Women and Narrative Identity: Rewriting the Quebec National Text 9780773568877

Citation preview

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Women and Narrative Identity

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Women and Narrative Identity Rewriting the Quebec National Text mary jean green

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston · London · Ithaca

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2001 isbn 0-7735-2128-3 Legal deposit first quarter 2001 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been undertaken with the assistance of the Government of Canada and the help of a grant from the International Council for Canadian Studies through its Publishing Fund. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp ) for its activities. It also acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for its publishing program.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Green, Mary Jean Matthews Women and narrative identity: rewriting the Quebec national text Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-7735-2128-3 1. Canadian fiction (French) – Women authors – History and criticism. 2. Canadian fiction (French) – Quebec (Province) – History and criticism. 3. Nationalism in literature. 4. Group identity in literature. i. Title. ps8199.5.q8g74 2001 c843.009’358 c00-901081-5 pr9188.g74 2001 Typeset in Palatino 10/12 by Caractéra inc., Quebec City

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To Jane, Karen, and Paula And to the memory of Jeanne

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Contents

Acknowledgments Note on Translations Introduction

ix xiii

3

1 Writing Passion into the National Text 21 2 Women and the Romance of the Land 49 3 Women in Revolution 74 4 Rewriting the Narratives of Identity 103 5 New Narratives of Identity in a Multicultural Quebec 135 Notes 155 Appendix: Original French Texts 167 Bibliography 177 Index 193

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Acknowledgments

This book has been with me ever since I read my first Quebec novel, Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion, years ago, and it has been nourished by conversations with many people who are important to me, whose thoughts and ideas have woven themselves into mine to the point where I find it impossible to adequately acknowledge their influence or even, at times, to separate their insights from my own. This is particularly true of the group of friends who have been affectionately called “the Frenchettes” in humorous recognition of our early commitment to bringing Quebec’s francophone literature to the United States. With these friends and colleagues – Paula Gilbert, Karen Gould, Jeanne Kissner, and Jane Moss – I have shared personal and professional concerns over the past twenty years, and our ongoing conversation on Quebec women’s writing has been a strong source of nurturance for this book. In the last year I have keenly felt the absence of Jeanne, whose generous words and warm smile always encouraged me – as they have so many others – to work toward realizing the best in myself. Ben Shek has been a part of this book from the time his reading of social realism in the Quebec novel provided the critical inspiration for my first published article, and I am grateful for his reading of parts of the current text. Ongoing dialogues with Patricia Smart, whose enthusiasms have often seemed to parallel my own, and Robert Schwartzwald, who was the first to make me aware of the gendered nature of Quebec political discourse, have been important shaping forces in my work. And exchanges with Lori Saint-Martin,

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Acknowledgments

Janet Paterson, Paul-André Linteau, Lorna Irvine, Lee Thompson, Barbara Godard, Katharine Roberts, Marilyn Randall, and many other scholars in the United States and Canada have woven themselves into this book, as have personal conversations with writers Marie-Claire Blais, France Théoret, Marie Laberge, and Arlette Cousture. My colleagues at Dartmouth College have been essential in broadening the critical horizons of this book, especially Lynn Higgins, Marianne Hirsch, Graziella Parati, Virginia Swain, Roxana Verona, and Keith Walker, and I have particularly benefitted from Katharine Conley’s readings of contemporary Quebec women’s texts. My reflection on women’s writing in French has been enriched by my interaction with colleagues with whom I have shared editing projects in recent years: Mary Ann Caws, Micheline Rice-Maximin, Ronnie Scharfman, and Jack Yeager. Dartmouth College has supported my work in a number of ways, especially through the Edward Tuck Professorship. Special thanks are due to Dartmouth President James Wright, whose invitation to join him in the Dean’s office almost prevented me from finishing this book, even as his own scholarly example inspired me to bring it to completion. Important support for this book was provided by a Senior Faculty Grant from the Government of Canada, as well as an earlier Faculty Enrichment Grant. The Government of Quebec has also been generous in funding my research, and I have appreciated the collegial encouragement of Myrna Delson-Karan in the New York Delegation. And the University of California at Berkeley afforded me a new viewpoint on Quebec when I was a visitor in its Canadian Studies Program, so ably directed by Tom Barnes. I would also like to thank my editor, Joan McGilvray, and the International Council for Canadian Studies for their essential help with publication. Over the years, my family has been drawn into my love affair with Quebec, joining me in exploring the Maria Chapdelaine country of Lac St Jean, the Quebec City convent of Marie de l’Incarnation, the historic Maison Trestler, and Montreal’s multicultural cuisines. My husband, in particular, has struggled through many long, snowy drives to Quebec in the course of my research, for which he has been an essential source of support and encouragement. Certain parts of this book have been published, in very different form, in the following journals and edited volumes, whose permission is gratefully acknowledged: “Changing Subjects: Multi-Voiced Narrative and Feminine Textuality.” In Les Discours féminins dans la littérature postmoderne au Québec,

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Acknowledgments

edited by Raija Koski, Kathleen Kells, and Louise Forsyth. San Francisco: EMText 1993, 61–81 “Laure Conan and Madame de La Fayette: Rewriting the Female Plot.” Essays on Canadian Writing, no. 34 (Spring 1987): 50–63 “The ‘Literary Feminists’ and the Fight for Women’s Writing in Quebec.” Journal of Canadian Studies 21, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 128–43 “L’Itinéraire d’une écriture au féminin: une lecture féministe de Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska.” Voix et Images 67 (Autumn 1997): 84–99 “Private Life and Collective Experience in Quebec: The Autobiographical Project of France Théoret.” Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature 17:1 (Winter 1993): 119–30 “Quebec Women Writers and the Quiet Revolution.” In Contemporary Women Writing in the Other Americas: Contemporary Women Writing in Canada and Quebec Vol. 3, edited by Georgiana M.M. Colvile. Lewiston, ny : The Edwin Mellen Press 1996, 367–82

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Note on Translations

Published translations of the primary texts have been used where available, and are referenced in the bibliography. All other translations are mine. The original French text of material quoted from the primary sources is provided in the appendix and indicated by superscript letter. Page numbers that follow primary source quotations in the main text refer to the published translation; page numbers in the appendix refer to the French edition.

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Women and Narrative Identity

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Introduction How is it that women have played such an important part in our literature: Gabrielle Roy, Anne Hébert, Germaine Guèvremont, Marie-Claire Blais. How come, in particular, that their works were able to reach a wide section of the Quebec public? With what collective schizophrenia did their own phantasms connect? On what oppression did they throw light?1 – Nicole Brossard

Feminist theorist and writer Nicole Brossard has defined with characteristic acuity the paradoxical situation of the woman writer in Quebec, where women have attained an unusual level of recognition as authors and yet have shared in a cultural oppression felt by women with particular force. Brossard’s comments on this subject, made during a 1975 conference on women and writing, seemed to articulate the contradictory questions raised by my own initial readings of Quebec women’s writing, and it was my attempt to explore answers to these questions that launched my own feminist re-reading of the Quebec literary tradition, a re-reading intended as a “revision,” in Adrienne Rich’s terms: an “act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction” (“When We Dead Awaken,” 33). As Jacques Godbout has lamented, all Quebec writers have found themselves, willingly or unwillingly, involved in the Quebec identitary project, which he calls the “national text.” Because of the central role of the Quebec novel in the construction of national identity and the readiness of Quebec readers to accept certain fictional portrayals as, in the words of Henri-Raymond Casgrain, a “mirror” of their own collective experience, Quebec literary history has seen the continued production of what I have called “identity narratives,” narratives designed and perceived as a statement about an always endangered national identity. Because this identitary project, and the place of women within it, has historically been defined according to masculine conceptions of the world, women’s literary expression in Quebec

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4 Women and Narrative Identity

has been severely constrained and, in some cases, completely silenced. In other cases, however – and the four women writers mentioned by Brossard offer excellent examples – the possibility of working within the forms and discourse of the national identity narrative has empowered the feminine authorial voice. Precisely because this voice seemed to participate in a traditional ideological discourse, constantly situating its assertions within a culturally sanctioned national intertext, it was endowed with a unique identitary power that can only be compared, among modern women writers, with that held in the African-American community by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison. Writers like Laure Conan, Germaine Guèvremont, Gabrielle Roy, Anne Hébert, and Marie-Claire Blais have been recognized as important writers because they have been widely perceived as speaking to and about the people of Quebec. In its various consecrated and familiar forms, considered to embody collective cultural values, the Quebec identity narrative offered women writers a protective framework within which they were able not only to make their voices heard but to tell another story, a story of feminine dispossession and desire that often questioned the very cultural values the form was thought to convey. As is most evident in the postwar novels of Germaine Guèvremont and Gabrielle Roy, readers responded warmly to traditional characters and situations, only later coming to see the extent to which these familiar structures were being challenged from within. What Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have observed about nineteenth-century English women novelists in The Madwoman in the Attic has been true of women writers throughout much of the twentieth century in Quebec: “In effect, such women have created submerged meanings, meanings hidden within or behind the more accessible, public content of their works … these authors managed the difficult task of achieving true female literary authority by simultaneously conforming to and subverting patriarchal literary standards” (72–3). If the writers studied by Gilbert and Gubar were subtly altering the form of the novel, in Quebec women were also, in their subversion of the narratives of Quebec identity, redefining the terms of the nation itself. Quebec women, like the contemporary minority (or women) writers described by Homi Bhabha in Nation and Narration, were able to enter into the dominant discourse and renegotiate its terms: “The minority does not simply confront the pedagogical, or powerful master-discourse with a contradictory or negating referent … Insinuating itself into the terms of reference of the dominant discourse, the supplementary antagonizes the implicit power to generalize, to produce the sociological solidity … the power of

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5 Introduction

supplementarity is not the negation of the preconstituted social contradictions of the past or present; its force lies … in the renegotiation of those times, terms, and traditions through which we turn our uncertain, passing contemporaneity into the signs of history” (306).

plots invented by men In 1866, in his foundational work of French-Canadian literary criticism, “Le Mouvement littéraire en Canada,” Henri-Raymond Casgrain set forth his prescriptions for a “national literature,” calling for works that would represent the particularity of French-Canadian life and would, above all, bear the mark of a deep religious faith: “If, as is incontestably the case, literature is the reflection of the customs, character, aptitudes and genius of a nation, if it retains the imprint of the places that give it birth, the various aspects of nature, sites, perspectives, horizons – ours will be solemn, meditative, spiritual, religious, as evangelizing as our missionaries, as generous as our martyrs, as energetic and persevering as our pioneers of yesteryear … chaste and pure as the virginal mantle of our long winters. But, above all, it will be inspired by religious faith … or it will not endure” (25–6). With the exception of a passing reference to a desirable “virility” (1), the qualities Casgrain prescribed for the new national literature set no limitations as to gender, and he was, quite literally, the first to welcome the publication of the first full-length French-Canadian novel written by a woman by providing a preface for Laure Conan’s Angéline de Montbrun. In this preface, however, despite his admiration for Conan’s writing and her sense of spirituality, Casgrain betrays some uneasiness about her unusual novel. He laments a “European” influence, which may have been an oblique reference to the anomalous plot and to the eclectic mode of narration that opened Quebec literature to the expression of an anguished personal – and feminine – voice. There seems to have been an intuitive recognition on the part of this astute and sympathetic reader of the extent to which Conan, despite her literary talent and commitment to spiritual values, had transgressed as yet unwritten literary norms. Later, Casgrain would use Conan’s interest in Quebec history, already evident in passages of Angéline de Montbrun, as a way of providing guidance about the kind of stories she might more appropriately tell, directing her politely but firmly toward his preferred genre of the historical novel, which, in his eyes, embodied the values of Quebec’s sanctified French past. Recognizing the voice of patriarchal authority, Laure Conan bestowed on Casgrain his now traditional title

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of “father of Canadian literature”2 and proceeded to take his advice. The first to propose an ideological mission for French Canada’s nascent national literature, Casgrain was also the first to impose the form within which the writer, especially a woman writer like Laure Conan, was to work. Reflecting on gender and writing in her essays in Subject to Change, Nancy Miller sees in the struggle of the woman author to transcend the limitations of plots invented by men the mark of women’s writing: “the peculiar shape of a heroine’s destiny in novels by women, the implausible twists of plot so common in these novels, is a form of insistence about the relationship of women to writing … To read women’s literature is to see and hear repeatedly a chafing against the ‘unsatisfactory reality’ contained in the maxim [imposed by the dominant culture]” (39, 44). The work of Laure Conan bears the traces of this confrontation of woman writer and literary form, coming perilously close to exclusion from the literary canon in its initial refusal to accept dominant parameters of narration and plot. Unlike other women of her time, however, Laure Conan was ultimately able to inscribe her story – not only the tragic story of her own personal passion, but the nuances of a woman’s emotions and experience – within the framework of the dominant cultural discourse, transforming it into a vehicle that enabled her voice to be heard. The situation of Laure Conan, writing her story within the historical framework proposed by her clerical mentor, is not, in a broad sense, unusual. As Gilbert and Gubar have observed, “Most Western literary genres are … essentially male – devised by male authors to tell male stories about the world” (67). Nancy Miller sees that women writers have always had to work within literary structures generated by the dominant culture, masculine in its expectations and imaginings: “the fictions of desire behind the desiderata of fiction are masculine and not universal constructs … the maxims that pass for the truth of human experience and the encoding of that experience, in literature, are organizations, when they are not fantasies, of the dominant culture” (444). In Writing a Woman’s Life Carolyn Heilbrun suggests that the great achievement of the contemporary feminist movement has been its attempt to free women from the life stories, fictional and real, proposed for them by men, and those plots, usually of love and marriage, that had long set the limits of a woman’s experience. In Heilbrun’s view, it is control over narrative rather than language that is essential not only for the production of new literary texts, but for the creation of new understandings of women’s identity, in life as in fiction: “We know we are without a text, and must discover one” (44).

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narrative and national identity in quebec If it has been the lot of women throughout Western culture to struggle with stories imposed on them by men, women in Quebec have found themselves particularly constrained because the dominant plots of literature and society have historically been enmeshed in the political project of Quebec’s cultural survival, always threatened, which endowed these narratives with unusual ideological force. Almost from its beginning, as Casgrain’s pronouncements attest, the Quebec novel has been enrolled in an ongoing identitary project involving the entire society, given the task of providing narratives through which French-Canadian and, later, Québécois identity could be defined. Benedict Anderson has insightfully described the way in which, in various cultures, the novel has been significant in affirming national consciousness in the process of formation, contributing to the feeling of belonging to what, for Anderson, is essentially an “imagined” national community. What is perhaps unusual in Quebec is the continually unresolved nature of the identitary project itself, which has never attained the sort of closure that might have been provided by Quebec’s formal recognition as a nation-state. As many Quebec writers have been heard to lament, particularly during the period of the Quiet Revolution, the identity of the people of Quebec has been a struggle to survive, a continual process of becoming. It has been, in the words of Hubert Aquin, a Sartrean “project” rather than a stable set of attributes.3 For Jacques Godbout, only the attainment of political independence could free Quebec writers, once and for all, from their obsessive preoccupation with a national identity always under construction.4 But more recent writers, like France Théoret, have rebelled against the imposition of a rigid identity – “an iron-hard identity” (168), as she calls it in Nous parlerons comme on écrit – and have reveled in the openness of the Quebec identitary exploration. In her essays in Entre raison et déraison, Théoret redefines the very notion of identity: “identity … is perhaps a project, it is interrelationship, connection … It could be an opening, a window on the world” (107–8). For Régine Robin in La Québécoite [The Wanderer], the excitement of this project is located precisely in the sentiment of “being on the edge,” in a constant state of creative tension: “this (fortunately) unattainable identity is essentially the product of an unconscious effort perpetually situated on the edge of, about to, without ever actually reaching its goal, remaining in the subjunctive, as a dream, as a potentiality

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that must never be realized; on the edge of independence, on the edge of being American, on the edge of being postmodern, on the edge of being Canadian” (223–4). The involvement of literature in Quebec’s ongoing preoccupation with national identity can be understood in terms of Paul Ricœur’s observation in Time and Narrative iii that narrative and identity are inextricably intertwined. In Ricœur’s analysis, the identity of individuals or communities is necessarily constituted through narratives, through the stories they tell about themselves: “To answer the question ‘Who?’ … is to tell the story of a life” (246). Ricœur can thus speak of “narrative identity,” an identity constructed and shaped through the telling of stories, both real and fictive. If identity is constructed in narrative form, then – turning Ricœur’s terminology around – the stories that constitute a “narrative identity” could, in their turn, be considered “identity narratives”: narratives constructed or construed as statements about the identity of the speaker and perhaps about the community of which she or he is a member. In this sense, the whole of Quebec literature has commonly been considered, by its own writers and readers, as a sort of overarching national identity narrative, within which each text is called upon to make its individual contribution. Somewhat like the texts of emergent third world nations read by Fredric Jameson as national allegories in his well-known article on “Third-World Literature,” in which “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public thirdworld culture and society” (69), the relationship of personal and political in Quebec literature has always, in the eyes of its creators and theorists, been close. In the words of Casgrain, the literary narratives of French Canada were to constitute “the faithful mirror of our little people” (“Le Mouvement littéraire,” 26). The cultural project developed and successfully imposed by Casgrain and his literary colleagues of the “Quebec Patriotic School,” as it has been described by Lucie Robert in L’Institution du littéraire au Québec, sought to enlist each individual writer in the national cause, as builders of the national edifice: “In this perspective, any production, however banal, becomes a ‘building block’ in the patriotic edifice: any writer becomes a ‘worker’ in the construction of a national literature. Writing is a duty, criticism is a priesthood. The community is bound together by this providential mission of the Canadian nation on American soil with which literature is intimately associated” (182). As suitable literary texts were eventually produced – a suitability carefully guarded by what Robert tellingly calls the “priesthood” of

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critics – these narratives came to be seen as the archives of a people. In the words of Camille Roy, who, at the turn of the century, almost single-handedly institutionalized the study of Quebec literature, the aim of literary analysis was further knowledge of the “national subject,” for which each text provided new information: “The literature of a people is its statement of meaning, it is the collection of notes it has itself prepared for its contemporaries and the judges of posterity, so that they may pronounce judgment on its worth.”5 This conception of the role of literature in society was reaffirmed by early twentiethcentury nationalist intellectuals like Lionel Groulx, for whom art was important because it gave immortal form to “the soul of a race.”6 But even after the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s had liberated writers from the outmoded survivance ideology of Casgrain and Groulx, a more secular nationalist intellectual like Jacques Godbout could speak of a “national text ” in which he explicitly saw his 1967 novel, Salut Galarneau!, as taking its place. Godbout’s “national text” embodied a new identitary project, summed up in the stillechoing words of Charles de Gaulle: “Vive le Québec libre.” For Godbout, as for others of his generation, this new national project was to be founded not on tradition or religious belief as Casgrain had recommended, but on a common language. As Godbout wrote in his essay, “Novembre 1971 /Ecrire,” “The national text demands … the invention of a literary language that would express the uniqueness of the national group. A written form that would be to the language spoken on the rue Saint-Denis what written French is to the French spoken in France” (156). Like the project outlined by Casgrain, in which each work would add its stone to the literary edifice, Godbout, in a more homespun image, envisions an interwoven text that, like a traditional FrenchCanadian rag rug, is formed of individual literary contributions: “Quebec literature is a single text that can be unrolled like a rag rug, each scrap of coloured cloth representing an author, a book” (150). While Godbout stresses the confining and even exclusionary nature of the national text, his 1971 essay nonetheless continues the longstanding Quebec tradition of viewing literature as inextricably bound to the national identitary project and, in fact, an important means of its expression. This conviction, which governed much of Godbout’s own literary production, was widely shared by writers and critics in the Quiet Revolution era, and, in fact, political scientist Daniel Latouche has speculated that the Quiet Revolution itself may have been more literary than political, more the product of changes in cultural self-perception than of specific alterations in the apparatus of the state.7

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Although the overwhelming emphasis on the national project and its associated themes inevitably produced a backlash, particularly on the part of a new generation of feminist experimental writers who in the 1970s explicitly turned their backs on the national identity narrative, the close connection between literature and Quebec identity has persisted at least to the end of the century, even in the minds of feminists. As recently as 1996, in her controversial essay L’Arpenteur et le navigateur [The Surveyor and the Navigator], novelist Monique LaRue could expect to find agreement when she declared: “we have given Quebec literature … the mission of serving us as our homeland and the grounding of our identity” (10). Although LaRue questions the narrow definition of Quebec identity proposed by an imagined xenophobic colleague, she does not put into doubt the identitary mission of Quebec literature itself. In fact, she argues that the narratives of Quebec’s recent immigrants can alter and expand the definition not only of the national literature but also of what it means to be Québécois. If Quebec literature has been perceived as a composite national identity narrative, some of the narratives of which it is composed have been seen as more relevant than others: certain colours and textures have dominated the braided fabric of the rag rug while other contributions have been tossed into the critical scrapbag. Although the novels of Jacques Godbout himself seemed to epitomize the form taken by the identity narrative of the 1960s, termed by Jacques Pelletier “the national novel,” Godbout was alert to the critical excommunication that awaited writers who preferred to explore more “individualistic” veins of literary inspiration: “A Quebec author is valuable only if he participates intensely in the single text , but he will be able to exist only if he discovers the keys to the national text ” (“Novembre 1971/Ecrire,” 151). Godbout’s heavily capitalized statement, sweeping as it may seem, does sum up much of the oppressive history of the Quebec literary institution, particularly as it has related to women writers. In order to enter the critical mainstream, writers have been expected to produce texts capable of serving as identity narratives, but, in a sort of double jeopardy, texts that risked being perceived as statements about identity were subject to severe critical constraints. At certain moments in Quebec literary history, a writer’s contribution to the national identity narrative could only adopt certain literary forms or genres, while others were viewed as inappropriate. This perhaps explains the absence in Quebec of the women’s romance novels that proliferated in nineteenth-century France, England, and the United States – and even in English-speaking Canada, where the multiple works of

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Rosanna Mullins-Leprohon were rapidly translated into French for a presumably feminine public. The French-Canadian literary project, the identitary mission, was just too important for writers to waste time on trivial matters, of interest only to women; this attitude may also help to account for the relatively small number of women writers in nineteenth-century Quebec. As we have seen, Casgrain, that arbiter of literary taste, preferred the historical novel, and historical novels with nationalist themes dominated nineteenth-century literary production.8 Not coincidentally, this was the genre ultimately adopted by Quebec’s only nineteenth-century women novelists, Laure Conan and Adèle Bibaud, who seem to have understood the ideological priorities. By the turn of the century, however, the historical novel was displaced by a genre somewhat closer to contemporary social reality, the novel of the land or roman de la terre. Its idyllic portrait of Quebec rural life was perceived as an ideal literary vehicle for the FrenchCanadian “agriculturalist” vision, in which life on the farm became the expression of a divinely inspired mission.9 This genre dominated the literary/identitary project through the Second World War, and even after it waned in importance (Germaine Guèvremont’s 1945 novel Le Survenant is often considered the swansong of the genre) it continued to influence women’s fiction through to the end of the century, even in Gabrielle Roy’s “urban novel,” Bonheur d’occasion, as well as Anne Hébert’s “Le Torrent,” Marie-Claire Blais’s La Belle Bête and Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel, and Arlette Cousture’s bestseller of the 1980s, Les Filles de Caleb. But even as the freedom of the postwar period seemed to encourage a more personal and somewhat more individualistic form of expression, the exuberant nationalism of the Quiet Revolution at once reasserted the centrality of the national identitary project and privileged new hegemonic literary forms. Both Jacques Godbout and Hubert Aquin were heard to lament the writer’s crushing responsibilities, Godbout describing the “exhausting enterprise of the quebec text ” (“Novembre 1971/Ecrire,” 151) and Aquin writing of “the problem … of fully and painfully assuming all the difficulty of [this] identity (“La Fatigue culturelle,” 96).” Yet, while it has been men like Godbout and Aquin who have complained most loudly and eloquently about the identitary burden, it has generally been men (like Godbout and Aquin) who have benefitted most handsomely from the cultural accreditation it confers, both of them having gained fame in the 1960s for writing identity narratives like Salut Galarneau! and Prochain Episode, in which the protagonists were immediately recognized as giving content to the new identitary signifier, Québécois, which seemed not yet to have acquired its feminine form.

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Despite the radical new approach to literary criticism taken in the 1950s by Laval University professor Jeanne Lapointe, who argued for replacing ideological judgments with purely aesthetic criteria,10 and despite the greater heterogeneity of critical positions in the era of the Quiet Revolution, a number of women’s texts that were not perceived as identity narratives found themselves, as Godbout had predicted, marginalized by the newly reconstituted literary institution.

women in the national text If Hubert Aquin found it painful to assume the burden of Quebec identity, it was in part because he sought role models in the too readily defeated fighters of the Rebellion of 1837. His tellingly entitled article, “The Art of Defeat,” formed part of a 1965 special issue of the young nationalist periodical Liberté, in which a number of 1960s writers and intellectuals recorded their spiritual link to the rebels. But women seemed to have no such heroic predecessors, at least of their own sex: once they had moved beyond chaste founding mothers like Marie de l’Incarnation and Jeanne Mance, Quebec history offered little in the way of active feminine role models. As her male colleagues at Liberté proclaimed their solidarity with the heroes and martyrs of 1837, nationalist poet Michèle Lalonde was left to muse on the cautious role taken in the rebellion by Julie Bruneau Papineau, one of the few nineteenth-century women whose name and writings have survived long enough to undergo a veritable transformation in the 1990s.11 But the nuances of this independent feminine spirit, buried under a century of ideological suppression, were not available to Quebec women in the 1960s. Forced, like the abused Donalda Poudrier of Claude-Henri Grignon’s Un Homme et son péché, into the cramped coffin of a limited cultural role,12 women were not easily perceived as actors in the consecrated forms of the identity narrative within which women writers were asked to inscribe their work. As Jean Le Moyne observed sadly in 1960, “Our fictional women are distinguished by the fact that nothing happens to them, or so little, or so badly, that it amounts to the same thing” (104). While men like Godbout and Aquin were opening new paths through the identitary wilderness, women writers were, like the emblematic Maria Chapdelaine, still struggling within the enclosed space of overdetermined feminine roles. Indeed, Godbout, perhaps unintentionally, illustrated both the limitations imposed on women within the “national text” and their implicit exclusion from his definition of the writer when he proposed another homespun metaphor. He envisions a writer who is clearly

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male forced into intimate contact with a nation conceived as a female figure: “All Quebec writers sleep with the same girl whose name is Nation. But this girl has no house. That’s why we say of he who wants to become a writer that he is a pioneer; like the pioneers, he will have to, simultaneously, build the house and make love to the girl” (baiser la fille) (“Novembre 1971/Ecrire,” 157). Like his predecessors in the Quebec literary establishment, Godbout unquestioningly asserts the centrality of the masculine role in Quebec’s literary tradition and, perhaps unconsciously, reinscribes it into the supposedly new era. If the writer-protagonists at the centre of the dominant 1960s identity narratives of Godbout and Aquin were men, they could hardly have been otherwise, a situation implicitly acknowledged by Godbout as he links them to their predecessors of the literary past, the intrepid pioneers of the roman de la terre and the heroic founding fathers of the historical novel. In the allegorical scenario he proposes, the woman – appropriately identified as “the girl” (la fille), since only marriageable maidens enjoyed central status in the traditional Quebec novel – has only one role, and that a passive one. In the new, liberal era of the Quiet Revolution Godbout’s reiteration of the writer’s role in building the national edifice is more explicitly gender-marked than the one proposed a century earlier by Casgrain. But Casgrain had no need of making statements on gender, since he could rely on the work of his ecclesiastical colleagues to impose the social roles that would naturally be “reflected” in the literary mirror he envisioned. In 1866, the same year as Casgrain’s groundbreaking proclamation of “The Literary Movement in Canada,” there appeared an important book by François-Louis Laflèche, bishop of Trois-Rivières, entitled Quelques considérations sur les rapports de la société civile avec la religion et la famille [A Few Considerations on the Relationship of Civil Society With Religion and the Family]. Despite its long-winded title, Laflèche’s book did not mince words in his assignment of gender-related tasks. In a hierarchical world whose constitutive units were, in ascending order, family, state, and church, power flowed directly from a male God and was embodied in a masculine figure at each level of the social organization: “Thus the authority, or the power that is the divine instrument destined to maintain these various conditions of existence is always personified or incarnated … in a single individual. In the family the person endowed with authority is called Father; in the State, that person will be called Emperor, King President, …; in the Church this person is named Supreme Pontiff or Pope. Thus, whoever speaks of family, state, or church, at the same time refers to Father, King, Pope” (85).

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Women do not enter into the italics of the social structure outlined by Laflèche, but, in a significant afterthought, he generously accords a place in the family (although not in state or church) to the woman as mother, whom God has endowed not with power but with “the intelligence of the heart,” and whose authority is clearly “subordinate” to the male head of the family, for whom she serves as “a helper” (99). As Laflèche’s lengthy title suggests with its reference to “civil society,” his delineation of gender roles gives woman, as mother, a place within the family and at the same time situates her within the larger political order. It is important to remember that, at the moment when Laflèche and Casgrain were making their foundational ideological pronouncements in 1866, a crucial struggle for French-Canadian survival was taking place against the background of English-Canadian national formation, as expressed in the British North America Act of 1867 which constituted the Dominion of Canada. A good century before Quebec feminists were to adopt as their own the slogan, “the personal is political” (le privé est politique), a long series of French-Canadian thinkers had recognized the centrality of the family, of which women formed the reproductive and affective core, to French-Canadian survival (survivance) and self-affirmation in the political sphere. As late as 1943, when other tenets of survivance ideology had begun to drop away, the family – by now almost completely centred on the mother – was still seen as the bulwark of French-Canadian identity, newly threatened by social change brought on by the Second World War. In a 1943 brochure written for the conservative nationalist Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste and redundantly entitled, “The Role of the French-Canadian Mother in the Home,” historian Guy Frégault provided a clear formulation of a widespread use of women as a last line of defense against change: “It is in them (women) that the family found its source of cohesion: the family, which still remains our last line of defense which we cannot allow to be breached without knowingly giving ourselves up to a certain death.”13 The family was also a centrepiece of the nationalist ideology of Lionel Groulx as set forth in 1924 in his major work, Notre maître le passé [The Past Our Master]: “If our fathers have survived, it is because a certain moral dignity gave them the proud strength to remain themselves; it is because their family institutions and the purity of their customs allowed them to give birth abundantly to life” (ii, 281). If Groulx seems oddly to attribute the power to “give birth abundantly” directly to fathers, women could not in reality escape involvement in this ideological scheme. As Denis Monière explains

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15 Introduction

in Le Développement des idéologies au Québec, the natalist strategy of la revanche des berceaux – the “revenge of the cradle” – that developed in late nineteenth-century Quebec as part of the ideology of survivance not only assigned women their unique role as mother but defined the number of children they were expected to bear, creating the social ideal of the large family. The importance of women’s reproductive role in an essentially political project accounted for the vehement opposition among Quebec nationalist intellectuals to women’s suffrage – opposed, most famously, by Henri Bourassa, founder of the newspaper Le Devoir, in the name of women’s sacred maternity – and to women’s participation in the world of education and work outside the home. Even feminist thinkers in pre-1960 Quebec were obliged to formulate their demands for women’s participation in the public sphere in terms of the mother’s “mission,” as defined, among others, by long-term Quebec premier Louis-Alexandre Taschereau, in educating children in the French language and national traditions. The incessant reiteration of the ideological role of the mother, increasingly idealized and expanded by national rhetoric in the face of perceived “foreign” threats to the French-Canadian social order, led to the crystallization of the “myth” of the French-Canadian mother so vividly described by Jean Le Moyne in 1953: “The FrenchCanadian mother, dressed in calico, stands on her linoleum in front of a cookstove and a pot, a baby on her left hip, a cooking spoon in her right hand, a bunch of children hanging on to her skirts and another little one in the cradle of revenge” (Convergences, 71). In the 1950s this figure still possessed mythic force even though it was already removed from social reality. Deeply ingrained into the French-Canadian psyche, at the origin of what Mona-Josée Gagnon terms an Oedipal complex of national scope (18), this vision of the mother was from its origin a political construct, enrolled, like Quebec literature, in the ideology of national survival. It is not surprising that, as late as 1978, overt attempts to smash a reified feminine stereotype identified with the mother and Virgin Mary in Denise Boucher’s play, Les Fées ont soif [The Fairies Are Thirsty] could still call forth a form of censorship by the quasipolitical authorities of the Montreal Arts Council.14 Like the narrative of Quebec literature itself, the socially constructed narrative of women’s lives was firmly integrated into the national project. While women writers found it necessary to participate in the literary form of the identity narrative in order to receive serious critical consideration, the role of women within such a politically charged text was subject to intense scrutiny precisely because of its position within the national political project.

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negotiating the narrative of identity Consciously or unconsciously avoiding the charged ideological status of the Quebec mother, the culturally aware Laure Conan chose to portray her woman protagonists as motherless orphans, not only Angéline de Montbrun but the heroines of her subsequent historical novels as well: Gisèle Méliand, Elisabeth Moyen, Thérèse d’Autrée, and Guillemette de Muy. If a real mother survives to assume an active role in Conan’s work, it is only – like Angéline’s historical ancestor Mme de Montbrun, or Mme de Tilly in La Sève immortelle – at the very moment of the British conquest when the military suppression of men authorizes mothers to get out of the house and man the symbolically charged plow. While avoiding the ideological pitfalls of the motherfigure herself, Conan did embrace its underlying principle of feminine devotion and self-sacrifice, and it was her mastery of the appropriate spiritual discourse in Angéline de Montbrun that led Casgrain, in his preface, to bestow on her work what was surely his highest accolade, “it is a book from which we exit as from a church” (8). Fortunately for the continuation of her literary career, Laure Conan also seemed genuinely to share much of Casgrain’s love for Quebec history, as well as his tendency to read it in highly spiritual terms. As a more practical matter, she also had the literary ability to adapt the form Casgrain had imposed on her to the telling of her own story, and not just the story of New France. Conan’s historical novels set in the early days of the French colony present a coherent vision of a world governed by spiritual heroism and self-sacrifice, a world in which her women protagonists could play an active and valued role. Because of her ability to tell the right kind of story about herself and her community, Laure Conan was able to write what can now be recognized as a clearly feminine sensibility into a national literature carefully monitored by Casgrain and his colleagues. And because of her literary canonization, Conan’s enigmatic and fascinating Angéline de Montbrun has been available for the multiple re-readings proposed by readers in a post-1960 Quebec newly open to the currents of Freudianism, feminism, and revised concepts of national identity. Had she not been able to write herself into the very restricted national text, it is fair to speculate that Angéline de Montbrun would have ended up on the trashheap of literary history, and the selfeffacing Félicité Angers would not have become known through her pseudonym of Laure Conan. Such a scenario is not the invention of a pessimistic feminist imagination but, unfortunately, an event repeated in Quebec history. The

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story of a woman writer unable to inscribe herself into the national identity narrative can be seen in the experience of Jovette Bernier in the early 1930s. Like Conan, Bernier enjoyed the protection of a powerful male mentor, in the form of her editor Albert Lévesque, who was instrumental in encouraging new French-Canadian writers. And Bernier too was a gifted innovator, like Conan also introducing a strikingly modern first-person voice into a Quebec novel dominated by conventional impersonal narration. However, she refused to participate in the literary genre of the day, the roman de la terre, with its story of women defined by their role in the family and literally entombed in the “family plot.”15 In contrast to the respectable Angéline de Montbrun, Bernier’s La Chair décevante [Delusions of the Flesh] was a shocking evocation of carnal sin, describing an unwed mother on trial for killing the father of her son. It was hardly the story anyone wanted to hear about the Quebec family, especially in an era when the economic realities of the Depression were putting new pressures on the traditional large-family ethic. Subjected to a wave of virulent critical attack, La Chair décevante attained a second printing only at the expense of the author. Bernier, who had already established a reputation as a poet, seemed scarred by her first encounter with narrative form, and it was more than thirty-five years before she undertook another novel.16 In fact, she withdrew for a time from writing by taking up a career in radio, resurfacing in print giving advice to the lovelorn in the 1960s for the new women’s magazine Châtelaine. But, by that time, she had learned her lessons about the proper role of women in Quebec all too well: the advice she offered was surprisingly conservative17 for a time that welcomed new forms of women’s writing and the new modes of reading that eventually led to a feminist-inspired appreciation of La Chair décevante.18 If Jovette Bernier’s story is dramatic, it is not unique. Eva Senécal began her literary career as a successful poet of the same generation as Bernier, that “new generation” of the 1920s which, in its masculine incarnation (the generation of “La Relève”), was slowly beginning to transform and modernize Quebec literature. But sentiments and desires acceptable in poetic form were apparently unacceptable in the novel, which, with its closer relation to social reality, seemed to bear greater identitary weight. Senécal’s two novels of the early 1930s, Dans les ombres [In the Shadows] and Mon Jacques [My Jacques], were badly received by the critics because they introduced female love and desire into the presumably emotionless literary landscape of rural Quebec. Dans les ombres launched a controversy that raged in the press for several months when Jules Larivière denounced it for making a crude appeal, unprecedented in Quebec

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literature, to the physical passions.19 Although Senécal, like Bernier, had already achieved a measure of recognition for her poetry, she too withdrew from the arena of literary publication after the critical disaster of her novels. To this casualty list could be added the case of Robertine Barry, who wrote under the pseudonym of Françoise, viciously attacked by a conservative and ultra-nationalist critic in 1895 for her collection of short rural fiction, Fleurs champêtres [Flowers of the Field]. While evidently in touch with the predominance of rural themes in late nineteenth-century Quebec literature, Françoise had clearly underestimated the dangers of attempting to violate the conventions of the roman de la terre by offering too accurate portraits of the lives of rural women, pointing out the importance of crass economic factors in marriage and drawing attention to the plight of abused wives. Such a reading of the rural world, in properly attenuated form, would have to wait fifty years for the work of Françoise’s journalistic successor, Germaine Guèvremont. Needless to say, after this reaction to her Fleurs champêtres, Françoise did not return to rural fiction, nor did she ever attempt a novel. If such a reception had greeted Guèvremont’s initial publication, a 1942 collection of short stories on rural life entitled En pleine terre [On the Land], she might not have gone on to write Le Survenant [The Outlander]. This was the dilemma that faced women who chose to work within the ideologically weighted form of the novel: to stray from the dominant genre and its recognized constraints on women was to invite marginalization or even, as was the case with Bernier and Senécal, to risk ending a promising literary career. On the other hand, to write within the parameters of the prescribed generic form, with its heavy ideological strictures, was again to make oneself vulnerable to censure, as seen in the experience of Françoise. The alternative seemed to lie in accepting serious constraints on innovation, an option chosen by Blanche Lamontagne-Beauregard, who achieved some success writing rural novels in the early twentieth century. Yet it was in the parochial and confining form of the roman de la terre that women writers in the twentieth century were ultimately able to achieve some of their most enduring creations. All four writers mentioned by Nicole Brossard as having attained an important place in Quebec literature wrote their major works – those immediately recognized as making a central statement about Quebec – in the familiar and time-worn framework of the roman de la terre – not only Guèvremont’s Le Survenant and its sequel, Marie-Didace, but also Gabrielle Roy’s innovative transposition in Bonheur d’occasion [The Tin Flute] of the rural genre’s characteristic “family plot” into the

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world of the modern city. It was this persistence of a unique Quebecrelated form in both novels that initially struck me as I began to reflect on Nicole Brossard’s observation on the ability of women writers to gain recognition for their powerful interpretations of Quebec reality. Both Le Survenant and Bonheur d’occasion, appearing within a few months of each other in 1945, demonstrated the power of Quebec women writers to renegotiate the terms of a contemporary cultural reality while attaining literary success. At the same historical moment, Anne Hébert’s “Le Torrent” more radically subverted the structures of the rural novel to mount an attack on the cultural values it embodied. Hébert’s critique and the violence of her prose paralleled and anticipated the historic contestatory manifesto of 1948, Refus global, seven of whose fifteen signatories were women artists. And more than a decade later, still working within a rural genre now vulnerable to caricature and derision, Marie-Claire Blais wrote her own account of dispossession and oppression in La Belle Bête [Mad Shadows] and Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel [A Season in the Life of Emmanuel], one that uncannily echoed Hébert’s. Despite the acknowledged status of Hébert and Blais, and despite the atmosphere of personal and cultural liberation fostered by the Quiet Revolution, the exploration of new roles and concerns on the part of women was not immediately seen as relevant to the hegemonic social discourse of the 1960s, which, as Micheline Cambron has contended in Une Société, un récit, revolved around a circumscribed and homogeneous Quebec “we.” While Blais’s caricature of the roman de la terre in Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel was recognized by the nationalist critical establishment, her subsequent foray into feminine autobiography in Manuscrits de Pauline Archange [The Manuscripts of Pauline Archange] was all but incomprehensible to critics attuned to more overtly nationalist and familiarly masculine life stories. Of the many women’s novels of the Quiet Revolution period, only Anne Hébert’s Kamouraska, with its return to the historical novel and its evocation of the newly rediscovered historical intertext of the Rebellion of 1837, was seen as making a significant statement about Quebec identity. This marginalization of the concerns of many women writers by the 1960s literary establishment undoubtedly contributed to the turn away from national themes and the explicit rejection of the identity narrative by the strongly experimental feminist writers of the 1970s. It was only in the wake of the first failed bid for Quebec’s political independence in 1980 that women writers who could be identified as feminist – or, rather, in Lori Saint-Martin’s terms, as “metafeminist”20 – began to

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write new identity narratives of Quebec women. These writers considered themselves, echoing France Théoret, as both écrivaines and Québécoises,21 terms brought into existence by the Quiet Revolution and the feminist movement that arrived on its heels. Returning to the Quebec identitary project in the 1980s and 1990s, writers like Théoret, Francine Noël, Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska, Arlette Cousture, Monique Proulx, Monique LaRue, Régine Robin, Mona Latif-Ghattas, Abla Farhoud, and Marie-Célie Agnant found themselves free to propose their own rewritings of Quebec identity, interrogating older constructions of narrative, of history, of nationalism, and of identity itself, and extending the definition of Quebec identity beyond the monolithic pure laine masculine subject to encompass the plural, even pluricultural identities that have come to constitute post-referendum, postmodern Quebec.

