic understanding, one that emphasizes the interconnections among various aspects of human and nonhuman life” (1999, 195). Even though fly fishing is historically grounded in a white, predominantly male, leisure class, the literature of fly fishing has the potential to break down these dualistic barriers. By examining fly fishing literature and texts by women, we can see how women have navigated relationships with both masculine spaces and the natural world. In Swamp Angel, we watch as fly fishing transforms Maggie Vardoe, allowing her to communicate with her own body and with the world around her in new, meaningful, and less prescriptive ways than were possible in Vancouver, where she begins. This type of communication is what Sandilands might call a “mutant language”—an interaction that fills the “space between human and nonhuman animal sociality” (1999, 184). Fly fishing, I argue, is one such language.