316 Davies, Robertson
Dunstan’s natural curiosity about sex, contributed
to his guilt.
Other issues stem from how the other parties
reacted. Percy Staunton never acknowledges guilt,
although we learn that he feels a spiritual empti-
ness in later life, despite his financial, political, and
personal success. Late in the novel, Paul, known in
later life as the famous magician Magnus Eisengrim,
tells Dunstan that his father had tried to make him
feel guilty because it had been his birth that had
robbed his mother of her sanity. But, he says, “I was
too young for the kind of guilt my father wanted me
to feel; he had an extraordinary belief in guilt as an
educative force.”
Paul’s statement so near the end of Fifth Busi-
ness forces us to question seriously whether guilt
is indeed an educative force. It obviously did not
teach Dunstan anything about himself or others but
functioned instead as an obstacle to his living a full
life. In fact, as we have seen, Dunstan’s guilt probably
was unnecessary in the first place.
Susan Bowers
respOnsibility in Fifth Business
A snowball encasing granite, a pregnant woman, a
10-year-old boy, and a village dedicated to repress-
ing emotion make up the recipe for personal disaster
in Fifth Business.
The snowball is thrown by the town bully, Percy
Staunton, intended for his rival, Dunstan Ramsay.
But when Dunstan dodges it, the pregnant Mary
Dempster is struck on the head, causing permanent
brain damage and the premature birth of her son.
Although it takes him 50 years to reveal who threw
the snowball, Dunstan assumes moral responsibility
for Mrs. Dempster’s injury and all that ensues from
it, including the woman’s mental illness and amoral
behavior, the family’s eventual isolation, her son’s
running away at an early age, her husband’s deser-
tion, and her eventual need for institutionalization.
Dunstan makes Mrs. Dempster and her child the
focus of his life. He does chores in the Dempster
home, teaches the child magic tricks, befriends Mrs.
Dempster, and as an adult becomes her guardian
after her husband deserts her and her sister dies.
His every major decision—to go to war, to become
a teacher, to research and write 10 books about
saints—grows out of his deep sense of responsibil-
ity for her. However, Robertson Davies’s novel asks
whether it is always appropriate to assume moral
responsibility and concludes that its exercise even
can become pathological.
Dunstan’s acceptance of responsibility for Mrs.
Dempster’s injury can be traced to four causes: the
power structure of the village, the child’s perception
of damnation, his culture’s repressive attitude toward
sex, and Dunstan’s understanding that the adults in
his life cannot be trusted in this “strange world that
showed little of itself on the surface.” First, even
at the age of 10, Dunstan correctly perceives that
because Percy Staunton belongs to the richest fam-
ily in the village, it would be almost impossible to
accuse him of throwing the snowball without dire
consequences for Dunstan. (Ironically, Percy will go
on to become one of the richest and most power-
ful men in the country, and he and Dunstan will
perpetuate their dominant-subordinate relationship
for life).
Second, Dunstan’s childish understanding of
the punishments of sin, which he gleans from his
church and from his father’s copy of Dante’s Inferno,
is so charged with lurid details of eternal damnation
that he terrifies himself with the thought that he is
one of the damned because if he had not dodged
the snowball, Mrs. Dempster would not have been
injured.
Third, because the snowball incident occurs just
as Dunstan is entering puberty in a culture in which
the attitude toward sex is “enough to make a hell of
adolescence,” Dunstan reasons that because it led to
a premature birth, he is “directly responsible for a
grossly sexual act—the birth of a child.”
Finally, Dunstan realizes that adults cannot
be trusted enough to be told the truth about the
incident because such a revelation could unleash
the powerful chaos of their repressed emotions. The
telling episode for him involves his mother, who
cries hysterically while she punishes him fiercely for
a minor transgression.
The act of assuming genuine moral responsibil-
ity requires that the individual be capable of reflect-
ing on a situation and deciding how to act. To be
morally responsible for something is to be worthy
of praise or blame. Dunstan is not old enough to