Renascence

Volume 65, Issue 3, Spring 2013

Essays on Values in Literature

A Bird Between the Prison Bars
Gabrielle Roy’s Spiritual Calling

Through the lens of her meandering faith journey, this essay reviews the work of the celebrated Canadian writer Gabrielle Roy. A metaphor Roy used in an interview, that of life as a prison and the artist as a bird singing between the bars, provides a common theme in the shifting religious attitudes of her writings. At times her attitude grows bitterly satirical, with a “broad steak of anti-clericalism” (The Cashier). But Roy’s spirituality shows through in how she was affected by her two sisters’ illnesses and deaths. If a prison, life was still able to grant “sacramental moments” pointing to a “radiant world beyond this one.”