Fearful Repression: Donald Ryan’s Struggle with Sexuality in The Divine Ryans

Throughout history, society has time and time again shown itself to be intolerant of others. If the truest test of a man is how he treats those beneath him, then humanity as a whole it seems has failed that test time and time again before it can learn its lesson, and even then it seems to only learn it with regard to specific minorities. In literature, we can often hold up a mirror to our own society by having a character be marginalized due to race of gender, with the end result perhaps even being positive social change through the narrative of the text. Yet there are additional factors that can be used to marginalize a character. One less visible than race or gender is sexuality, as is the case with Donald Ryan in The Divine Ryans by Wayne Johnston. Forced by the world around him to repress and ignore his homosexuality, Donald is marginalized most by those that should be his main means of support: his family. They do this by forcing him into a lifestyle that he would never have chosen himself, then making him feel inadequate within that lifestyle, and then finally ignoring the mental and medical cries for help that come from him as a result of that lifestyle, in affect helping cause his eventual suicide.

The type of oppression that the family forces upon its members would have different psychological results based on the person they were trying to control and the emotional situation of that person. They do not simply try to control Donald because he is homosexual, in fact many (if not all) of the Ryan family members may be unaware of his sexuality. They do this to all their members. For example, they force Father Seymour to go into the celibate life of priesthood even though it is clear to all members of the family that he is strongly attracted to the opposite sex, as the narrator first touches on in chapter two: “Father Seymour had the reputation of being… a ‘charmer with the ladies.’ That is, he was known to indulge in a kind of playful ribaldry with the older ones, especially those who were widowed or unmarried, a kind of mock flirtation that many of them found hilarious and even encouraged” (Johnston 11). While this does impact negatively on Seymour (as we see clearly later in the novel with his attraction to Draper’s mother Linda), it is not as constricting for him as it is for Donald. Seymour is not being asked to deny his sexual attraction to women, simply not to act upon it. While this is not doubt difficult for him at times, Donald is being forced to wed into a heterosexual marriage and produce children when he is, in fact, homosexual. This is an outright denial of who he is and some of his most basic human urges, and the severity of the lie he must lead has much more drastic psychological and physical manifestations in Donald than it did in Seymour. In other words, it is easier to claim say you do not like fruit than to claim you do not eat at all. The true tragedy (and almost comic absurdity) of this arrangement is that they are forcing both men into lifestyles they do not want, when simply switching their positions would have been ideal. Had Seymour been forced to marry (and indeed, given that the Ryan weddings seem to have an air of arrangement to them, he may have even had to marry Linda) he would have been much happier. Donald at first did not seem to want to engage in sexual activity with other men, but would rather the celibate lifestyle of a priest, allowing him to ignore his sexual urges instead of combating them regularly. The family (as a unit) compromises with him to an extent and the result is Donald’s “missing year”, indicating that they are on some level aware of his discomfort at the idea of marriage but are unwilling to stray from the planned fate of their children, even though easy alternatives present themselves. Draper sees this early on in the novel, but does not come to realize it fully until he starts to regain his memories of the truth of his father’s life and death: “[t]he death of his father has highlighted for Draper the fact that the Ryans are trapped in an identificatory tautology, which in turn is entangled with the phylogenetic paradox of original sin. Because the family views its New World presence as a symbolic orphaning, the need for legitimating narration becomes all the more critical” (Sugars 165). The family’s tendency to place its members into roles which do not suit them result in extreme pressure which builds over time. For those for whom the changes are minor tweaks, like Seymour, that pressure can be managed on a day-to-day basis. For Donald it could not be handled this way, as he seemed to feel he could not even speak with anyone about it, until it eventually lead to circumstances culminating in his death.