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1 Writing Passion into the National Text In a word, it is a book from which we exit as from a church, eyes raised to heaven, a prayer on the lips, the soul full of brightness, and the clothes smelling of incense. – Henri-Raymond Casgrain, “Etude sur Angéline de Montbrun”1

The first full-length novel by a woman to be published in Quebec, Angéline de Montbrun sounded a different note in a literature more preoccupied with cultural survival than with personal happiness, giving expression to a personal passion that may well have mirrored the experience of its author, Félicité Angers, who wrote under the name Laure Conan. Angéline de Montbrun was equally iconoclastic in its choice of literary form, an eclectic mixture of letters and personal diary with only limited recourse to the omniscient narration that was the norm in other Quebec novels of the day. In the eyes of some modern readers, Angéline de Montbrun also represents an early assertion of feminine autonomy, unusual in the literature and society of the time. The novel violated the existing canons of literary discourse in many ways, yet far from being censured or ignored, it was hailed by the literary establishment of the day, in the person of HenriRaymond Casgrain. In his speech prepared for the Royal Society in 1883, which served as a preface to the first published edition of Angéline de Montbrun, Casgrain gave Conan’s novel the strange tribute that was to shape its future: “it is a book from which we exit as from a church, eyes raised to heaven, a prayer on the lips, the soul full of brightness, and the clothes smelling of incense” (ix). If Laure Conan’s continuing literary reputation in Quebec is a tribute to her outstanding talent as a writer, her success among her contemporaries was equally due to her ability to manipulate appropriate elements of literary language and genre. Through a profound understanding of the dominant nationalist ideology of her particular

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place and time and an apparently sincere allegiance to its goals, Laure Conan was able, in Angéline de Montbrun and the historical novels that followed it, to make a place for women – and women’s fantasies and desires – in Quebec’s developing “national literature.” The concept of a “national literature” was very much in the air as Conan wrote her novel. The term was used openly by a loosely organized group of writers who had been meeting in Quebec City since the 1860s in their effort to encourage the development of a FrenchCanadian “national literature.” Within this group of writers and intellectuals, now known in literary histories as “the Quebec Patriotic School,” the man who did most to define the parameters of this new national text and promote its publication was Casgrain. He was, therefore, presumably able to recognize a good example when he saw it, and he seemed to find in Conan’s unusual novel the essential ingredients from which a “national literature” could be made. For Casgrain, each text written in Quebec had the duty of participating in the definition – or, as he preferred to put it, the reflection – of French-Canadian identity: “literature is the reflection of the customs, character, aptitudes and genius of a nation” (“Le Mouvement littéraire en Canada,” 25). Casgrain himself favoured historical subjects, following the model of the contemporary nationalist historian François-Xavier Garneau, and he encouraged the preservation of French Canada’s rich oral tradition as exemplified by the material contained in Philippe Aubert de Gaspé’s Les Anciens Canadiens, a novel Casgrain also helped to promote. Conan’s novel, however, did not have a historical subject or a grounding in Canadian legend. Nor did it include much local colour, a serious defect, as Casgrain did not hesitate to say in his preface: “One is sorry not to meet more truly Canadian passages, such as Angéline’s pilgrimage to Garneau’s tomb” (ix). And he emphasizes the consequence of this lack: “Our literature can be seriously original only by identifying itself with our country and its inhabitants, only by painting our customs, our history, our features: this is its only reason for existing” (ix). On the other hand, Angéline de Montbrun displayed a mastery of the discourse of spirituality, an ability of its author to evoke religious feeling in her reader – and for Casgrain, the “national literature” had to possess a religious base: “above all, it will be inspired by religious faith … or it will not endure” (“Le Mouvement littéraire en Canada,” 26).

the crusade for women’s writing Laure Conan’s critical success is even more astonishing when it is set within the cultural context of nineteenth-century Quebec, which

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could claim very few women writers. Entrapped within a powerful ideological grid that condemned the writing of novels as immoral while, at the same time, setting strict limits on the proper role of women, Quebec’s would-be women writers had greater obstacles to overcome than their contemporaries in France, England, or the United States, or even nearby English Canada. Indeed, the only woman novelist listed in bibliographies of Quebec literature for the period 1840– 69, the first three decades of Quebec’s novelistic production, was, in fact, the anglophone Canadian Rosanna Mullins-Leprohon, whose romance novels were popular in French translation. The striking absence of women writers in Quebec was brought to public attention in 1900, when a group of Canadian women prepared a brochure for the Paris Exposition summing up the accomplishments of “The Women of Canada.” In the section on literature, of sixty names listed under the heading of “novel” only three are francophone. Under the heading of poetry, the ratio is even worse: three francophone women among the eighty-seven women poets listed. A more modern source, David Hayne and Marcel Tirol’s Bibliographie critique du roman canadien français 1837–1900, which lists forty-two authors, yields similar statistics: only three of the authors listed are women, one of them Mullins-Leprohon. The fact that so few francophone women were writing fiction in nineteenth-century Quebec calls for some explanation. It is not enough to say that the nineteenth century in general was not a period of full equality for women, for that century was in Europe and the rest of North America an extraordinarily successful time for women writers of many types. In England, Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, and George Eliot shaped the direction of the novel, while many other prolific women writers enjoyed wide popularity. Mme de Staël and George Sand flourished in France, and in the United States Harriet Beecher Stowe and Louisa May Alcott headed a large group of professional women novelists. In A Literature of Their Own Elaine Showalter suggests that the nineteenth century in England could be termed the “Age of the Female Novelist” (3), and, according to Nina Baym, the popularity of the women’s fiction published in the United States between 1820 and 1870 ensured that “authorship in America was estabished as a woman’s profession, and reading as a woman’s avocation” (Women’s Fiction, 12). It may, of course, be argued that Canada was a young and stilldeveloping culture. Yet, while English-Canadian women novelists may not have attained the status of George Eliot, the women preparing the Paris Exposition brochure were able to list fifty-seven of them, as against the three French Canadians. It may also be alleged that few people in Quebec, men or women, were publishing novels before

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1900. While it is certainly true that the province’s clerically dominated ideology expressed low regard for novels, particularly the type produced in post-revolutionary France, this quasi-official disparagement did not prevent the other novelists listed in Hayne’s pre-1900 bibliography from producing their work. It seems evident that the almost total absence of women’s fiction in nineteenth-century Quebec is the result of forces at once unique to Quebec and particular in their effect upon women. The nature and pervasive strength of these forces can be understood from the work of a group of women who actively espoused the cause of women’s writing at the end of the century. Within the decade that followed the first publication of Angéline de Montbrun in book form in 1884,2 this group began to examine the conditions that had worked to suppress women’s writing, and undertook to create a welcoming climate for feminine authors. Clear evidence of this enterprise appears in the pages of two early women’s magazines: Le Coin du Feu [By the Hearth], published from 1893 to 1899 by Mme Joséphine Marchand Dandurand, and its successor, Le Journal de Françoise, published from 1902 to 1909 by one of Quebec’s first women journalists, Robertine Barry, who used the pseudonym Françoise. Both periodicals appear, in fact, to have been founded largely in order to promote women’s access to writing. Disguising their potentially subversive purposes under a smokescreen of recipes, helpful household hints, and fashion advice – the traditional stock-in-trade of women’s magazines – both periodicals display a deep and continuing concern for the development of literary and artistic culture among Quebec women. The women connected with these periodicals constituted a fairly coherent group which included the major women authors like Laure Conan, journalists like Françoise, and intellectual leaders of the day, like Marie Gérin-Lajoie. The project was essentially feminist, and some of them also joined the Montreal Local Council of Women, a feminist organization that, like Le Coin du Feu, was founded in 1893. But, at least in their literary journals, they often proclaimed their distance from the feminist activists of the time, and particularly from the demands for women’s suffrage. Because they limited their aims to gaining women access to the written word, rather than the vote, I refer to this group of women as the “literary feminists.”3 Their focus on women’s role in culture showed perceptive observation of the reigning ideological climate, which placed the preservation of the French language and Quebec’s unique religious values at the centre of its concerns. While it created special problems for women writers, the cause of Quebec’s cultural survival also gave these literary

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feminists a set of powerful arguments for women’s participation in the cultural sphere. In her article in the 1900 Paris Exposition brochure, “Canadian Women in Literature,” Françoise began by admitting that, in 1900, Quebec women were only beginning to write and that women’s literary works of any length were rare, a situation she attributes to a social climate overtly hostile to women writers: “Since we cannot attribute the very minor role of French-Canadian women in the domain of letters to lack of talent or culture, what causes can we assign to it? Would it not be due especially to social attitudes hostile to literary works by women, which do not allow them to become accustomed to practicing the art of writing?” (209). In support of her analysis, Françoise cited the reluctance of FrenchCanadian women to make public their works, or even their names. She pointed out that even the many younger women writers who were just beginning to write at the turn of the century felt it necessary to use “appealing pseudonyms of flowers and birds” (215). Françoise herself wrote under a pseudonym, as did Laure Conan and some of the female journalistic colleagues whom she mentions, “Colette” of the Journal and “Madeleine” of the Ottawa Temps. Of course, nineteenth-century women novelists in other cultures had also frequently used pen names, and for many of the same reasons. In her study of the “literary domestics” in America, Mary Kelley saw the female pseudonyms prevalent in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as evidence of a climate that discouraged women, as writers, from moving into the public sphere: “by becoming secret writers they demonstrated that their social conditioning was powerful enough to cripple their efforts, if not to prevent them” (128). However, by the end of the century, most women writers in the United States were writing under their own names. It is interesting to note that when the Quebec-born Anna Duval-Thibault published her francophone novel Les Deux Testaments [The Two Testaments] in the United States in 1888, she felt free to use her own name – and this only a few years after the Quebec publication of Angéline de Montbrun. The Collectif Clio which authored L’Histoire des femmes au Québec [Quebec Women: A History] show that, in contrast to the relative autonomy enjoyed by Quebec women during the early years of the colony, the nineteenth century saw a growing distinction between public and private spheres, and by the end of the century women found themselves definitively relegated to the private: “Men defined the newly emerging society in terms of what they were doing; women were excluded from it. Men also defined what women

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should and should not do. Men reserved a tiny little place for women, where they were queens and prisoners in the domestic sphere” (180). The distinction between public and private was reinforced by the role assigned to women in the political strategy of survival through demography, la revanche des berceaux, which glorified women as mothers of large families, and which left little time or space for writing. Thus Mme Dandurand, in the Paris Exposition brochure, emphasized the need for a woman writer to obtain society’s “pardon” by proving herself a better housewife and mother than her non-literary counterparts. A woman writer would also have to demonstrate “an attitude of modesty, complete self-effacement” (28) – an overcompensation that suggests the extent to which the mere act of publication was thought to place special burdens on the expected feminine reserve. In Micheline Dumont’s analysis, the conflict between culturally prescribed feminine modesty and the activity appropriate to a literary figure posed a very real problem for Laure Conan, which she resolved by her use of a pseudonym. Her dual identity as Laure Conan/Félicité Angers enabled her to express both aspects of her profoundly ambivalent attitude toward her writing. The other francophone woman to publish novels in nineteenthcentury Quebec, Adèle Bibaud, did publish under her own name, no doubt empowered by the fact that she was a member of an illustrious Quebec literary family.4 Bibaud insisted on putting discussions of women’s writing into her historical novels: in one instance, her characters pause on the eve of the crucial battle for Quebec to argue the question. In these discussions, two specific charges were brought against the literary woman: that she neglected her home and family, and that she sought personal renown, an aim contrary to feminine modesty. In response, Bibaud’s defender of the woman writer had to accept for her a number of restrictive conditions. First, she was obliged to make sure her literary activities did not interfere with her duties to husband and children (it is perhaps not coincidental that many of the literary feminists themselves were unmarried, including Laure Conan, Françoise, and Adèle Bibaud herself). Having met these priorities, a woman might write, but only for her own pleasure, and she must continually refuse to seek fame. The conditions outlined in Bibaud’s arguments very clearly reveal the pressures faced by those few Quebec women who attempted to develop their literary talents. And the picture she painted of the gentlewoman-author was totally different both from the hard-working literary professionals who were, by this time, common in England, France, and the United States, and from even the newly emerging group of women journalists in Quebec.

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While they shared problems of role definition with women novelists in other cultures, Quebec women in particular faced a clerical establishment that targeted novels with special condemnation. Many of the most significant contemporary French novels had been placed on the papal Index, and the enforcement of this ban on “immoral” literature had been a major political and cultural battleground of the 1860s, which was eventually won by conservative forces. In their glorification of romantic passion, novels were considered dangerous to the dominant family values of nineteenth-century Quebec, while novels by French writers like Rousseau and Zola were held responsible for the overthrow of traditional religious and political authority in France: “By their attacks against the constitution of society, the head of the nation was sent to the scaffold and royalty was dragged through the mud” (Henri Noiseux, “L’Action malsaine du roman”). In 1893 the conservative ideologue Jules-Paul Tardivel went so far as to call novels appearing in the press “a veritable tribune of Satan.”5 In this moralistic atmosphere, even male novelists of the nineteenth century found it necessary to offer apologies and justifications for their suspect activity. For her part, Laure Conan took care to emphasize that her Angéline de Montbrun had read no novels, and few novelists appear among her many literary references, with the striking exception of the right-thinking Chateaubriand. This generalized condemnation of the novel also focused more narrowly on women, as is evidenced by a spate of articles appearing in the years 1889–91 in the prestigious Revue Canadienne, which had published Angéline de Montbrun in serial form ten years before. Indicating their awareness of the growth of a feminine reading public in Quebec, these articles condemn with great energy the noxious influence of novels written by and for women, targeting above all George Sand, who was seen by Louis Franc as “taking delight in rolling in manure” (“Mauvais livres et mauvais feuilletons”). In the face of these attitudes, the new women’s magazines had to show that the writing – and even the reading – of fiction was a laudable activity for women. Le Coin du Feu began by providing its readers with fiction by major French writers such as Maupassant, Alphonse Daudet, Hugo, and Balzac – all, it goes without saying, of a moral character beyond reproach. It also opened its pages to articles and fiction by the small group of Quebec women writers of the time, who included Conan and Mme Dandurand herself. Far from repeating any of the lamentable excesses attributed to French fiction, their works presented a model of feminine virtue that fell little short of sainthood. In fact, in a short historical note appearing in Le Journal de Françoise, entitled “An Example for Women Unhappy in Marriage,”

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Conan told the story of an Italian woman of the Renaissance whose steadfast devotion in the face of her husband’s unparalleled abuse resulted in her attaining, if not sainthood, at least beatification (iii , 515–16). Statements and works by Quebec women writers seemed implicitly or explicitly to ally themselves with the vision of women that Virginia Woolf has called “the angel in the house” – a term specifically used in Le Coin du Feu in 1894 by the contemporary Quebec writer Louis Fréchette. It was imperative to rehabilitate George Sand, who continued to loom as a formidable role model, and Le Journal de Françoise published letters that emphasized her maternal devotion. In stressing the virtuous intentions of Sand, and in overemphasizing the virtues of feminine sacrifice and self-abnegation in their own writing, the literary feminists were, in their own way, attempting to make their world safe for women’s writing. Quebec women also played strongly on another string of the dominant ideology, French-Canadian nationalism and cultural survival. After Lord Durham’s scathing dismissal of French Canadians in 1840 as a people “without history or literature,” the writing of either history or literature had taken on the aura of a patriotic duty, and, of course, the writing of historical fiction had the merit of combining both. The contributors to these early women’s periodicals did not hesitate to call upon patriotic sentiments. Laure Conan, an avid reader of historical sources, frequently contributed her short studies of early Quebec women to the pages of both Le Coin du Feu and Le Journal de Françoise; fortunately, strong and widely admired feminine figures like Marie de l’Incarnation and Jeanne Mance were abundant in the early years of New France. And one of the devices through which women’s writing was promoted was an essay contest for girls, publicized in Le Coin du Feu in 1896, on the topic of Quebec women of history. Patriotic arguments were also central to the effort to improve francophone women’s education, which the literary feminists considered sadly inadequate and a major cause of women’s failure to write. As Mme Dandurand tartly stated in Le Coin du Feu in 1896, “An education more complete than is currently offered to women in this country would be necessary if they were to have a hope of becoming writers” (2–4). In answer to those who saw education as distracting women from their true maternal roles, the literary feminists emphasized its importance in improving women’s ability to teach Quebec children their language and cultural traditions, aims essential to nationalist ideology. In “The Women of Canada,” Mme Dandurand grounded her arguments in her concern for the welfare of the sacrosanct Quebec family, and, in the first issue of Le Journal de Françoise,

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Françoise herself called this sacred role of women into play as the ideological grounding of her enterprise. The conservative ideology prevalent in Quebec at the end of the nineteenth century certainly created a cultural climate that was much more hostile to feminine autonomy than were those of neighbouring societies. In response, the Quebec literary feminists portrayed themselves as subscribing to the concept of femininity held by the dominant French-Canadian ideology, with its limited definition of women’s role and its implicit doctrine of “separate spheres.” At the same time, however, they emphasized the need for educated women in preserving French Canada’s traditional values and contributing to the growth of a new national culture. In making their arguments they implicitly established the parameters of a type of women’s literature that could be written in Quebec, a women’s fiction focused on specifically feminine virtues and participating actively in the patriotic endeavour to preserve French cultural identity. Turning the pages of Le Coin du Feu and Le Journal de Françoise, these early defenders of women’s right to culture in Quebec, it becomes clear that if women were to enter the restricted canon of Quebec literature, they would have to be prepared to contribute to the national project.

the case of

ANGÉLINE DE MONTBRUN

It is within the situation so pessimistically described in the pages of Quebec’s early women’s periodicals – and, in fact, more than a decade before their foundation – that Laure Conan wrote and succeeded in publishing her groundbreaking novel Angéline de Montbrun. Groundbreaking not only in the context of women’s writing, Angéline de Montbrun set new standards for the Quebec novel as a whole. Within a genre preoccupied by the telling of long and complicated stories, Angéline de Montbrun rather awkwardly relegates the narration of events in the plot to a few brief pages inserted between the novel’s two longer sections. In a genre characterized by impersonal narration and oriented toward collective goals, Angéline de Montbrun foregrounds the individual voice, which speaks in the first person and expresses a series of deeply personal emotions, including romantic passion. Laure Conan’s protagonist, furthermore, seems flagrantly in contradiction with society’s expectations for women of her day. Wilfully rejecting marriage, she takes up an independent existence and assumes the administration of her own estate. Angéline’s facial disfigurement and her decision to renounce her marriage have long constituted an enigma in the eyes of modern readers – although apparently not for Conan’s contemporaries, who

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do not seem to have questioned her actions. The events hurriedly presented in the terse third-person narration of the central section have provoked a long and varied stream of more recent critical speculation and have often been cited as an example of implausibility or invraisemblance suggestive of hidden motivations on the part of character or author. Feminist writer and theorist Madeleine Gagnon is particularly struck by the section’s breathless tone and by “the flagrant implausibility” of the events recounted. In her view, it is because of this “sudden implausibility,” which risks making narrative impossible, that the author must allow Angéline to express her fantasies in her own voice in the long first-person journal of the third section (62). Suzanne Paradis, one of the first critics to write about women in Quebec fiction, characterizes the tumour that disfigures Angéline in the first edition of the book6 as “inexplicable” and suggests it is merely a psychosomatic symptom of Angéline’s real desire to avoid marrying her fiancé Maurice (13). In the end, many critics have been led to share the question posed by Jacques Cotnam: “What really happened … for the account we have just read of the tragic events is far from answering our questions?” (155). For feminist critic Nancy Miller, looking at the equally implausible decision not to remarry on the part of Angéline’s literary ancestor, Madame de Lafayette’s Princesse de Clèves, such otherwise inexplicable decision marks a difference that distinguishes women’s writing. Miller seeks this difference not, as others have done, in the representation of the female body in the text or in a specifically feminine sentence structure. Rather, she finds it “in the insistence of a certain thematic structuration, in the form of content” (27). The Princesse de Clèves’ “action without a maxim” – an action that makes no sense in the seventeenth-century sociolect – is, in Miller’s reading, a sign of a woman’s (re)writing of “female plot” (126), society’s normalizing narrative that governs women’s lives: “that organization of narrative event which delimits a heroine’s psychological, moral, and social development within a sexual fate … Female plot thus is both what the culture has always already inscribed for woman and its reinscription in the linear time of fiction. It is generally mapped by the heroine’s engagement with the codes of the dominant ideology, her obligatory insertion within the institutions which in society and in novels name her – marriage, for example” (208). Women writers, Miller asserts, approach this narrative convention in a different way, in their texts questioning and commenting upon the “female plot” itself (125–6). In the Princesse de Clèves’ refusal of an offered love, Miller sees an assertion of feminine autonomy, an act she finds reiterated in Maggie Tulliver’s renunciation at the end of George Eliot’s

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The Mill on the Floss. As Miller might also have said, this act is repeated in Angéline de Montbrun. In the case of Conan’s text, a common perception of its implausibility has launched modern critics into psychoanalytic studies of Angéline – and her creator. Cotnam sees the tumour as a symbolic representation of Angéline’s guilt over an incestuous relationship with her father, a feature of the text that has been repeatedly pointed out. While this analysis is based on the text alone, Cotnam also points a finger at the life of Félicité Angers herself: “there is reason to think that the structure of the novel is more responsive to the psychological needs of the author – concerned with presenting, with supporting documentation, the case of Angéline de Montbrun (which is in part her own case) before a jury that will convict or acquit – than with purely esthetic preoccupations” (152). Roger LeMoine, editor of Conan’s collected works, agrees with Cotnam, seeing in Conan’s entire work an effort to rewrite her personal drama, her youthful love for an older man and local political figure, Pierre-Alexis Tremblay, who apparently withdrew from her life because of a longstanding vow of celibacy. Others, like Sœur Jean de l’Immaculée, would dig further into Félicité Angers’ largely undocumented past, finding indications of a hidden “moral failing” supposedly responsible for Tremblay’s defection. Whatever may be the case, most modern readers agree that some relationship between her characters and Laure Conan’s own experience is necessary to account for the depth of her psychological insight, which was largely absent from the two-dimensional characters who populated other Quebec novels of the time. Laure Conan’s contemporaries, however, no doubt following Casgrain’s lead, did not engage in such speculation about her heroine’s motives even though, to use Nancy Miller’s terms, Angéline’s actions were also unusual – if not unreadable – in the sociolect of her time. Women in late nineteenth-century Quebec were generally expected to marry and raise large families. If a woman chose to remain celibate, she could find social sanction for her decision only by entering a religious order. Angéline de Montbrun, on the other hand, refuses to marry while at the same time retaining her personal autonomy, including control of her dead father’s estate. Such situations certainly existed in nineteenth-century Quebec, where women had a legal right to inherit from fathers and husbands: L’Histoire des femmes au Québec cites several cases of women in the early part of the century who remained unmarried while running family businesses (113–14). However, by the end of the century, women’s roles were subjected to greater ideological constraints, and far greater numbers of unmarried women were entering convents in order, as suggested

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by L’Histoire des femmes au Québec, to provide the low-cost labour needed for social services controlled by the Church (223–6). At this time, the figure of the autonomous unmarried woman was so peripheral to the idealized wife and mother that she was not considered worthy of enshrinement in literature. In the highly regarded genre of the roman de la terre, which concerned itself precisely with the issue of inheritance, the few women characters who inherited land were expected to find themselves a man capable of exercising the appropriate patriarchal domination, and, as Janine Boynard-Frot reminds us, women unmarried at the beginning of such novels were inevitably married by the end. What is unusual about Angéline’s decision is not only her refusal of marriage, but, even more, her assertion of agency and autonomy by remaining as administrator of her father’s estate rather than following her friends Mina and Emma into the convent. And, in fact, Angéline’s decision was not very distant from that of her creator, who maintained her state of celibacy, but, despite her religious devotion and some involvement in a religious community, never took religious vows, preferring to maintain her independence and earn her living as a writer. For modern feminist readers like Madeleine Gagnon and Patricia Smart, Angéline’s assertion of autonomy is at the centre of the novel, demonstrating, for Gagnon, her “desire for power, domination, and possession” (66). In Gagnon’s reading, there is a gradual assertion of power on the part of the protagonist, who evolves from the submissive daughter silently watching herself become an object of exchange between father and fiancé to the woman who, by eliminating her father and symbolically castrating her fiancé, takes possession of the heritage: “Angéline has refused to be given and possessed in the first part of the story. She eliminates the two heroes in the second. And, finally a heroine, she possesses and gives” (66). While Gagnon had read Angéline de Montbrun through the lens of the discourse of decolonization prevalent in the Quebec of the early 1970s, Patricia Smart sees it, in the feminist 1980s, as the staging of a woman attempting to write “in the father’s house.” For Smart, Conan’s strange plot tells the story of a woman coming to writing, “the path followed by a woman’s voice seeking to emerge into writing and to insert itself in time and reality.” The novel is a series of failed rebellions that ultimately permit the protagonist to gain the autonomy of the written word in the final section: “a female ‘I’ emerges from the destruction wrought in the literary edifice” (26). Smart’s reading of Angéline’s quest for autonomy does offer a convincing interpretation of the text, one that accentuates the gap between Conan’s novel and the social roles of women in her time,

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while Gagnon sees Angéline’s assertion of autonomy in the context of “power, domination, and possession.” In the terms of Conan herself, however, it is an act of fidelity and renunciation. In my own, late twentieth-century feminist reading, Angéline de Montbrun asserts her autonomy by removing herself from the love story as it is written by men and declaring her fidelity to another vision of love, one in which women are not the helpless victims of an inconstant masculine passion. At the cost of great personal suffering – suffering shared by the women after whom she has chosen to model herself – Angéline de Montbrun is able to affirm her power over her own life and her own vision of human reality. Angéline’s vision of ideal love is one that can paradoxically be preserved only through its renunciation. If her actions presented no enigma to a late nineteeth-century reader like Casgrain, it was because they were consonant with the religious and patriotic ideals of the day, which made fidelity and self-sacrifice central values. For Casgrain and those who espoused the Quebec nationalist cause, fidelity to the Catholic faith and the heroic French-Canadian culture that embodied its ideals was the basis of their patriotic action. In this spiritual conception of life, the capacity for self-sacrifice and renunciation of earthly pursuits was an important virtue, and one particularly central to the role of women, who were constantly expected to sacrifice themselves to higher goals. Paradoxically, in such an ideological context, even acts of feminine autonomy could be justified if they appeared to conform to these fundamental values. In Conan’s text, it is clearly Angéline’s perception of her fiancé’s loss of affection and not a religious élan that is responsible for her decision to break off the engagement: “she came to the painful conviction that only honour and pity were detaining him near her. And her resolution soon taken was firmly executed” (74).a Her decision is prefaced by a moral commentary and psychological explanation: “But, as has been said, in the love of a man, even when it seems as deep as the ocean, there are lacunae, unexpected dry spots. And when his fiancée had lost the enchanting charm of her beauty, Maurice Darville’s heart cooled” (74).b Rather awkwardly, to be sure, Conan has contrived an occasion for Maurice to display his inconstancy, which becomes only one illustration of the more generalized inconstancy of human love. Later in the text, this theme is reiterated in a citation from Chateaubriand, in which the old missionary consoles Atala: “Daughter … one might just as well cry over a dream. Do you know man’s heart, and could you count the inconsistencies of his desires?” (134).c While inconstancy may be a constant of the heart of “man,” it is a failing from which Conan’s women characters seem remarkably

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exempt, and Conan delights in presenting multiple examples of the constancy and undying fidelity of women.7 Long before either of the two major characters have been faced with the necessity of renunciation, Conan inserts a sombre vision of the insufficiency of human love in the words of Mina’s friend Emma, who has already decided to enter a convent: “however it appears at certain times, it is the cold, the barren, the dull which make the bottom of the sea, and it is not love that makes the bottom of life” (61).d Reflecting a viewpoint that she herself calls “the wisdom of women,” Emma seems to ground her doubts in a certain pessimism about men: “you hide everything needed to love forever a man of character, dignity, refinement and – I ask forgiveness of these gentlemen – all that seems very rare” (61, italics mine).e The unfailing nature of women’s love is mirrored in Maurice’s sister Mina, who has long felt an unrequited passion for Angéline’s father. When Monsieur de Montbrun dies, Mina abandons the world to become a nun rather than marry one of her many suitors. Even the minor female characters in the novel share this ability to remain eternally faithful. The poor fisherman’s daughter whom Angéline’s father has aided keeps a remembrance of him in her room and tells Angéline, “I will die before I forget him” (90).f Angéline herself maintains an undying love for her father, and even her love for Maurice is seemingly unaffected by his loss of passion for her or even by their long separation. Although she has resigned herself to a life of solitude, she still spends time imagining Maurice’s reactions when he inherits her house after her death, toys with the idea of writing to him, and on the last page of the novel she laments, “And yet how sweet life with you would still be” (168).g While repeating to herself words of wisdom about the superiority of divine love, she is, throughout her journal, still preoccupied with Maurice. By the end of the novel, she attains an attitude of resignation but never one of transcendance. Angéline’s renunciation of marriage, and thus of women’s accepted social role, finds its justification in its fidelity to higher spiritual goals. Read in this way, the protagonist’s decision, while unusual, is not without historical precedent, and Conan calls upon those precedents with multiple references throughout her text to francophone women of the past. The most important of these predecessors is Marie de l’Incarnation, the beatified seventeenth-century nun who was a founding mother of Quebec and who makes a crucial appearance in Angéline de Montbrun. Founder of the Ursuline convent in Quebec City which is still renowned for its education of women, Marie de l’Incarnation had presided in spirit over the education of Félicité Angers herself. She was also very present in the contemporary

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nationalist ideology: Casgrain himself had published a major study of her life in 1864. In Conan’s text, however, Marie de l’Incarnation is represented not as the capable administrator or writer of spiritual memoirs – roles, it should be noted, that are also shared by Angéline de Montbrun – but as a mother renouncing her love for her son. In a piercing moment of reminiscence, Angéline remembers reading a life of Marie de l’Incarnation (perhaps Casgrain’s own text) with her beloved father, and she recalls her father’s tears at the depiction of Marie de l’Incarnation’s final abandonment of her young son, “at that passage where her son says that she never kissed him – not even when she left for Canada, when she knew that she was seeing him for the last time” (91).h This was indeed a pivotal moment in the life of Marie de l’Incarnation, and she spends much time, in the spiritual autobiography she prepared at her son’s request, explaining the reasons for this desertion of him at the age of twelve to pursue her own spiritual life. Natalie Zemon Davis sees the abandonment and its resolution through writing as a central subject of Marie de l’Incarnation’s work: “The rewritten spiritual autobiography and the sequence of letters between Marie Guyart [de l’Incarnation] and Claude Martin constituted an act of forgiveness, Marie of herself and Claude of his mother for the abandonment. Through an ocean of words, mother and son came to terms with each other” (103). In justifying an action so opposed to the normal expectations for maternal behaviour that even her son’s schoolmates protested on his behalf, Marie de l’Incarnation describes her painful decision as necessary to raise the earthly love of mother and son to the only meaningful spiritual level, in complete devotion to God. Invoking this powerful model of renunciation and autonomy, and supported by the full force of Marie de l’Incarnation’s well-known spiritual and material achievements in early Quebec, Laure Conan provided an implicit validation of her heroine’s enigmatic choice. She also adopted much of Marie de l’Incarnation’s spiritual discourse, lamenting the impermanence of earthly love and magnifying the pleasures to be found only in the love of Christ. Although, to a sceptical modern reader, the spiritual struggles of Angéline de Montbrun appear to blur the lines that separated earthly from divine, these same motifs of yearning and renunciation find an antecedent in the writings of Marie de l’Incarnation, whose spirituality was viewed as beyond reproach. Marie de l’Incarnation also provided Conan with a powerful model for the expression of a woman’s personal voice, one at times filled with anguish and longing.8 Such a voice could not easily find literary expression at this time in Quebec, when collective rather than

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individual sentiments seemed to be the order of the day. Perhaps the most radical feature of Angéline de Montbrun was this use of the personal voice, especially in the long last section containing the “intimate pages” written by Angéline in the course of her solitary emotional struggle. Certainly conscious of her departure from the characteristic mode of impersonal and omniscient narration that dominated nineteenth-century Quebec novels, Conan again carefully established a precedent in the personal effusions that occur in the letters and spiritual autobiography of Marie de l’Incarnation. In these writings, primarily a record of her daily experiences as she attempted to found a convent in a new land and educate and catechize young women both native and French, Marie de l’Incarnation employed the spiritual vocabulary of other religious writers in the Europe of her time, many of whom, as Mary Rowan has pointed out, were women, like Jeanne de Chantal and Thérèse d’Avila. Thus Marie de l’Incarnation inscribed the strange adventures of life in New France into the already familiar story of spiritual struggle to attain God’s grace. Although there is no reason to think that she herself did not firmly believe in the authenticity of the vision she presented to her correspondents, it is nonetheless true that her success in translating the adventures of the New World into spiritual terms was a key factor in their continued support from religious benefactors in France, which was clearly the objective of her letters. As Marie de l’Incarnation had ensured the readability of her experience by inscribing it within a familiar and legitimized discourse, Laure Conan invoked the sanctified writings of her spiritual foremother as a precedent both for the spiritual adventure of her protagonist and the intensely personal literary form in which it was presented. Conan also evokes a more recent predecessor in the diary genre in the Journal of Eugénie de Guérin,9 one of the few nineteenth-century French texts repeatedly mentioned as approved reading for women in Quebec, perhaps as a consequence of de Guérin’s conservative political views. Laure Conan’s explicit literary references to her predecessor certainly helped suggest the admiring title of “our Eugénie de Guérin” attributed to her in Casgrain’s preface. Addressed to her dead brother, de Guérin’s journal is, like Angéline de Montbrun’s, an elevation of spiritual values and a lament for a lost love. De Guérin’s selfless devotion to her brother Maurice, even after his death, provided both the parallel with Angéline’s experience of love and loss with another man named Maurice and a guarantee of the writer’s own respectability.10 One of the few published examples of authentic women’s diarywriting in nineteenth-century France, the Journal also provided a

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respected model for the form used by Conan. As Valerie Raoul points out, diary writing was a fairly common activity for young French girls in the nineteenth century, as it was in Quebec, and the representation of a girl writing a diary was not uncommon in French fiction written by men. Yet, paradoxically, in France only fictional, male-authored women’s “diaries” were published, while real diaries written by women seldom saw the light of day.11 The exceptions were published as a consequence of their author’s relationship to a famous man: thus the diary of Eugénie de Guérin, in homage to the memory of her famous brother, and the diary of the mother of the poet Lamartine. In contrast, no women’s diaries were published in nineteenth-century Quebec: the diary of the journalist Henriette Dessaules, now considered the most important example of women’s diary-writing in Quebec, did not see publication until 1971. Women’s letter-writing was also an important activity in nineteenthcentury Quebec, and the epistolary form of the first section of Conan’s novel is grounded both in social reality and in the historical reality of the correspondence of Marie de l’Incarnation. Women’s letters in nineteenth-century Quebec, unlike those of their heroic predecessors, largely went unpublished, and even the fascinating letters written by Julie Bruneau Papineau during the Rebellion of 1837 were not published until the twentieth century. Interestingly, however, a woman’s correspondence with her husand did constitute the basis of the one book published by a Quebec francophone woman during the period 1840–69. It may not be irrelevant that this solitary example was written by the mother of Henri-Raymond Casgrain, Eliza Baby. In her own quest for literary models Conan prudently invokes the respectable Mme de Sévigné, in preference to later examples of the epistolary genre, such as Les Liaisons dangereuses and La Nouvelle Héloise, that might have been considered morally dangerous. The presence of Marie de l’Incarnation, Eugénie de Guérin, and Mme de Sévigné calls forth a corpus of morally respectable women’s writing amongst which Angéline de Montbrun can take a place, not as a dangerous innovation but as a commendable continuation: Conan established the legitimacy of her novel-writing by positioning herself within a company of respectable women. The references to Marie de l’Incarnation also furnish another kind of validation for Angéline de Montbrun, by anchoring it in Quebec’s heroic past. The romantic tragedy of a contemporary woman belonging to the rural aristocracy, Angéline de Montbrun does not fit in with either of the two literary genres dominant in Quebec at the time, the historical novel or the roman de la terre. This anomaly was registered by Casgrain, when he remarked on the rarity of “Canadian passages”

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in Conan’s work and directed his protégée to his own favoured genre of historical fiction. But if Casgrain found Angéline de Montbrun acceptable, it is in part because Conan had, even in her first novel, created some historical grounding for her character, thus adding another dimension to Angéline’s act of fidelity. Marie de l’Incarnation had already provided an important example of a woman whose fidelity to her vision induced self-sacrifice in love, but, not content with such real historical figures, Conan also inserts a fictitious eighteenthcentury ancestor for Angéline, in the midst of a host of authentic masculine figures taken from the Quebec history written by FrançoisXavier Garneau, a reference cited with approval by Casgrain.12 A French survivor of the British conquest of Quebec, the invented Mme de Montbrun resigns herself to the loss of her husband and two sons in the battle of Sainte-Foy and demonstrates her fidelity to the values of New France by tilling the fields herself in a struggle for physical and cultural survivance. Conan’s patriotic evocation of Angéline’s “valiant” ancestor suggests a parallel between the eighteenth-century woman’s sacrifice and Angéline’s own, despite the fact that none of the same issues seem to be at stake. The comparison is then extended, quite unexpectedly, to the nineteenth-century martyr of the 1837 Rebellion, Chevalier de Lorimier: “I have a letter of hers [Mme de Montbrun] from after the surrender … It is a proud letter. “They gave all the blood of their veins,” she writes of her husband and sons, “and I have given that of my heart; I have shed all my tears. But what is sad is to know that the country is lost.” The noble woman was mistaken. As Chevalier de Lorimier said the day before he climbed the scaffold, “the blood and tears shed on the altar of the nation are a fount of life for the people,” and Canada will live. Ah! I hope so” (145).i As a quasi-historical figure and a model of fidelity to the vision of a French Canada, Mme de Montbrun suggests the future direction of Conan’s work.

rewriting the narratives of history The success of Laure Conan in making a woman’s love story acceptable to an elite reading public in nineteenth-century Quebec was a tour de force, but not one destined for easy repetition. As we have seen, Casgrain urged Conan to turn her hand to the historical novel, the genre he himself considered most important to the future of French Canada’s new national literature. By the time Conan published her first historical novel in 1891, the genre had seen a number

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of notable examples. But where Conan found occasions for psychological analysis and the expression of personal anguish, other novelists used historical material quite differently, seeking interesting twists on plot. As Pierre Nepveu has said, “it is clearly the human adventure that interests Laure Conan in the texts of Canada’s origins … especially the subjective experience of settlement and daily living, in the midst of ‘the endless forest’“ (Intérieurs du Nouveau Monde, 84). One of Conan’s predecessors in the historical novel was Adèle Bibaud, who published Avant la conquête [Before the Conquest] in 1887. Bibaud’s interest in history was no doubt encouraged by the example of her grandfather, Michel Bibeau, one of Quebec’s early historians. Her two historical novels – Avant la conquête and Les Fiancés de Saint-Eustache [The Fiancés of Saint-Eustache] in 1910 – used tragic events of Quebec history, the British conquest and the defeated Rebellion of 1837, as backdrops for sentimental and even melodramatic stories, not unlike the very popular work of the English-Canadian Rosanna Mullins-Leprohon, which had been available in French since the 1860s. Some real historical figures lend their presence to Bibaud’s novels – General Montcalm in Avant la conquête and Louis-Joseph Papineau in Les Fiancés de Saint-Eustache – but the major characters are Bibaud’s own creations. Several of these major characters are women, but Bibaud’s heroines remain securely within the bounds of proper femininity, fitting comfortably into the mode of damsels in distress. Although these women are intelligent and even capable of writing poetry, they seem unable to participate meaningfully in the historical action of the novels. In Avant la conquête one of Bibaud’s feminine characters does break out of this passive mold – but, not insignificantly, she is a Native princess. While the white heroine wrings her hands at the bedside of her dying lover, her resourceful Native rival leaps out from behind the bed to save the hero’s life with a few drops of a secret elixir and then goes on to save his life twice over again, once in the heat of combat. This unheard-of freedom of action, however, is possible only because she is a Native and thus freed from the restrictions placed on her helpless white sisters. Nonetheless, these heroics do not win the heart of her man: while they do gain her the hero’s attention, he rather predictably prefers his frail white sweetheart. In contrast, Elisabeth Moyen in Conan’s L’Oublié [The Forgotten One] willingly offers her life to protect her beloved Lambert Closse from attack by a hostile Iroquois chief and thereby gains his love, although he still reserves a higher allegiance to the spiritual crusade to establish Ville-Marie, the fledgling Montreal. This heroic exploit is a unique fantasy of feminine agency, even in the historical novels of

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Laure Conan. Yet the women protagonists of both her early historical novels, A l’œuvre et à l’épreuve [At Work and On Trial] (1891) and L’Oublié (1900), stand out from the self-effacing feminine figures who had preceded them in Quebec fiction. Jeanne LaFrance observes in her study of Quebec novels written between 1837 and 1862 that the typical female characters are submissive, silent, and lacking in initiative: “The two hundred or so women in these novels are presented to us as ‘peerless housewives,’ rarely ill-tempered and tirelessly submissive, obedient, virtuous, devoted, silent, taking little initiative and abandoning to their husbands all responsibilities and important decisions. Only the shrews without husbands seem endowed with that masculine vigor that ordinarily characterizes the wives of pioneers; the fragility and physical frailty of most of these women is astonishing” (145). In Conan’s early novels, on the contrary, it is the women who make the major decisions and undertake the most significant actions, even if their actions are less immediately visible than those of their male counterparts. Conan’s women operate within a very restricted concept of women’s role and an even more restricted dramatic situation, yet within the paradigm of elected self-sacrifice they display an unprecedented dynamism and ultimately manage to become masters of their fate. In creating her women characters, Conan was able to look to the model of feminine self-sacrifice already established by the significant but marginal figure of Blanche d’Haberville in Les Anciens Canadiens, another novel that had been heavily promoted by Casgrain. Like Angéline de Montbrun, Blanche d’Haberville is an exemplar of fidelity and renunciation, sacrificing her love for her Scottish lover out of loyalty to her own defeated and endangered French-Canadian culture. In Conan’s works this renunciatory act becomes central rather than peripheral to the action of the novel, and the struggle of her feminine protagonists is the focus of a historical drama that, in Conan’s hands, takes on new psychological dimensions. The self-sacrificing attitude of the Conan heroine is typified by Thérèse Raynol, who appears in her first published work, the 1878 novella entitled Un Amour vrai [A True Love]. The plot is extremely simple. Thérèse makes a vow to the Virgin to give her life in exchange for the conversion of her Protestant fiancé. Since the Virgin is quick to answer prayers in the nineteenth-century Quebec novel (in contrast to the situation that prevails in the French-authored Maria Chapdelaine), Thérèse promptly contracts a mortal illness, and her lover not only converts but becomes a monk. What is interesting today about this somewhat improbable tale is the writer’s attempt to open the possibility of effective feminine action. If women were to

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be a centre of focus, as they are in almost all of Conan’s work, then they could not manifest the passivity that had been the hallmark of their predecessors in the Quebec novel. Neither could they violate the norms of acceptable feminine action that dominated nineteenthcentury Quebec society, prescribing womanly immolation on the altar of family and faith. Remaining well within social norms and, in fact, carrying them to their logical conclusion of total self-annihilation, Conan’s Thérèse Raynol is nonetheless permitted to accede to heroic action. In Angéline de Montbrun the protagonist’s renunciation, unlike that of Thérèse Raynol, is really of benefit to no one; it is in the service of no higher cause, less an act of self-abnegation than an assertion of feminine autonomy. But in her first two historical novels Conan experiments with the creation of a new fictional universe in which such acts could find a meaningful place. Exploring the heroic early years of New France through a lens formed of patriotic nostalgia and her own idealized desire, she develops a vision of an entire society dominated by the ideals of fidelity and self-sacrifice that had earlier been the property of her women characters. By creating a universe in which these ideals are shared by men, who are capable of acting on the world, Conan removes her women figures from the margins and enables them to participate in significant historical action. Although their field of choice is still severely limited, these heroines actively assume the self-sacrificial path laid out for them, a renunciation that has the paradoxical effect of bringing them closer to the man they love. It is perhaps because their actions are so integrated into their social world – or perhaps, as Roger LeMoine speculated in his introduction to A l’œuvre et à l’épreuve, that Conan had gained greater understanding of her own personal drama – that the writer no longer feels it necessary to indulge her heroines in a direct, first-person expression of their anguish. Their tranquil acceptance of their renunciatory role is reflected in a more conventional third-person narration, which nonetheless leaves room for dialogues fraught with strong emotion. In both A l’œuvre et à l’épreuve and L’Oublié the beloved men turn away from the female protagonists, repeating the pattern initiated in Angéline de Montbrun and perhaps the personal experience of Félicité Angers. But, unlike Maurice Darville, these men, both historically grounded, act not out of involuntary inconstancy but because of their own devotion to a higher cause, the service of God. In A l’œuvre et à l’épreuve Charles Garnier refuses marriage in order to follow his calling as a priest and later as a missionary martyred by the Iroquois of New France. While the destiny of Garnier provides exciting adventures,

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which Conan borrowed conscientiously from the famous Relations of the Jesuits of Quebec, Garnier’s life offers little psychological conflict. From his first appearance in the novel, he is sure of his vocation, and, after a brief skirmish with his longstanding attraction to his destined fiancée, Gisèle Méliand, he leaves her to meet incredible hardships and cruel martyrdom without for a moment deviating from his mood of serene optimism. The psychological struggle is left to his abandoned fiancée, Gisèle, a character invented by Conan to fill the space in Garnier’s early life that had been left blank by the Jesuit Relations. Having created Gisèle, Conan anchors her in historical reality by placing her in contact with the real and imposing figure of Mère Angélique Arnaud, who presides over her convent education at Port-Royal-des-Champs. Although Gisèle did not make the decision that seals her solitary fate, she does have the freedom to determine her response to it. Like Angéline de Montbrun, she chooses to assume her situation, out of fidelity to her love and a spirit of self-sacrifice. Rather than contenting herself with passive acceptance, Gisèle takes an active role in convincing Charles’ father to give the necessary consent, first, to his son’s entry into the priesthood and, second, to his departure for Quebec. After remaining for a time to comfort her fiancé’s bereft parents, Gisèle ends her days in a convent, where she joyfully receives the news of Charles’s martyrdom, a heroic sacrifice in which she too played a part. As Maïr Verthuy has remarked, the project of colonization of New France that is outlined in Conan’s novel by the historical figure of Samuel de Champlain allowed little room for women, and the heroic exploits reported in the Relations, the forays into the wilderness and life with the Native Indians, were simply not open to female participation. This is perhaps less a criticism of the early colonizing project, as Verthuy would have it, than a simple recognition of historical fact on Conan’s part. What was innovative in Conan’s use of the Relations, historical documents that evidently held great fascination for her, was the construction of a heroic role for a woman in the silences of the Jesuit text, the one major fictional addition she made to an otherwise authentic historical account. And the role invented for Gisèle Méliand contains a heroic self-sacrifice implicitly compared to the martyrdom of the man. In L’Oublié, however, Conan took care to choose a historical episode that placed a woman, if only for a moment, at the centre of the heroic action, an episode that so appealed to her imagination that she used it twice, returning to the subject of L’Oublié near the end of her life in her short play, Aux jours de Maisonneuve [In the Days of

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Maisonneuve], written in 1920. Conan’s relentless focus on Elisabeth Moyen, rather than her more famous husband, Lambert Closse, was, in fact, a source of astonishment to Camille Roy, Quebec’s first literary historian, who wrote on L’Oublié in 1903, three years after its publication. Although he did not hesitate to place the novel in “our Canadian library,” under the rubric of the historical novel, Roy seemed perplexed by Conan’s lack of proper focus on the male protagonist: “Really Lambert is too often cast aside in L’Oublié. The author too often forgets this ‘forgotten one’ herself, and the reader begins to lose patience when the main hero is more or less neglected for the first hundred pages of a book of only two hundred fifty pages, and when Elisabeth is the one whose character is developed. Why doesn’t Lambert have a more important role in the book of which he is the subject?” (108). After some reflection, Roy concludes that perhaps Elisabeth Moyen, as well as Jeanne Mance, the formidable heroine of early Montreal, were of more interest to the author: “It is probably also because she takes greater pleasure in depicting delicate, feminine souls that she gives too great a role in her book to Elisabeth and Jeanne Mance” (114). A historically based protagonist, but one all but “forgotten” by contemporary historians, Elisabeth Moyen in the novel is in love with the heroic Lambert Closse, who is torn between his desire for happiness with her and his yearning to immolate himself to the Virgin in defending the vulnerable settlement of Ville-Marie. His desire for self-sacrifice is greatly facilitated, as it was for Charles Garnier, by the omnipresent Iroquois, who were only too eager to provide occasions for martyrdom. In the meantime, however, the heroine herself has an opportunity to act by risking her life to save her beloved from a vengeful Native’s murderous attack. Elisabeth Moyen thus becomes the first of Laure Conan’s protagonists to take meaningful action not directed exclusively against herself, although it remains appropriately self-sacrificial. She is also the first of Conan’s heroines to get her man, using the model of feminine self-sacrifice as a means to real power. Overcome by her courage and devotion, Lambert Closse momentarily puts aside his quest for martyrdom and gives in to the passion that had been slowly building between the two protagonists since their first dramatic meeting, when he had, at the risk of his own life, obtained her release from Indian captivity. In L’Oublié Conan had located a historical subject that authorized a sustained focus on the tragic destiny of a great love. Here, in contrast to Angéline de Montbrun, Conan’s narrative moves smoothly and with minimal implausibility through the birth and acknowledgment of the love between Elisabeth and Lambert Closse, the brief joys of their

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married life, set against the forest backdrop of the early colony, and the pain of Closse’s willed detachment from domestic happiness to die in the defense of the precarious but divinely inspired settlement. But along with the perfect love story, one that conformed to Conan’s preferred pattern of great passion cut short by a sublime self-sacrificial gesture, the story of Elisabeth Moyen offered Conan a setting in which the values of resolute renunciation previously displayed by her women characters were shared by an entire society and where dramatic historical events both reflected the emotions of the protagonists and provided comprehensible motivations for their actions. As Elisabeth Moyen and Lambert Closse risk their lives one for the other, a small force of seventeen young men sacrifices itself to save Montreal from a massive Iroquois attack. This event, in its turn, initiates a personal crisis for Lambert Closse, and provokes him to sacrifice life with his wife and child in order to immolate himself on the altar of Ville-Marie. In their promise of heroism and adventure, the early years of New France had always held particular appeal for Laure Conan. In Angéline de Montbrun both Angéline and Mina dream of participating in the drama of the Quebec past. Mina writes her brother: “As for me, I have always regretted not having been born in the first days of the colony, when every Canadian was a hero. There is no doubt that that was a great era for Canadian women. It is true that once in a while they heard that a friend had been scalped, but then those who lived at that time deserved to be mourned. On that point, Angeline shares my feelings” (18). j As Conan portrays it in L’Oublié, the early years of Ville-Marie offer an “atmosphere of bloody and celestial poetry” (263), an appealing combination of military adventure and religious devotion. The repeated attacks of the Iroquois on the small settlement – far more exposed than the more established one at Quebec City – demanded self-sacrifice from every member of the community and turned even the simple gestures of everyday life, such as plowing the fields and caring for the sick, into acts of brave resistance. Heroism is at the centre of this universe, as indicated by the epigraph from La Chanson de Roland, through which Conan implicitly compares Montreal’s early settlers to the small band of soldiers led by Roland, who sacrificed themselves to save the large body of Charlemagne’s Christian army, a comparison that sets the French-Canadian people within the legitimizing frame of a pre-revolutionary, Christian France. At the same time, Conan enlarges the heroic “we” of the epigraph to encompass an entire community that, unlike Roland’s rear guard, was made up of both men and women. Although in early Ville-Marie

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men did most of the actual fighting, women were also of necessity on the front lines of defense;13 as in the case of Elisabeth Moyen, women were subject to capture by the Iroquois, and whole families were massacred in their attacks. Elisabeth Moyen chooses to remain in the exposed settlement rather than returning to the relative safety of Quebec City, a courageous decision to which several scenes are devoted in Conan’s later dramatized version of the novel. Like her, other women are eager to take their place among the defenders of this holy colony dedicated to the Virgin. In the opening pages of the novel, the great founding father, Maisonneuve, shows his secretary a miniature of the Virgin inscribed by his sister with her plea to be allowed to come to Montreal, along with other members of her religious community. The courage of women in early Montreal becomes a focus of Conan’s text, as she presents the women who played defining roles in the settlement’s first years. The orphaned Elisabeth Moyen is immediately placed in the care of the settlement’s “two angels,” Marguerite Bourgeois and Jeanne Mance. Jeanne Mance, in particular, is described as “the heroine of Villemarie” (241), or simply referred to as “the heroine,” and she displays an intriguing mixture of maternal and virile qualities as she calmly brushes Elisabeth’s badly tangled hair amidst the shots and warwhoops of a minor Indian attack. While pointing out the importance of the educator Marguerite Bourgeois, whom she describes as a “celestial creature” (245), Jeanne Mance signals the presence of other, less famous women who have also chosen to share the dangers of settlement, wives of workers and her own nursing assistant Geneviève. Conan also memorializes the Montreal mothers who, without a murmur, sent their sons off to certain death with Daulac’s small expeditionary force, women who fully shared the sacrifice of the young men. As Elisabeth Moyen describes her surroundings in a letter to her spiritual adviser and teacher, Marie de l’Incarnation in Quebec City, she includes herself as part of the courageous “we”: “We are always in peril. This outpost, unceasingly attacked, survives only by a sort of miracle … It is a colony of apostles, of heroes, that seems like a single family … they live like the faithful of the early Church, awaiting the hour of martyrdom.”k Not only does this community, like the family and the early Church, include women as full members, but it is animated entirely by the values of fidelity and self-sacrifice that, at least in Angéline de Montbrun, were the special property of women characters. The entire community shares a dedication to the Virgin. A female figure who combines masculine and feminine virtues, the Virgin mingles power

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with faith in a radiance that constantly reappears in Conan’s descriptions of her women characters: Jeanne Mance is described as “surrounded by divine light as by a sun,”l and Elisabeth herself, in her youth and passion, is typically radiant. As Roger LeMoine observes, Conan’s vision of early Montreal as a small resolute community inspired by religious devotion was not far from that purveyed in the historical sources on which she relied, but Conan makes the selfsacrificial mission of this holy colony a leitmotiv of her novel, restated by each of the major characters, especially Lambert Closse: “I came here to fight and die … I want to immolate myself totally … forgotten by all … except by Her.”m In this charged atmosphere Conan brings together the opportunity for virile heroism with a feminine desire for self-abnegation. As Ginette Michaud has observed, early Montreal becomes, in Conan’s vision, the place where opposites are reconciled: “In the image of Ville-Marie come to mingle … the most heroic and most virile virtues, but also, curiously, the most feminine: the moment an allusion is made to Ville-Marie, sacrifice (of love), abnegation and giving (of self, to a Lady greater still) are constantly exalted. Ville-Marie, and especially the figure of the Virgin, is the place where these opposing images … meet and exchange their respective natures, sometimes even going to the point of inversion: the virile hero, feminized by his wound, softens as he invokes the Virgin, the heroine is virilized” (78). By creating a fictional world in which the values of fidelity and devotion extolled by Angéline de Montbrun could be shared by an entire society, Laure Conan not only fulfilled the wishes of Casgrain, but, more important, created a space in which her women characters were free to take meaningful action. Although not totally exempt from the solitary anguish that is the lot of all Conan protagonists, Elisabeth Moyen nonetheless finds it possible, if only for a brief moment, to live out the author’s own cherished fantasies of heroic action and romantic passion. Yet Conan’s creation of a strong, resourceful woman protagonist and her preoccupation with another rewriting of her own unhappy passion did not draw criticism from conservative readers. If, years later, the austere Camille Roy was still prepared to give L’Oublié a place of honour in his newly created Quebec literary canon,14 it was because Conan had bathed her characters and plot in the radiant light of a foundation myth that spoke to the messianic mission through which French-Canadians had come to define themselves and their national destiny. Her representation of the early community as freed from self-interest and inspired by religious ideals was an apt embodiment of the spiritual mission in which men like Casgrain had seen the destiny of the French-Canadian

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people, affirming their unique identity in the face of their materialistic Anglo-Saxon neighbours. But Elisabeth Moyen represents a highpoint of feminine passion and heroism in Conan’s work. In one of her later novels, L’Obscure Souffrance [Obscure Suffering] (1919), Conan provides what could be seen as an ironic commentary on the brief outbursts of ostentatious feminine heroism that had been evident in her earlier experiments with historical fiction. Struggling to sustain the daily burden of life with an alcoholic father, the protagonist confides to her journal that she has invented daydreams of noble action in an attempt to escape the harsh reality of her daily life: “And stupidly I lull myself with dreams of action, of good deeds … I tear myself from abject reality, I seek refuge in dream, I invent for myself a life more to my taste, and so noble, so beautiful, so sweet.”n But in L’Obscure Souffrance feminine heroism remains well within the bounds of “abject reality,” as the protagonist makes her sacrifice of self not in a single impressive act but only in an unending series of anonymous self-denials. The pathetic narrator of L’Obscure Souffrance, enclosed within the domestic sphere by traditional feminine duties, was probably far closer to the experience of women of Conan’s time15 than were the heroic adventures of Elisabeth Moyen. But for a time, the form of the historical novel, imposed by a narrowly defined vision of FrenchCanadian identity, had offered Laure Conan and other early Quebec women writers, like Adèle Bibaud and Gaëtane de Montreuil,16 a space within which women could invent the experiences denied them by the social restrictions of Quebec at the turn of the century. As the new century proceeded, however, even this literary freedom was limited by new constraints. Conan’s final venture into the historical novel, La Sève immortelle [The Immortal Seed], written at the end of her life in 1923, returns to the period immediately following the French defeat in 1760. She had already envisioned this era, in the figure of Angéline de Montbrun’s valiant foremother, as the heroic beginning of French-Canadian survivance. La Sève immortelle tells the story of Jean Le Gardeur de Tilly, who must renounce his love for Thérèse d’Autrée, forced by her father to return to France, in order to marry Guillemette de Muy, who shares his devotion to preserving the family’s lands in Quebec. Guillemette is a courageous and energetic figure, who, as Katharine Roberts points out, bases her concept of French-Canadian identity largely on the historical contributions of women. Yet her sphere of action is essentially limited to refusing marriage to a prosperous anglophone in an act of patriotic fidelity. Jean’s mother, Mme de Tilly, is also a model of steadfastness and courage. Neither woman,

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however, attains to the self-sufficient and independent heroism of Conan’s eighteenth-century Mme de Montbrun, who tills the fields alone as she mourns the deaths of husband and sons. In La Sève immortelle the role of possessor of the land, as well as the route of anguished sacrifice and self-renunciation that Conan had earlier given to female protagonists, has passed to a man. As Maïr Verthuy comments acidly, “Only a man … can incarnate the ‘virile’ virtues necessary for waging this other war, to inseminate the land and the women” (38). But La Sève immortelle is the product of a new century, and, as Roger LeMoine observes in his introduction, it is already on its way to participating in a newly dominant genre: “Here the historical novel is transformed into a roman du terroir” (96). In this new genre of the roman de la terre, the land and its male possessor are assigned the dominant role. LeMoine also notes that in this, her last novel, Laure Conan has finally freed herself from the necessity of recounting her sentimental adventure (101). The price of such freedom, however, is submission to the rigid demands of a literary genre that would imprison Quebec’s women and their literary expression for much of the first half of the century.

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2 Women and the Romance of the Land we must abide in that Province where our fathers dwelt, living as they have lived. – Louis Hémon, Maria Chapdelaine her mother’s life appeared to be a long dreary voyage under leaden skies that she, Florentine, would never make. – Gabrielle Roy, Bonheur d’occasion

When in 1895 Robertine Barry, a woman journalist writing under the pen-name of Françoise, published a collection of fifteen short stories about rural life innocently entitled Fleurs champêtres [Flowers of the Field], she became the first Quebec woman writer to venture into the genre of rural fiction known as the roman de la terre (or roman du terroir), which became the dominant literary genre in Quebec throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Almost immediately, the slender volume became the target of virulent public attacks by Jules-Paul Tardivel, a prominent ideologue and spokesman for the conservative right. The public controversy surrounding Fleurs champêtres provides an illuminating commentary on the problems that awaited women who attempted to adopt this sacrosanct literary form, since, for those who subscribed to the ideology articulated by such men as Monseigneur Laflèche, bishop of Trois-Rivières, and Lionel Groulx, the “novel of the land” lay at the heart of contemporary concepts of French-Canadian identity. Rural life was the inspiration for a literature designed to create a comforting vision of Quebec identity, but the ideological weight borne by this ideal made the romance of the land a potential minefield, especially for a journalist accustomed to accurate observation and penetrating analysis, and especially when the subject was women. The Quebec rural novel is typically dominated by what I have come to call the “family plot,” in which individual identity is buried: it tells the story of a family rather than the trajectory of a single protagonist.1 Thus, even more than the historical novel, this genre

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would seem to offer an appropriate framework for women’s writing. Women, after all, were clearly active participants in the family, as they were not agents in Quebec history, or were not perceived to be. Philippe Garigue’s studies stress the importance of the mother’s role in the family, and sociologist Jean-Charles Falardeau observes in Notre société et son roman, “The father of the rural family was the putative head of household but it was most often the mother who possessed the real authority” (132). Apparently confirming their real authority in the rural family, the then dominant ideology of survivance venerated women in their strictly defined role as the mothers of numerous children, as a prime element of the Quebec policy of cultural survival through demography known as la revanche des berceaux, translated literally as “the revenge of the cradle.” But despite the importance of their role in society and ideology, mothers do not play an active role in the plot of the roman de la terre, which has been described, in its essence, as the passing on of the land from father to son. Married women have an alarmingly high mortality rate in the roman de la terre, as Janine Boynard-Frot has documented: in almost half of the cases, women already married at the beginning of a novel die or otherwise disappear by the end. As for unmarried women, their primary function is to find a husband, in a marriage connected with the man’s taking possession of the land. Condemned to inactivity and equated with the silent, passive land, women and women’s experience are not often at the centre of this genre, with the exception of the rather anomalous Maria Chapdelaine. Even the few women writers who managed to write romans de la terre seemed unable to alter these fundamental parameters. Only at the end of a long line of rural novels, and in the wake of the deep cultural changes brought by World War ii were Germaine Guèvremont and Gabrielle Roy finally able to create a real role for women in the family plot. In her novels of the immediate postwar period, Le Survenant [The Outlander] and Marie-Didace , soon acclaimed as significant statements about Quebec reality, Germaine Guèvremont was able to use the familiar structures of the roman de la terre to inscribe a vision of women’s experience that subtly altered official stereotypes. Guèvremont’s novels had so much resonance with the public, in fact, that she spent many of the remaining years of her life working on their popular radio and television adaptations, which made her fictional characters household names in Quebec. Also in 1945, in a novel published only a few months after Le Survenant, Gabrielle Roy used essentially the same structure of the roman de la terre in Bonheur d’occasion [The Tin Flute] to describe the

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large Quebec family, traditionally associated with rural life, here transposed into an urban setting. Roy’s novel enjoyed a critical and commercial success in Quebec – as well as in English Canada, the United States, and France – that, according to François Ricard’s biography of Gabrielle Roy, was unprecedented in the history of Quebec literature (268). Thus, at the same historical moment, in works that have been termed Quebec’s last roman de la terre and its first urban novel, women writers transformed the conventional drama of transmission of land from father to son into an anguished drama of inheritance from mother to daughter. In the hands of both women writers, the literary structure that had over the course of a century confirmed the unchanging nature of tradition and rural life became a vehicle for a contestation of traditional values that pointed in the direction of the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. In fact, I would speculate that it was precisely because of their use of the established plot structure and their adoption of many familiar characters that, despite the social conflicts directly expressed in both texts, neither was perceived as a dangerous challenge to the status quo of French-Canadian society or its literature. Even if the dominant ideology of the period known as la grande noirceur (the great darkness) refused to recognize the realities of Quebec’s urbanization and industrialization, those realities were articulated to the readers of Le Survenant/Marie-Didace and Bonheur d’occasion in terms of traditional structures and characters. Having perhaps learned a lesson from the experience of Françoise and other women writers attacked for their disconcertingly accurate observation of women’s reality, Guèvremont and Roy used the familiar framework of the roman de la terre to make penetrating commentaries on social change and to present radically new visions of women’s experience.

the attack on

FLEURS CHAMPÊTRES

The formal relationship of women writers and Quebec rural fiction begins in 1895, when Françoise selected for publication fifteen short rural sketches, labelled historiettes, from the many fictional pieces she had included in her weekly newspaper column Chroniques du lundi [The Monday Chronicles]. Her choice of such an abbreviated form was not unusual for the time, since much short fiction and poetry was published in newspapers and periodicals, and Françoise herself was shortly to become the editor of her own periodical, Le Journal de Françoise, which published many such examples of women’s writing. A sophisticated urban woman with a successful career in journalism,

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Françoise frequented the bourgeois salons of Montreal, where she had inspired a hopeless passion in the young Emile Nelligan, who made her the subject of some of his best-known poems. Such scenes of elegant urban life provide the background for many of the short fictional pieces Françoise published in her column, and it is thus somewhat surprising that she chose a group of sketches set in rural Quebec as the subject matter of her first (and ultimately only) published book. However, Françoise was already well known for her patriotic zeal, having launched a province-wide subscription campaign to save the historic bell from the old French fort of Louisbourg, and she was acutely sensitive to the values articulated by the ideological leaders of her time, who pointed to rural life as the true model of French-Canadian reality. For such clerical figures as Monseigneur Laflèche, agricultural labour was sacred in its very essence and thus central to the French-Canadian cultural identity: “agricultural work is … the most favorable to the development of man’s physical, oral and intellectual faculties and, above all, that which puts him most directly in relationship with God … The prosperity and future of French Canadians is to be found in the fields and pastures of its rich territory.”2 Accepting the premise that agriculture was the key to Quebec’s cultural and economic survival, a number of nineteenth-century novelists had already produced texts that praised the superior moral virtue of simple country life and the joys of clearing new land, as opposed to life in the immoral cities or emigration to the Englishspeaking and materialistic United States. The roman de la terre plays an important and recognized role in Quebec literary history during the century that begins with Patrice Lacombe’s La Terre paternelle in 1846 and closes with Germaine Guèvremont’s Le Survenant in 1945. Most critics are content to cite the genre’s best-known examples – Jean Rivard, Maria Chapdelaine, Un homme et son péché, Menaud maîtredraveur, Trente Arpents, Le Survenant – but Janine Boynard-Frot, who has done more than any other critic to define the parameters of the genre, is able to list a corpus of sixty-one texts (which, in her reading, continued to be written until 1960). The basic form of the genre was already apparent in its first example, Lacombe’s aptly named La Terre paternelle, which focuses on the drama of inheritance from father to son. Here the land is clearly a possession of the father, and as Lori Saint-Martin has tellingly pointed out, the daughter is forced to relinquish her inheritance rights, calling attention to her presence only by a nervous laugh: “she laughs at their absurd schemes for dividing the wealth from which she, as a daughter, is automatically excluded” (“Sexe, pouvoir et dialogue,” 289). It is the family that functions as the real protagonist

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of the novel, not only effacing the presence of women but effectively shutting out the drama of the individual and, as a matter of form and content, silencing the personal voice. It is largely because of the persistence of the family plot throughout the first half of the twentieth century that Quebec literature was so slow to adopt the firstperson narratives that, in other literatures, have been so central to modernism. Like the mystique of the land, this emphasis on the family seems more determined by ideology than by the requirements of literary form. Again Mgr Laflèche provides the most succinct articulation of the reigning belief: constituted by God, the family is organically related to the larger society, “the nation,” of which it is the source. Thus, in speaking of the rural family, Quebec writers had reason to believe they had found an adequate representation of an entire people. Such an analysis of the structure of reality helps to explain why a type of novel which, in other societies and even in highly agriculturalized France, was marginalized as the “regional” or “peasant” novel was given such a central role in Quebec. It was certainly because of the ideological freight borne by this genre that Françoise’s seemingly innocuous rural sketches became an object of attack. Not coincidentally, the attacker, Jules-Paul Tardivel, represented a particularly right-wing version of the dominant clerical ideology in his newspaper, modestly named La Vérité [The Truth]. Tardivel’s attack on Fleurs champêtres was certainly inspired, at least in part, by his dislike of Françoise’s liberal ideas and, as he made quite explicit, her liberal friends. These included women who were active feminists of their day as well as sympathetic liberal male writers like Louis Fréchette, who immediately came to her defense.3 However, the substance of Tardivel’s attack remains somewhat unclear. He made vague accusations of “Rousseauism,” especially in the story entitled “Gracieuse,” but these were effectively ridiculed by Fréchette when he pointed out that neither Françoise nor Tardivel had ever read Rousseau, considered an undesirable revolutionary figure in late nineteenth-century Quebec. Françoise’s supporters were also able to respond to Tardivel’s charge that she showed a general lack of respect for religion by citing passages from her work that arguably portrayed the beauty of religious faith and rural life; as an article in Le Coin du Feu pointed out, “’Gracieuse’ is the story where we are respectfully shown the priest’s passage with the viaticum among the people working in the fields, creating a religious atmosphere that gives the narrative a character completely unlike the style of Jean-Jacques Rousseau” (1895, 217). A broader accusation, however, went largely undefended. Reproaching Françoise for her portrayal of characters who used rural patois and displayed superstitious

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beliefs, Tardivel charged her with giving “a false idea of our agricultural class.” Re-reading Fleurs champêtres with an attention to elements which may have incited Tardivel’s suspicion, it is hard to deny the presence of a potentially subversive element in Françoise’s work. Tardivel was not entirely off base in noting Françoise’s tendency to present an image of the “agricultural class” that clashed with the dominant social discourse. In among these picturesque and touching stories are tucked at least three that would be more at home in the grim naturalistic tradition of Emile Zola, also despised in the Quebec of the time, than alongside the idealized vision presented by approved novels like Jean Rivard. While some of the sketches put forward images of true love, joyous weddings, and happy familial interaction, others present a very different view. This is particularly true of “Gracieuse,” which Tardivel had pointedly singled out for attack. In this story, a frail young wife is neglected by her husband and dies pitifully through the negligence of a venomous mother-in-law. While it is hard to see just how this would relate to “Rousseauism,” to use Tardivel’s terms, it is certainly not a tale of happy family life. In fact, given the reigning ideology of the family, it is hard to see why Françoise would have chosen to relate such an incident, if it had not been the result of her own experience or journalistic observation. In an even more subversive tale, “Le Mari de la Gothe” [The Husband of the Goth Woman], a young widow tells the narrator about her eight-year experience as a physically abused wife. This sketch, in particular, strikes a starkly modern note in what is, in other places, a world of idealized nineteenth-century virtues. Yet, as Phonsine Ladouceur would later do in Guèvremont’s Marie-Didace, this young widow continues to see married life, even under these conditions, as a desirable alternative to the humiliation of domestic service. This is certainly a devastating overview of the economic situation of poor rural women. In another of Françoise’s stories, entitled “La Douce” [The Gentle Girl], the narrator tries to comfort a neighbour’s daughter whose beloved has deserted her, at the behest of his family, to marry a sturdier woman more able to contribute effectively to the farming. Nevertheless, the delicate, graceful girl musters the courage to sing at his wedding, in order to prove to everyone she bears no grudge. The involvement of such crass economic factors in the lives of women strikes a jarring note in the utopian world of the roman de la terre, where the ideals of utility and beauty are generally brought into harmony. Françoise, with her reporter’s sense of honesty, seems to have been unable to lend her voice to a falsified picture of feminine

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reality, and she felt compelled to say things that the reigning social discourse had ruled unsayable. The real reasons behind Tardivel’s attack on Fleurs champêtres are only obliquely articulated in his vague charge of “Rousseauism,” but he must have sensed the nettles of social criticism lurking beneath the quaint flowers of the title.

the model of

MARIA CHAPDELAINE

In the early years of the twentieth century, the roman de la terre was profoundly altered by the work of a Frenchman, Louis Hémon, who placed a woman’s passion – and, to some extent, a woman’s experience – at the centre of his novel Maria Chapdelaine.4 Hémon’s novel, certainly influenced by the fictional women who had dominated the great texts of nineteenth-century French literature, became a powerful literary model for Quebec, which was explicitly evoked by the important cultural spokesman Felix-Antoine Savard in his novel Menaud maître-draveur, and which implicitly underlay much of the subsequent literary production. The extent to which the fictional Maria Chapdelaine and her family also provided a model for reallife French Canadians has been documented by Nicole Deschamps, Raymonde Héroux, and Normand Villeneuve in their study of Le Mythe de Maria Chapdelaine, which demonstrates the use of the novel, a decade after its publication, in the effort to encourage settlement of Quebec’s remote – and generally untillable – northern lands as an alternative to emigration to the anglophone-dominated Quebec cities or even the States. Hémon’s unusual choice of a woman to represent the people of Quebec suggests a complex and intriguing shift in vision. As opposed to the active masculine figures who dominated the nineteenth-century Quebec roman de la terre, Maria Chapdelaine is hardly a heroic or even an active figure. Unlike Gérin-Lajoie’s Jean Rivard, who through his labour and determination founds an entire community, Maria remains enclosed within the space of domesticity. Like the traditional feminine figure, she spends most of her time not acting but passively waiting – waiting for the bread to bake, waiting for François Paradis to return, waiting for the winter to end. While Maria does make a choice at the end of the novel, her choice is largely determined by the death of her true love, François Paradis, and the intervention of the “voices,” who tell her to remain on the land with Eutrope Gagnon rather than seeking prosperity in the States with Lorenzo Surprenant. As Deschamps points out, Quebec readers did not immediately perceive the full consequences of this altered concept of the central

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figure, privileging instead the pioneering ethic of Maria’s father, Samuel Chapdelaine, and the lyrical tribute of Maria’s mother to the heroic work of creating new land. In 1927 the Quebec minister of colonization used the title Maria Chapdelaine, wife and mother to praise a heroic widow who, with her thirteen children, had cleared 300 acres in the new territory of Abitibi – certainly a far cry from the passive maiden depicted by Hémon. As Deschamps ironically comments, readers of the time seemed more eager to see themselves represented as “colonizers” (of northern lands) than as oppressed and passive “colonized people,” as Maria Chapdelaine and her family would appear to many readers of the 1960s. Yet Hémon’s literary descendants were not entirely oblivious to the implicit pessimism of his vision of French Canada, in which the strong male figures are ultimately overcome by the hostile environment, like François Paradis (and as in Menaud maître-draveur), or by old age, like Samuel Chapdelaine (also the fate of Euchariste Moisan in Trente Arpents and Didace Beauchemin in Le Survenant). In various ways, however, Maria Chapdelaine, which moved women to the centre of the fictional Quebec family, eventually helped open the way for women writers’ involvement in the genre. Seen in the light of Maria Chapdelaine, Blanche LamontagneBeauregard’s 1923 novel, Un Cœur fidèle [A Faithful Heart], seems aimed at solving Maria’s conflicts, showing how the feminine qualities of fidelity and self-sacrifice might bring together into a happy ending the virtues embodied by Maria Chapdelaine’s three suitors: true love (François Paradis), fidelity to the land (Eutrope Gagnon), and material prosperity (Lorenzo Surprenant). Lamontagne-Beauregard’s view of a happy, prosperous rural existence was certainly more in keeping with the glowing rhetoric of Mgr Laflèche than with Hémon’s rather bleak representation of life in Péribonka. One of the few women to venture into rural fiction before 1945, LamontagneBeauregard was apparently committed to the rural ideal, which became a central element of her considerable literary reputation. Considered a founder of literary regionalism in Quebec5 and always mentioned as part of the generation of writers connected with the significantly named journal Le Terroir, Lamontagne-Beauregard first received recognition for her various collections of poetry, which were also focused on rural themes. Despite her identification with the rather conservative perspective of regionalism, Lamontagne-Beauregard was a feminist of her day: she was one of the first Quebec women to receive a secondary education equivalent to that available to men, and she was a close friend of the public feminist Marie Gérin-Lajoie, who published an article in Le Devoir about her friend’s literary

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feminism, which Lucie Lequin terms “maternal.”6 As David Lonergan points out, Lamontagne-Beauregard was also one of the first women in Quebec to write under her own name, which she kept even after her marriage by adding her husband’s name in contemporary hyphenated form. Un Cœur fidèle is thus arguably an example of a roman de la terre rewritten by a feminist of the early 1920s, and it illustrates the way in which an active female protagonist could occupy the centre of a roman de la terre without violating important literary or cultural norms. Indeed, Lamontagne-Beauregard is so skilled at manipulating the limited possibilities of plot and inheritance law that her heroine, while displaying the requisite virtues of fidelity and sacrifice, still gets her man – and the land. Since the plot of the typical rural novel records the passage of the land from father to son, the action of Un Cœur fidèle becomes more convoluted as it makes room for the female protagonist to become an agent in the process. Conforming to her father’s wishes, she accepts marriage to a wealthy, landed widower whose fortuitous death eventually enables her to marry her childhood sweetheart, to whom she transmits the land that makes it possible for him to remain in Quebec. Although Lamontagne-Beauregard does not hesitate to rhapsodize on the beauties of country life, as she had in her earlier poetry, her understanding of the prevailing economic situation is, in many ways, eminently realistic. As Boynard-Frot observes, she is one of the few rural novelists to appreciate the unique legal and economic power of the widow, temporarily released from the subordinate status of wife or daughter. Like Angéline de Montbrun, Lamontagne-Beauregard’s heroine comes to exercise sole ownership and direction of a prosperous farm, but this part of her life is all but ignored by the novelist, who prefers to portray her protagonist in a less dominant role. In fact, although she does take a role in passing on the land, Lamontagne-Beauregard’s heroine does not venture any action that moves beyond the parameters of fidelity and sacrifice already established by Laure Conan as the only acceptable basis of feminine agency. Like other writers of her generation who avoided exposing the real economic and social conflicts that lay behind Quebec’s idealized rural communities, Lamontagne-Beauregard disposes the elements of her plot in order to minimize confrontation. In particular, she removes the childhood sweetheart from the scene until the husband has safely passed on, avoiding for her heroine even the temptation of adultery that would create such literary scandal only a decade later in the novels of Eva Senécal.7 Yet the situation in which Lamontagne-Beauregard’s protagonist is placed is fraught with conflict:

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like Maria Chapdelaine, she must choose between two suitors, between marrying for love or for land. Wisely, however, LamontagneBeauregard portrays her heroine’s actions as motivated neither by passion nor desire for material gain, but unwaveringly determined by traditional ideals. In marrying a well-to-do landowner, she is only submitting to the authority of her parents, and Boynard-Frot points out that she is thus following the authoritarian teachings of her convent school education. If she returns to her first love in the end, it is only as a means of reaffirming her commitment to the land, which is apparently in need of a strong man. Despite Lamontagne-Beauregard’s generally poetic vision of rural life, she does risk a brief glimpse of its more negative aspects, as her heroine is briefly confronted with the necessity of caring for her husband’s mentally handicapped sister, whose pathetically limited mental and physical condition is accompanied by dark resentment and unpredictable movements of overt hostility.8 Seemingly out of place in this placid universe of rural beauty, this troubled character may have emerged from Lamontagne-Beauregard’s realistic understanding of the actual conditions of rural existence, with its numerous duties to the extended family, as she herself had experienced it. Whatever the case, Lamontagne-Beauregard does not linger over such problems, quickly sweeping the disabled sister-in-law off to a welcome death, as she had earlier dispatched the intruding husband, before she can become an obstacle to the reunion of the lovers. Because of her careful manipulation of the elements of the roman de la terre, Lamontagne-Beauregard was able to inscribe a more realistic vision of women’s experience into the genre, even providing insights into the convent education that lent her female character an intellectual depth that had not been seen in Quebec fiction since Angéline de Montbrun. But, while the lyrical rhapsodies of her prose are sometimes punctuated by a surprising realism of vision, she is careful not to overstep the bounds of permissible portrayal of rural life, which reveal themselves to be narrow indeed.