Once the family has successfully forced Donald into a heterosexual lifestyle, they then proceed through their machinations to make him feel inadequate in his role as a man within that lifestyle. Whether they are consciously aware of this or not is not a debate I wish to engage in here, though I personally do not believe it to be true. I believe the family to work much as anthropologists and sociologists claim “mob mentality” to work, where the group acts toward a common goal and no one person feels responsible to the eventual outcome if negative, but all feel responsible if the outcome is positive. In this way the Ryan family is almost as (if not more so) “deviant” than Donald himself, though they are deviant in a way found socially acceptable at the time: “[i]n resisting the effort to make their activities seem deviant, the target group may criticize the reasoning or attack the motives of those who are doing so… What ensues, then, is a ‘deviance contest’ whose outcome depends on the relative power of the two (or more) groups engaged in the contest” (Greenberg 7). Once they have guilted and shamed Donald into this lifestyle to which he is not suited, they continue to make him feel uncomfortable and inadequate within it. They sense how uncomfortable he is around Linda and coach him how to act around her, telling him to kiss her and hold the door for her, the way one would coax a small child to act around a member of the opposite sex. This is similar again to their treatment of Seymour, getting him to dance at Christmas as he has since a child (Johnston 88-89) even though it is ludicrous to expect it of him at this age. The Ryan family refuses to accept either for what they actually are, be it in age or in sexuality. They simply want the men to behave as they expect them to. Tradition outweighs human dignity, and even common sense. This again is even harder on Donald, who is bound by family obligation to produce heirs (and even more specifically, male heirs) but finds the act so uncomfortable that, on one occasion, Draper discovers him openly weeping while attempting to have intercourse with Linda (Johnston 41). This act not only ruins Donald, but also fosters a very clear confusion in Draper and must have intense psychological effects on Linda as well. In an attempt to ensure that the family goes on genetically through reproduction, the Ryan family is forcing itself to be torn apart.

The Ryan family then proceeds to ignore the ill effects of that lifestyle on Donald Ryan’s person. At a very young age, Donald has a mental breakdown, with the family blaming the strain on his immense intelligence (Johnston 69) rather than his ‘straightening’. Sweeping his issues under the rug only serves to exasperate the issue, causing him to work longer hours not only to get away from the stress of his false life but also to engage in an affair with a man that he only has the solitude to engage in at work. Although on some level this must have been freeing for Donald, on another much more real level the conflict of leading these two lives only deepened his mental strain.  Donald is stuck between a rock and a hard place, unable to be happy hiding or to be happy being what he truly is. This stress and unhappiness finally comes to a head when his two lives collide; his young son Draper catches him in the act with his male lover. Rather than deal with the consequences of being revealed, Donald chooses to take his own life: “Draper's father's death is interpreted by his son as the culmination of his existence, as though his life was always a delusion and his death "no more than a completion of... the absence that had been his life" (77). His death becomes a blotting out of what was never there to begin with” (Sugars 157). It is here that the Ryan family prevent even Donald’s final statement from being heard by the world at large because of their need to preserve the family, covering up the truth of his suicide and calling it a heart attack.

In the end, Donald Ryan is a sad case of a man who succumbed to the pressures of duty and family and society, even when those pressures conflicted directly with his own wants and needs. The Ryan family, like many others, successfully forced a square peg into a round hole and thought nothing of how the jamming chipped at the unwanted edges of Donald’s soul until there was nothing left of him. In the end, like many other such novels that deal with how we treat those considered different from ourselves, we have to take from it the lesson that ethnocentrism in all its forms is the truest, and most heinous, form of deviance.

Works Cited:

Greenberg, David F. The Construction of Homosexuality. University of Chicago Press, 1988.

            Summary: Greenberg’s book attempts to trace the origins of the prejudice against homosexuals in various societies, as well as deal with issues of why social rules and preferential marriage rules came into play in some cultures to try and limit homosexual coupling.

Johnston, Wayne. The Divine Ryans. Ontario, Random House, 1990 (First printing)

Sugars, Cynthia. “Notes on a Mystic Hockey Puck: Death, Paternity, and National Identity in Wayne Johnston's The Divine Ryans.” In, Essays on Canadian Writing, Spring2004, Issue 82, p151-172

            Summary: Sugars article investigates the novel’s perspective of heritage, sexuality, and its connection to the epic literature of Virgil and Homer. In addition to deconstructing the novel’s connections to psychology and theology, Sugars brings new light into the death of Donald Ryan and the role his family came to play in it.