rewriting the novel of the land If the experience of Françoise showed the real dangers that awaited women writers in the realm of the rural novel, the less venturesome example of Blanche Lamontagne-Beauregard outlined its limited parameters. Perhaps noting this, the brave novelistic experiments of women like Jovette Bernier and Eva Senécal in the 1930s moved away from the agricultural setting to place their characters in a more sophisticated bourgeois environment. However, the roman de la terre

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seemed to offer ample opportunity for experimentation by men in the 1930s, who produced three of the most noted novels of the interwar period: Claude-Henri Grignon’s Un homme et son péché [A Man and His Sin], Félix-Antoine Savard’s Menaud maître-draveur [Menaud the Master-Driver], and Ringuet’s Trente Arpents [Thirty Acres]. It was not until 1945 that a woman writer, Germaine Guèvrement, was able to write women’s experience into the roman de la terre in sequential novels, Le Survenant and Marie-Didace; at the same time Gabrielle Roy was transposing the form and substance of the roman de la terre – the focus on the large Quebec family and the related drama of inheritance – into an impoverished quarter of Montreal in Quebec’s first urban novel, Bonheur d’occasion. Like the rural novels that preceded them, Le Survenant/MarieDidace and Bonheur d’occasion are essentially stories of inheritance. In the hands of Guèvremont and Roy, the process of inheritance is wrenched from its traditional course, and the heritage ends up in the possession of a daughter. Even in Maria Chapdelaine the “normal” process of passing the land from father to a strong male heir had been interrupted by the death of François Paradis, the only successor worthy of Samuel Chapdelaine, although Maria’s marriage to Eutrope Gagnon permitted the continuation of her life on the land. In the three major male-authored rural novels of the 1930s, the process of inheritance is also thwarted, in Un homme et son péché and Menaud maître-draveur by the failure to produce an heir. Only in Trente Arpents does a father pass on the land to his son, but, in consequence, he himself is ultimately abandoned and forced to leave for the States. The situation is even less promising in Le Survenant, where Didace Beauchemin’s hopes of succession are disappointed, first by the weakness of his own surviving son Amable and then by the instability and ultimate disappearance of the robust stranger, the Survenant, in whom he had unwisely placed his hope. In order to understand the full drama of the Beauchemin family, however, it is necessary to read Le Survenant together with its sequel, Marie-Didace, which picks up the same story and characters at the point of the Survenant’s departure and brings the cycle of inheritance to its logical conclusion, the passing on of the Beauchemin name and land to little MarieDidace, daughter of Phonsine and Amable and seventh in the series of Beauchemins who bear the name of Didace. As Guèvremont reroutes the course of inheritance through the female line, she also opens new space in the novels for the representation of women’s experience. This is especially true in Marie-Didace, where Phonsine assumes a more central role9 and Guèvremont lingers on descriptions of the quilting bees, the seasonal household

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tasks, the loneliness of an isolated farmhouse, the humour and cruelty of women’s gossip, the apprehensions of childbirth. Having lived and worked as a journalist in the Sorel region where her novels are set, Guèvremont was able to draw on her own experience and familiarity with such women to bring depth and substance to the domestic life only referred to in Maria Chapdelaine and largely ignored by other writers of rural fiction. Roy, too, drew on her journalistic and personal experience to bring her readers into the reality of the lives of women in the poor SaintHenri district of Montreal, from the annual search for a new apartment to life as a waitress at the five and dime, the “Quinze Cents.” And she, too, changes the pattern of inheritance – radically so, since her urbanized characters, in their rented dwellings, have already been dispossessed of the land. The centrality of the mother-daughter relationship between Rose-Anna and Florentine allows Roy to reexamine not only the process of inheritance but the heritage itself. Florentine re-enacts the role previously given to the prodigal son in novels like La Terre paternelle, a child who initially rejects the heritage and subsequently returns home to enter into its possession. The heritage here is not land, which had embodied a whole set of cultural values, but the family values themselves, now detached from their identification with rural life. These values of mutual caring and family solidarity are embodied by Rose-Anna, who is an admirable incarnation of the traditional maternal ideal, and perhaps its most positive representation in all of Quebec literature. In many ways, Roy and Guèvremont both seem to be telling versions of the same story,10 a story of thin, desperate young women unable to fulfill the model of traditional Quebec motherhood in a world without traditional sources of continuity and support. Both novels surely incorporate aspects of their authors’ personal experience as women, yet both were read by a diverse public as a statement about a more general Quebec reality and even as a mirror of their readers’ lives. The drama of struggle and survival enacted by the daughters in these novels seemed to provide an apt representation of the situation of French Canadians in a period of profound social change that had not yet reached articulation in the dominant ideology, which persisted in presenting Quebec as an unchanging rural culture. The women of these novels, forced to assume unaccustomed roles as head of household – and even breadwinner, in the case of Florentine – reflect the disarray of the Quebec people in their movement from an agricultural to an urban industrial economy, a process accelerated by the war. The marginal status of the female protagonists created by Roy and Guèvremont mirrors a more general situation of

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marginalization and alienation experienced by French Canadian society in this period, as it has been described by Ben-Zion Shek: “The ex-farmer … was placed in a subordinate position to an employer of another culture and language. This led to a loss of self-confidence and feelings of alienation which has been defined as a feeling of powerlessness and helplessness, when one can no longer grasp the meaning of one’s life nor be oneself” (Social Realism, 19).11 The ability of Guèvremont and Roy to give fictional expression to a generalized social malaise may account for the sympathetic response of the reading public to these novels suddenly and inexplicably dominated by women. Analyzing the overwhelmingly positive critical response to Le Survenant and Bonheur d’occasion, Gilles Marcotte observes that both novels were read as direct transpositions of a known reality, “texts in direct contact with life,” quoting Roger Duhamel as saying of Gabrielle Roy, “she made us see simply what her eyes saw, what we all had seen many times” (“Restons,” 7). In contrast, Quebec readers perceived other major novels published in the same year as distanced from their own everyday lives, and Marcotte attributes the sense of recognition readers felt with Guèvremont and Roy to their use of the familiar form of literary realism. But if the fictional worlds of Bonheur d’occasion and Le Survenant/Marie-Didace seemed well-known to Quebec readers, this was due in large part to their adoption of the family framework and the traditional characters and themes that had been associated with the roman de la terre, the form realism had taken in Quebec. This connection is suggested by Victor Barbeau’s review of Le Survenant, also cited by Marcotte: “There is nothing prefabricated in this simple and rustic story. Germaine Guèvremont has borrowed and respected the architecture and mode of construction of our traditional peasant dwellings” (“Restons,” 7). As suggested by Barbeau’s architectural image, she framed her complex and troubling story in the comforting literary structure of the Quebec rural tradition. Meanwhile, Roy had translated the central traits of the roman de la terre into an urban environment, a filiation implicitly recognized by the many critics who placed Bonheur d’occasion in the tradition of Maria Chapdelaine and Trente Arpents.12 Readers of both Guèvremont and Roy responded so warmly to traditional characters and values that they all but ignored the presence of the problematic young women who were nonetheless at the centre of their novels.13 If we read early reviews of Bonheur d’occasion, the main character seems anyone but Florentine, who is mentioned only in summaries of the plot. Ironically, in one of the very first press reviews, Julia Richer sets Roy’s novel against the background of Maria Chapdelaine, but goes on to equate Hémon’s daughter-protagonist

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with Roy’s maternal character, Rose-Anna, considered an embodiment of French-Canadian values.14 Subsequent critics took up this praise of Rose-Anna, and even weaker, secondary characters like Rose-Anna’s husband Azarius and the opportunistic Jean Lévesque came in for lengthy critical examination.15 For years, most FrenchCanadian critics stressed the novel’s representation of traditional values, of which Rose-Anna became the icon.16 Similarly, the characters who attracted readers of Le Survenant were Didace Beauchemin, who embodies the old Quebec way of life on the land, and even the footloose stranger, the Survenant, interpreted as an appealing modernday equivalent of the coureur de bois. And, of course, Didace’s daughter Marie-Amanda carries on the tradition of the ideal Quebec mother. It was a strength of both Guèvremont and Roy that, while they provided an anguished portrait of the collapse of the old order, at the same time they offered appealing portraits of the dying tradition. Presented in the familiar form of the roman de la terre, these ambiguous texts allowed Quebec readers of the 1940s to respond in terms of traditional values, even as the events of the plot told them these traditions were lost in the past, and they themselves, like Florentine and Phonsine, caught in the throes of a difficult transition. It is significant that both these novels of the mid-1940s revolve around the fate of young female characters who introduce a new note in the portrayal of women in Quebec literature. Like the much-studied Quebec hero, who in the same era is engaged in questioning traditional role models and seeking a new identity,17 these two young women aspire to a life different from that of the more traditional women with whom they are continually contrasted. Florentine and Phonsine are central to their creators’ attempts to work out in fictional terms the problems of feminine survival in what they perceive to be a rapidly changing world, and it is therefore somewhat ironic that critics have tended to find both characters relatively unappealing, if not subject to criticism,18 in contrast to the representations of the traditional mother that appear to dominate these two novels. But it was only in the postwar period, as Suzanne Paradis points out, that strong mother figures were finally represented in the Quebec novel, at a time when the large-family values with which they were identified had become problematic. Although it had been given lip service by the ideology of la revanche des berceaux, the ideal of Quebec motherhood had, in reality, received little attention in the novel of the land, with the exception of Maria Chapdelaine. More typical, as Patricia Smart has observed, was the fate of Alphonsine Moisan in Trente Arpents, who fades away while bearing her last child, her death making little impact on the world of the novel.19

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In contrast, Rose-Anna Lacasse is a central figure in Bonheur d’occasion and a luminous portrait of the idealized Quebec mother. In the face of her husband’s inability to provide for their numerous offspring, Rose-Anna courageously assumes primary responsibility for the family, selflessly coping with the practical problems of feeding and clothing the many children on the scant income provided by her oldest daughter’s job. Roy associates her with the Mater Dolorosa, whose picture is piously hung on the wall, and with the image of a beacon, whose unfailing light is a source of security and guidance for her family. These same characteristics of maternal love, sacrifice, generosity, courage, and practical virtue are embodied in Guèvremont’s MarieAmanda, whom Suzanne Paradis has described in Femme fictive, femme réelle as a “brilliant exemplary image of the feminine soul” (7). Marie-Amanda is the faithful image of her fondly remembered mother Mathilde and of a whole line of Beauchemin women who have made possible the settlement of this land. Like Rose-Anna, Mathilde had aged prematurely from the cares of raising a large family (as opposed to her husband, the hearty and energetic Didace, who lives to take a second wife). By the end of the series, Marie-Amanda, in her one moment of self-pity, seems to be feeling the same burdens. But Marie-Amanda does not often indulge in contemplation of her own problems. A brave acceptance of the difficulties of her austere life enables her to transcend them and to bring consolation to others. As if all this were not enough, Marie-Amanda is a gifted housekeeper, knowing exactly how to cook, clean and, most important, fill a home with warmth. Like Rose-Anna, she is identified with a lighthouse beacon and her mother Mathilde, again like Rose-Anna, is compared with the Virgin, in her role of Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows. However, as Paula Gilbert Lewis has observed in The Literary Vision of Gabrielle Roy, these traditional themes of Quebec literature, the large family and the self-sacrificing mother, often appear in her work only to demonstrate their failure (9). In fact, readers have often failed to notice the extent to which both Guèvremont and Roy undertake a serious critique of the role of the Quebec mother as it was defined in this prewar period. If both novels have a radiant maternal image, each also contains a character who appears to conform to the model while lacking its substance. Such a figure in Le Survenant/Marie-Didace is Blanche Varieur, L’Acayenne, whom Didace marries after the death of his devoted Mathilde. In the character of L’Acayenne Guèvremont questions the equation of physical strength and housewifely skills with real maternal qualities, a set of values that Françoise had earlier critiqued in Fleurs champêtres.

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Indeed, Blanche seems to possess all the qualities of the legendary Beauchemin women: she is strong, courageous, placid, and skilled as a housekeeper and cook. Didace, however, soon comes to realize that just as her much admired silence masks a longing for her Acadian homeland, her plump, seemingly maternal figure conceals a physical inability to bear children. This incapacity is only indicative of a more basic failing. At least in the context of the Beauchemin family, Blanche lacks real maternal love and generosity, a flaw Didace is finally able to identify: “But it was not enough for a true woman that order reigned over the household; there must be order in the minds of the members of the household, or that house could not endure” (211).a While the ideal mother figure is always giving, L’Acayenne only wants to take for herself. From the moment she enters the Beauchemin household she tries to usurp the property of others: first Phonsine’s cup, then her daughter, and ultimately the entire family heritage. This quality of absorbing all into herself is reflected in her ample figure and, ironically, in her death, which results from her overeating and subsequently gobbling down an entire bottle of pills. In Bonheur d’occasion the failure of the maternal ideal is represented in Madame Laplante, the mother from whom Rose-Anna vainly seeks consolation during her one return home to the countryside. The older woman has borne the requisite number of children and performed all the necessary womanly tasks, but she has never acted out of love. Motivated solely by a sentiment of religious duty, she has lived her joyless life in a spirit of Christian resignation, never failing to make others aware of her martyrdom. Although Madame Laplante feels sure her acts of “charity” have earned her a place in heaven, Roy accuses her of having omitted the most important on the scale of maternal virtues: she has lost any real maternal feeling: “she had never bent over [her children] with a look of affection in her steely gray eyes” (10).b In fact, Madame Laplante’s early recognition of her inability to meet the needs of her many children had made her steel herself against her emotions. Rose-Anna’s confrontation with her mother leads her to reflect on her own inevitable failure as a mother. Even she, who constantly radiates love for her family, must suffer the same defeat: she can never succeed in meeting all the many emotional demands placed upon her. This is made poignantly clear during her one visit to her son Daniel in the hospital where he is dying of leukemia. He has already transferred his affection to a pretty young anglophone nurse who, having time to pay attention to him, is a living reproach to Rose-Anna. Thus, the unsympathetic figure of Madame Laplante serves as a catalyst for Roy’s profound questioning

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of the traditional maternal ideal, which, in practice, works to undermine the bonds of love uniting mother and children. As both Guèvremont and Roy begin to question the traditional construction of the maternal role, they also demythologize women’s lives as constrained by silence and physical confinement. Guèvremont’s rural novels, as Robert Charbonneau has observed (12), concern themselves primarily with the feminine world of the house rather than with the man’s world of the fields. Indeed, it is their confinement to the house that differentiates women’s lives from that of men in this wintry setting: as Guèvremont wrote in En Pleine Terre, the collection of short stories in which she begins to sketch the background of her novels, “In winter, except for an occasional party and the obligatory mass, outings were rare for the country people. Women, especially, were confined to the house.”c The men work in the fields, go hunting, and travel freely to nearby towns, while the women wait for them at home. Conforming to a literary image of Quebec women that had been prominent at least since Maria Chapdelaine, Phonsine and her neighbour Angélina wait in vain in their houses for the return of their absent men. Nor does residence in a modern urban milieu free Roy’s characters from this sense of spatial limitation. Images of imprisonment dominate Bonheur d’occasion, even in the perceptions of male characters. The women, however, experience an even greater confinement, which is closely identified with the feminine condition.20 Rose-Anna is generally seen inside her house; she goes outside only to visit Daniel in the hospital – or to look for another house. While her husband Azarius moves quite freely in many different spaces, even going off to France in the end, Rose-Anna’s one attempt to escape her confinement is thwarted: when she goes to the country, her mother forbids her to follow the others into the woods because of the advanced condition of her pregnancy. Indeed, her pregnancy is quite often cited as a factor in her lack of mobility: because of it, she cannot even visit Daniel in his last days. Florentine remains away from home as much as possible and intuitively recognizes the house as a form of imprisonment: “the same sacred pictures, the same family portraits hung on the walls, and the walls always closed in on her” (206).d Even Rose-Anna comes to perceive her situation as confining. As she goes into labour, “she had a sense of being imprisoned within these four walls only to suffer, and for nothing else” (295).e It is interesting that both women become acutely conscious of this imprisonment during their pregnancies. The house is thus clearly to be identified with the enclosed space of the womb, a space which may represent security to a child (as in the case

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of Florentine’s attempt to seek refuge at home) but one which for the mature woman becomes the locus of her confinement, the ultimate trap. In seeking to escape her spatial limitations, Florentine is really rebelling against the inevitable reality of the feminine condition, summed up in her pregnancy: “she could only see the trap that had been laid for her weakness … she felt unutterable scorn, stronger even than her fear, for her womanhood” (205).f As the traditional feminine role implies confinement, it also entails repression of emotions and their expression in speech. Lori SaintMartin observes that in Bonheur d’occasion the silencing of women is reflected in their reduced role in the dialogues of the novel, which are spoken primarily by the male characters; Roy communicates the women’s commentaries largely through their domination of the novel’s point of view (“Réalisme et féminisme,” 91). In her unsympathetic portrait of Rose-Anna’s mother Roy shows that conformity to the maternal role seems to demand the stifling of all spontaneous personal desires or emotions. A related need to suppress natural reactions makes Rose-Anna consider it a point of honour not to cry out during the pain of childbirth and renders her unable to speak to Florentine when she instinctively realizes her daughter is pregnant. In a culture that seeks to deny women’s sexuality, such shameful bodily realities must not be openly discussed. As she senses this, Florentine ceases to display the openness she has shown with her mother in the opening scenes, and she becomes a mute figure. She quickly learns that the free expression of her feelings is a danger to be avoided with her mother, with women friends, and especially with men. Having paid dearly for her openness with Jean, she successfully uses dissimulation to gain her ends with Emmanuel. As she sees no possibility of escaping from the repressive aspects of the feminine condition, she can at least recognize them and use them to her own advantage. In the society of Le Survenant/Marie-Didace there is also a clear ethic of feminine repression, which becomes a major cause of Phonsine’s madness. L’Acayenne immediately wins admiration for her silences: “the men felt at ease in the company of this smooth-browed woman who let them smoke in peace or talk without ever interrupting them or asking questions” (166).g Suppressing their need to talk is seen as part of the sacrifice women are expected to make for the sake of others. Admonitions to repress their grief or resentment form an important part of Marie-Amanda’s well-meaning advice to both Phonsine and Angélina, and this is perhaps why both women come to feel Marie-Amanda is incapable of understanding them. MarieAmanda herself, of course, never utters a word of complaint. When

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Phonsine goes into labour, L’Acayenne immediately recalls to her the traditional ethic of female silence, and Phonsine dreams of the day when her own daughter may feel free to cry out in similar circumstances. After the death of Amable, for which she feels partly responsible, Phonsine’s repressed anxieties find an outlet in her recurrent nightmare of falling down the well. When she consults a doctor, however, she realizes the futility of attempting to discuss it: he attributes all her problems to the absence of a man in her life. Thus Phonsine continues to repress her emotions until the guilt she feels at L’Acayenne’s death, a guilt resulting from her own feelings of anxiety and helplessness, finally drives her to madness. In both novels a new generation of women, represented by Florentine and Phonsine, is set in opposition to the traditional maternal figures on several levels. Perhaps most noticeably, the new Quebec heroine is thin, a contrast with the plump motherly forms of the more traditional characters.21 While Rose-Anna is portrayed as heavy and deformed from her pregnancies, descriptions of Florentine abound in adjectives of thinness, and it becomes the salient feature of her characterization.22 The extent to which Florentine’s thinness is a denial of the traditional feminine image is recognized by Rose-Anna as she observes her daughter: “With her thin little figure and her devil-may-care pose she looked like a boy” (134).h If Florentine’s unusual thinness is the physical effect of her undernourished urban existence, Phonsine’s is symbolic of her alienation. Despite her access to the abundant resources of a prosperous farm, she continually rejects food. As Guèvremont reiterates, Phonsine suffers from a sensitive stomach, a problem that first appears in her life as she is placed in the alienating environment of an orphanage after the death of her mother. In the Beauchemin household, she is set apart by her aversion to seasonings. A special piece of roast pork must be put aside for her, because she is unable to tolerate garlic. Unlike the others, she fills her teacup only partly and drinks it with delicate gestures and small sips. Phonsine’s thinness is a sign of her difference from Marie-Amanda, who, even when not pregnant, is enviably robust, and from L’Acayenne, whose ample physique is commented upon at length. Eating becomes for Phonsine so associated with these strong, well-adapted female figures that it is through eating that she at first seeks to express her defiance of her new mother-in-law. Unfortunately, at this point, her pregnancy has rendered her even less able to absorb food, and her efforts fail miserably as she is forced to run outside to vomit. Phonsine’s nausea denotes her inability to adapt to her existence, a monotonous and unappealing reality summed up in the food she is

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forced to ingest: “The potatoes, which had begun to sprout, had deliquesced into a grayish, unappetizing paste” (79).i Phonsine’s rejection of food may also, like the anorexic condition often found in adolescent girls, be a part of her rejection of womanhood, at least the image of womanhood that is proposed to her. It is indeed ironic that Florentine and Phonsine, in their deprivation and alienation from food, are condemned to its constant preparation and serving, Florentine as a waitress and Phonsine in her role of housewife. Both Florentine and Phonsine find themselves in a situation of alienation that has its root in their experiences as women and their unwillingness or inability to conform to the traditional feminine role. Florentine’s encounter with Jean at the five and dime awakens a dissatisfaction with her situation, summed up for her in the appearance of Rose-Anna: “her mother’s life appeared to be like a long dreary voyage under leaden skies that she, Florentine, would never make” (95).j In the meeting of Florentine and Rose-Anna at the five and dime, as in Rose-Anna’s confrontation with her own mother, the daughter consciously sees her mother as a negative mirror-image of herself, a reaction that clearly prefigures later feminist analyses of the mother-daughter relationship, such as that proposed by Adrienne Rich.23 Florentine’s rejection of her mother’s role – and not, it must be emphasized, of Rose-Anna as a person – is also evident in the scene where Rose-Anna confides the news of her latest pregnancy. Florentine’s curt reply – “Good gracious [Vinguienne], Mother, don’t you think there are enough of us?” (71)k – is a vehement protest against the large-family ethic. Florentine’s determination not to follow in her mother’s footsteps is opposite to the ideal of Maria Chapdelaine, who had consciously chosen to repeat her mother’s life. Her sphere of action, however, is as limited as Maria’s – and like that of almost all female figures in the Quebec novel before 1960 – in that she can choose only between available husbands.24 As Nancy Miller would say, she is entrapped within the society’s “female plot.” The role of François Paradis is played by the ambitious Jean Lévesque, who is also, in a sense, carried off by the hostile environment, here the materialistic Englishdominated society symbolized by Westmount rising above the poor district of Saint-Henri. After her abandonment by Jean, Florentine’s methodical seduction of the compliant Emmanuel can be considered manipulative and hypocritical, but, in a sense, her determination to provide for her unborn child by marrying a local boy is no different from Maria Chapdelaine’s decision to enter a loveless marriage with Eutrope Gagnon. At the end of the novel Florentine shows the extent to which she represents a continuation of her mother’s ethic of caring

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even as she succeeds in moving up in the world by welcoming her mother and the younger children to her new home. Phonsine seems to be even more alienated from her life than Florentine, but, unlike Florentine, she has not consciously rejected the role-model proposed to her. Indeed, the object of her aspirations is utter conformity to the pattern established by Mathilde and MarieAmanda, and she desperately desires the security and freedom of her own règne as female head of the house. Phonsine does not even have Florentine’s opportunity to reject her mother, since Phonsine’s mother has abandoned her at an early age, an experience which, both factually and symbolically, explains much of Phonsine’s inadequacy in fulfilling the traditional feminine role. This is particularly evident with respect to her housekeeping abilities. She seems lamentably out of touch with the food she serves and the household objects she manipulates, as is emphasized by her repeated mishaps when cutting bread. Phonsine’s clumsiness is contrasted with the skill of Marie-Amanda: “Marie-Amanda brought to all her gestures a dignity and significance which gave the least of them an air of something definite. Even the very objects seemed to obey her” (162).l In addition, like the typical modern alienated hero, Phonsine finds herself unable to establish effective communication with others. Phonsine proves as ill adapted to the role of mother as to that of housewife, although she is capable of tenderness and is utterly devoted to her daughter. She almost dies giving birth, is unable to nurse and, finally, seems to be rejected by the little Marie-Didace in favour of the buxom L’Acayenne. Florentine and Phonsine are also differentiated from the traditional woman by their attempts to take an active role in determining their destinies. An ethic of resignation, formulated in the same terms by both Rose-Anna and her mother – “We can’t do as we like in this world” (71)m – finds its ironic contradiction in Florentine’s emphatic reply: “I’m going to do as I like” (71).n,25 Sometimes tempted by passivity, Florentine most often takes things into her own hands. Significantly, she takes the initiative in her relationships with both Jean and Emmanuel, a pattern that contrasts with Rose-Anna’s more accepting relationship with Azarius. Florentine’s desire to define a new self-image is reflected in her continual attempts to alter her physical appearance. Her most characteristic gesture is that of consulting her compact mirror to check and reapply her makeup. Roy’s emphasis on Florentine’s overdone makeup reminds us, of course, of her proletarian origins and her preoccupation with surface appearances, but it is most importantly a manifestation of Florentine’s effort to become a new person. Although she is generally placed in unfavourable comparisons with

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her mother, her constant references to the mirror reveal a willingness to confront a reality that eludes Rose-Anna. The older woman’s failure to look at herself results from her greater role-security and lack of vanity, but it also reveals her greater capacity for self-delusion. Only when others have made her aware of her worn and overweight body does she suddenly realize that she still holds an outdated vision of herself. Florentine’s need to affirm her beauty in mirrors is related to her need to be desired by men. As in Sartre’s work, which clearly had some influence on Roy in this era,26 the ultimate mirrors are the eyes of the Other. This facet of her relationship with Jean, for example, is brought out in the restaurant scene, where, after being forced to put away her compact, she finds a wall mirror that begins to compete with Jean for her attention. What Florentine really seeks is not Jean, nor even the success he represents, but a new image of herself, a point made clear in the subsequent scene where Jean points out to her the Montreal mountain that symbolizes his career aspirations. Florentine looks toward the mountain too, but sees instead a reflection of her own face. At times Florentine seems excessively preoccupied with clothes and meaningless trinkets, often to the exclusion of things of real value. Her attempts to make herself over often seem, like her makeup, to be only skin deep, and their effect, again like that of her makeup, is to make her appear hard and vulgar. Nevertheless, these actions represent a practical effort to better her economic status through marriage to a more affluent man.27 Few paths to wealth are open to her, and she uses to the fullest her one asset, her physical attractiveness. Her decision to marry Emmanuel, while egoistic, is a real attempt on her part to meet the needs of her unborn child and her mother’s family, who are still dependent upon her earnings. Although she does not yet love Emmanuel, having rejected romantic love as a trap, she seems committed to making a good life for him and her child. In marrying Emmanuel, Florentine creates for herself what she describes as a “new being” which is necessarily reflected in an utterly transformed physical appearance. No longer the vulgar young waitress, she becomes the elegant and dignified wife of a departing soldier. Now that she has found her place and her role, Florentine is ready to dispense with mirrors. This is the meaning of the important last scene where she encounters Jean in the street. For a moment she yearns to show off her new elegance to his admiring eyes, but she finally decides to turn her back on him. She is now sure of herself and of her direction in life, an assurance that comes from within and

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no longer requires confirmation from the eyes of men. It is true that Roy has put dark clouds in the sky, which have been variously interpreted as prefiguring Emmanuel’s fate in the war or suggesting the result of his marriage to Florentine. However, Florentine shows many signs of a positive development in continuity with the tradition of Rose-Anna. While rejecting her mother’s passive martyrdom to unending maternities, Florentine carries on her mother’s practical sense and concern for her loved ones, as Rose-Anna herself realizes. Although Florentine’s future is not resolved, Roy has left her with the possibility of finding her place in a new Quebec reality. Phonsine, too, is portrayed as a determined young woman. Although she is dreamy and ineffective in the beginning of Le Survenant, her pregnancy makes her recognize Amable’s weakness and the necessity of assuming responsibility for her family’s future. As with Florentine, her assertive acts invite disaster – when, for example, she forces her husband to make good on his threat to leave home – but she remains obstinate in her resistance, despite MarieAmanda’s counsel to resign herself to life as it is. Phonsine’s tragedy stems in part from the fact that so few possibilities of action are open to her in this limited rural setting. Unlike Florentine, she is denied the opportunity to make herself over, either physically or economically. She does engage in grotesque experiments in makeup and clothing as she prepares for Sunday mass, but these efforts bring no corresponding change in her life as they do for Florentine. Phonsine’s attempts to act are never rewarded with success: either they result in disaster or are frustrated by the incomprehension of others, as when she seeks help from the doctor or Marie-Amanda. Like many other nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fictional heroines, Phonsine can only take refuge in madness. Like Bonheur d’occasion, Marie-Didace ends with a reminder of a world war (here World War i), whose presence even this isolated region can no longer ignore. Indeed, both novels deal with a pattern of social change that is essentially the same: the disintegration of Quebec’s rurally based culture with its attendant values and the involvement of the province in a greater world.28 The rural milieu described by Guèvremont does not have the possibilities of new modes of life available in Roy’s Montreal, and nothing is offered as a replacement for collapsing values. Guèvremont does, however, provide some hope for the future in the figure of Angélina, in her adoption of little Marie-Didace. Also a member of the new generation, Angélina is no traditional mother figure, as indicated by her thinness, her limp, and her refusal to accept a conventional marriage. Nevertheless, she is a strong female figure who, in her courageous acceptance

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of a lonely life that has been transformed by her love for the Survenant, stands firmly within the Quebec literary tradition. In her strength and tragic isolation, she is reminiscent of Laure Conan’s Angéline de Montbrun, and the repetition of the name may well indicate a literary filiation. By entrusting the resilient Marie-Didace to Angélina’s guidance, Guèvremont seems to be indicating a direction for the future, one based, like Roy’s, on a certain continuity with the past. Florentine and Phonsine embody the transitional situation of a new generation of Quebec women, the generation of the authors themselves. In neither case has there been an attempt to make the life of the character conform to the facts of the author’s biography; nevertheless, there are important points of correspondence between character and author. Many critics, noting Bonheur d’occasion’s dedication to Roy’s mother, have seen in Azarius and Rose-Anna Lacasse transpositions of her own parents. In his biography of Roy, François Ricard traces numerous parallels with Roy’s family and sees her first novel as, in a sense, an expression of Roy’s problematic relationships with her family milieu: “Tableau of an era and a society, Bonheur d’occasion is also, in a certain way, a self-portrait” (261). Florentine, then, is Roy’s first attempt to work out the conflict between her own love for her mother as a person and her rejection of her mother’s life as a model for her own, a conflict that reappears in her later, clearly autobiographical works, Rue Deschambault and La Route d’Altamont, as well as in her autobiography, La Détresse et l’enchantement, and its unfinished extension, Le Temps qui m’a manqué. In this slim second volume of the autobiography, there is a suggestion that Rose-Anna, too, may be a projection of Roy’s own experience into a figure much like her mother, expressing a new understanding of her mother made possible only after Mélina Roy’s death: “It was in that night of June 1943 that, somewhere in an Ontario forest, began the strange dialogue between my mother and me … or rather the long unending quest that we pursue in search of someone who has died, which can only end with our own lives, since it is only through our own experience that we know theirs, through our illness their cruel illness, through our weariness their inexhaustable weariness, through our death their last, solitary instants” (25). In the case of Guèvremont, the public image of the writer as devoted wife and mother of several children seems to contrast sharply with Phonsine’s alienation from the housewifely role, yet Rita Leclerc states with some confidence that in Phonsine, Guèvremont had tried to express her own temperament: timid, hesitant, and full of anxiety (20), a sentiment corroborated by interviews with the

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author. Claiming as her own Phonsine’s anxiety dream of falling down the well, Guèvremont herself has admitted parallels with her younger characters: “Phonsine, that awkward young woman … is a little like me. Angélina, in her fragility, as well!”29 Certainly, Guèvremont must have felt some of Phonsine’s dissatisfaction with her role of housewife and must have shared her desire to escape its confinement, which Guèvremont herself was able to do through her writing. Through Florentine and Phonsine, Roy and Guèvremont were able to express some of their own role-conflicts, conflicts that were, to a greater or lesser degree, also experienced by an entire generation of women who were no longer able to identify with the traditional mother-figure nor with the rural society with which she had been intimately connected. Before the attack on the Quebec mother-figure was mounted with a new violence and hostility by such authors as Anne Hébert and Marie-Claire Blais, and long before this figure had ceased to represent a certain ideal in the popular mind, Roy and Guèvremont focused attention on the failure of a feminine ideal that occupied a key position within traditional culture and explored with great sensitivity the situation of young women caught in a moment of radical change.

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3 Women in Revolution I was a child dispossessed of the world. – Anne Hébert, “Le Torrent”a

In the opening words of Anne Hébert’s “Le Torrent,” Quebec readers found a powerful articulation of their own situation on the eve of the Quiet Revolution. Written in 1945, Hébert’s story of a child who unleashes a murderous rage against an oppressive mother prefigured the language and spirit of Refus global, the radical manifesto of 1948 in which, for the first time, Quebec’s conservative ideology was overtly contested by a group of fifteen artists, seven of whom were women.1 Hébert’s protagonist François Perrault, isolated from the world by his overbearing mother, is an incarnation of the situation of the Quebec people as described by Refus global, “held apart from the universal evolution of thought, full of risk and dangers.”b Hébert’s emphasis on personal and emotional rather than political liberation, and her protagonist’s violent rejection of the old order, paralleled its spirit as well: “ours the unpredictable passion, ours the total risk in a global refusal” (281).c By the time Hébert’s story was published in a longer collection in 1950, her words could begin to evoke affinities not only with Refus global but also with theorists of decolonization in the francophone world like Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, and Jacques Berque, who would have such resonance for the Quebec of the 1950s and 1960s.2 Hébert’s story of a child who dares to act out a violent revolt against the mother brought the Quebec rural novel, with its familycentred plot, into step with a more radical approach to political change and a modern, secular understanding of the family with many affinities to Freud. The Quebec mother had finally moved into

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a central role in Bonheur d’occasion, published just as Hébert was writing “Le Torrent,” and Gabrielle Roy had offered a respectful critique of the traditional maternal ideal. By the early 1950s, however, the gradual evolution of the family portrayed by Roy had begun to seem conservative and sentimental to readers who, like Laval University professor Jeanne Lapointe, were eager for change.3 In contrast to Roy, Hébert summed up all the forces of social oppression in her maternal figure, Claudine Perrault, making her a fitting target for violent revolt and, ironically, turning the mother into a monster almost as soon as she had entered the Quebec fictional universe.4 Not surprisingly, the image of the monstrous mother surfaces in other women’s fiction of the same era, notably Françoise Loranger’s 1949 novel, Mathieu, where the mother shares the bitterness and authoritarianism of her counterpart in “Le Torrent.” And in 1959 the murder of the mother is restaged, in a scenario very similar to Hébert’s, in Marie-Claire Blais’s short first novel, La Belle Bête [Mad Shadows]. It is significant that in La Belle Bête as in “Le Torrent,” murder does not bring about liberation: neither Hébert’s François Perrault nor Blais’s Isabelle-Marie is able to escape her mother’s influence, and both are ultimately driven to self-destruction. As Jean Le Moyne had immediately seen in “Le Torrent” an allegorical reading of Québécois alienation, the Belgian sociocritic Lucien Goldmann soon recognized Blais’s La Belle Bête, as well as her 1965 Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel [A Season in the Life of Emmanuel] as allegories for the doomed revolt of a generation of young Quebec intellectuals struggling to break free of an oppressive traditional ideology. Pierre Vadeboncœur, himself a member of the contestatory intellectual generation that came to maturity in the 1950s, spontaneously used the figure of the abused child to describe the doomed attempts at rebellion that had preceded the Quiet Revolution: “We were like children crushed by an authoritarian father: soon the child loses even the desire for self-affirmation” (173). Yet, in “Le Torrent” and La Belle Bête, the authoritarian figure is not a father but a mother, and the fictional struggle of mother and child does not re-enact the clear break of the Oedipal scenario of father and son but rather the forever unresolved struggle of mother and daughter described by Freud.5 As in the less violent intergenerational conflicts traced by Gabrielle Roy, Hébert and Blais drew upon women’s experiences with their mothers as a means of understanding and representing a radical process of social change. Blais also used aspects of the mother-daughter relationship to provide a powerful re-reading of the Quebec tradition in Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel, not only satirizing the failings of the old Church-dominated ideology but, in the ambivalent figure of

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Grand-Mère Antoinette, working out a new understanding of the strength and courage of the Quebec past. By inscribing their allegorical fiction in the familiar structures of the roman de la terre, in which Quebec identity had for so long been embodied, Hébert and Blais were able to foreground the political relevance of their work while extending their attack on the status quo to the literary forms with which it had been associated. Signaling their intention to continue the tradition of the Quebec identity narrative, their use of the familiar rural setting alerted readers to the fact that their texts were making a statement not just about strange and idiosyncratic individuals but about the people of Quebec, a message reinforced by their barely allegorized attacks on the Church and the Quebec educational system, favorite targets of the Quiet Revolution. Similarly, in her 1970 novel Kamouraska Hébert used the traditional form of the historical novel, with its identitary associations, to tell a story of freedom and oppression that many readers saw as relevant to the contemporary situation. If works like “Le Torrent,” La Belle Bête, Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel, and Kamouraska were hailed by critics, it was because they were seen to participate in the dominant ideological discourse of their time, Quebec’s struggle to break with an oppressive political and intellectual order. What the critics generally failed to mention, however, is that, in their major texts of the Quiet Revolution era, Blais and Hébert were breaking new ground by integrating women’s quest for personal and sexual autonomy into the dominant discourse of political independence. If Isabelle-Marie in La Belle Bête is a figure of a genderless Quebec intellectual, as Lucien Goldmann would have it, she is also a woman, seeking love and struggling with a mother who imposes an outmoded and oppressive code of feminine values. The repression and exploitation of women’s sexuality is a central issue in Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel, where the battle for sexual freedom undertaken by Héloïse is surely as central to Blais’s concept of the text as the struggle of Jean Le Maigre to become a poet. And by the end of the decade, in Kamouraska, Hébert is able to use the historical struggle for French-Canadian independence as a backdrop for the effort of a nineteenth-century Quebec woman to attain her sexual freedom. Women’s struggle for liberation from the outmoded roles imposed by the old ideology seemed to be readable, however, only when expressed within the parameters of the dominant political discourse, which seemed opaque to gendered categories. Yet, of the many ideological changes brought about by the process of secularization and modernization that constituted the Quiet Revolution, the most sweeping transformation was arguably in the lives of Quebec women. With

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the abandonment of la revanche des berceaux and the loss of influence of the Catholic Church, the Quebec birth rate was cut in half in the course of the 1960s, a statistic that reflects changes in attitude more profound than the mere acceptance of the birth control pill. In the sudden absence of restrictions on sexuality imposed by the Church, women were free to explore possibilities of lives beyond home and convent. This exploration became a major subject of the great outpouring of Quebec women’s writing in the 1960s, which began to question marriage as well as religiously imposed celibacy, taking as its subject sexual passion and even – for the first time in Quebec fiction, as Suzanne Paradis points out – women’s desire for other women. Although these “women’s issues” were indeed central elements of the social and ideological change, the women’s novels that made them their primary subject were often swept aside by critics in the rush to invent a new form of the Quebec identity narrative, the story of Quebec’s self-affirmation in the political sphere. As texts by Hébert and Blais seemed to participate in the era’s newly dominant political discourse, they became part of the literary canon, but the work of many other women was left by the wayside, often to be rediscovered by feminists of later decades.6 Even Blais’s autobiographical trilogy of the late 1960s, Manuscrits de Pauline Archange [The Manuscripts of Pauline Archange], a statement of personal liberation that followed on the heels of her satirical indictment of Quebec society in Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel, was not fully understood by critics, who did not recognize its relevance to the contemporary scene. And Michèle Lalonde, arguably the most important nationalist spokeswoman of the 1960s, intuitively felt it necessary to put aside issues of gender in her stirring poem “Speak White.” It is in this cultural context, in which women’s reality continued to be marginalized even after the ideological liberation of the Quiet Revolution, that the achievements of Hébert and Blais take on their full significance. Perhaps because both women were living outside of Quebec during most of the decade and were thus less subject to the force of the Quebec intellectual milieu, they were able to bring the personal dimensions of women’s experience together with the dynamics of Quebec’s quest for political autonomy, thereby creating a new place for women in the revolutionary identity narratives of the 1960s.

refusing the maternal As Anne Hébert told interviewers, “Le Torrent” was based on a real event reported in the newspapers, a young Quebec seminarian’s murder of his mother.7 The torrent of the title, the whirling stream that

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mirrors the psychological state of the protagonist, also existed in the real world of Hébert’s childhood. But in her fiction elements are extracted from the world of everyday reality to construct a mythic universe peopled by strange, obsessed beings who act out dramas of violent passion. Nonetheless, critics recognized in “Le Torrent” a reflection of contemporary Quebec. Only three years after the story’s publication in book form, Jean Le Moyne declared that Hébert’s fable provided “the key to our alienation” (97), and, by 1964, with the new understanding made possible by the advent of the Quiet Revolution, Gilles Marcotte in La Presse could consecrate “Le Torrent” as the most perceptive fictional representation of “French Canada’s spiritual drama.” This recognition was called forth, in large part, by the story’s participation, however stylized, in the world of the roman de la terre, evoked in the routines of life on the farm and the drama of continuity from parent to child. As the roman de la terre had been for years the form in which Quebec’s agriculturalist ideal had most appropriately been enshrined, in the postwar period, at least in the work of Hébert and Blais, it became the form in which this ideal could most effectively be subverted. If Hébert’s first-person narrative of a mentally unbalanced young man represented a break with the Quebec realistic tradition, the fictional universe of Blais’s La Belle Bête seems even more detached from reality. Blais’s two-dimensional characters seem to float in a fairy tale setting far removed from the gritty poverty of rural Quebec. Yet, like many of its Quebec literary predecessors, La Belle Bête is a family drama, whose characters live on a farm (which, as at the conclusion of Germaine Guèvremont’s rural saga, is now run by a daughter in the absence of an appropriate male heir). Blais’s American mentor and friend, the critic Edmund Wilson, saw it as essentially a rural novel, “a story of country life that is in its narrower way as … shocking as Zola’s” (“Marie-Claire Blais,” 148), while Lucien Goldmann, who offered a political reading, observed that La Belle Bête relied on the same structural premises of conflict between country and city as Maria Chapdelaine and Bonheur d’occasion, placing it squarely in the tradition of the roman de la terre. Thus, as in the case of “Le Torrent,” despite its evident departure from realism, La Belle Bête evoked in its readers a sense of continuity with previous identity narratives. In the case of Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel, of course, the link with traditional Quebec rural life was visible to all. Oddly enough, despite its obviously parodic intent and its bizarre situations, many readers took the novel as a still accurate portrait of contemporary French-Canadian reality. In his introduction to the English translation, Edmund Wilson claimed the text was “filled with the turbid and

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swirling sediment of the actual French Canadian world – with that squalor and the squirming life that swarms in the steep-roofed cement-covered houses of the little Canadian towns” (vi). In France, critics expressed their delight at seeing the Prix Médicis awarded to a work that seemed an authentic portrait of French Canada. While this type of realistic reading may have been excusable in the hands of foreign critics, many Quebec readers as well accepted Blais’s fiction as an image of their own reality, some even to the point of being offended by her treatment of the Church and her demeaning portrayal of the French-Canadian grandmother. More discerning critics, however, saw that Blais was working not with contemporary reality but with a cultural myth. For Lucien Goldmann Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel presented a mythic vision, “a quasi-mythical universe born of the almost rigorous transposition of the vision of French-Canadian society and its history possessed by a large number of intellectuals” (353–4), and he identified both La Belle Bête and Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel as representations of the revolt of young Quebec intellectuals against traditional French-Canadian society. But if some readers were offended by Blais, many others – even before Goldmann’s magisterial reading – had spontaneously rejoiced in Blais’s parodic attacks on the outmoded ideological concepts of family, Church, and school, and excerpts from her work quickly found their way into new nationalist periodicals such as Liberté. For Gilles Marcotte, who shared Goldmann’s insight that the novel was far from being an accurate representation of sociological reality, the source of Blais’s vision of French-Canadian society – and the target of its satire – was a cultural text, the roman de la terre and the ideology it embodied. If “Le Torrent,” La Belle Bête, and Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel shared a participation in the roman de la terre, they were further linked by their reading of the family drama that had always been integral to the genre. While the roman de la terre had historically told of the transmission of the land from father to son, “Le Torrent” and La Belle Bête depicted a violent rupture in the traditional continuity and a rejection of the heritage, seeming to envision the radical changes soon to take place in the society beyond the text. In contrast to the customary depiction of the father as the figure of cultural authority, Hébert and Blais incarnated the cultural tradition in a mother. In fact, in “Le Torrent” and La Belle Bête, the father is absent, while in Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel he is merely an anonymous source of negation who pales in comparison to the powerful figure of GrandMère Antoinette. The decision to represent a weakened but still menacing traditional order in the maternal figure did not, however, seem

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unnatural to Quebec readers, perhaps because, as Pierre Maheu contended in his 1965 essay “L’Oedipe colonial,” the peculiar nature of an oppressive traditional ideology seemed to evoke an engulfing relation with a mother, appropriate for what he called, echoing Hébert’s words, a people “dispossessed” of their future: Authority threatens not to strike us but to swallow us; it is a tradition: not a set of precise rules, but a presence of vague and obscure prohibitions, an all-encompassing, maternal presence. Our mythology is an affirmation of the world of the Mother; it is the universe of moral values, of the intemporal, of the interiorized; opposed to the world of action, it is a world of being, of immutable nature, it is the frozen dream of our traditionalism. And the concrete role of the mother within the family corresponds to these structures: she is above all the guardian of the home, the faith, and the language (25).

If this representation of tradition in the form of a mother made sense to a male reader like Maheu, it was even more natural to women, who, in the words of Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, tend to “think back through [their] mothers” (79) – in this case, identifying the mother as the central authority figure of their childhood. In the later work of Freud, as well as in the thought of contemporary feminists like Nancy Chodorow, the complex and ambivalent relationship with the mother exerts a powerful influence on the daughter, a psychoanalytic scenario for the violent yet unresolved relationships with the mother seen in Quebec women’s fiction in this period. In this scenario, centred around the strong pre-Oedipal relationship between mother and child, the daughter can never fully disentangle herself from the mother. Despite her desire to reject a shared – and disvalued – feminine identity, she can resolve her conflicts only by recognizing and accepting a certain continuity. In analogous fashion, Québécois of the Quiet Revolution sought to reject an oppressive cultural ideology while at the same time engaging in a process of renegotiation with their past, finding new sources of continuity with a re-examined collective history.8 The mother-daughter relationship was thus an apt model for this complex renegotiation of basic identity that women writers found themselves particularly well-placed to understand and represent. Mirroring this psychoanalytic model, “Le Torrent” and La Belle Bête depict rebellious children unable to detach themselves from the rejected mother, even after her death. Taking the process one step further, Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel inaugurates the slow process of coming to terms with a (grand)mother who is recognized as both nurturing and repressive.

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As they re-enacted the drama of mothers and daughters, these early fictional texts by Blais and Hébert also offered barely allegorized readings of changes taking place in the lives of contemporary women. Well before the Quebec feminist movement presented a sustained critique of the traditional maternal role, “Le Torrent” and La Belle Bête illustrated the way in which women, themselves repressed by society, could turn this repression against their children. Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel offered a tragic portrait of the physical toll taken on women by endless maternities in a context of rural poverty, not to mention the emotional cost of repeated infant mortality and the incessant demands of too many children. But Hébert and Blais moved beyond the critique of la revanche des berceaux to undertake a deeper analysis of gender issues. The drama of La Belle Bête is not limited to the rebellion of a young intellectual against an outmoded social order, as described by Goldmann: on the level of the text, there is a specific conflict between mother and daughter played out in terms of gender expectations, particularly the traditional ideal of feminine beauty. In Blais’s fable, the mother bases her self-worth on her ability to seduce men and rejects her daughter because she fails to conform to conventional ideals of feminine appearance and behaviour. The daughter’s successful management of the family farm, her assumption of a traditionally masculine role formerly held by the father, has no value in the mother’s eyes. In any case, merging traditional gender hierarchies with an ideal of feminine beauty, the mother prefers her beautiful son to her ugly daughter. Even a superficial reading of Blais’s enigmatic text evokes the plight of a generation of Quebec women trapped in a limiting and outmoded version of society’s “female plot,” which bases women’s possibilities on their beauty and attractiveness to men. By its title, La Belle Bête identifies itself as a fairy tale. Re-read in this context, the relationships of Blais’s two-dimensional characters offer a subversive re-enactment of several traditional fairy tales which, as Bruno Bettelheim has observed, have provided plots for the lives of real women. The title clearly invites comparisons to Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la bête), a tale in which a beast is transformed into a handsome prince through the love of a beautiful woman. In Blais’s version, however, the female protagonist is anything but beautiful, and Isabelle-Marie transmits her own lack of beauty to all the other characters by the end of the tale, disfiguring her brother’s face, setting fire to her mother, and passing on her own ugly features to her daughter. As is generally true in Blais’s fictional universe, there is no happy ending.

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Blais’s portrait of the vain, cruel mother also evokes the wicked queen of Snow White. Unlike Snow White, however, Isabelle-Marie is not “the fairest of them all” and cannot triumph through her superior beauty. Her role of servant in the family and her position as true daughter of the father relate her to Cinderella, another maiden persecuted by an evil (step)mother.9 But while Cinderella is sought out by her prince after the magic has worn off, Isabelle-Marie is rejected by her husband when her true identity is exposed to view. Cinderella begins her trajectory in the ashes of the kitchen and finishes in a palace, but Isabelle-Marie ends up in the ashes to which she has reduced the family home. In each of these cases, Blais has subverted the plot of the original fairy tale, challenging the traditional structure of progress toward the happy ending of marriage to a handsome prince. Even more important, Blais’s parable challenges the classic equation of passive beauty with feminine moral worth, creating a world in which external appearances are irreparably severed from internal reality. But, despite the implicit critique, Blais’s protagonist is incapable of completely detaching herself from her mother’s system of values and finding a way out of her dilemma. Perhaps, writing in 1959, Blais herself did not possess the ironic perspective she would eventually gain through physical and spiritual distance from Quebec and its values, a perspective that was evident six years later in Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel, in which Blais openly attacked traditional feminine roles. Linked to this revolt against tradition was a call for sexual liberation, especially the liberation of female sexuality from its submersion in the family and its denial in a celibate religious life. As a freer expression of sexuality strongly marked Quebec films of the 1960s, a new attitude toward women’s sexuality was manifest in much women’s writing of the decade, even before its theorization by the feminists of the 1970s. In “Le Torrent,” sexuality – or its repression – had assumed an importance greater than it had in the relatively more traditional texts of Guèvremont and Roy written in the same period: for the first time in Quebec women’s writing since Jovette Bernier’s ill-fated La Chair décevante [Delusions of the Flesh], an unwed mother was the main protagonist. Although the subject is touched upon in somewhat veiled terms, it is clearly the mother’s obsession with the carnal sin committed in her youth that poisons her life and prevents her son from having a healthy sexual relationship with a woman after her death. Sexuality also assumes a central role in Blais’s Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel.10 In one reading, the novel is an analysis and condemnation of the simultaneous repression and exploitation of women’s sexuality by the major institutions of traditional Quebec

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society, of which Grand-Mère Antoinette is both defender and victim. A complex and ambiguous character, Grand-Mère Antoinette displays admirable qualities of nurturance and courage as she defends the children against a brutal father and a society that, in its seminaries, schools, and factories, seems devoted to their destruction. However, the intrepid and devoted grandmother has one major failing: her refusal of desire. Despite her devotion to Jean Le Maigre and his poetic genius, her condemnation of the sexual dimensions of his poetry leads her to burn his texts. Her suspicion of sexuality becomes quite understandable when its consequences for women are examined through the life of her exhausted daughter, worn out by endless maternities. But her rejection also extends to the infant Emmanuel, as she pushes him aside with the gesture with which she has always refused physical love and punished men’s desire. She refuses him the physical warmth he desperately seeks from her body, bathing him in cold water and laying him down in a cold room with icy sheets. It is no wonder that the grandmother’s cold sheets are one of the first targets of the pyromania of Jean Le Maigre and the older boys. Grand-Mère Antoinette’s lack of warmth reflects itself in the wintry coldness of her world, the frigid Quebec environment. While earlier rural novels were structured around the cycle of the seasons, winter is the only season in Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel. The constant sexual experimentation of Jean Le Maigre and his brothers is related to their need to huddle together in an effort to keep warm, and their thwarted desire is expressed in their incessant attempts to set fire to everything around them. The specific problems of female sexuality are embodied in Jean Le Maigre’s significantly named sister Héloïse, whose medieval namesake was confined to a convent as punishment for her youthful sexual passion. Although critical commentary of the time tended to downplay Héloïse in favour of her brother, feminist re-readings of the novel recognize her importance as an early advocate of women’s sexual liberation. Blais’s analysis of the way in which Quebec institutions channel adolescent sexual desire into religious yearnings is underlined by her humorous conflation of the brothel where Héloise eventually ends up with the convent from which she has been ejected. Both institutions – and, in fact, the entire society – are clearly engaged in exploiting female sexuality, although, in Blais’s reading, only the brothel is honest about its activities. Alternative careers open to girls like Héloïse, as described by want ads for nurses and babysitters, are transparent efforts to take sexual advantage of women while utilizing their nurturing skills. The large family itself, portrayed in the text as the result of a series of rapes of the mother, is merely another form

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of sexual exploitation, one that is presented as far less appealing than professional prostitution. And it is in the liberated atmosphere of the brothel that women are finally able to fulfill the basic human desires so cruelly frustrated in the infant Emmanuel: Héloïse recognizes in one of her clients “a big baby with primal appetites, suspended from her nipples, exploiting in all kinds of gestures and sudden transports … the thirst, the huge thirst of that first day, unfortunately unassuaged” (133).d Turning Quebec’s traditional ideological values on their head, Héloîse’s brothel presents itself as a reasonable alternative to the convent of which it is the mirror-image.

the personal and the political Blais envisioned a sequel to Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel that would have foregrounded a young schoolteacher named Judith and placed even more emphasis on women’s experience.11 But, as can be seen from her personal notebooks of the late 1960s, this project was eventually displaced by her need to tell a story much closer to her own experience, in the quasi-autobiographical novelistic trilogy Manuscrits de Pauline Archange12 that occupied her attention at the end of the decade. Such an autobiographical project was unusual in the context of Quebec literature, but the identitary preoccupations of late 1960s gave rise to at least two other similar texts: Pierre Vallières’ Nègres blancs d’Amérique [White Niggers of America] and Claire Martin’s Dans un gant de fer [In An Iron Glove]. All three books offer a sociological and ideological analysis of Quebec life in the 1940s and 1950s, tracing the experience of a protagonist whose progression toward personal autonomy offers analogies to the changes taking place on the level of the larger society.13 Even though it broke with traditional Quebec literary forms, Vallières’ strikingly titled Nègres blancs d’Amérique was immediately accepted as an important new contribution to the Quebec identity narrative, its author’s claim to be a representative figure given credibility by his militant proindependence activities (the book was written while he was in prison) and by his assertion within the text of the representative quality of his experience.14 In the case of Martin and Blais, however, the critical response was notably different. While reviewers welcomed their critique of an obsolete Quebec educational system, they seemed unable to find in these accounts of female experience a potential model for the Quebec people. Blais’s critics were obviously disconcerted by her departure from the rural form and setting of Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel, and they found little political relevance in the experience of Pauline

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Archange, despite the more contemporary urban setting. Although the trilogy quite clearly constitutes a “portrait of the artist as a young girl,” a structure in which the protagonist slowly frees herself from the limitations of her environment to become a writer, critics seemed to have difficulty following the plot and understanding the significance of events. Roger Duhamel in Livres et Auteurs Québécois called Manuscrits de Pauline Archange a novel where “nothing happens”(41), and Yvan Lepage found it lacking either “logic or chronological order” (laq 1969, 174) – comments that unwittingly echo typical responses to other women’s autobiographical texts.15 Although Manuscrits participated fully in the quest for autonomy that preoccupied Quebec literature of the 1960s, at the same time it undertook an exploration of women’s experience that would characterize more explicitly feminist writings of the 1970s and 1980s.16 In the absence of an obvious political agenda, however, the relevance of Manuscrits to the era’s major ideological movements remained almost invisible to the critics of the time. Because of the recognized political content of her earlier work, Blais’s autobiography was at least given serious attention by reviewers, who nonetheless seemed to be looking for something more. However, what now seems to be a critical misperception of Manuscrits de Pauline Archange was symptomatic of a much larger problem: despite their supposed openness to new literary modes of expression, the preoccupation of critics of the 1960s with “political” questions – that is, issues relating to Quebec’s government and its move toward greater autonomy – often affected their ability to read women’s texts. In the absence of recognizable “political” content, the work of women writers was often easily dismissed. A story by Andrée Maillet, published in her collection Les Montréalais in the early 1960s, describes a dialogue between father and daughter marked by mutual incomprehension. Although this is not its intention, the story is revealingly emblematic of the relationship between the divergent discourses of Quebec men and women in the 1960s, which would seem to be well described by the phrase originally used to characterize the disparate realities of French and English Canada: “two solitudes.” In Maillet’s story, entitled, “Pleure, Pleure! …” [Cry, Cry!], a daughter returns home in a state of emotional disarray after her fiancé has suddenly and inexplicably called off her longingly awaited wedding. While her father makes a sincere effort to listen to her problem, he finds it impossible to free himself from his preoccupation with the headlines in the papers, and his concern for the preservation of the French-Canadian language and culture. Maillet describes the

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conversation between father and daughter: “While he listened to his daughter blurting out her sad little story, Mr Belisle also heard the most alarming things in the background, as if he had tuned his radio to two stations at once: the next decade will represent french canada’s last chance of survival … after the negroes of the united states, french canadians constitute the lowest-paid workforce in all of north america. we are not masters in our own house” (22–3). e Although the father does not seem to be in the vanguard of the separatist movement, he clearly participates in the political discourse that marked the early 1960s: in defining himself, he uses terms like “vanquished,” “occupied,” and “resistant.” He sees the situation of the people of Quebec as similar to that of blacks in the United States, recalling Pierre Vallières’ characterization of the Québécois as the “white niggers of America.” While the father is sensitive to the drama of contemporary politics – and, on the other hand, seems genuinely concerned about his daughter – he is incapable of hearing her story or of understanding the emotional reality that underlies it, as revealed in the words, spoken in consolation, that finally send his daughter fleeing from the room: “I was upset about seeing you leave home so soon.”f The father’s reluctance to part with his daughter “so soon” ironically reveals his failure to recognize that she is a twentyseven-year-old woman who fears remaining forever imprisoned in a room filled with flounces of pink flowered nylon. For all his rhetoric of political autonomy, the father is nevertheless reluctant to recognize the need for autonomy in his own daughter. In psychosexual terms, Maillet’s father is acting out once again the centuries-old conflict of the father torn between his desire to retain his daughter and the culturally sanctioned need to give her away, as Lynda Boose describes it in her essay in Daughters and Fathers. In the Quebec of the Quiet Revolution, this family drama also symbolizes the situation of women writers still trying to express themselves within the confines of what Patricia Smart has called “the father’s house.” While the daughter struggles to give voice to the reality of her own situation, her words are all but drowned out by the dominant discourse of the time: her father is obsessed by concerns that we would commonly label as “political.” This, of course, is to use the word “political” in its most limited and generally understood sense, in its relationship to the governance of states, although feminists and many other theorists have enlarged the scope of this term to describe a broad range of power relations. In Quebec of the 1960s, such limited “political” concerns were intimately bound up with the question of Quebec nationalism, and for

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the father of Maillet’s story, these “political” concerns are intrinsically more important than his daughter’s emotional experience, which he perceives as totally unrelated to the real issues of life: at one point he tells her that life is not a soap opera. When it comes to his relationship with his daughter, the father quickly abandons his current vocabulary of domination and decolonization for the rhetoric of the Quebec’s traditional Catholic conservatism, with its smug possession of certain truth: “before being a Catholic or a French Canadian, Mr Belisle is a father; this is an admirable certitude.”g The mutually inaccessible regions inhabited by Maillet’s father and daughter could be represented by the overlapping but not concentric circles used by Shirley and Edwin Ardener to model the relationship between dominant and muted groups.17 While the father and daughter appear to use the same language, their words have different meanings. For him the concept of liberation would be defined in terms of “political” autonomy and economic power; for the daughter – who, in this story, has not even begun to think in feminist terms – liberation would lie in the sexual and emotional domain. The differences between this masculine and feminine discourse is underlined by the positions occupied by the speakers. While the daughter’s story is the focus of this encounter, it is blurted out in the spaces left open within the institutionalized ritual of the family meal; it fails to compete for the father’s attention with the powerful discourse of Quebec nationalism; and it is only when the daughter has fled to the privacy of her own room that she can begin to formulate her final cry of revolt, a cry that nevertheless remains silenced by her years of training as a dutiful daughter. From the nineteenth century onward, the conversation between women writers and the dominant discourse of Quebec in many ways resembled this dialogue of daughter and father. In order to be taken seriously the daughter had to adapt her speech to the preoccupations of the father, and her words were continually misunderstood. When in 1881 Quebec’s first woman novelist, Laure Conan, chose to write about issues central to her own emotional life in Angéline de Montbrun, her spiritual father, Henri-Raymond Casgrain, misread it, much as Maillet’s father continually misreads his daughter’s story. In the 1960s, with the advent of the Quiet Revolution, the breakup of outmoded ideologies, and the involvement of all areas of Quebec society in a process of rapid social change, the situation should have been quite different. But was it? Although women were profoundly implicated in this social change, it is striking that few women writers were active participants in the well-known nationalist intellectual groups of this era. Women seem to have had no significant role in

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the radical Parti pris movement, for example – which, nevertheless, as Diane Lamoureux has pointed out in Fragments et collages, had an important influence on the feminist discourse of the 1970s. And very few women were connected with the larger and more broadly defined group of nationalist intellectuals clustered around the periodical Liberté. The two most recognized Quebec women writers of the 1960s, Hébert and Blais, had already left Quebec, having gone into a sort of voluntary exile in France and the United States. But the opportunity for writers to participate in social change did not seem to provide motivation for either to return. Blais did publish excerpts from her fiction in Liberté, but she has said that, on a personal level, she felt marginal to the activities of this group.18 The one woman writer who seems to have taken an active part in the nationalist intellectual circles of this era was the poet Michèle Lalonde, and her example may be instructive. Before her political involvement effected what she has termed a “conversion,” Lalonde’s major works of the late 1950s were, as she has herself described them, “very intimist poems … where I speak in a personal voice.”19 In her Songe de la fiancée détruite [Dream of the Fiancée Destroyed] the poet positions herself as a woman and describes a problematic relationship with a masculine figure. This text can certainly be identified as québécois, but it is not, in the then current sense of the word, “political,” that is, concerned with Quebec’s independence from Canada. When, in the 1960s, Lalonde became conscious of her role in the struggle for Quebec’s autonomy, a significant shift occurred in her poetic voice. This is evident in her best-known poem, “Speak White,” where the speaker’s voice is strikingly gender-neutral.20 The poem focuses on issues of domination and colonization, but the relationship between the sexes is not mentioned. This is not to say that Lalonde’s poetry of this period does not retain evident traces of gender-marking: Lalonde herself sees in “Speak White” a profoundly feminine consciousness of oppression, and Patricia Smart points out in Ecrire dans la maison du père that “Speak White” proposes an anticolonial nationalism different from that of men, one that transcends borders and affirms the solidarity of all marginalized peoples (239). But, ironically, one of the ways in which Lalonde’s poetic voice in her “political” texts most clearly distinguishes itself from those of her male contemporaries – particularly Gaston Miron, whose influence she has acknowledged and with whom she has often been paired – is its very failure to assert its gender identity. Indeed, a dominant characteristic of the poetry and fiction of the Quiet Revolution is its use of what Robert Schwartzwald has termed a “discourse of virilization.”21 This is apparent in a work like Miron’s “La Marche à

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l’amour,” where the poetic voice associates itself with masculine imagery and positions itself in relationship to an idealized feminine figure, who has been identified with the elusive reality of Quebec itself. Miron clearly had no problem identifying himself as, at the same time, a sexual and “political” being, and, in his work, his exploration of issues of gender and sexuality reinforces his “political” argument for a more forceful assertion of identity on the part of the Quebec people. This scenario repeats itself in different form in works published in the 1960s by such writers as Jacques Godbout and Hubert Aquin. The exploration of masculinity seemed, for many of these writers, to coincide exactly with the exploration of what it meant to be Québécois. For male writers in this era, problems of gender and political identity seemed to be interwoven in a nonproblematic way. The case of Michèle Lalonde suggests that the same cannot be said of women writers. Looking back at the work of those women of the 1960s, much of it does not easily lend itself to discussion in a context shaped by the work of Godbout, Aquin, and Miron, to mention only a few major figures identified with the independence movement. Aside from the now classic works of Blais, Hébert, and Lalonde – all of which have been seen to have some relevance to the “political” situation – most work by women writers of the 1960s received relatively little attention from editors or literary historians. Clearly, political issues were determinative in securing texts a place in the Quebec literary canon of the 1960s.

women in love The pages of the periodical Liberté, which brought together a number of Quebec intellectuals of the period, offer an opportunity to examine the role played by women in the discourse of the Quiet Revolution. Merely from looking at the journal’s directorate, it is immediately apparent that women played little role in defining editorial policy, apart from the ever faithful Michèle Lalonde, who for a time held various positions, including that of editorial secretary. Some space in the publication itself, however, was given to work by women writers. One of the most frequently published was Claire Martin, whose presence is intriguing: prior to the publication in 1965 of her autobiographical Dans un gant de fer, Martin’s work focused on the various facets of erotic relationships between men and women and had no apparent relevance to the contemporary “political” issues that filled issues of Liberté. Martin’s stories and short novels of the early 1960s, as critics have remarked, seem to take place in a timeless present, to

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float in a geographical void. In this, it must be noted, they are not unlike the work of many other women of the period, including much of the early fiction of Marie-Claire Blais, especially her first novel, La Belle Bête, in 1959 and the first novel of Anne Hébert, Les Chambres de bois, in 1958. Moreover, some reviewers of the early 1960s, like Pierre de Grandpré, had questioned the extent to which Martin could be said to participate in the enterprise of creating a truly national literature, pointing to her use of expressions imported from France as evidence of her attempt to write for a French public rather than for potential readers in Quebec. Martin herself, however, saw her work as participating in a movement designed to bring fundamental and needed change to the Quebec literary tradition. In an article written in 1960, she asserted that the ideology of traditional Quebec had kept love out of Quebec literature, a situation she herself had set out to remedy. Monique Bosco, another woman writer who also published occasionally in Liberté, had noted the problem even earlier. In a thesis presented at the Université de Montréal in 1953, Bosco identified the theme of isolation as central to the Quebec novel, and she particularly noted the absence of what she termed “true love stories.” By the mid-1960s the absence of love in the Quebec novel had become a widely recognized problem, principally because of Michel van Schendel’s discussion of “Love in French Canadian Literature” at a major colloquium on French-Canadian literature and society held at Laval University in 1964. But, as critic Gilles Marcotte has pointed out, the recognition of this phenomenon did little to alter what Marcotte sees as the mainstream of Quebec fiction in the Quiet Revolution era. A number of women writers in the 1960s did, in fact, seem to share Claire Martin’s project of making a place for love in the Quebec literary canon. Louise Maheux-Forcier is an excellent case in point. Her trilogy – Une forêt pour Zoé [A Forest for Zoe], Amadou, and L’Ile joyeuse [The Joyous Island] – focuses on the struggles of her female protagonists to pursue the objects of their emotional and physical desire. For Maheux-Forcier sexuality includes the relationships of women with women, and her exploration of this area of female experience opened up a domain previously closed to Quebec women writers.22 Another woman writer who shared Martin’s project is Michèle Mailhot, whose novels of the 1960s have more recently been reprinted and re-examined after years of critical neglect. In Dis-moi que je vis [Tell Me I’m Alive] in 1964, Mailhot writes of a woman’s effort to free her body from the restrictions of a traditional education and her physical passion from the stifling atmosphere of a bourgeois marriage. In Le Portique [The Portal] in

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1967 she more closely approached current social issues by describing a woman’s struggle to free herself emotionally from the confining structures of the convent. For critics of the time, however, these works by writers like Maheux-Forcier and Mailhot did not assume the important place they have been granted in later feminist readings. In Gilles Marcotte’s analysis of the literature of the 1960s in Une Littérature qui se fait, the one mainstream novel that foregrounds the theme of love is Anne Hébert’s Kamouraska. But, Marcotte argues, this hardly counts, because Hébert situated her story in a time far distant from contemporary reality. It is true that Hébert chose a historical setting, renewing a connection between Quebec women writers and the historical novel that had largely been abandoned since the later work of Laure Conan. Opening the way to a return to historical sources that would characterize Quebec women’s fiction of the next decade, Hébert in Kamouraska summoned the latent political force of a genre in which the FrenchCanadian identity narrative had for so long been expressed. The novel takes place in the nineteenth century rather than the heroic days of New France, but many contemporary readers, including the militant nationalist Pierre Vallières, were able to see its relevance to their own time. In the text itself, Hébert suggests various links between the historical episode of 1839 on which the novel is based and the Rebellion of 1837, which played a crucial role in the nationalist discourse of the 1960s. And the problems faced by a nineteenth-century woman who becomes an accomplice to murder in order to free herself from an abusive marriage cannot have seemed completely removed from a society that had granted women real access to divorce only in the late 1960s. Unlike Gilles Marcotte, many contemporary women readers had little trouble seeing the relevance of the experience of Hébert’s Elisabeth d’Aulnières to highly publicized modern contemporary legal cases involving wife abuse and murder. It is not by accident that when near the end of the novel Elisabeth is united with her lover for the last time, the two words that define their encounter appear next to each other on the page: “love” and “liberty” (a word bearing all its “political” overtones). As Hébert portrayed a historical event in a way that inscribed it within the reality of her own time, she also articulated the integration of women’s “personal” and “political” concerns that has become not only a slogan but a hallmark of the contemporary feminist consciousness. The story of Kamouraska is based on the real murder of Achille Taché, Lord of Kamouraska, by his wife’s American-born lover in 1839.23 The wife was accused of complicity in the murder and imprisoned for two

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months, although she was liberated for reasons of health and subsequently, in the words of the account, “honourably acquitted.” This obscure nineteenth-century murder case was not a major event in the history of Quebec. It was not even an unsolved murder mystery, since a great deal of circumstantial evidence pointed to the guilt of the lover, George Holmes. The only question that may have lingered in some minds is that of the possible involvement of the wife, which was never established, at least not “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Yet in the late 1960s, 130 years later, this ancient story of murder in Kamouraska came to fascinate Hébert, who was then living in Paris. Her novel appeared in 1970 and became a major literary and popular success, even more so after it was made into one of Quebec’s best-known films in 1973 by the director Claude Jutra, with Hollywood star – and Québécoise – Geneviève Bujold playing the heroine. The strange fascination this obscure historical episode held for Hébert and for the Quebec public seems in need of some explanation. Links with the concerns of the Quiet Revolution period begin to suggest themselves when the historical documentation is compared with the plot of the novel. As several Quebec historians have testified, Hébert remained extremely close to the historical record, perhaps filling in details where they were lacking but never falsifying the known facts. In the novel she refers to the actual dates and places of the events and even includes a good deal of the original testimony at the murder trial, the records of which can still be found in the Quebec Archives. Hébert did, however, change some names, and it is the changes she made that begin to suggest the significance of this story for her and for her readers. These changes appear most strikingly in the three major characters in the fatal love triangle of husband, wife, and lover. The alterations made to the name of the victim are very slight: Achille Taché becomes Antoine Tassy, just enough to cover the historical tracks while remaining close to actuality. The name of the murderer, however, is changed from Dr George Holmes to Dr George Nelson. The replacement of one Anglo-Saxon name by another may hardly be a matter of great concern, but for Quebec readers even moderately aware of their own past, the name of Dr Nelson could not help but ring a bell. At the time of the Rebellion of 1837, there were not one but two Doctors Nelson – in fact, two brothers – who despite their name were French-Canadian, and who played a part in the unsuccessful insurrection. The rebellion was significant in the history of Canada, and particularly of French Canada, because it represented the only real action taken by French Canadians, first parliamentary and then military, to free themselves from English domination after the British conquest

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of 1760.24 The rebellion was unsuccessful and severely repressed by the British: many homes and farms were burned, several Patriot leaders were executed and many others went into exile in the United States. As a result, French-Canadian parliamentary power was sharply reduced, and Lord Durham was led to issue his famous report in 1840 in which he called the French Canadians, among other things, “a people without history or literature” and consequently urged their rapid assimilation to British culture. In this rebellion the two Doctors Nelson played important and radical roles. Wolfred Nelson was a mobilizing force in the town of SaintCharles, where his readiness to act contrasted with the hesitation of the parliamentarian Louis-Joseph Papineau. When Wolfred Nelson was taken prisoner after his men’s defeat by the British, his brother Robert fled to the United States and became a leader in the movement that tried to inspire a new rebellion in 1838. In fact, he issued a proclamation establishing a new Quebec Republic based on liberal democratic principles, such as the separation of church and state, and – quite relevant to Hébert’s novel – the abolition of seigneurial rights like those enjoyed by the Lord of Kamouraska. Robert Nelson led a brief armed rebellion across the border in November of 1838, but when his small and poorly armed force was defeated, he fled back to Vermont and spent the rest of his days in the United States. The trajectory of the historical Robert Nelson exactly parallels the destiny of Hébert’s Dr George Nelson, who, like his historical namesake, brought a message of liberation from seigneurial domination to the abused wife of the Lord of Kamouraska. He, too, fled across the border after his brief act of violence, leaving the woman for whom he had committed the murder to face the consequences alone, much as many Patriot leaders had left the people of Quebec. The significance of the parallels between the historical Robert Nelson and the fictional George Nelson become even clearer when we realize that the Kamouraska murder itself occurred in the winter of 1839, a date clearly indicated in the text, just a few months after the defeat of Robert Nelson’s invasion. Moreover, the murder was planned in the town of Sorel, not very far up the Richelieu River from the towns where the most important battles of the rebellion took place. Hébert calls our attention to these coincidences several times, and at one point her heroine, invoking the names of two of the major battles, exhorts us to remember Saint Denis and Saint Eustache. That Hébert should have been sensitive to the history of the rebellion is not surprising, since many Quebec intellectuals of the 1960s saw it as an early attempt at the project they were now carrying through: to make of Quebec a liberal democratic secular society and

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to assert its unique francophone identity in the political arena. An indication of the feeling of the time can be found in a 1965 issue of the journal Liberté, which gave expression to a diverse group of Quebec nationalist intellectuals. Despite the editors’ avowed intention of avoiding “faulty comparisons” between 1837 and current events, analogies seem indeed to be at the heart of the issue. In an article simply entitled “1837-1963,” for instance, the poet Paul Chamberland suggests parallels between the discrediting of the flq terrorists and the historical denigration of the Patriots. And both André Major and Hubert Aquin identify the Patriots as spiritual ancestors: Major’s contribution is, in fact, entitled “Chénier my ancestor.” His response to the tragic fate of Dr Jean Chénier, the Patriot leader killed at Saint Eustache, clearly reveals its emotional impact: “This image of our defeat haunted me as a black eye shames a schoolboy.” And he concludes: “Never will I be able to accept our reality, never will I resign myself to our daily defeat … we must regain the lost time, the lost country” (94–5). In evoking the historical events of the 1830s, then, Hébert touched on questions of great contemporary relevance. During the 1960s many writers were involved in making political statements, but the novels written by these nationalist intellectuals were usually set firmly within contemporary Quebec reality. Kamouraska, on the other hand, approached the contemporary situation only obliquely. But there is another difference: its protagonist is a woman rather than a man. Although readers were quite used to female protagonists, the choice of a woman as the central figure was jarring in the context of Quebec’s political literature of the 1960s. This may have been an understandable protest against the classic scenario, which, as Hubert Aquin pointed out in his essay “The Mystical Body,” represented the union of French and English Canada as a marriage in which Quebec, as the weak and submissive partner, was inevitably assigned the role of the woman. Questions of gender are clearly not far removed from the effort to define the content of the new adjective québécois – and, given the assertively masculine definitions selected, it begins to appear less surprising that so few women were connected with the militant nationalist groups. This virilizing language also appears in creative works. In one typical plot, the terms of the English–French-Canadian marriage are reversed, with the Québécois intellectual as the man and the anglophone as the woman. During the 1960s the typical dénouement of this scenario, in novels like Jacques Godbout’s Un Couteau sur la table [A Knife on the Table] and Hubert Aquin’s Trou de mémoire [Blank Memory] was the murder of the woman by the newly self-assertive Québécois.25 Another variation on this gendered political theme is

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the scenario in which the young masculine Québécois affirms his desire to possess a woman, who represents the land of Quebec. This is the structure of Paul Chamberland’s poem Terre Québec, as well as Hubert Aquin’s novel Prochain Episode, where the secret agent pursues a mysterious and evasive woman identified only as K, obviously Quebec. This schema of the Quebec nationalist male who possesses the mysterious, passive, and silent Quebec people-as-female would be generally inappropriate for the work of a woman writer, because it grants the active role to the man and, particularly, because it silences the woman’s voice. Yet in Kamouraska Anne Hébert essentially adopts this distribution of roles, with George Nelson as the revolutionary and Elisabeth as the people of Quebec. However, she then focuses on Elisabeth. The second major name change Hébert has effected in her rewriting of the historical record is that of the accused murderess, from Josephte-Joséphine Taché to Elisabeth Tassy, a choice that is particularly interesting because Anne Hébert’s own mother was named Marguerite-Marie Elisabeth Taché. In fact, Joséphine Taché was a member of Hébert’s mother’s family, being the wife of a cousin of her grandfather’s. If Hébert claims, in fact, to have long been haunted by this story, it is because she had heard it told by her own mother. If the change from George Holmes to George Nelson denotes Hébert’s effort to rewrite a history of the Quebec people, her change of Josephine to Elisabeth suggests that she is also attempting to reconstruct her own history, the story of women’s experience in Quebec. Just as it was not a simple matter to make room for a woman’s experience in the indépendantiste literary plots, it was not easy to find a place for women – or even a specific historical model – in nineteenthcentury Quebec, where women were confined to convent or home. In the issue of Liberté on the Rebellion of 1837, Michèle Lalonde does attempt to say something about the women of the time, but the few historical portraits she unearths are far from heroic. If, in his famous essay “The Art of Defeat,” appearing in the same issue of Liberté, Hubert Aquin found it depressing that the only active male model available to Québécois was that of the defeated Patriots, one can only imagine the effect on the women of Quebec, who had no active models at all after the British conquest. It is this historical absence that Hébert seemed to have had in mind when she saw in the story of the Kamouraska murder a woman who, for a brief moment, tried to free herself from domination and live out her passion. Of course, Hébert was not unrealistic enough to let her succeed: this would have been untrue to the particular historical episode as well as to the larger historical context of the nineteenth century. She chose instead to

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study in the life of this spirited and yet defeated woman the process of revolt and eventual submission to an alien authority. In her research on the Quebec women of 1837 Michèle Lalonde finds in their actions a “feminine ambivalence,” in which she sees a reflection of “the paradox and profound contradictions that define our national character,” a character torn between the contradictory forces of “the desire for affirmation and independence,” on the one hand, and “the immediate, more pressing demands – alas, sometimes cowardly – of daily survival” (17).26 This identification of “feminine ambivalence” with a national character fostered by years of domination also stands at the centre of Hébert’s vision of the heroine of Kamouraska. The novel thus participates fully both in the 1960s nationalist vision of the Quebec people as victims of foreign domination and the newly emerging feminist vision of woman as dominated by a patriarchal society. Kamouraska is far from being a blueprint for revolution. Like several of the overtly political novels of Quebec in the 1960s, it is concerned not with action but with understanding the failure to act. This is also the focus of Hubert Aquin, whose revolutionary agent is blocked more by internal than external forces. For Aquin and other intellectuals of the 1960s, the roots of Quebec’s failure to assert itself politically could be traced back to the defeat of the Patriots and the subsequent development of the ideology of survivance, which preached submission to the dominant authority and sought refuge in the idealization of rural life and the large rural family of la revanche des berceaux. For many of the Quebec nationalists of the 1960s, in order to change the present, it was necessary to take a long look at the repressive forces of the past. This perspective accounts for the changes Hébert has made in the classic structure of the murder mystery, which generally begins with the murder and goes on to discover the identity of the murderer. Hébert relegates the murder to the end of the novel and begins by presenting us with Elisabeth in 1860, twenty years later, as the death of her second husband forces her to come to terms with the events of the past. If the reader is led to ask any question, it is how the young and passionate Elisabeth has evolved into the anxiety-ridden matron before us. Hébert’s analysis takes the form of a trial, for Elisabeth a second trial, which this time takes place in the courtroom of her own mind. The dialogic nature of the novel is clear from the opening segment, where Elisabeth’s internal monologue is confronted with the accusing voice of her dying husband and an unidentified, free-floating narrative voice that seems

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to take up her defense: “What devotion, what attention! A saint, Monsieur Rolland, that’s what she is, a saint. And so pretty, too. [A real princess.]” (9).h As Elisabeth sinks into a drugged sleep, these voices are joined by others from the past, including that of her younger self. But as the trial culminates in the reconstruction of the murder, it suddenly reveals a new aspect of the case: it is Elisabeth herself who has chosen imprisonment over freedom, when, suddenly repelled by her lover’s bloody act – an act that she herself had encouraged and instigated – she refuses to join him in his flight. Hébert herself, in an interview, stressed the centrality of this decision: “For Elisabeth, total freedom would have meant the freedom to leave. In this era, it was very difficult: she did not have the strength to do it” (“L’écriture et l’ambivalence,” 444). Thus, the corpse dug up in the last scene is not Antoine Tassy’s but Elisabeth herself, as she envisions herself twenty years later, “Off in a parched field, under the rocks, they’ve dug up a woman, all black but still alive, buried there long ago” (250).i She has been the agent of her own imprisonment, the perpetrator of her own murder. In this complex psychological study of the mechanisms of oppression, Hébert’s analysis presents striking similarities to a current of thought that was very much in the air in the Quebec of the 1960s, the theory of decolonization. In the context of the struggles for independence of France’s former African colonies, radical thinkers like Aimé Césaire, Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon, and Jacques Berque had analyzed the effect of colonization on populations. Although Quebec had never actually been colonized by the British, many Quebec intellectuals were agreed in seeing the relevance of this analysis to their own situation as a culture long dominated by another, and this analysis was convincing to Memmi himself.27 In many ways, Hébert’s intepretation of the heroine of Kamouraska is analogous to Memmi’s portrait of the colonized man, which is the subject and title of his best-known work. For Memmi, the most destructive aspect of colonization is the attempt to convince the colonized people of their inherent inferiority, which is necessary to justify the privileges usurped by the colonizer. The strangest and most pernicious element in this process is that as the colonized man is constantly confronted with this degrading picture of himself, he ends up by accepting it as true. The presence of the colonizer, in Memmi’s account, takes the form of an “accusation,” creating in the colonized man a sense of guilt and shame about his own real being.

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This is exactly the situation of Anne Hébert’s Elisabeth, who feels herself accused from the beginning of the novel. Like Memmi’s colonized man, Elisabeth is only being accused of being what she really is, a passionate woman yearning for freedom to love, as she puts it, “To live to the fullest in your flesh, intact, like blood coursing happy and free” (17).j Her freedom and her passion are, of course, profoundly unacceptable in this restrictive patriarchal society. In the perception of Memmi’s colonized man, the only way to escape these inevitable feelings of inferiority is to conform utterly to the ideal embodied by the colonizer. But, of course, the attempt is ultimately doomed: the colonized man can never really become one of the colonizers, who will always be ready to find a flaw in his perfectly learned performance. Hébert’s Elisabeth, too, seeks refuge in conformity to an ideal – for her, an ideal of feminine virtue – but she is often painfully aware of the distance that separates it from her real being. Elisabeth’s ideal is summed up in the image of a real historical woman, the woman in whose name she has been charged and whose values she has been accused of violating: Queen Victoria, who occupied the British throne at the time of the Kamouraska murder. Elisabeth’s interior monologue reveals the way in which she has sought to protect herself, through her assumed identity as virtuous wife and mother, against the accusations made against her long before: “The Queen against Elisabeth d’Aulnières? Absurd. Who would dare accuse me of offending the Queen? When it’s obvious that I look just like her, enough to be her sister, with all my brood around me. I look like the Queen of England. I act like the Queen of England. I’m fascinated by the image of Victoria and her children. Perfect imitation. Who could find me guilty of doing anything wrong?”(29).k Of course, as with Memmi’s almost perfectly assimilated colonized man, there is always a flaw in the image, which here is exposed by one of Elisabeth’s own daughters: “Suddenly little Anne-Marie’s sweet voice pipes up: ’But Mamma is wearing her robe! And her hair isn’t combed. And besides, her face is all red!’ What a nuisance, this bright, clever child. Too clever. In a flash the charm is broken, the sham unmasked” (29).l Even though she puts in eighteen years as a respectable matron, even though she sends her oldest sons to Oxford, even though she produces nine carefully groomed children, Elisabeth can never quite manage to turn herself into Queen Victoria. Hébert’s choice of Queen Victoria to represent the ideal against which Elisabeth attempts to measure herself admirably embodies the double colonization she analyzes in Kamouraska: the domination of French Canadians by the British, and the domination of women by a patriarchal ideal. Victoria, of course, represents the British monarchy,

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and its power over the lives of French Canadians like Elisabeth is shown in the customary language of the formal accusation made against her in the name of the sovereign: “against the peace of our said Lady the Queen, her crown and dignity” (44). Significantly, this accusation is made in English, although Elisabeth and all others involved in her case speak French. The proclamation of Victoria’s ascent to the throne in 1837 had in fact provoked one of the minor episodes in the rebellion, as French Canadians had walked out in protest from the Te Deums held in celebration. The date of her coronation in 1838 was marked in French Canada by the announcement of the exile of the Patriot leaders. Nor has the significance of Queen Victoria been lost in the twentieth century. Her name graces a Canadian national holiday: in the 1960s, this holiday became the target of protests, especially in 1965, when a demonstration by young Quebec nationalists in Montreal was violently repressed by the police. But Victoria is a sign with multiple meanings: not only is she a symbol of British power, she also embodies an ideal of feminine behaviour. Elisabeth recognizes this when she says, “I look just like her … with my brood all around me”(29).m The British Victoria is also the perfect incarnation of the French-Canadian ideal of womanhood in this era of la revanche des berceaux, a maternal ideal that was definitively rejected by Quebec women in the era of the Quiet Revolution. A princess who went on to become a queen, Victoria is closely connected with another figure who has long dominated feminine dreams and aspirations: the fairy-tale princess, as immortalized by Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and Snow White. As Bruno Bettelheim has shown in The Uses of Enchantment, fairy tales can play a role in shaping our response to real life, and theories of their effects on women in particular have always been quite common in popular literature. In Kamouraska fairy tales provide the structure that governs Elisabeth’s telling of her life story, as well as the way in which she has experienced it. As Elisabeth goes back over the memories of her birth and childhood, she describes her maiden aunts as three good fairies who hovered over her as they did Sleeping Beauty. In accordance with their wishes, Elisabeth goes to a ball and meets a handsome young lord, who sweeps her off to his distant manor. At this point, however, the tale sours, because the prince soon proves to be a drunken monster (something of a reversal of Beauty and the Beast). Thus, in order to preserve her role, Elisabeth must recast herself in another fairy tale, with a new prince. This is the part she writes for her lover, George Nelson: “to deliver the imprisoned princess, destroy the dragon who holds her captive” (164).n One might well ask why Elisabeth insists on clinging to the role of princess, which is essentially

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a passive role that leaves her in an eternal state of waiting. In fact, as soon becomes perfectly clear to the reader, she has not completely refrained from acting: as she lets slip, she was the one who first articulated the thought that had begun to suggest itself to the lovers: “Antoine must be killed!” (146).o But she consistently refuses to take responsibility for her acts, and she denies her complicity in the crimes that have been committed. By convincing her accusers – and at the same time convincing herself – that she has always been the virtuous princess victimized by evil forces, she can maintain the image of her innocence. It is her role as princess that even guarantees her innocence before the Queen: “I look just like her, enough to be her sister” (29).p If the queen and the princess represent an ideal, their antithesis has long been represented, in fairy tales as in popular religion, by the figure of the witch. When Elisabeth is most deeply troubled by her participation in the murder, in the worst nightmare of her drugged sleep, she sees that she must really be a witch. In Kamouraska, a number of motifs suggest the presence not only of witches in general, but of a particular witch who is part of the history of Quebec. Unlike Victoria, this feminine figure is not named, but she nevertheless lurks just beneath the surface of the text, evoked by constant images of bars and imprisonment, the fear of hanging, and Elisabeth’s sense of being enclosed in a cage. This is MarieJosephte Corriveau, known in Quebec history simply as la Corriveau, who, like Elisabeth, was accused of having murdered her husband (this was her second husband: some oral versions of the story have her also murdering her first one, and, in fact, some variants have her going through six or seven husbands).28 This happened in 1763, shortly after the British conquest of Quebec, so that her trial was held under British martial law, and like Elisabeth’s, in English, a language neither she nor the witnesses understood. It took place in the Ursuline Convent in Quebec City, just a few feet away from the house where Elisabeth lives in the novel, on the rue du Parloir, which may be why Hébert chooses this particular street as her residence.29 La Corriveau’s trial was clearly not exemplary by any modern standards, and the evidence under which she was convicted seems circumstantial at best. Nevertheless, she was sentenced to be hanged and subsequently – and this is what provides the real horror of the case – to have her body exposed in an iron cage hung at Pointe-Levis, across the river from Quebec City and a spot Hébert’s characters pass by on their way to and from Kamouraska. This much seems to be historically accurate: the cage was later dug up in a nearby churchyard and displayed by P.T. Barnum in his circus sideshow. The story of la Corriveau became part of the official Quebec folklore when it

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was recounted by Philippe Aubert de Gaspé in one of Quebec’s first novels, Les Anciens Canadiens (39–55). But Aubert de Gaspé put his emphasis on the legend that grew up around the historical facts: namely, that la Corriveau in her cage took up the practice of jumping on passing travellers in the night and begging them to carry her across the river to join her friends in the witches’ sabbath on the Ile d’Orléans (299–304). Thus an ordinary woman who is condemned as a murderess is turned into a witch. This progression is almost inevitable, for witchcraft is the ultimate crime with which women have traditionally been charged, both in history and in fairy tales. Contemporary re-examination of witchcraft accusations has shown that they were often a way of condemning social marginality and punishing female deviance. In recent years feminists have done a good deal to rehabilitate the image of the witch, not only exposing its function as a tool of social repression but even recasting witchcraft as an expression of female power. Anne Hébert herself does a humorous version of this in her 1975 novel, Les Enfants du sabbat [Children of the Black Sabbath], where the heroine is a powerful but playful witch who wreaks havoc in a traditional Quebec convent. Witches became heroines of feminism in Quebec, as elsewhere. An important Quebec feminist play was entitled La Nef des sorcières [The Witches’ Ship], and the well-known singer, Pauline Julien sang Anne Sylvestre’s song, Une Sorcière comme les autres [A Witch like the Others], along with Gilles Vigneault’s song about la Corriveau. But la Corriveau, like Queen Victoria, is another sign with multiple meanings: she has been rehabilitated in modern Quebec not only as a feminist figure, but, even more visibly, as an incarnation of the nationalist plight. The song La Corriveau was written by Gilles Vigneault, certainly the most important of those singer-songwriters, the chansonniers, who in the 1960s helped define the term québécois. Vigneault wrote his song about la Corriveau in 1966, at the height of the Quiet Revolution, for a ballet also entitled La Corriveau, which was performed at Montreal’s prestigious new Place des Arts by Les Grands Ballets Canadiens with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. Unlike previous treatments of the legend, this one sought to exculpate rather than incriminate the unfortunate Corriveau, who is given the more intimate name of “Marijou.” But most important, the song begins by establishing the real background of the story, the British conquest: It was in that time when this country Was betrayed, invaded, conquered. The conquering Englishman was master and king; He was the judge and made his own law. (my translation)q

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The 1966 performance of La Corriveau at the Place des Arts and the success of Vigneault’s song marked a radical change in public attitude toward this formerly sinister figure.30 In subsequent years she would become a folk heroine, capable of representing Quebec to the outside world. Like the Rebellion of 1837, and like so much of Quebec’s newly reinterpreted past, la Corriveau emerged in the 1960s from the depths of Quebec’s history of oppression to become the symbol of a people victimized and imprisoned within an alien culture. Although it is a foreign conqueror that hanged her as a murderess, it is the patriarchal discourse of her own society that condemned her as a witch. By linking Elisabeth with the figure of la Corriveau, Hébert shows her as the incarnation of a double oppression – or, to use the rhetoric of the time, a double colonization. Kamouraska illustrates the way in which the desire for liberation and self-affirmation on the part of Quebec society as a whole coincided in the 1960s with the desire of Quebec women for liberation from the traditional patriarchal ideology. In later years, these desires would diverge: as Michèle Lalonde would lament, the feminist movement that emerged in the Quebec of the 1970s remained largely indifferent and even critical of much of the nationalist/sovereignist rhetoric (212). But, for a brief moment, these two struggles were able, in the works of writers like Anne Hébert and Marie-Claire Blais, to speak in the same voice. Or, rather, they employed a “double-voiced discourse,” to use Elaine Showalter’s terminology,31 a discourse that works within the forms of the dominant ideology to permit the expression of a culturally muted women’s reality. In the work of Hébert and Blais the analysis of both forms of domination strengthened and reinforced one other.

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4 Rewriting the Narratives of Identity Ecrivaine et Québécoise. – France Théoret, Entre raison et déraison

In her essays collected in Entre raison et déraison [Between Reason and Unreason] France Théoret repeatedly defines herself as “Ecrivaine et Québécoise.” This confident affirmation of a complex identity as both woman writer and woman of Quebec would hardly have been possible, in linguistic or existential terms, before the 1980s. As the word Québécois(e) became the signifier of a national identity only in the turbulent decade of the Quiet Revolution, the concept of woman writer as écrivaine was inscribed into the language – the language of Quebec if not of Paris-based français international1 – by the Quebec feminists of the 1970s, who had learned from their experience in the Quebec nationalist movement that, in fundamental ways, changing language could transform society. By 1987, when the essays of Entre raison et déraison were published, Théoret’s linking of these two key terms of identity seemed natural and even inevitable, but the production of new gender-marked narratives of Quebec identity in the period following the 1980 referendum on Quebec independence signaled a shift in the attitude of many feminist writers, who had earlier turned their backs on the rhetoric of independence and nationalist themes. Oddly enough, it may have been the challenge to the second term in Théoret’s equation posed by Quebec’s failed bid for political autonomy in 1980 that freed women writers to participate in the definition of what it meant to be québécoise. In 1976, when René Lévesque’s Parti Québécois assumed control of the Quebec government, many writers believed that a political movement had taken over the job of defining Quebec identity in a new non-problematic

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way and that the struggle for autonomy would now take place in the political arena. Quebec feminists were generally supportive of sovereignty and of a political party that put more women into government, but nevertheless kept their distance from the Parti Québécois when it hesitated to support key issues such as abortion rights. When, in 1980, Quebec voters halted the effort to realize Quebec identity in a sovereign political state, they opened the way to a new exploration of the question in literature. Some of the literary texts produced in the wake of the 1980 referendum, like Yves Beauchemin’s popular 1981 novel Le Matou, seemed to propose an even more reductive reading of Quebec identity, a retrenchment into roots and even a certain xenophobia. Women’s identity narratives of the same period, however, share a rejection of limited and monolithic definitions of Quebec identity – perhaps because, after a decade of feminist exploration, they had come to understand the way in which these traditional hegemonic narratives had suppressed the “different voices” of women. France Théoret writes Nous parlerons comme on écrit [We Will Speak As One Writes] to contest the restrictions of a traditional concept of identity, which she calls “an iron-hard identity,”a and Francine Noël’s protagonists constantly flee the confines of the traditional Quebec family. If the cultural discourse of Quebec in the 1960s, as described by Micheline Cambron, had been based on a homogeneous and unchanging collective “we,” the new definitions of a québécoise subjectivity are plural, heterogeneous, and open to change. Despite their diversity of form and content, these new women’s identity narratives nevertheless show the imprint of the various Quebec feminist movements of the 1970s, the exploration of language at the centre of l’écriture au féminin (writing in the feminine), as well as new research in women’s history and the ongoing political struggle for women’s rights in the workplace and at home. Having absorbed the lessons of the preceding decade, many women’s texts from 1980 onward could be described, in the terms suggested by Lori SaintMartin, as “metafeminist.” Unlike the dismissive term “post-feminist,” “metafeminism,” as defined by Saint-Martin, signifies an inclusion of feminism and a moving beyond: “the term metafeminism both includes and calls into question; it accompanies feminism, espouses its causes, incorporates it into new forms. It does not imply abandonment of what has come before but a new form of integration, a way of building on past accomplishments.”2 The Quebec feminism of the 1970s had itself built on the insights of the nationalism of the 1960s, as Karen Gould has shown, incorporating its new understanding of oppression, in terms of the discourse of decolonization, and its central focus on the issue of language.3 But,

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as Michèle Lalonde had remarked with some regret, by 1970 it was already apparent that the nascent feminist movement was proceeding on a path that did not seem likely to merge with the nationalist mainstream (212). The newly formed flf (Front de libération des Femmes), named to parallel the radical flq (Front de libération du Québec), did for a time cling to its twin slogans, “No liberated Quebec (Québec libre) without liberation of women. No liberated women without liberation of Quebec.” But the union of the Quebec independence and feminist movements in the political sphere was sporadic and ephemeral at best, despite the fact that many feminists were in favour of independence. On the literary front, the divergence was even more pronounced. The turn away from a nationalist thematics was first asserted during the Quiet Revolution period by the group of poets associated with the literary journal La Barre du Jour, which included two figures who would become central to the definition of l’écriture au féminin, Nicole Brossard and France Théoret. The group at La Barre du Jour, with its “formalist” perspective, saw language rather than politics as the site of revolutionary change; as Brossard remembers, a feeling of fatigue with Quebec nationalist themes had been a central force in the foundation of the journal: “Everything that had to do with ‘the country’ was annoying to us – wind, snow, poudrerie; it didn’t fit in with our sensibilities” (“Entrevues,” 72). Of course, as has been emphasized by Brossard and others, this turn away from nationalist themes remained fundamentally in step with demands for Quebec autonomy by encouraging Quebec writers to develop their own literary voice. The team at La Barre du Jour, which soon expanded to include Théoret, talked passionately about nationalist politics even as they wrote and published texts that were apparently apolitical. But, as Théoret remembers it in Entre raison et déraison, the formalist focus on language promoted by La Barre du Jour created a literature removed from grounding in reality and, in consequence, hostile to the assertion of a female subjectivity: “This speaking subject (in formalism) has no social inscription, no individual history and belongs to no nation, generation or gender/genre. If formalism has brought about the revision of an undeniably gossipy element in literature, it also tended to make literature aseptic” (146).4 Because of these repressive forces, Théoret herself found it difficult to continue her association with La Barre du Jour, in large part because of her assertion of a gendered identity in her writing and a need to retain a connection with the real. As she explained in an interview in Voix et Images, “You weren’t supposed to be a woman. If you were a woman, you brought something from the order of existence to

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writing and that meant semanticizing writing, returning to representation. And representation was just what you were supposed to avoid. It was not supposed to happen, in any way” (89). Even Brossard, a major proponent of the Barre du Jour movement, soon began to register her impatience with a view of literature that abstracted the speaking subject from its grounding in gender. Dissatisfied with the neutral voice at the centre of her early poetry, Brossard went on to explore gendered subjects in avowedly feminist texts, like L’Amèr and Picture Theory, that mixed feminist theory and fiction. Maintaining her association with La Barre du Jour (which in 1977 was renamed La Nouvelle Barre du Jour), Brossard edited issues on contemporary Quebec women writers that functioned as landmarks of the new feminist writing. Continuing a friendship begun when both were students at the Université de Montréal in 1965, Brossard and Théoret together organized some of the most important of the feminist literary manifestations that marked the 1970s in Quebec: the periodical Les Têtes de Pioche and the collective volume of dramatic monologues La Nef des sorcières (1976). Along with other women like Louky Bersianik, Madeleine Gagnon, and Denise Boucher, they engaged in the type of productive literary dialogue that had characterized groups of male writers in Quebec from L’Institut canadien and the Quebec Patriotic School right through to Liberté and Parti pris in the 1960s.5 The work of the women writers associated with the term l’écriture au féminin, whose literary significance has been brilliantly analyzed in Karen Gould’s book Writing in the Feminine, has done as much to bring Quebec literature to the international scene as the nationalist texts of the 1960s. The women who participated in this new feminist writing project were, by and large, committed to Quebec independence but, unlike the primarily male nationalist writers of the Quiet Revolution, they felt no need to make this political commitment the source of their writing. These 1970s feminists, like their more timid predecessors of the 1960s, turned their attention away from the national text, exploring the inscription in language of the female body rather than the pays, seeking a new language of the feminine in preference to joual. Brossard’s early fiction does point to its Quebec setting – Un livre [A Book] refers to the bombings and arrests of 1970, and French Kiss foregrounds the physical presence of a modern Montreal – but an exploration of “what it means to be Québécois(e)” is peripheral to its meaning. In later texts Brossard leaves Quebec altogether to explore the drama of a broader américanité: her much studied 1987 novel Le Désert mauve [Mauve Desert] takes place in New Mexico. While Brossard, Théoret, and other practitioners of l’écriture au féminin have,

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in fact, often embodied the Quebec writer in the eyes of the world, in their texts of the 1970s the exploration of Quebec identity was not their expressed objective nor was it a salient feature of their work. After almost a century of struggle to inscribe themselves in the “national text,” Quebec women had finally attained literary autonomy, but they now seemed ready to move beyond the nationalist literary project. Although the feminist literature of the 1970s directly involved a relatively small number of writers, it played a crucial role in the development of women’s writing in Quebec, finally freeing Quebec women from the obligation of framing their words in the structures provided by men – as Patricia Smart would state it, the necessity of “writing in the father’s house.” Through their explorations of l’écriture au féminin, women were able to gain a new understanding of gendered identity and its expression in language. Eventually, as they grew more confident in their role of woman writer – in the new Québécois formulation, écrivaine – they were able to take up an aspect of their identity that had seemed to be temporarily set aside, that of Québécoise. This was not a development signaled by manifesto or by the foundation of yet another literary journal. Neither a literary school nor a political movement, Quebec women, like other Quebec writers of the 1980s, seemed to go their own, individual ways. As France Théoret and others have stated, the literary production of the 1980s, in its diversity, seems to defy attempts at categorization. Yet a number of women’s writings of the 1980s and 1990s have concerned themselves with rewriting the narratives of a Quebec identity that had previously been defined almost exclusively by men. If the feminist movement of the 1970s had built on the theories that formed the new nationalism of the 1960s, after 1980 a more diverse group of women writers were able to bring to their narratives of identity insights gained from the feminist experiences of the 1970s. One such legacy of l’écriture au féminin was a new freedom of genre and textual form, which had liberated women’s texts from the straitjacket of the old “female plot” by releasing it from the demands of conventional plot itself. As Théoret has said in Entre raison et déraison, the movement produced “a multiple form of writing which splinters the concept of literary genre” (147). Since the new Quebec modernité, associated with writing in the feminine, contested the primacy of realism and questioned the possibility of representation itself, many practitioners of l’écriture au féminin moved away from writing realistic novels and produced texts that blended theory with fiction, blurring the boundaries between prose and poetry. Some feminist texts of the 1970s used this new generic freedom to produce hilarious

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parodies of pompous patriarchal discourse, like Louky Bersianik’s L’Eugélionne and her parody of Plato’s Symposium, Le Pique-nique sur l’Acropole [Picnic on the Acropolis]. Others, however, privileged what Gould has called “a Derridean indeterminacy and unreadability” (Writing in the Feminine, 20), creating a new but hermetic language that made it inaccessible to many readers. With the 1980s, however, came a new openness to “readability,” and even a return to realism. This was true even of Brossard and Théoret themselves, as a new accessibility was praised by critics in both Brossard’s 1987 novel Le Désert mauve and Théoret’s 1989 collection of short stories, L’Homme qui peignait Staline [The Man Who Painted Stalin]. Other women’s productions of the 1980s, like Francine Noël’s Maryse or Arlette Cousture’s Les Filles du Caleb [Emilie], were major bestsellers, reaching a wide, popular audience while incorporating a resolutely feminist reworking of form and content. Another result of the generic freedom created by the feminist 1970s was a new openness to autobiography, a genre that, like diaries and letters, had been considered a minor form, especially when written by women. As Théoret has observed, the new “texts” produced by women writers were “a writing made up of a mixture of major and minor forms – such as the diary, autobiography” (Entre raison, 147).6 Perhaps due to the perceived subversiveness of Rousseau in the nineteenth century, the autobiographical tradition had never been strong in Quebec, even in the case of men, the significance of the individual life seemingly crushed beneath the demands of the collective drama, or buried in the “family plot.” In the new freedom of the 1960s, however, autobiographical elements entered texts like Hubert Aquin’s Prochain Episode. Pierre Vallieres’ autobiography, Nègres blancs d’Amérique [White Niggers of America], written from prison in 1966, became an iconic text of Quebec identity. Vallières had no problem envisioning the story of his own individual life as representative of the fate of the people, at least of the more specifically oppressed Quebec proletariat, and the first words of his text refer to “our ancestors” of New France. He feels confident that his mother, with all her irritating characteristics, can be understood as an example of “the Quebec mother” and his father as an embodiment of the oppressed and eventually martyred people of Quebec (who, in Vallières’ text, often seem to be men). Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck have pointed out in Life/Lines that the type of self-perception exemplified by Vallières is quite common in the tradition of male autobiographical writing: “The (masculine) tradition of autobiography beginning with Augustine had taken as its first premise the mirroring capacity of the autobiographer: his universality, his representativeness, his role

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as spokesman for the community.” According to Brodzki and Schenck, however, the female autobiographer, “[n]o mirror of her era” (1), has never possessed this non-problematic assumption of the integrated and exemplary nature of the self. With the new emphasis on women’s life experience produced by the feminist movement, women’s autobiography became a privileged means of gaining insight into lives freed from the deformation imposed by the fictional patriarchal plot. In Writing a Woman’s Life, Carolyn Heilbrun points out that the dominant masculine plots of romance and marriage left little room for aspects of women’s lives that refused to be contained within “the acceptable narrative of a female life” (45), and she argues that, since 1970, women’s conscious recognition of the importance of moving toward a new and collective understanding of self had profoundly changed the nature of women’s narratives. This focus on women’s actual experience was particularly important in the United States, and, as Gould has shown, this pragmatic side of American feminism had an important influence on the parallel movement in Quebec (Writing in the Feminine, 28–34). The new women’s life-writing of the 1980s, however, did not simply insert feminine pronouns in the traditional masculine autobiographical structure. Rather, building on the new feminist understanding of female development articulated by theorists like Nancy Chodorow and Carol Gilligan, it recognized the interconnectedness of female identity, its grounding in a complex network of relationships. As Domna Stanton expresses it, “The female ‘I’ was thus not simply a texture woven of various selves; its threads, its life-lines, came from and extended to others” (15). This concept of autobiography is embodied in Théoret’s Nous parlerons comme on écrit as it is also a part of Théoret’s understanding of women’s subjectivity: “The speaking subject, in its singularity, never ceases opening itself to the other” (Entre raison, 126). In the Quebec feminist autobiographies of the 1980s, the central subjects are frequently doubled and multiplied, embedded in a complex network of other women. This phenomenon was not confined to Quebec. With the development of new national identities in the postcolonial context, the 1980s marked the coming to writing – and the coming to autobiography – of other francophone women, for whom the genre also served as a means of telling the story of an entire people. The exchanges, the interplay of women’s voices had already begun to play an important role in women’s autobiographical writing in francophone Africa. In Une Si Longue Lettre [So Long a Letter] the Senegalese writer Mariama Bâ can tell an essentially autobiographical story only in dialogue, in this case, an epistolary dia-

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logue with a childhood friend whose experience offers a variation of the narrator’s. In L’Amour la fantasia [Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade] the Algerian writer Assia Djebar weaves into the story of her own life the actual voices of Algerian women who had participated in the War of Independence from France, as well as the moans and whispers of Algerian women of an earlier century, silenced in the course of the French conquest. Bâ, Djebar, and others are consciously constituting a female self through the inclusion of a number of different women’s voices, in the process blurring the lines between personal and collective identity and implicitly affirming the truth of Heilbrun’s speculations about the creation of new women’s narratives. Similarly, Quebec autobiographical texts, like Nous parlerons comme on écrit, Maryse, and even La Maison Trestler [The Trestler House] decentre the monolithic narrative and embed it in a multiplicity of women’s voices. NOUS PARLERONS COMME ON ÉCRIT

Although labeled on its cover as a novel, Nous parlerons comme on écrit is central to Théoret’s autobiographical and identitary project. Through the interplay of different voices, the interlocking and mirroring of disparate narratives, the text constructs a plural female autobiographical subject that encompasses the multiple reality of Quebec women. The outlines of this project may be seen in Théoret’s 1978 text Une Voix pour Odile [A Voice for Odile], begun, as the author tells it, as the result of an alienating confrontation with a male professor in France.7 In her attempt to affirm her own countervailing identity as female and Québécoise, Théoret found it necessary to incorporate into her text the life, and, in fact, the imagined voice, of a maternal aunt who had died at menopause. In Une Voix pour Odile, Théoret implicitly recognized the impossibility of affirming her own individuality without recognizing its grounding in the experience of other women, particularly those of preceding generations. In Théoret’s texts, the stories of women of the past are clearly marked as deriving from a women’s oral tradition: the only trace of the existence of the dead Aunt Odile in Une Voix pour Odile, other than an unrevealing photograph, are the words of Odile’s daughters. In Théoret’s postmodern text, which foregrounds the process of its own construction, participating in this process of transmission from woman to woman is an essential part of the protagonist’s development. For all those attempting to make contact with obscure rural women whose lives have left few written traces, this chain of oral transmission is a vital link to the past.

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In Nous parlerons comme on écrit, the experience of a contemporary protagonist is broadened and illuminated by stories of a recent past told her by the voice identified only as “the 74-year-old woman,” based, according to Théoret, on an elderly relative.8 These stories are always introduced by the words, “She is 74 years old. She tells me …,”b thus marked as participating in a chain of oral transmission. Drawing on her experience as a country nurse, this elderly woman tells of mothers driven mad by unceasing maternities, women left to run farms on their own, children irremediably damaged through lack of parental care. These tales merge imperceptibly with more recent stories of paternal incest and matrimonial abandonment. If all these stories may be said to have a single function, it is that they illustrate the destructive effects of the traditional female roles constantly proposed to the protagonist by her parents and the forces of the larger society, while underscoring the long-masked oppression inherent in a traditional rural life. Understanding this legacy helps Théoret’s protagonist to free herself from rigid models of identity, even as her sustained dialogue with the seventy-four-year-old woman helps her to see that strength and compassion, as well as an ability to tell stories, have enabled at least this one woman to retain her humanity and to reach a serene old age. Other references to women of the past, while not related to the history of rural Quebec, also deliver this dual message. They speak of women’s oppression, of their silencing and death at the hands of a repressive society, but they also point to avenues of liberation, of the possibility of dialogue and mutual support between women, of the importance of liberating language. The dual impulse toward personal and collective autobiography is present from the first pages of Théoret’s text. The novel begins with a baffling series of seemingly incoherent affirmations: “When death passes by, I answer here. On my watch, it is always time. The full and the untied.”c In light of the multiple musical allusions in the text, this opening passage can be seen as a sort of overture, in which themes are introduced before being presented in their proper context. In the midst of this fragmented and seemingly incoherent series of statements emerges a human figure: “a very young girl begins anew to learn how to live.”d Although presented in the third person, this figure is an early representation of the speaking subject, the voice who has already begun the narration by saying “I.” The young girl’s speech is described in terms that will later be attached to the first-person speaker: “she stutters, hesitates when she speaks.”e Here, as later in the text, the process of learning to “live” is attached to the question of language. Despite its incoherence, the first short section of the text has already gestured toward its Montreal setting: “the street of brick

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buildings, iron stairways.”f In the second section, however, the speaking subject expands to take on the dimensions of the territory of Quebec: “Between Abitibi and the Eastern Townships, in the Maisonneuve and Saint-Henri districts [of Montreal] and the four corners of Saint-Colomban where dogs bark at the moon. The community … seeks me out wherever I am.”g, 9 The narrator’s movement, extending from the northern region of Abitibi southeast to the Eastern Townships, sweeps through the densely populated, francophone Montreal working-class areas of Maisonneuve and Saint-Henri, thus taking in much of the Quebec population before moving on to the typical Quebec village of Saint-Colomban. The community with which the speaker identifies herself is thus first defined in territorial terms, reflecting the definition of Québécois identity dominant since the Quiet Revolution. But the speaker’s identity also has roots in history, as, on the same page, she proclaims, “I have the blood of previous generations flowing in my veins.”h It is only in the fourth section, on the third page of the book, that Théoret takes up the story of a young girl who refuses to work in her father’s grocery store. There is as yet no link between this unnamed character, described only as “she,” and the speaking subject, although her stuttering provides a powerful link to the “very young girl” mentioned on the first page. The subject of autobiography is inevitably split. If, according to Philippe Lejeune, autobiography is a “retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence” (On Autobiography, 4), the subject is at the same time the author/narrator who looks back and the protagonist who actually experiences the events being told. This split between present and past selves exists in Théoret’s text, which is set primarily in two different time periods. She has described the structure of the novel as a sort of chiasmus: fragments concerning the period 1955–60 constitute approximately two-thirds of the first long section of the novel, while the narrative present of 1975–80 dominates in the conclusion. But Théoret’s splitting of the autobiographical subject goes beyond a simple temporal division. The first-person voice that speaks in the opening pages immediately expresses a more complex fragmentation, as it affirms “In the city I circulate shattered.”i The narrative voice makes no pretentions to a false unity, and the reasons for this refusal are made explicit in the section entitled “Lamento d’Arianna,” where the effort of a young schoolteacher to attain the coherent identity prescribed by society threatens to end in total silence. Coherent identity, on a personal or collective level, produces an undesirable and paralyzing rigidity, “an iron-hard identity.”j

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Théoret uses the fragmentation of the female subject as her point of departure and the grounding of her textual practice: it determines the very form of a text that is broken into short segments not only typographically but, more evidently, by the different voices that speak in each fragment. Commentators have tended to identify the first-person voices with the autobiographical experience of Théoret, and this reading, based on extratextual knowledge of Théoret’s life experience, suggests an identity of author and narrator, an intermingling of reality and fiction. Yet, on the basis of textual evidence alone, there is little to suggest that the first-person voice that begins anew at the start of each fragment does indeed belong to the same subject. It is only our tendency as readers to perceive a continuity between subjects that leads us to believe that the little girl who falls from the streetcar is to be identified with the barmaid and the young schoolteacher and the writer who speaks with her friend who loves the writer Colette. In the same way, this recognition of continuity within difference leads us to perceive the various “she(s)” of the text as possible variants of the “I.” The splitting apart of the narrative voice at the same time opens it to a multiplicity of feminine experience, both in the context of history (“I have the blood of previous generations flowing in my veins”k) and of the surrounding society (“I lose myself, drawn in and borne by shattered looks. Old women who talk to themselves, drunk and senile. The same mental space opened up”l). The process extends to include in a collective feminine subjectivity even the unnamed “she(s)” whose experience is clearly separate from that of the speaking voice. Even the stories of oppression and madness told by the seventy-four-year-old woman retain links with the experience of the speaking subject. Théoret encourages her readers to break down the boundaries between “she” and “I” as she shifts pronouns within a single fragment or reiterates in the third person an experience already narrated in the first. Although there is a blurring of identities, a commonality of experience, the process of dialogue between different voices is crucial to the construction of a collective subject, and it is foregrounded in the text. As the stories of the seventy-four-year-old woman are always introduced by the words, “she tells me,” other oral exchanges between women proliferate within the text. The adolescent girl talks with her mother, a friend telephones to tell of childhood sexual abuse, the present narrator meets and converses with her anglophone friend who loves Colette. In their dialogues the friends traverse linguistic boundaries – the linguistic boundaries of Canada itself – as the francophone narrator replies to her friend’s references to the

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French Colette with her own love for the British Virginia Woolf. Beginning with quotations from Woolf herself, written as well as spoken words of other women enter Théoret’s text, along with references to literary figures of the past (Quebec figures such as Angéline de Montbrun and la Corriveau, and figures of ancient myth, like Electra), establishing a dialogue of intertextuality whose form is suggested by the young girl’s summer correspondence with her friend – “The rhythm of a correspondence. Exchange. A network of words”m – or like a musical composition by Schönberg, as described by the narrator: “In turn, the voice of a man, a voice of a woman, instruments come in as the voices die out, a finale like a beginning … Alternation, the human voice becomes an instrument and the instrument answers in its turn. Death of rivalry. Total musical fabric. Sudden bursting out of a chorus. And the chorus takes it up.”n It is significant that this music involves the voices of both women and men. Although the voices who speak in Théoret’s text are those of women, experience shared with men is also evoked. Reflecting on her relationship to suicide, the narrator thinks of Hubert Aquin and Claude Gauvreau, with whom she also shares the desire to invent a new language. Although the experience of the autobiographical subject is in many ways the private experience of a girl becoming a woman, it becomes, almost insensibly, the collective experience of all Québécois, an experience profoundly shaped by the “private” sphere of life within the family. The family of the protagonist comes, by the end of the novel, to represent the whole of Quebec society, as signaled by an oblique reference to the era of la revanche des berceaux: “A small place where what is called rigour and exactness is nothing other than rigidity. It is the place where whole families are crushed under the weight of children, told to survive in large number above all and where each person’s trouble is hidden behind a mask.”o This blurring of the lines between public and private is particularly evident when the shared experience is specifically the political experience of the 1960s and 1970s. Set during the month of October, the last section of the book evokes thoughts of the October Crisis of 1970, bringing its reality into the present: “In October people with an enlightened look were locked up. Every expression of anger is threatened. All outbursts are a threat.”p While Catherine den Tandt is correct in observing that Théoret’s novel gives more explicit weight to oppression linked to gender than to oppression linked to the experience of being québécoise, many of the explicitly gendered forms of oppression evoked by Théoret are also implicitly grounded in a Quebec reality, and both forms of oppression are shown to be related and analogous.

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The “we” of Théoret’s title is constituted by the multiple voices throughout the text, evoking the collective Québécois subject that Quebec writers of the 1960s aspired to create. Unlike the homogeneous “we” of the 1960s, however, the unity of this subject in Théoret’s postmodern (and post-referendum) work is neither seamless nor even assumed. Théoret’s title, in fact, reverses the literary project of the 1960s, when many writers sought to reproduce in writing the reality of oral speech, especially in its particular variant of joual (a project that might be characterized as “We will write the way people speak”). Théoret, on the other hand, seems to be suggesting a different relationship between writing and lived experience, in which the practice of writing might transform the lives, the words spoken by real women. Her autobiographical project thus embodies the dream articulated so forcefully by Carolyn Heilbrun, of women’s collective creations of narratives that can rewrite individual lives: “I suspect that female narratives will be found where women exchange stories, where they read and talk collectively of ambitions, and possibilities, and accomplishments … As long as women are isolated one from the other, not allowed to offer other women the most personal accounts of their lives, they will not be a part of any narrative of their own” (47). MARYSE

Although Théoret’s text has been recognized as crucial in forging a link between the new feminist writing of the 1970s and the persistent problematics of Quebec identity, Nous parlerons comme on écrit did not attain the sort of public reception that had greeted the more widely diffused songs and poems of the 1960s which, like Michèle Lalonde’s “Speak White,” had called forth an immediate response of identification from readers. Other women’s texts of the 1980s were ready to abandon the often hermetic feminist language of l’écriture au féminin to take up a more popular vein. In this context, Francine Noël’s Maryse and Arlette Cousture’s Les Filles de Caleb must be recognized as major literary events of the decade. Both were bestsellers that evoked a personal response from readers, despite their feminist slant – and an initial neglect in academic circles.10 Copies of Maryse were warmly recommended by friend to friend11 and the novel and television series made from Les Filles de Caleb achieved a media success not enjoyed by a woman writer since the heyday of Le Survenant. The initial response to Maryse by its readers was one of recognition of self and society, as Lucie Joubert has abundantly documented. Like many of the significant nationalist texts of the 1960s, Maryse was

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immediately seen as the story of a generation,12 an opinion that was eventually endorsed by academics when Jacques Pelletier, an analyst of the “national novel” of the 1960s and 1970s, described it in his introduction to the dossier on Noël in Voix et Images as “a major work in the context of contemporary Quebec novelistic production that merits being re-read and studied seriously for what it tells us about ourselves and our relationship with the world” (217). Noël herself emphasizes the importance of her Quebec identity in her writing. Almost echoing Théoret’s “écrivaine et Québécoise,” she responds vehemently to a comment by interviewers Pelletier and Lori SaintMartin that her mixture of feminism and nationalism was unusual in Quebec: “it’s normal to be a woman and to be a Québécoise. I am a woman, living in a country” (227). By her choice of a realistic and generally chronological narrative, Noël effectively distanced herself from the formal complexity and hermetic language of feminist writers like Brossard and Théoret. Yet, in its own mode, Maryse shares many of Théoret’s central concerns, and it is not surprising that Théoret, one of Noël’s early reviewers, recognized the significance of Maryse in the context of the contemporary Quebec novel.13 Like Nous parlerons comme on écrit, Maryse tells the story of a woman’s life, from childhood through a certain coming of age marked by an entry into language, a prise de parole.14 Like Théoret’s central speaking subject, Maryse comes from a background of poverty and works for a time as a waitress. As in Nous parlerons comme on écrit, childhood memories unexpectedly interrupt the story of the present, and a life history is reconstructed from fragments – dreams, family photographs, bits of song. Maryse is arguably less of an autobiography than Nous parlerons comme on écrit: Noël’s central character does not speak in the first person, and, in contrast to Théoret, Noël has claimed that autobiographical elements play a small role in her novel.15 Yet the central women characters in Maryse certainly live out many elements of Noël’s own experience, from her years at the university (Maryse), to her then recent experience of maternity (Marité) to her relationship with the world of theatre (Marie-Lyre). Indeed, like Théoret’s, Noël’s central subject is plural, belying the singularity of the title. The “Maryse” of the title, a name symbolically québécoise, really includes at least three Marie’s: Maryse herself, whose family name is Mary O’Sullivan; her friend Marie-Thérèse Grand’Maison (Marité); and a third friend, Marie-Lyre Flouée, whose initials conveniently spell out mlf, the acronym for the French women’s liberation movement. Although the organizing narrative and the dominant perspective belong to Maryse/Mary, the novel is also structured around the friendship of the three women and their

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relationship to men and language. Maryse finally learns to write beyond the bounds set by her pompous professors, her censoring génie de la langue française, and even her rhetorically dominant boyfriend, as the actress Marie-Lyre moves beyond roles written by others to present her own monologues, speaking in her own words and those of her friends. In her practice of family law, Marité learns to use her natural confidence with language to communicate her own spirit of independence to abused women. The apparently seamless third-person narration of Noël’s text, not unlike Gabrielle Roy’s narration in Bonheur d’occasion, is punctuated by countless dialogues and decentred by shifting points of view, which allow Noël’s readers to enter the minds of the three Marie’s and, in addition, give weight to the masculine viewpoint of the symbolically named François Ladouceur, Noël’s portrait of the ideal non-dominant Quebec man. Like his women friends and companions, François learns to use language to transform the pretentious Quebec academic milieu, often a target of Noël’s satire, into a site of communication and learning.16 As the singularity of the title opens into a multiplicity of subjects, the apparent québécité of the name Maryse incorporates an Irish Mary, whose bilingual and dysfunctional family, formed by an alcoholic Irish-Canadian father and an emotionally debilitated French-Canadian mother, resists representing the fiction of a pure laine Quebec.17 As Noël has explained, this choice of background reflects a questioning of the nature of Quebec identity that dated from the immediate postreferendum period: “I began to write Maryse just after the referendum, I was a little let down. I wondered what it would mean to create a Québécoise character, I didn’t believe in it any longer. And anyway, we’re not pure, and I don’t believe in purity. So I created a hybrid character because I think Québécois are ‘mixed.’“18 Even as the humorous nostalgia of Noël’s reading of the national past softens and obscures a biting critique, her simple title, with its promised portrait of the “typical” Québécoise, both presents and undermines the master narrative of Quebec identity. As Théoret had opened her text to women’s voices from the past, Noël embeds her characters in a familiar body of Quebec literary texts, emphasizing a continuity with the traditional identity narrative and creating a comfortable illusion of cultural cohesion. The onomastic references to Maria Chapdelaine were immediately obvious to critics, and Noël admitted splitting the figure of Maria’s beloved François Paradis into the two men in Maryse’s life, François Ladouceur and Michel Paradis. Unlike her namesake Maria, however, Maryse ultimately rejects the love of both men, remaining free of attachment at the end of the novel. Even more pervasive, however, are the repeated evocations of

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Bonheur d’occasion. As a reader of the 1980s, Noël was able to identify Florentine as the central figure, and the parallels between Maryse and Florentine are many and obvious,19 from their love for a dreamy and incompetent father to a thinness expressive of poverty and alienation. But the connection particularly stressed by Noël is their low-paid and subservient work as waitresses. Maryse’s background as a waitress and the professional pride she feels in seeing the job well done is a dominant motif of the novel, serving as an ironic commentary on the often professed concern for the plight of the “proletariat” on the part of Michel’s friends, a pretentious group of 1960s intellectuals. Not only do these would-be Marxists ignore the people who serve them, but they repeatedly fail to leave a tip, despite Maryse’s reiterated reminders of the economic realities of the job. Noël loses no occasion to point out the way in which the category of the oppressed defined by the hyperintellectual leftists of the 1960s managed to exclude the victims of their own oppression, especially women. When Michel’s leftist friends join the amusingly named organization whose acronym is lmnopqrstu, it comes as no surprise that the m in the alphabet soup stands for Machiste. Indeed, the problems of women, very real in Noël’s text, have little import in the intellectuals’ neo-Marxist social analysis unless, of course, the women qualify as interestingly “third world.” When Maryse tries to raise the problems of women closer to home, Michel uses the current social jargon to marginalize her concerns: “You’re really colonizeddominated, Michel answered, you can’t talk about anything without becoming personally involved and trivializing everything!”q As Maryse’s professional identity of former waitress connects her with an unacknowledged female “proletariat,” it also links her with the Quebec immigrant community in the character of Manolo, the Spanish waiter who constantly serves the group in their favourite hangout, La Luna de Papel, whose “paper moon” underlines the artificial nature of the intellectual ambiance. In many ways, Maryse feels closer experiential ties to Manolo than to the more affluent pure laine Michel, and it is by sleeping with Manolo that she first asserts her independence from Michel’s domination. Through her relationship with Manolo she is led to the world of Manolo’s wife, the aptly named Soledad, alone with her children in a city whose language she does not understand. As Maryse walks the streets of her own old neighbourhood, she realizes it is now inhabited by Soledad and other immigrants, who are repeating her own experience of poverty. Through the play of intertextuality, these foreign-born immigrants are linked not only to Maryse, but also to the immigrants from the Quebec countryside first elevated to literary status by Gabrielle Roy.

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Noël feels free to name her Quebec intertexts in her respectful readings of Maria Chapdelaine and Bonheur d’occasion, but she has been less willing to lay her cards on the table in other cases, even disclaiming any referent for Adrien Obedon, the one poet-figure who does appear in her text and whom critics have generally seen as a caricature of Gaston Miron. If Maryse participates in the creation of the new plural subject of the 1980s, it is also a parodic re-reading of the nationalist identity narratives of the 1960s, which found in the common man and his use of the common language the answer to the question of Quebec’s language and identity. A version of this figure was provided by Pierre Vallières’ 1965 autobiography Nègres blancs d’Amérique, and another, more closely linked with the politically significant use of joual, by Jacques Renaud’s Le Cassé [Broke]. But the essential antecedent for Maryse would seem to be Jacques Godbout’s Salut Galarneau! [Hail Galarneau!], which also tells the story of a “typical” lower-class Québécois(e) who, in the throes of a failing romance, finds autonomy and meaning in writing. Jacques Pelletier considered Salut Galarneau! an important example of the “national novel,” its story a “parable of the collective coming to consciousness and the eventual liberation of Quebec” (Le Roman national, 37). Indeed, as a text whose narrative present coincided with the moment of its publication in 1967, Salut Galarneau! participates in the time period chronicled by Maryse, whose first entry is dated in November 1968. But the most evident connection between the two novels is suggested by the fact that François Galarneau’s indifferent and social-climbing girlfriend is also named Marise (Doucet). Noël has kept the names but reversed the roles, making Maryse her writer/ protagonist and relegating François (Ladouceur) to the role of wouldbe lover and friend. Both Patricia Smart and Lori Saint-Martin have called attention to the disturbing violence against women found in the sovereignist love story of the 1960s, especially in Hubert Aquin’s Trou de mémoire [Blank Memory] and Godbout’s Un Couteau sur la table [A Knife on the Table].20 But, as Michael Klementowicz has more recently pointed out, Salut Galarneau! is no exception to this rule. Godbout’s young writer-hero dreams of killing the treacherous Marise and stuffing her like a hunting trophy, and he fantasizes a replacement, constructing what could be considered a 1960s image of the ideal woman reader (what Noël would call, in the figure of Elvire Légarée, a Muse): “I’m going to put together an ideal reader, a girl like the ones in the ads, with brown eyes and breasts as big as her nose. She’ll be my confessional, my analyst, my silencer, my devouring consumer – and I’ll teach her about dirt. She’ll drink my words as if they were ice-cold Pepsi, she’ll smile and grow generous as a child of five”

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(122).r Today it is hard to read this without ironic distance, but in 1967 Godbout/Galarneau appeared to take the image seriously. The trajectory of Noël’s Maryse uncannily repeats the journey of Godbout’s Galarneau in her discovery of a language that can be linked to the reality of daily experience, as expressed in Galarneau’s neologism vécrire. But the “child of the people” has become a woman who is no longer merely a Muse for the budding nationalist writer but an author in her own right. Much more is at stake than a simple shift in gender, however important this alone may be. In Noël’s work this shift is accompanied by a significant rewriting of the central subject of the Quebec identity narrative of the 1960s. In her study of various Quebec texts from the period 1967–76 (which corresponds quite closely to the period chronicled by Maryse), Micheline Cambron describes a unified social discourse, presenting itself as “a sort of definition of Quebec identity,” based on an unproblematic and unchanging “we”: “The collectivity is conceived as an all-encompassing ‘we’, emptied of all social or political tension … This ‘we’, defined spatially, outside of any exteriority, immediately rejects any transforming action” (175–6). While it may be possible to criticize Cambron’s work as offering too reductive a reading of certain texts of the period,21 her analysis certainly seems applicable to Salut Galarneau!, which, published in the first year of Cambron’s time period, could easily have been a focus of her study, as it had for Pelletier’s. The embodiment of Cambron’s enclosed and monolithic “we,” Galarneau is preoccupied mainly with his relationships with members of his own family, from which he manages to eject intruding women, like Marise and his detested first wife. His dream of reconciliation at the end – presumably meant as an allegorical representation of a reconstituted Quebec – expands the Quebec “we” only slightly, to include his two brothers. In contrast, Maryse constructs a more diversified network of relationships that is not limited to ties of blood or history but created on the basis of shared experience of the present and projects for the future. In breaking apart the monolithic Quebec subject, Maryse also opens up the hegemonic cultural discourse to an interplay of heterogeneous discourses that is a central focus of her text. Like Salut Galarneau!, Maryse is about language: in her introduction to the novel, Lise Gauvin calls it a language “trip,” echoing Noël’s own terminology of the 1960s (13). Both Salut Galarneau! and Maryse show the way in which language is constitutive of personal and collective identity. Galarneau is at his amusing best fighting off the incursions of English, in the insidiously anglophone signs of Henault’s Drugstore and Gagnon’s Electrical Appliances, as well as the media onslaught

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from the United States that penetrates even his attempt to wall himself off from the world. On the home front, he has also to contend with purists like his taxidermist uncle Leo, whose insistence on replacing the familiar hot dog with chien chaud would embalm the French language in a vain effort to preserve it. By privileging the voice of his “common man” protagonist, whose writing reflects the lexical realities of Quebec French, Godbout does much to point the way toward a standard, written québécois not limited by the regional particularities of joual, the spoken form championed by the theorists and writers at Parti pris. But as he rejects the incursions of colonizing discourses and refuses the parochialism of joual, Godbout has, nonetheless, in a symbolic and literal sense, given his text over to a single voice that is meant to be representative of a newly created language. In contrast, Noël’s flexible narration welcomes the inclusion of different forms of discourse, playing on their interaction. The characters of Maryse do not limit themselves to a single form of French. Rather, they use various linguistic codes as the mood affects them, playing with exaggerated québécois, using English words to make a point, dabbling in joual, even reveling in the liberation of speaking Spanish with Manolo. The hard lines of Godbout’s battle between hot dog and chien chaud are softened when the debate over toaster vs grille-pain (in either form, a major source of heat in the low-rent student apartments) becomes a form of play. In this juxtaposition of competing discourses, language is evaluated only against the standard of its relationship to reality. In this perspective, the use of joual by the group at the Luna de Papel is revealed to be as fake as their professed love for the proletariat. If joual is often seen as a political pose, Noël shows herself capable of defending and manipulating different forms of spoken québécois, most dramatically in Marie-Lyre’s impassioned defense of the word chum. In the face of the linguistic snobbery of her French lover, MarieLyre unexpectedly finds herself defending this uniquely québécois appropriation from the English as the only possible way to describe their unromanticized and unmarried relationship, in opposition to “this great Frenchity-Frenchitude that smothers us like marshmallow sauce.”s This scene is a crucial one, illustrating Noël’s integration of language usage with the emotional evolution of her characters: it forces Marie-Lyre to reflect on the ephemeral nature of her unsatisfactory relationships with men and to assert herself against masculine domination, even as it enables her to recognize the resources of her own language and the power of her own spoken word. Parody and pastiche are crucial elements of Noël’s work, as was signaled by Anne Elaine Cliche, who links Noël’s text with the feminist

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practice of such writers as Nicole Brossard and Madeleine Gagnon and sees such play with language as central to the contemporary feminist project of deconstructing patriarchal language. It is Maryse’s ability to dominate the pseudo-Marxist student discourse through pastiche that enables her finally to silence the rhetorically oppressive Michel, in a final dispute over their cleaning woman. Ultimately, of course, Maryse, like Marie-Lyre, moves beyond citation and pastiche to create her own text, inventing female characters. Her text, presumably much like Maryse itself, creates room for the multiplicity of discourses that make up (post)modern, post-referendum Quebec.

rewriting the narratives of history For many Quebec women writers of the 1980s, the opening up of the subject was also an opening into history, and the multiple voices that circulate in their texts include those emerging from a long obscured past. When Maryse reappears in Noël’s second novel, Myriam première, she has become attentive to the stories of the women who underlie her own existence, much like the channeled streams and rivers that still flow beneath the asphalt of modern Montreal. Noël’s title character, Myriam, represents a new generation of women, but she is the offspring of her parents, Marité and François, and strongly linked to her two grandmothers, Blanche Grand’Maison, of the traditional Montreal francophone bourgeoisie, and Alice Ladouceur, with her roots in the maritime culture of L’Ile Verte. Noël’s turn toward the future seems necessarily to proceed through a re-reading of a past now freed of the social myths and familial silences in which it had been enshrouded. Appropriately figuring the Quebec woman writer of the 1980s, Maryse wanders above and below the streets of Montreal, obsessively reading her bright pink-covered copy of L’Histoire des femmes au Québec, as she works to reconstruct the lives of preceding generations of women. Maryse’s plays stage the diversity of Quebec women’s experience, reconstructing the lives of working women, immigrants, prostitutes, and unwed mothers who had long been excluded from the Quebec historical narrative. If Noël is saying that women’s future can develop only on the basis of a new understanding of the past, a parallel message emerges from Anne Hébert’s 1988 novel, Le Premier Jardin [The First Garden], in which a mother can be reunited with her runaway daughter only after turning to face her personal and collective past. Hébert’s aging actress, Flora Fontanges, returns from a life in France to her birthplace in Quebec City, moving back through her own layers of identity as, at

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the same time, she uncovers the obscured history of women in Quebec. Walking through the old streets, Flora relives the humiliation of being adopted into the self-enclosed Quebec City elite and experiences again the pain of an earlier life as an abandoned orphan, perhaps the illegitimate child of a servant girl whose story of rape and betrayal is evoked by the old mansions of the Grande-Allée. The monuments and museums of the city evoke a broader, collective history, as a pair of scissors forged by an eighteenth-century nun causes the actress to imagine the frustrated vocation of Guillemette Thibault, and a street sign provokes a dramatic re-creation of the life of the barely known Barbe Abadie. And, of course, the genealogy of the author herself is surely at play in the evocation of Marie Rollet-Hébert, credited with planting the colony’s “first garden.” In constructing a personal vision of the past, Anne Hébert at the same time deconstructs more traditional versions of history, beginning with the substitution of Marie Rollet for her better-known husband, Louis Hébert, who is commonly represented as “Quebec’s first settler.” Similarly, the traditional vision of robust and cheerful filles du roi is undermined by the sparse inventory of possessions of the girl who wanders away from a life of abject poverty to freeze to death on the shores of the Ile d’Orléans. And her daughter’s friend Céleste reminds Flora of the cruelty to Natives that underlies the heroic foundation stories. As she had previously done in Kamouraska, Anne Hébert opens the archives of Quebec City to unearth women banned from traditional history and to question the heroic myths of historically based Quebec identity. The 1980s saw a broad resurgence of interest in Quebec history, or as Francine Bordeleau has suggested, a renewed fascination with origins on the part of all Québécois that could be seen as symptomatic of a renewed quest for identity. The corresponding return of women writers to historical fiction marked a radical change, however. Since their forced immersion in the historical novel in the late nineteenth century, Quebec women writers (with the notable exception of Hébert in Kamouraska) had avoided historical subjects, a distaste for the past perhaps related to their revolt against the traditional Quebec mother and the literary genre in which she had been enshrined, the roman de la terre. But the historians of the 1970s had produced a sea change in the understanding of Quebec historiography, engaging in new research on the lives of women and others previously excluded from the standard historical accounts. The transformation was clear even in male-authored “mainstream” history, as represented by the influential two-volume Linteau-Robert-Durocher Histoire du Québec contemporain published in 1979 and 1986. Feminist historians produced a great deal

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of important work focused on women, most notably the massive Histoire des femmes au Québec depuis quatre siècles by the Collectif Clio, published in 1982 (and read by Noël’s Maryse), as well as a large number of specialized studies on hitherto undocumented women’s lives.22 This research gave women writers of the 1980s a new understanding of their foremothers as well as new resources for reconstructing the lives of their characters. But even the most sophisticated research could not give them access to the realities of daily experience, of feeling and emotion, that might have been provided by the writings of the women themselves, autobiographies or even letters and diaries. As the historians of the Collectif Clio remind us, the written testimony of nineteenth-century Quebec women is rare: the diary of Henriette Dessaules, published long after her death, and the letters of Julie Bruneau Papineau, preserved because written to her famous husband and published only in the twentieth century, are notable exceptions (227). It was left to the writer of historical fiction to furnish this missing insight into the lived experience of women’s lives, through sympathetic imagination. Arlette Cousture points to this aspect of her own creation in the frontispiece of Les Filles de Caleb, a novel based on the lives of her mother and grandmother: “even if the background of this novel is authentic, I have provided all the characters with thoughts, words, souls, feelings, and resentments.” Like Hébert’s Flora Fontanges, contemporary women writers seek out traces of the past and use them as a point of departure for the reconstruction of women’s lives. The new wave of women’s historical fiction thus takes up the effort of women’s history at the point where documentation fails, attempting to delve further into what French historian Jacques Le Goff has called the “archives of silence” (302). LES FILLES DE CALEB

If Noël’s Maryse had evoked amused recognition in Quebec readers, Arlette Cousture’s Les Filles de Caleb [Emilie] seemed to reawaken the comforting sense of grounding in a common heritage that had been called forth by Le Survenant. Cousture’s 1,300-page, two-volume novel was a runaway bestseller, and, like Le Survenant, it soon gave birth to an equally popular television series. Although it did not share the focus on language that many women’s texts of the 1980s had received as a legacy from the experimental feminist writing of the 1970s, Les Filles de Caleb placed itself firmly in the active current of Quebec feminist history. Cousture shared with France Théoret the need to give voice to silenced figures from her own past, transforming the oral history of

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her family into enduring written form. Les Filles de Caleb, like Hébert’s Kamouraska, reconstructs the life of a real woman – in the case of Cousture’s novel, two real women, named Emilie and Blanche Pronovost. Like Hébert’s, Cousture’s work has many roots in oral tradition: her acknowledgments give a long list of Pronovosts, including at least two of Emilie’s surviving children. Like Hébert, Cousture also sought out written documentary sources. In interviews she freely cites facts about nineteenth-century schoolteachers drawn from the LinteauRobert-Durocher Histoire du Québec contemporain, and it is evident that, for the second volume of Les Filles de Caleb, she did substantial research on the experience of Quebec women in medicine. When interviewers accused her of granting anachronistically modern careers to her women of the past, she justified herself by giving statistics on the prevalence of women teachers in small country schools, as well as by referring to the actual experience of Emilie and her daughters. Cousture tries hard to avoid major anachronisms: for example, she carefully documents the reasons why Emilie’s ambitious and intelligent daughter Blanche could not realistically hope in 1929 to fulfill her dream of becoming a doctor, even though at least one woman doctor was actually practicing medicine in Montreal at that time. But, in reconstituting the lives of her grandmother and mother, Cousture found herself, perhaps unintentionally, rewriting the literary form in which the lives of nineteenth-century rural women had previously been embedded, the roman de la terre.23 Despite its brief renaissance in the hands of Guèvremont and Roy in the immediate postwar period, the genre had become an easy target of attack in the rebellious beginnings of the Quiet Revolution, and it was generally considered that Marie-Claire Blais’s Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel had sounded its death knell. But with the abandonment of the roman de la terre, the lives of rural nineteenth-century Quebec women were left shrouded in myth – the rosy mythology of the idealized mother still perpetuated by Guèvremont and Roy, or the more terrifying and equally mythologized maternal figure invented by Anne Hébert in “Le Torrent.” The roman de la terre, with its rigid, ideologically determined structures, had prescribed a Quebec version of what Nancy Miller had called the “female plot.” Women’s experience that fell outside this model could not be inscribed in the literary text – or in the social text it shaped and supported. Cousture’s literary project reinvented the literary form in which these myths had been preserved, in the process of making contact with the reality of women’s lives. Les Filles de Caleb uses the new historical research on women to reshape in significant ways old structures and stereotypes. Not only are women at the centre of the text, a situation that occurs in the

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traditional roman de la terre only in Maria Chapdelaine, but these women are agents in their own lives rather than passive objects of the actions of others.24 Both Emilie and her daughter Blanche lead lives shaped not only by their role as mothers, as in the roman de la terre, but by their choice of profession. Emilie becomes a schoolteacher in 1895, at a time when teaching represented the only profession open to a poor rural woman. In 1929, when Blanche finally gets to Montreal, she is able to enter nursing training at the Hôpital NotreDame, one of a small number of nursing schools opened at the beginning of the century. Even more unusual in the context of the roman de la terre, Cousture’s novel is structured by the events in a woman’s life throughout its entire span: the two volumes of Les Filles de Caleb follow Emilie from the age of thirteen until her death at age sixty-six. Even in those traditional romans de la terre where a woman is a focus of attention, most notably Maria Chapdelaine or even Menaud maître-draveur, she is a maiden about to be married; once married, women seem to die or otherwise disappear from the text, as Janine Boynard-Frot has documented. Although Emilie does die in the course of Les Filles de Caleb, it is only at the end of 1,300 pages and a long and eventful life; her story does not end with her marriage to Ovila Pronovost but follows through the births of all ten of her children, right up to the moment of her abandonment by her husband. It is true that once Emilie is safely married, the children arrive with mind-dazzling rapidity25 and that most of the reader’s attention is focused on the ups and downs of Emilie’s relationship with Ovila. It is also true that almost as soon as Ovila, the romantic interest, disappears for good, the centre of the drama shifts to Blanche, one of Emilie’s younger daughters, and her attainment of career and husband (in that order). As an older woman, Emilie is seen more and more through the eyes of others, particularly Blanche, and her own perspective breaks through only rarely. Yet, as is increasingly the case in contemporary women’s writing,26 the mother’s perspective is expressed along with the daughter’s. By giving attention to women’s lives after marriage and particularly by giving voice to the mother, who had been silenced in the roman de la terre, Cousture significantly modified the traditional structure of the genre. Cousture also reshapes the genre’s concept of time: in the classic roman de la terre, the movement of time is cyclical, dominated by the self-renewing processes of the changing of the seasons, the cycle of birth and death; events seem to take place in a timeless present, and historical events beyond the lives of the characters rarely enter the text. While using the same subject matter as the traditional roman de la terre, Les Filles de Caleb transforms it into the stuff of a historical

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novel by locating events firmly within a definable past. This is effectively handled by the chapter headings, each of which indicates the exact dates of the action. The foregrounding of dates is significant, because time in Les Filles de Caleb plays an important and largely positive role. Rather than following the cyclical pattern of a traditional society, the passage of time in Cousture’s text is associated with change and, frequently, progress. Although her characters inevitably participate in the cycle of birth and death, they do not mindlessly repeat the lives of their parents. In fact, their very refusal to participate in the cyclical repetition of the world of the roman de la terre is the mainspring of their actions: in the first episode in the book Emilie challenges the traditional gendered distribution of labour in the household and then insists on becoming a schoolteacher, rather than following in the footsteps of her mother; her daughter Blanche is not content to continue in the new family tradition of schoolteaching but must become a nurse (at that time, a better paid and more prestigious profession); Emilie’s husband Ovila, like several of his brothers, hates working on the land and aspires only to leave his rural village, a dream realized not only by him but by every one of the children, who end up in Abitibi or Montreal. If, as Janine Boynard-Frot describes it, the central drama of the roman de la terre is the passing on of the land from father to son, with those who leave the rural world suffering cruelly for their ill-considered act, the central drama of Les Filles de Caleb is the liberation from servitude to the land through the development of alternative, and more modern, modes of life. Les Filles de Caleb focuses on women, but it also updates and modifies the traditional masculine stereotypes of the roman de la terre. The Quebec myth of the nomadic male, previously embodied in such sympathetic figures as the Survenant or François Paradis, reveals its dark underside in the spectre of the absentee husband and father. Emilie’s once-loving Ovila is lured away from the family by his love of life in the wilderness, which offers a welcome escape from a house full of little children. But, even here, the portrait is nuanced. Rather than simply casting Ovila in the role of villain, Cousture explores the reasons for his moral collapse, invoking the harsh conditions of the lives of Quebec men in this period. Unsuited to life on the land, Ovila is attracted to the freedom of the woodcutter’s camp, into which he is, under any circumstances, forced by economic necessity. His brief experience working for a factory in Shawinigan, where he is recognized for his mechanical expertise, exposes the discrimination existing in this era against even very talented francophone men, and the alcoholism induced by life in the woods becomes an easy refuge from poverty and the inevitable tragedy of infant mortality.

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Although the strongest bond in the novel is arguably that uniting Emilie and her daughter Blanche, Emilie, for all her independence, is supported throughout her life by strong reliable male figures, from her own father to her oldest son. Mutual support among women is essential to survival but relationships between women are not idealized, nor can they provide a refuge from harsh realities. Having no access to economic power, the good-hearted women in Emilie’s family are unable to help her support her children. Roles in this turnof-the-century society are assigned by gender, but Cousture’s fictional world is not one of separate spheres: her men and women are subject to the same difficult conditions and survive only through helping one another. The image of the traditional Quebec rural woman with her many children has long been part of Quebec’s collective mythology and still exerts a certain power over lives of women in the present. As Jacques Le Goff contends, historical memory influences present reality, and the writing of history is not simply an examination of the past but an interaction of past and present: “Memory, on which history draws and which nourishes it in turn, seeks to save the past only in order to serve the present and future” (179). In reinterpreting a time period with such resonance in the Quebec collective memory, Cousture’s Les Filles de Caleb, with its widespread impact on the public imagination, in turn changed perceptions in the present. If the myth of Maria Chapdelaine and other traditional images of women presented in the roman de la terre had as a desired effect the perpetuation of traditional patterns of rural life, Cousture’s reading looked beyond the petrified figures of saintly mothers and provided contemporary Quebec women with a new understanding of the strength and courage of their foremothers, not only the canonized heroines of the seventeenth century, but the mothers and grandmothers whose idealized legacy had once seemed so oppressive. The effect of Cousture’s vision on her contemporary public was articulated by Marina Orsini, the actress who played the role of Emilie in the television series: “I think today’s Quebec women have been able to recognize themselves in [Emilie] … Seeing her on the screen, I believe they must have seen themselves as beautiful and good. And known they are strong and capable of dealing with life and coming out all right.”27 LA MAISON TRESTLER

While Cousture cast her historical material in the form of the roman de la terre, Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska in La Maison Trestler contests

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the structures of history itself, at least as written by patriarchal historians. In the process, she uses elements of autobiography, diary, and the historical novel, forms in which women had traditionally found expression in Quebec. In making her own statement about Quebec identity, Ouellette-Michalska, like Théoret, set her own life story against a background of dialogue with women of the past. Her novel is also a reflection on Quebec itself, occupied at the same time by a French prime minister, a queen of England, and American armies, whose invasions in past centuries are blurred with more recent incursions of tourists from the States. In the text the collapse of the Trestler family is set against the defeat of invading armies, while, in the narrative present, the departure of the narrator’s partner parallels her friend’s failure to preserve the historic house. At the same time, there is a successful contestation of the patriarchal order and the establishment of a new maternal line, as well as a regeneration of the long-dead Catherine Trestler, which seems to fuse with the narrator’s re-creation of her own life.28 The novel’s historical anecdote is provided by a story of illicit passion not unlike that of Kamouraska. Like Anne Hébert’s text, La Maison Trestler imaginatively reconstructs the life of a nineteenthcentury Quebec woman on the basis of a limited set of official documents. But Ouellette-Michalska’s novel focuses on the process of reconstruction itself, thus placing it among the works of historiographical metafiction that Linda Hutcheon sees as part of the postmodernist enterprise.29 Although La Maison Trestler was Ouellette-Michalska’s first historical novel,30 she had been meditating on women’s relationship to history at least since her 1978 master’s thesis, Le Féminin comme lieu d’inscription scripturale [The Feminine as Site of Scriptural Inscription]. There, in an observation that could serve as an epigraph to La Maison Trestler, she concluded that women had been cut off from history: “woman cannot have a history nor, even less, can she make history” (126). In the conclusion to her thesis, however, she seems to propose a dual feminist literary agenda, both writing woman’s body and writing women into history: “Once she has performed the symbolic reading of her body, her fantasies, her desire, her language, woman transcends herself as presence and symbol by moving back through time to gain access to history, in order to discover her roots, a possible genealogy, but not to become fixated, for history is a dynamic process that works itself out in the present and perpetuates itself in the future” (158).

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Much of Ouellette-Michalska’s early literary production had been devoted to fulfilling the first part of her agenda, the writing of the body, and it was not until La Maison Trestler that she undertook the search for a “possible genealogy” and continued her interrogation of women’s place in history. As Ouellette-Michalska’s narrator searches in vain through the historical records for traces of the Trestler women, she is led to question the work of conventional historians. The history books, she finds, like the conversation of the male members of the Trestler family, have focused only on war and politics, the same events that dominate television news broadcasts in the novel’s present. But even in this limited domain, the narrator discovers the failure of the smooth and apparently realistic narrative to coincide with observable facts. As she reads a historical description of American soldiers making a rapid retreat through a snowstorm after a failed invasion of Quebec, she is forced to recognize the improbability of the historical account, made plausible only by the familiarity of its narrative form. The narrator has understood that historiography is really a form of literary narrative, shaped by the historian’s concerns: “History with a capital h was first of all a literary genre, endowed with a style, rules and writing procedures. Of all possible stories, it was the one that you chose for ends that only became clear later.”t If all historical writing is a form of narrative constructed to convey a desired meaning,31 then Ouellette-Michalska’s writer finds herself justified in combatting the intent of previous histories centred on war and death – “the fascination with death that contaminates our archives, our laws, our memory”u – by proposing her own lifeaffirming reconstructive effort: “I try to reconstruct a history that would escape their appetite for destruction. A chronicle of daily life, perhaps, of an extreme simplicity, that could exert an analogous power over the instinct for survival and the will to create.”v In so doing, she realizes that she is doing what historians have always done; like Hayden White, she discovers that what we call History is, in the end, a story that we tell. By choosing her own version of history, the narrator, and OuelletteMichalska with her, effects a critique of History “with a capital h,” which deforms lived experience and particularly suppresses the experience of women. Women are noticeably absent from the work of professional historians: “My first ancestor defeated Phipps at Rivière Ouelle with his three sons in 1691, but I still know nothing about his daughters.”w This history of successive wars leaves even less place for the real life of women: passion, childbirth, the many sentiments evoked of the events of daily life. As Ouellette-Michalska laments in the diary she kept while writing La Maison Trestler,

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published as La Tentation de dire [The Temptation of Saying], the writings capable of telling the story of women are destined to be burned, if they have ever existed: most of the personal diary of her own mother had been burned, as had the letters of Iphigénie, the niece of Catherine Trestler. The few documents that remain are only a series of dates, as the narrator remarks when she finds notes about Catherine’s elder sisters: “In this biographical notice, their life is summed up in four lines. Two for their birth, two for their death.”x The other archives to which the narrator has access are documents about the exchange of goods – inventories, wills, records of court cases – drawn up by a judicial institution from which the voice of women is excluded and within which women themselves are very often condemned or made destitute. Like the protagonist of Kamouraska, the only traces of Catherine in the historical archives present her as a renegade, the one who dares to bring a legal suit against the father. Faced with this limited and deforming evidence, the narrator understands that the only way to enter into the historical reality of Catherine Trestler is through the imagination, in recognition of a real continuity between generations of women, “a continuity inscribed in the memory of blood.”y In this way, the fictional character of Catherine Trestler is born from the physical sensations of the narrator even more than from the archives of the Maison Trestler. Thus Ouellette-Michalska finally fuses the projects of writing the body and writing women into history, which she had long regarded as interdependent. It is especially through the body that the narrator of La Maison Trestler enters into her own past and the mysterious life whose traces are embodied in the old house that seems to demand her presence. When the narrator approaches the Maison Trestler for the first time, the countryside powerfully evokes an image drawn from her own physical memory, quickly crystallized in a sensual memory of summer Sundays from her childhood: “In those moments life was a warm substance that stuck to your fingers. Happiness, a countryside that stretched on indefinitely for the body’s pleasure.”z These strong sensations of contact with the earth allow the narrator to enter into the reality of Catherine Trestler: “This appetite for warm earth that she satisfies as soon as she escapes their domination, running into the fields where she stretches out in the sun, tasting the play of liquid in veins, the ripening of skin.”aa Thus, the narrator’s initial contact with Catherine realizes the fusion between the body and history that, in an interview with Lettres Québécoises, Ouellette-Michalska has called “bodily memory” (22). If it is through sensations of physical pleasure that the narrator discovers the intimate life of Catherine, it

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is by the memory of cooking smells from her childhood that she approaches the daily life of the Trestler family: “The narrative will be organized around warm smells. Soup and vegetables sitting on the cast-iron stove, stews simmering during long mornings, pork roasts whose fat made me retch.”bb These memories of the narrator become imperceptibly those of Catherine’s life, and there comes a moment when the narrator finds herself blending completely into the subject of her research, where the “I” of the text comes to apply itself equally to both women. An original fascination with the character of Catherine becomes a recognition of similarity: “Two hundred years apart, we share the same suspect wisdom,”cc and similarity finally becomes identification: “In the night I dream of Catherine. I am Catherine.”dd The “she” of Catherine transforms itself imperceptibly into “I,” and the two first-person voices of the novel (those of Catherine and the narrator) begin to blend with each other, as in the fugue that certainly serves as a mise en abyme of the novel’s structure: “a first voice followed by a second, then by a third and a fourth that melt into a single stream.”ee Ouellette-Michalska’s narrative voices interact in continual dialogue, each opening onto the experience of the other. The boundaries between author and character at times cease to exist, and the narrator describes the novel she is writing as “[a] project that made me absorb this life to join it with mine.”ff The writer sees her character as her child, the process of writing a gestation taking place within her own body, and in the end she describes the Catherine she has created as at once her mother and her daughter. This complicity of women would seem to extend beyond writer and character to the reader, represented in the text by the narrator’s friend Eva, who is continually reading over her shoulder. It soon becomes clear that all three women (Catherine, Eva, and the writer) have been caught up in the same reality: “That night I heard Eva coughing through my sleep and I had the certainty that … Catherine had already suffered from a respiratory illness in analogous circumstances, that my health was affected by it.”gg This opening of the “I” is described by Ouellette-Michalska in La Tentation de dire: “the ‘I’ is also others.”hh It becomes evident that La Maison Trestler is not only the story of Catherine Trestler and of a moment in the history of Quebec, but also the autobiography of the narrator, in which the events of her present life as well as the memories of her childhood take their place. The title seems to emphasize the historical aspect of the novel, while the house that dominates the beginning of the novel is not the Maison Trestler but the site of the narrator’s childhood, an old house along the road to Gaspé. The novel is also perhaps the story of the author

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herself, for between the fiction and the known facts of OuelletteMichalska’s life there exist striking similarities: from her birth in Saint-Alexandre of Kamouraska (thus, on the road to Gaspé) to the existence of a foreign partner whose family names end in “ski” and “ska.” As Mary Mason has commented, women often choose to tell their life by telling the story of the other, and this need is evidently a part of Catherine Trestler’s hold over the narrator and probably also over the author. In her efforts to reconstitute the life of this distant foremother, the narrator of La Maison Trestler finds the opportunity of delving into her own memory, mingling her own revolt with that of Catherine, lending Catherine her passionate memories and her own experiences of giving birth. By this process, the Maison Trestler becomes for the narrator, and for Quebec itself, a “site of memory” as defined by Pierre Nora, a physical site that represents the past and permits the elaboration of a certain vision of the present. In making the actually existing Maison Trestler her own “site of memory,” Ouellette-Michalska establishes a dangerous rapprochement between reality and fiction, despite the traditional notice in the beginning of the novel declaring that “any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.” However, if we transgress the boundaries of fiction to visit the real Maison Trestler, we may discover that Ouellette-Michalska has chosen to ignore certain elements of the legend of Catherine Trestler.32 In the presentations of the guides employed by the historic site, the name of Catherine Trestler is evoked in connection with a ghost said to wander about the property, the only remaining trace of a sad and troubled woman who may have drowned herself in the well. Of this Catherine Trestler, unhappy and even suicidal, there is no mention in the novel, despite a few references to a mysterious young woman who walks naked from the lake or disappears into the swamps, and whose hair, like that of Ophelia, floats in the stream. The image of a woman who throws herself into a well could be linked to the death of the old grandmother of Ouellette-Michalska’s earlier novel, Le Plat de lentilles [The Dish of Lentils], or to the mythical woman in L’Echappée du discours de l’œil [Escape from the Discourse of the Eye], who kills herself while attempting to escape the domination of her celestial husband in a desperate plunge to the earth. But the image of a ghostwoman is effaced in La Maison Trestler, from which any mention of suicide or madness is absent. According to her own declarations, the narrator has seen in Catherine Trestler another emblem: a woman who rebels against her father to claim the heritage of a mother obscured by patriarchal power. The protagonist of Ouellette-Michalska’s novel is not the woman erased from the family ledgers because of her rejection

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by the father but rather the woman who is capable of following her own desire to the end by rebelling against an authoritarian father to found her own lineage. As the narrator explains, she could have chosen as her central character the older sister, Madeleine Trestler, calmer and more resigned, although equally disinherited by the father. But she preferred the passion of Catherine, “a rebel who defied her father because of a man and sued him to retrieve her share of the maternal heritage of which he wanted to defraud her.”ii Instead of following the historians who tell stories of death and destruction, the narrator has chosen, as she has said, to reconstruct a chronicle of daily life that would inspire its readers both to survive and create. In privileging the broader “historical” events that coincide with the life of Catherine Trestler, the narrator follows a parallel course, emphasizing the resistance of the French Canadians to the American invasions of 1775 and 1812 rather than the history of oppression that follows the British conquest. In contrast to Hubert Aquin, who saw Quebec identity as fatally marked by a history of repeated defeat, OuelletteMichalska prefers to tell a story of resistance and survival rather than one of oppression, thus sharing with Arlette Cousture a project of writing destined to open possibilities of action in the present.

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5 New Narratives of Identity in a Multicultural Quebec one does not become Québécois – Régine Robin, La Québécoite my country is where my children are happy – Abla Farhoud, Le Bonheur a la queue glissante

Not long after the defeat suffered in the 1980 referendum, the Parti Québécois issued a White Paper entitled Autant de façons d’être Québécois [So many ways to be Québécois], a hopeful cosmopolitan vision of Quebec identity, developed in somewhat belated recognition of the growing number of immigrants in Quebec who, thanks to Bill 101, were now receiving their education in French. Since, as Monique LaRue has observed in L’Arpenteur et le navigateur [The Surveyor and the Navigator], Quebec literature has always been considered to have a special identitary mission–”the mission of serving as our homeland and the grounding of our identity” (10)–it is not surprising that the strong presence of immigrants has given rise to new narratives of identity in the Quebec of the 1980s and 1990s. But, as set forth in LaRue’s controversial 1996 essay, the new immigrants are producing writings that may have no real place in Quebec literature, at least in the eyes of the xenophobic Quebec writer whom LaRue takes as her interlocutor, “works that have nothing to do with what has always been called Quebec literature, works that fail to inscribe themselves, in any way, in its history, in the logic of its development, that do not participate in its quest for identity“ (8). This discussion takes on a particularly acrimonious cast when set in the political context created by another referendum and another Parti Québécois premier: Jacques Parizeau’s unfortunate attribution of his party’s 1995 defeat to “money and the ethnic vote,” which LaRue specifically takes as one of the points of departure for her essay.

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Interestingly for my purposes, much of the controversy touched off by LaRue’s essay has involved women writers, including such figures as Lise Bissonnette, Andrée Yanacopolo, and Régine Robin. The most vehement of LaRue’s critics has been Tunisian-born Ghila Sroka, editor of La Tribune Juive and founding editor, in 1987, of the multicultural feminist publication La Parole Métèque. As suggested by its name, and stated in an initial editorial, La Parole Métèque was founded with the express purpose of “integrating the words of immigrant women into the Quebec feminist movement,”1 and in this context, it is perhaps not surprising that Sroka was the first to attack LaRue’s public articulation of what Sroka perceived as a division between immigrant writers and “native” Québécois, Québécois de souche. Sroka seemed bent on conflating LaRue’s own voice with the views of her imagined xenophobic colleague, calling her essay, as quoted by Patricia Smart, an example of “ethnic cleansing” that would “make Jean-Marie LePen leap with joy” (16).2 But most of the women’s voices that have been raised in this discussion, despite their diversity and a certain level of mutual misunderstanding, seem sympathetic to the vision of Quebec literature ultimately articulated by LaRue, one capable of integrating a diversity of identity narratives: “Imagine what Quebec literature would be if it became simply literature, if it unburdened itself of its ethnic identity without thereby denying it … and if it truly became a world, a place from which arise all points of view and where diversity is expressed in French in America” (28). This statement by LaRue, who herself could qualify as a pure laine Québécoise, is not far distant from one elaborated by Régine Robin, perhaps the most outspoken of the new generation of women immigrant writers. In her commentary on the notion of a “minor literature,” Robin asks the question raised by LaRue in a more personal way: “Will I become part of Quebec literature one day?” Although she knows that her work would be excluded by some Quebec critics, along with that of other Montreal Jewish writers, Robin’s answer is a qualified yes: “At the price of a ‘de-ethnicization’ of the notion, in an open play of collective memories, even in conflict, in the traversing of multiple intertexts, even in confrontation. It is at this price that Quebec literature(s) will have a meaning that enables others to find their place in it” (“A propos de la notion,” 14).3 Since 1980 a number of women writers have made such a visibly expanded and diversified notion of Quebec identity a reality of their texts as well as their critical commentary. In my reading, this movement has taken two major directions, which seem to depend on the point of origin of the writer. In the new identity narratives of women

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who could be considered Québécoises de souche – France Théoret, Francine Noël, Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska, Monique Proulx – there has been an expansion of the Quebec “we” beyond the limited and homogeneous entity described by Micheline Cambron, to encompass the reality of a visibly cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic urban space. The situation is quite different in the work of Quebec immigrant women writing in French, and here I am applying the adjective “immigrant” to women born elsewhere who have come to Quebec as immigrants, although they may have arrived at an early age and received some or all of their education in Quebec francophone schools.4 The narratives of Quebec identity written by immigrant women take Quebec (or, more precisely, Montreal) as an important part of their setting and often directly involve the experience of immigration. As Robert Berrouët-Oriel and Robert Fournier have said, these are narratives produced by “migrant subjects reappropriating the Here, inscribing fiction – still inhabited by the memory of origin – in the spatio-temporal framework of the Here” (12). Rather than the expanded, cosmopolitan Quebec identity proposed in texts by écrivaines québécoises de souche, the writings of francophone immigrant women implicitly raise the question of their place in the Quebec identitary canon, either by rejecting an identification with a narrowly conceived Québécois identity, as is most notably the case with Régine Robin, or, as in the work of some more recent immigrant writers, by seeming to ignore the issue altogether in developing their own multifaceted narratives of identity. An expanded Québécois “we” (nous) is evident in much women’s writing of the 1980s, as evidenced by titles like France Théoret’s Nous parlerons comme on écrit. But it is only in the writing of the 1990s that there emerges a sustained vision of a multicultural Montreal, formed of contributions from each of its characteristic ethnic groups. For Francine Noël, who seems most insistently to have developed this vision in the pluralistic perspective of Nous avons tous découvert l’Amérique [We Have All Discovered America], Montreal is a “joyous” Babel – the novel was originally entitled Babel, prise deux [Babel, Take Two]. Its Cf. (canadienne française) woman protagonist, a speech therapist, revels in the effervescent mixture of languages, and her lover observes, “For her, the neighbours are important people, and she slips in a word in their native language to each one: she knows a few phrases in Portuguese, Greek, even Ukrainian. She is at ease in this cosmopolitan neighbourhood, and I like walking around with her; people smile at us warmly.”a The protagonist’s oddly hybrid name of Fatima Gagné has overtones of Portugal and Islam, but is revealed to be a consequence of

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her Catholic grandmother’s devotion to Our Lady of Fatima; here, in contrast to Francine Noël’s Maryse, a foreign-sounding name masks a Cf., who is fleeing her traditionally large and overwhelming Québécois family. As is reflected in the métissage of her name, Fatima sums up the experience of an ethnic French Canadian living within a multicultural Montreal: as Katharine Conley has commented, “Noël shows that even for the native French-speaking Montreal residents, the effect of living within such a mix of cultures and languages has changed their lives and their sense of identity” (262).5 Others of Fatima’s acquaintance display an equal rootedness in Quebec, despite an apparent “ethnic” status. Her anglophone Jewish colleague Allan has no more understanding of her aloof Hassidic neighbours than she does, and his natural use of familiar Quebec forms like “à soir” convince her that he is really a native like herself. In Fatima’s eyes, the negative image of Babel served up by the Bible is a misinterpretation, just as the multi-ethnic reality of Montreal is falsely perceived as a threat to the Quebec national project of selfdefinition. In her reading, Babel is itself a project of self-definition achieved through bringing people together in a place where they can communicate across their differences: “The project of Babel consists in coming together in a City to ‘make a name for yourself.’ Which I interpret as a desire to define yourself rather than letting yourself be defined by a superior being. Here, there is no transcendence but a model of a society that is civil, pagan, autonomous and perfectly viable. People capable of constructing are at once similar and different, and their coming together is possible because, literally, they are speakable. This is a utopia, one of communication with respect for difference.”b Like Nous avons tous découvert l’Amérique, with which it explicitly asserts its affiliation, Monique Proulx’s 1996 volume of short stories, Les Aurores Montréales [Aurora Montrealis], offers itself as another contemporary identity narrative, one pointedly composed of a series of first-person narratives representing various residents of Montreal. This reading of Montreal has evidently found favour with Quebec readers, as indicated by a 1996 survey conducted by the magazine L’Actualité which listed this book, although still relatively recent, as one of twenty literary texts thought best to represent Quebec reality, along with such classics as Bonheur d’occasion and Les Anciens Canadiens.6 Proulx’s title evokes an ambivalent vision of Montreal, one that oscillates between the fear and fascination inspired by the aurora borealis. For Laurel, the sixteen-year-old protagonist of the title story, the multicultural mix of Montreal constitutes a never ending series of threats, beginning with the ethnically marked gang of rollerbladers in his new neighbourhood, whom he derisively calls Soufflaki. In

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devotion to his cause, “to defend French Montreal against the Invaders” (140),c he explicitly questions the positive image of Babel presented by Francine Noël and fears for his expansively tolerant mother, who could easily qualify as a Noël character: “His mother lives in the Greek district on the border of the Hassid district, has a natural-foods store in the English district, does her shopping from Italians and sleeps with a Chilean. In Laurel’s book she’ll be called Universalle and she’ll die early on, a victim of assassination or assimilation” (138).d Nonetheless, Laurel’s xenophobia recedes before the temptations of baklava at the Syrian bakery (where he notes the impeccable French of the proprietor) and comfort food at his favourite sushi restaurant (where he admires the remarkable adaptability of the Japanese). Returning home, he is confronted by the Greek rollerblade gang, who ominously block the sidewalk only to greet him with a chorus of “Welcome to Montreal.” In an ironic twist, the socalled “immigrants” have become the host culture (société d’accueil). In counterpoint to Proulx’s young pure laine Québécois are the voices of immigrant narrators in stories regularly interspersed throughout the collection, their titles set off from the others by italics and repeated references to colour: Grey and white (Latino), Yellow and white (Chinese), Pink and white (Italian), Black and white (Haitian), Red and white (Native) and White (English Canadian). These voices are often inspired by references to Quebec immigrant writing: Yellow and white is dedicated to Ying Chen, Pink and white to Marco Micone and Black and white manifestly inspired by Dany Laferrière. Thus, Proulx creates an intertextuality that includes immigrant literature, la littérature migrante, as her text includes the voices of immigrant communities. One of the most striking of these stories, Yellow and white adopts the voice of Ying Chen’s narrator in La Memoire de l’eau, which had ended on the plane bringing her from Shanghai to Montreal. Proulx’s story follows the same character through her first months in Montreal, and in Proulx’s version the young Chinese woman describes Montreal to her grandmother in the guise of a vast Canadian Tire store, bewildering in its infinite profusion of goods and its absence of guidelines or prescribed itineraries.7 While Fredric Jameson might have seen such a place, like the Los Angeles Bonventura Hotel, as an image of a bewildering postmodernism,8 Proulx’s Canadian Tire store soon evolves, in the eyes of the slowly adapting narrator, into an image of a welcome freedom: “Like the customers at Canadian Tire, I go directly where I believe I need to go, without waiting for support, and I am capable of walking past the overflowing shelves without buying anything. At first it’s not easy to recognize, but this is freedom, that painful and magnificent thing called freedom” (53).e She reflects

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that, despite the cool welcome of some Québécois, she has found her place: “I have found my place, Grandmother, the place inside that gives me the strength to go forward, I have found my centre” (54).f This commitment to finding a place runs throughout all Proulx’s “immigrant” stories, and it appears even the narrative of the Native woman, who – in what seems to be a reply to another Native woman created by Mona Latif-Ghattas in Le Double Conte de l’exil [The Double Tale of Exile] – vows to remain in Montreal: “I’m not going back to Kanahwake. I’m staying here in Montreal, in this old Hochelaga where my ancestors lived huddled into the mountainsides … The noisy earth with its garrulous inhabitants and treeless forests is all that’s left to us; we must put down new roots or accept death” (170).g In Proulx’s narratives the immigrant speakers, while evoking the difficulties of minority existence in Montreal, share a positive vision of the city which frequently centres on the beauty of its winters. A Latino immigrant concludes his letter to his brother left behind with a description of snow: “The beauty, Manu. The white beauty falling from the sky, absolutely white where before it was grey. Ah, live long enough Manu, stretch out your dog’s life long enough for me to bring you here to be with me and play in the snow” (11).h And a Haitian father offers a vision of a walk in the snow with his wife to counter the multiple incidents of racism related by members of his family: “When the snow is truly white, that’s when it’s easy, that’s when I can walk in it pretending that it’s sand, that Flore Saint-Dieu’s hand is soft in mine again, that it’s sand leading to the warm and fragrant sea” (127).i If women writers who, like Proulx, are Québécoises de souche can envision Montreal as a truly welcoming culture d’accueil, its snow providing a characteristic background of tranquil beauty, this is not the image encountered in the writings of immigrants themselves. A newly arrived Italian immigrant mother in Bianca Zagolin’s Une Femme à sa fenêtre [A Woman At Her Window] sees the Quebec winter as a prison: “On the windowpanes the winter cold had traced forests of frosts that emprisoned her vision in their branches.”j In the eyes of a Haitian grandmother in Marie-Célie Agnant’s La Dot de Sara [Sara’s Dowry], the snow is beautiful but terrifying, and it encloses her in her daughter’s small city apartment, transforming nature into a cemetery: “The park across the street … is transformed with the coming of winter into a cemetery for trees, a resting place for giants overcome by the cold. Looking at them makes me sad. Contemplating their long, thin arms, their bare claws offered to the sky, I imagine them praying, imploring all the saints to put an end to their suffering.”k For the Lebanese immigrant mother in Abla Farhoud’s Le Bonheur

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a la queue glissante [Happiness Has A Slippery Tail], the first winter in Quebec seems like an encounter with death. In contrast to the ebullient cosmopolitanism of many écrivaines pure laine, some women immigrant writers depict a host culture where they are not welcome guests. There is a recurrent emphasis in their work on the theme of return to the “native land,” nowhere more apparent than in Mona Latif-Ghattas’s Le Double Conte de l’exil, where the return is necessitated by rejection on the part of the host society. Rejection is almost unavoidable in the case of Fève, an illegal alien fleeing visions of violence in a generic Middle Eastern country.9 But even before his deportation by immigration authorities, he has been mocked and rejected by the native Montrealers, who themselves are revealed to be earlier generations of immigrants. The only authentically “native” person on the scene is a Native, Madeleine/Manitakawa, who has become a solitary wanderer in Montreal. With the departure of Fève, she loses her only human link to the city and decides to return to the reservation. Herself a immigrant from Egypt, Latif-Ghattas has, in Le Double Conte de l’exil, written a modern parable whose critique extends beyond Quebec’s immigration laws to expose a deep-seated xenophonia. The all-embracing vision embodied in the Parti Québécois’s Autant de façons d’être Québécois found an almost immediate retort in 1983 in Régine Robin’s La Québécoite [The Wanderer]: “one doesn’t become Québécois” (39). Robin emphatically reiterated this statement in her afterword to the 1997 English translation, in case her readers might have missed it: “One leitmotif in the book is that one does not become Québécois” (174). Offering itself tantalizingly as a new narrative about Quebec women’s identity, “la Québécoite” never quite becomes “la Québécoise.” Rather, the francophone immigrant protagonist rejects three different imagined scenarios of a possible life in Quebec, in the Jewish neighbourhood of Snowdon, among the French-Canadian elite of Outremont, or in the Greek and Italian quarters of Jean Talon and Park. But Robin’s protagonist ultimately chooses in each case to return to Paris, the place of her birth. Robin found it necessary to emphasize this too in her afterword to the English translation: “The reader will have noticed that ‘she,’ the character in the novel, always ends up leaving and going back to Paris” (173). Some Quebec readers apparently remarked negatively on Robin’s nostalgic love for Paris,10 but a number of important critics responded warmly to what they saw as a new cosmopolitan vision of Montreal. Although Simon Harel recognizes that references to Montreal in Robin’s text are more than likely to provoke a reaction of “melancholy distress,” he also sees her work as revealing a “jubilatory fascination,” opening Quebec and the

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Quebec text to a new diversity: “Montreal in this case is the city that permits a healthy openness, that, in the end, justifies the existence of a cosmopolitanism lived as the bursting apart of identities. Because you must not underestimate in the various writers examined a jubilatory fascination that makes the city a place where identity can be destroyed and incessantly reconstructed. The unusual energy of Montreal resides in the flexibility of the cultural alliances formed, the diversity of places invented and the memory unmade then regained of the urban imaginary” (“La Parole orpheline,” 418). On a first reading of La Québécoite, Robin’s images of a multicultural Montreal seem to parallel the effervescent variety of Francine Noël’s joyous Babel or the rich cultural smorgasbord of Monique Proulx. But in the vision of Robin’s solitary immigrant, the characteristics that fascinate writers like Noël and Proulx take on a negative dimension, beginning with the snow in Montreal’s francophone east end: “The Sherbrooke where one never goes, where only French is spoken, the sad Sherbrooke, where the snow is grey even right after a snowstorm, where thoughts are grey as life” (63–4).l Even Robin’s poetic visions of Montreal, especially her well-known reflection on the many faces of Sherbrooke Street, reveal a distinctly negative cast: Schizophrenic city collage of languages [patchwork linguistique] ethnic stew full of lumps purée of crushed cultures turned into folksy clichés frozen pizza souvlaki paellam

In Robin’s terms, the city is not interestingly multifaceted but schizophrenic, mentally ill and dangerously alienated from itself. Even patchwork – a term that, in North American women’s writing, often offers the vision of a newly reconstructed whole – seems strangely negative in Robin’s hands,11 particularly when attached to the adjective linguistique; it suggests a disintegration of the very project of francophone linguistic unity that should provide the cultural frame. The mixture of cultures, in Robin’s fragmenting vision, becomes not a mosaic, a kaleidoscope, or even a delicious ethnic salad, but a lumpy pablum in which even pizza, souvlaki, and paella have lost their native flavour and become indistinguishable: “Everything is congealed in grease, oil, American margarine. You put sweet Kraft dressing on your salad” (64).n

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One of the most striking features of Robin’s text is its collage of realia: National Hockey League results, restaurant menus, television listings, and endless lists of metro stations, credit cards, oil companies, banks. There is a suggestion of variety, of abundance, creating a space much like Proulx’s allegorical Canadian Tire store, a rich domain open to exploration by the newly arrived immigrant. But in her illuminating study of Robin’s enumerations, Madeleine Frédéric points out that most of these lists are imposed on the narrator by chance, they lead nowhere, and are entirely without affective resonance. This is true of all the lists based in the reality of Montreal. In Frédéric’s careful reading, the lists only begin to take on meaning when they refer to memories of Paris, although there they are as likely to lead to the site of Jewish deportations as to warm childhood memories. The fragmentary sections of France Théoret’s postmodern Nous parlerons comme on écrit are held together by the autobiographical frame and the reassuring presence of an expansive “we”; the ethnic groups observed by Francine Noël’s narrator form the elements that compose her neighbourhood; the immigrant voices in Monique Proulx’s Montreal sketches have their assigned places in the framework of the collection, an overarching vision of Montreal. In Robin’s text, however, there seems to be no larger framing narrative, no unifying pattern in which each of the fragmented sections can find its place. Rather than moving freely between one neighbourhood and another, the character participates in three separate narratives, isolated one from the other and each ending in rejection, concluding with a repetition of ritualistic words of rupture: “One day she would have decided to leave. Mime Yente wouldn’t even have tried to stop her. She would have taken an Air France 747 leaving from Mirabel at 20:45” (71, 137, 171).o In this novel, as opposed to Francine Noël’s, to walk through the city is to traverse a series of ghettos: “You leave one ghetto and enter another … Nothing but ghettos” (158).p In Robin’s vision, Montreal is not a multicultural mix, but a series of “juxtaposed exiles,/ of piled-up solitudes that touch without seeing each other” (160).q Robin’s attitude toward Montreal contains much ambivalence, as noted by Simon Harel: at the very end of La Québécoite appears the enigmatic remark “it seems the Place du Québec is in Saint-Germaindes-Prés,” (172)r certainly an accurate reading of contemporary Paris street signs and possibly the sign of a certain nostalgia for Quebec. Indeed, the Paris to which the character returns is itself an object of ambivalence, for the site of her childhood memories is undergoing transformation, becoming, like Montreal, a “schizophrenic city”12 – not to mention its historical lack of tolerance for ethnicity, as summed up by the Grenelle metro station, associated in the collective memory

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constructed in La Québécoite with the deportation of Parisian Jews during the Occupation. But despite the slight ambivalence of the final sentence, Robin’s character does make what seems to be a definitive return to Paris (although, of course, Robin herself has not). Seven years after the appearance of La Québécoite, Francine Noël offers a response to Robin’s fictional ending in her character of Amélia Malaise, Fatima Gagné’s best friend. In many ways, the ill-at-ease Amélia Malaise is a character in dialogue with “la Québécoite,” as Nous avons tous découvert l’Amérique seems to be a reply to Robin’s negative vision of a heterogeneous Montreal. Like “la Québécoite,” Noël’s Amélia constantly manifests her nostalgia for her French birthplace, even though, like Robin’s character and her relationship to Yiddish, Amélia often reverts to Spanish, the language of her refugee father. As Proulx has done with Ying Chen’s fictional creation, Noël pursues the trajectory of Robin’s character a step further. Amélia is allowed to complete the cycle of return to the “native land” only to find herself sadly out of place in Europe and to recognize the extent to which she has, almost despite herself, become Québécois. As she writes to Fatima, “I am no longer French nor Spanish, I have probably become a Québécoise. If I have a place in this world, it is in Montreal, with you. I’m not always comfortable there, but I feel less out of place than in Europe … Each culture has its limits, but, all things considered, one system weighed against another, I prefer Quebec: the barriers are permeable, and dreaming is still permitted.”s Ironically, Amélia dies in a plane crash as she attempts to return to Montreal, perhaps signifying the impossibility of fully reconciling all her identitary tensions. Robin’s text is unique in the brilliant postmodernity of its writing, but her vehement rejection of a too rigidly defined Québécois identity is something shared with other women writers of the 1980s, including those who could claim to be pure laine. France Théoret’s fragmented character in Nous parlerons comme on écrit asserts her resistance to “an iron-hard identity” (168) and a stifling family milieu. A flight from the Quebec family is also central to the identity of Francine Noël’s Maryse and her later character, Fatima Gagné. But the vehemence of Robin’s critique of Quebec identity and its oppressiveness is strangely absent from the writings of immigrant women writers of the 1990s, who seem preoccupied by other concerns. While Robin seeks to shatter and fragment an impenetrably coherent construction of Quebec identity, more recent writings by and about immigrant women are primarily concerned with reassembling a coherent narrative of lives ruptured by the experience of immigration

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and exile. In this exploration, conforming to a certain expectation of Québécois identity is of little importance – or perhaps a sort of belonging has simply been taken for granted. Many of these more recent immigrant texts seem to have taken up at the point where Robin found herself after writing La Québécoite: “After writing the book I understood that becoming Québécois was no longer of any importance to me. The Wanderer deals with the problem of finding a place for oneself here and making one’s voice heard when one comes from elsewhere, and once the book was finished, I felt that this was possible through writing, through social involvement, through the practice of one’s craft, through friendship and other relationships – and so I turned a page” (174, italics mine). The conjoined problematics, as Robin has defined them, of finding a place and a voice, dominate much writing by immigrant women in Quebec. If it does not present an altogether positive vision of Quebec multiculturalism, Robin’s novel itself is the statement of an immigrant woman able to find her voice through writing, overcoming the silencing implied by the coite of “Québécoite.” At one point, the narrator sees writing, and particularly women’s writing, as privileged in Quebec, and perhaps the only real way in which women can find a homeland: “Writing was no doubt the real country of these women in search of a country” (112).t In her various efforts to make a place for herself in Montreal, the character is involved in the creation of a sort of community of friendship and social involvement:13 in Outremont she surrounds herself with kindred ethnic souls and in the life she imagines with her Paraguayan refugee lover, the immigrant couple and their friends work together to effect a fundamental transformation of Quebec itself: “Quietly, without saying anything, without expressing it clearly to themselves, they would feel things changing around them. Quebec would be moving quietly, imperceptibly toward a plural society. Witnesses of this unconscious metamorphosis, they would also be its obscure, anonymous authors” (168).u Most significantly, however, Robin’s character works to find her place in history by reconstructing an extensive collective memory, what she has herself defined in Le Roman mémoriel [The Novel of Memory] as a memory of family and group, possessing a powerful emotional link to the remembering subject. The collective memory of La Québécoite represents the experience of an entire community, in this case a dispersed immigrant community of Eastern European Jews. In one sense, Robin’s character embodies a hybrid, postmodern “nomadic subject,” as Rosi Braidotti would define it, “the kind of critical consciousness that resists settling into socially coded modes of thought and behavior” (5), and this is how Robin’s text has been

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read by critics like Simon Harel, Pierre Nepveu, and Pierre L’Hérault. In another sense, however, “la Québécoite” is a contemporary feminine incarnation of the quintessentially nomadic figure of the “Wandering Jew,” a parallel emphasized by the title’s English translation as The Wanderer. Although, in her public statements, Robin continually denies her own identification with any form of “ethnicity,”14 an undeniable element of La Québécoite is its effort to reassemble the fragments of a Jewish community disrupted and dispersed by the forces of genocide and exile. To a potentially overpowering Québécois identity Robin opposes not simply an incoherent fragmentation of disconnected memories – nor an imagined French universalism, which she nonetheless raises as a possibility – but the multifaceted collective memory of a diasporic community. In La Québécoite she has written a “roman mémoriel,” by which she means the process through which “an individual, group, or society reflects on its past while modifying it” (Le Roman mémoriel, 48). As Sherry Simon has noted, the eminent Quebec sociologist JeanCharles Falardeau had long ago observed that Jewish-Canadian writers paralleled the French-Canadian sense of cultural identity, both groups possessing a strong tradition and both seeming to be, in Falardeau’s words, “intensely here and elsewhere,”15 terms strangely appropriate to Robin’s text. Thus, it is not unexpected that, in the face of the strident demands of Quebec cultural nationalism, Robin was led to undertake a personal reconstruction of her own disrupted and dispersed cultural community. In much the same way and at the same time, France Théoret had felt obliged to explore her identity as a woman and a Québécoise in opposition to a Parisian professor who was French and male; in her texts contemporaneous to La Québécoite Théoret had begun to reconstruct this new identity through exploration of personal and familial memory, beginning with the memory of her dead aunt in Une Voix pour Odile. Like Théoret, other Quebec women writers of the 1980s and 1990s – among them, Arlette Cousture, Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska, Anne Hébert, and Francine Noël – had begun to reconstruct the lives of foremothers, giving a voice to women silenced by history and further marginalized by cultural and linguistic isolation. Simon Harel has recognized the extent to which La Québécoite, too, is a familial novel, in which the presence of the aunt, Mime Yente, with her memories of Jitomar, is central, a pivotal character in all three imagined narratives. Madeleine Frédéric notes that Mime Yente, with her frequently mentioned samovar and her celebration of the sabbath, is one of two figures close to the narrator (the other being the old asthmatic novelist who studies Jewish history) who

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offer resistance to the loss of memory, “the amnesia of modernity” (494). In the absence of the mother, deported in the Vel d’hiv roundup of Parisian Jews, the aunt provides the possibility of transmission of memory from woman to woman. Read in this way, La Québécoite suggests its link to more recent texts of Quebec immigrant women, who offer intergenerational transmission from woman to woman as the basis for a reconstruction of personal and cultural identity. The figure of the aging mother or grandmother emerges as the central narrator in women’s immigrant writings of the mid-1990s, especially in the 1995 text by Marie-Célie Agnant, La Dot de Sara, the only novel by a woman of which I am aware to emerge from the Montreal Haitian community, which has already produced important Quebec writers like Emile Ollivier and Dany Laferrière. A similar character takes form in Le Bonheur a la queue glissante, published in 1998, the first novel of Lebanese-born Abla Farhoud, long recognized for her plays.16 Another elderly woman narrator provides the link between the short stories by the Egyptian-born Mona Latif-Ghattas in her 1996 volume, Les Lunes de miel [Honeymoons].17 As they foreground transmission from woman to woman, these new writings also extend the search of Robin’s woman immigrant to find a place and a voice. In each of the three texts a woman speaks. A fundamental orality appropriate to these often-silenced and poorly educated women is emphasized by the creole expressions that penetrate the voice of Agnant’s Haitian grandmother, the Arabic proverbs constantly cited by Farhoud’s Lebanese mother, and the ritualistic story-telling devices used by Latif-Ghattas’s elderly Egyptian character, “Tante Eulalie.” Even more significant, each narrative, in a sort of mise en abyme, foregrounds a situation of intergenerational communication between women. In Farhoud’s Le Bonheur a la queue glissante, a writerdaughter asks her mother to tell the story of her life so that she may use it in writing a book. In the narrative that frames Latif-Ghattas’s collection of interrelated short tales, the narratee, Christine Achour, is a forty-something Quebec-born woman who had long resisted ties to her parents and other members of their Egyptian immigrant community. Volunteering to work in a nursing home, she chances on eighty-eight-year-old Egyptian-born Tante Eulalie, unrelated by blood but linked to Christine’s grandmother by the bonds of a strong cultural community. Through the fascination of the old woman’s stories, Christine is made to appreciate the richness of a world she thought she had left behind. The oral narrative in Agnant’s La Dot de Sara has its origins in the stories Marianna tells her granddaughter Sara about her life in Haiti,

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which constitute the only legacy she has to leave Sara when the old woman returns to Haiti to die. In a real sense, it is Sara’s dowry, since the grandmother foresees that her granddaughter, like her own daughter, will marry and have her children in Quebec. This narrative situation, however, is not far from the reality that gave rise to this rather unusual novel, which was a series of interviews with Haitian women immigrants in Montreal conducted by a research team that included a writer. As described in the postface by the project sociologist, Verena Haldemann, the novel was conceived as a counterpart to the more statistically oriented sociological report, creating not only a legacy to Haitian granddaughters but, in her view, a sort of transcultural gift to all Québécois: “If Marianna can reveal to our understanding the precious inheritance that these women have to leave us, her immigrant solitude will inscribe itself in our collective experience” (181). In speaking about their lives, each of these three narrators, like “la Québécoite,” must overcome the forces of silence. A first of these is the silence imposed by younger generations who, established in Quebec, are no longer interested in hearing their stories or, in some cases, in speaking their mother’s language. Even the highly articulate Tante Eulalie has been abandoned to the silence of her nursing home, with only a charitable volunteer as an audience for her stories. Although Christine is captivated by this talented story-teller, she has not been willing to maintain contact with her own immigrant mother or participate in the conversations of the Montreal Egyptian community. Agnant’s Haitian grandmother is also effectively silenced by her assimilationist daughter, who walks away from her tales of Haiti and is scandalized by her mother’s voluble reunion with an old Haitian friend, which she finds shockingly out of place in a doctor’s waiting room in Quebec: “Giselle stood back, a little embarrassed by our conversation, which seemed to surprise all the patients obediently seated in the waiting room. How well-behaved people are here. We are disturbing the silence of this place.”v In this new society, only small granddaughters are willing to speak with their grandmothers in their own creole language, their relationship bridging the generational gaps that seem inevitably to divide mothers and daughters. Discouraged by the muteness of her Québécois neighbours and disoriented in the unfamiliar snow-filled city, Agnant’s formerly selfsufficient Haitian grandmother finds herself cut off from the world outside her daughter’s Montreal apartment. Her situation is much like that of Farhoud’s Lebanese mother, whose isolation is exacerbated by her inability to speak French. She never leaves the house unless accompanied by one of her French-

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speaking children, a state of childlike dependence underlined, in one episode, by her need to rely on the linguistic competency of her fouryear-old Quebec-born daughter. But her failure to speak French is only a symptom of a more fundamental inability to express her feelings and desires, and it is her progressive understanding of the causes of this aphasia that structures her narrative. Unlike the daughterfigures in the other two texts, the daughters of Farhoud’s immigrant mother are eager to receive aspects of her legacy. The youngest, Kaokab, a professor who has inherited her father’s gift for telling stories, is eager to learn how to make her mother’s wonderful zucchini in yogurt sauce, while the quieter and more reflective Myriam, the writer, is more interested in her mother’s legacy of words. What Myriam at first receives is a barrage of traditional Lebanese proverbs, one of which provides the title, Le Bonheur a la queue glissante, which characterizes the elusive nature of happiness, with its “slippery tail.” This sentiment becomes thematic in many immigrant women’s texts: Latif-Ghattas’s Tante Eulalie seems to be concealing a secret sorrow, and Agnant’s Marianna uses a strangely similar image to explain her own life: “This image of my life, like an eel that I tried so hard to direct but which went off in all directions.”w All the Lebanese proverbs used by the mother reappear in a list at the end of Farhoud’s book, in the original Arabic as well as French, constituting Farhoud’s contribution to the Quebec cross-cultural exchange, even as it forms part of the mother’s legacy to her daughter. But these proverbs also form a barrier to communication, as the mother is led to realize, when they are used as a sort of ventriloquism to avoid speaking in her own voice: “I answer with a saying, a proverb or a ready-made expression when my children ask me a question about my past, it’s easier than having to search for the truth, say it, relive it.”x Articulating the accepted values of her culture, which often preach a fatalistic resignation, the mother is forced by her daughter’s constant questioning to acknowledge the frequent discrepancies between her real feelings of frustration and revolt and the wise advice she offers her daughters. As Myriam asks her to speak and reflect, the mother realizes that she has somehow lost the confident voice she had exhibited as a child when she had become known in her village for her amusing stories. Throughout the years of her marriage, she has lost the ability to speak, as her husband has usurped her voice in family gatherings, even taking her place in the dialogue with her learned and respected father. When her husband writes his father-in-law long letters during their difficult first years in Quebec, she can only scribble in the margins the few Arabic characters she knows how to write, in a cry for help destined to remain

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unanswered because it is, literally and figuratively, unreadable in the patriarchal language. The real violence of the husband’s suppression of his wife’s speech – as well as his painful indifference to her feelings – is revealed near the end of the narrative when the mother can finally bring herself to speak of an extreme moment of shame and humiliation, when she had begged her husband to postpone a planned trip in order to be present for the imminent birth of their third child. Already on horseback, he responds with a literal and symbolic kick in the mouth, a gesture that, to her shock and surprise, is praised by her own father, who joins with her husband in patriarchal solidarity. This longsilenced memory is a pivotal moment, in which the narrator is forced to recognize her persistent lack of power over her language and her life. In Farhoud’s novel, the loss of language and sense of exile from home experienced by characters like “la Québécoite” are not merely features of the immigrant experience, but are repeated in the various ruptures in the narrator’s life, beginning with the move to her husband’s village in Lebanon and continued in the move to Quebec, and even in the family’s temporary return to a Lebanon that is no longer home. The narrator’s extreme linguistic and spiritual isolation during her first years in Quebec are thus not new experiences, specific to immigration, but part of the basic pattern of her life. Despite her alienation from language, however, the mother has retained an ability to communicate in a way denied her apparently more articulate husband, who is progressively cut off from their nonArabic-speaking grandchildren and sons-in-law. Still limited by her inability to speak French, the mother has long ago learned to pour her creativity and love into the food she prepares for her family: “my words are transformed into grains of wheat and rice, grape leaves and cabbage leaves … my thoughts are changed into olive oil and lemon juice.”y Through her constant gifts of food and care for her grandchildren, she is able to maintain her ties with a family scattered throughout Montreal. Despite her isolation, she creates a network of human affection, especially in her relationships with daughters and grandchildren, and within this human community she finds her place in Quebec: “My country is not the country of my ancestors or even my childhood village, my country is where my children are happy … my country is my grandchildren with their arms around my neck, who call me sitto Dounia … in my own language.”z The project of making a place through the creation of community is also central to the adaptation of Agnant’s Haitian grandmother. For her, the most alienating aspect of the immigrant experience in Montreal has been the anonymous nature of the cold urban landscapes,

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the closed faces retreating behind the closed doors of their apartments, “faces not only closed but also silent. They didn’t say hello. Their lips couldn’t manage to move” (26).aa It is only when she reencounters her old friend Chimène that she is able to re-create with her the human warmth and interaction of their old Haitian neighbourhood, and they join with a group of other elderly women, thereby opening this first-person narration to the stories of other Haitian immigrant women. It is with Chimène that Marianna first ventures out into the city, finding welcome in a kindred Catholicism, albeit one peopled with strangely named Quebec saints, and discovering Chinese restaurants whose rice closely resembles their own. It is only as this community dissolves through death that Marianna feels the necessity of returning to die in Haiti, where she feels her bones will not crack from the cold. But even though she welcomes the warmth of her native climate, her departure is not a rejection of life in Quebec, where she feels her daughter and granddaughter have found their place. In La Dot de Sara the process of return is explored more fully and with greater negativity than was the case in La Québécoite. Early in her life in Montreal Marianna had told her granddaughter, “The streets of your country don’t recognize the sound of my footsteps.”bb But once back in Haiti, she is confronted with the same lack of belonging: “But here I am and I hardly recognize the streets, perhaps this country, too, has lost all trace of my memory.”cc With the political degradation it had suffered during her twenty-year absence, Haiti seems no more the keeper of her history than Montreal: Marianna returns to her country as to a tomb, a political situation that is examined more deeply in Agnant’s subsequent short stories, Le Silence comme le sang [Silence Like Blood]. A parallel negativity characterizes the return of Farhoud’s immigrant family to Lebanon, where they encounter so many cultural and economic difficulties, including the beginning of Lebanon’s terrible civil war, that they are delighted to be finally united once again in Montreal. The return to Lebanon is particularly hard on the Quebecraised children, and the mother finds herself sharing their impatience with traditional customs that hold no meaning for them. Her new critical consciousness, born of her various displacements, is suddenly experienced as a positive force: “Perhaps Salim is right, I am a barbarian, as the Greeks called foreigners. He is surely right, I have been a barbarian for so long that I have gotten used to it … and I like it.”dd If Robin’s message was, most strongly, “one does not become Québécois,” a leitmotif of more recent immigrant texts would seem to be “one does not return home.” As Farhoud’s narrator realizes, a certain

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sense of alienation has always been part of her life: “In Lebanon, they called us ‘the Americans,’ in Canada in the early years they called us ‘the Syrians’; in my husband’s village they called me by the name of my village. When I think of it, I have been called Dounia only in my native village.”ee If being called by her name is a sign of individual identity, the narrator has found this recognition in Quebec, in her Quebec-born grandchildren, who call her sitto Dounia, and, most forcefully, in the Québécoise employee at her husband’s first store, who addressed her as “madame Dounia,” in contrast with the Lebanese custom of addressing her only by her husband’s name or as “Oum Abdallah,” the mother of her son. Mme Chevrette is also the only person who has bothered to teach her to express herself in a rudimentary French. In this immigrant narrative, the few Québécois with whom the mother has contact are portrayed as warm and welcoming, despite her own inability to speak, and it is for this reason – in recognition of the historical welcome given to Lebanese in Quebec – that the children, unlike others in the Montreal Lebanese community, are sent to francophone schools. Indeed, this immigrant family is even supportive of Quebec independence. As the oldest son comments, “They want to have their own house, even if it’s smaller. As immigrants, we should understand what it means not to have your own country, to feel foreign, like a minority.”ff Latif-Ghattas’s stories of the Montreal Egyptian community also present a positive view of life in Quebec, while stressing the importance of the immigrant community itself as a site of transition. All of Latif-Ghattas’s characters have come from Egypt to Montreal during the 1960s, and their stories offer multiple facets of the immigrant experience, sometimes difficult but, particularly in the case of women, potentially liberating. One character, Marie Maccabé, begins to gain a critical distance on her husband’s brutally oppressive family the moment she obtains her Canadian passport. And as her daughter finally persuades Marie to leave the house, she tells the father, “In my country, there are laws that protect women. Here, you’re in Quebec. Wake up.”gg In these immigrant tales, most of the problems are brought in the baggage from home, and Quebec proves a land of opportunity in which the characters are free to play out their inevitable dramas. As suggested by its title, Les Lunes de miel, the dozen stories tell of as many different marriages, stressing the confining and liberating nature of family groups and the ethnic communities in which they are embedded. In some cases, community ties can be destructive: Aglaë Balthazar destroys lives through her vicious gossip, and pressures

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from competing religions crush a Jewish-Muslim couple, leaving their child to be raised by Québécois friends. But families still support one other, and friendships are formed through the experience of a common immigrant background, as is the case with Tante Eulalie and Christine. Tante Eulalie’s interlocked stories create a web of connections that draw Christine back into this community, even as the wily old woman uses the seduction of her story-telling to draw her listener into romance and marriage with the Québécois social worker responsible for her case. Theirs is clearly a symbolic marriage, a cultural mixing made possible through story-telling itself, a relationship which draws on its roots in the Egyptian community to bind the narratee more closely to Quebec. As the stories reach their end, the fictions created by Tante Eulalie rejoin reality, as all the characters gather to celebrate a wedding in the community, of which the narratee and her Québécois fiancé are now a part. In these writings by immigrant women, there are few if any affirmations of a complex multi-ethnic identity that also asserts itself as thoroughly Québécois, one like that contained in the frequently quoted statement by the Italian-born Antonio D’Alfonso, a leader in the emerging field of “neo-Quebecois” literature, who speaks of being an “tripartite child.”18 As pure laine writers have inscribed stories of women into Quebec history and the national text, women immigrant writers have inscribed their narrators into the smaller ethnic communities whose existence, as Alain Médam explains it, is an important part of the transcultural exchange in which a society expands its identity without thereby losing its centre. The immigrant communities in which these narrators find their place are not, in these recent writings, explicitly situated within the larger context of a multicultural Montreal. But, through the represented scenes of narration, they are firmly placed within a context of intergenerational transformation, in which the experience of mother or grandmother provides the foundation of the daughter’s or granddaughter’s place within a broader Quebec society. These recent women’s immigrant texts, although located in the here and now of Quebec reality, would seem to risk incurring the condemnation of Monique LaRue’s xenophobic colleague, who would exclude such writings from the canon of Quebec literature because, he would argue, they have not participated in the logic of its development, its search for identity. In my reading, however, these texts participate fully in the development of women’s writing in Quebec since 1980. With pure laine writers like Noël, Théoret, OuelletteMichalska, and Anne Hébert, they share the project of giving voice to silenced women of preceding generations whom they see as essential

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to the construction of a woman’s identity that can only be fully understood in its relationship to the past. With France Théoret and other feminists these writers share a vision of woman as open to the other. Through the figures of the narratees, who have found their place in Quebec, these writings clearly contribute to a project of Quebec identity in which the unspecified object of the Quebec motto, “I remember” (je me souviens), opens to multiple horizons.

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Notes

introduction 1 Brossard’s remarks were reprinted in Liberté of July-October 1976, 13. Christiane Makward, whose translation is used here, quotes Brossard’s statement in her article “Quebec Women Writers.” 2 Laure Conan makes this statement in a letter of March 4, 1884, quoted by Manon Brunet in “Henri-Raymond Casgrain et la paternité d’une littérature nationale,” 212. 3 “‘A man defines himself by his project,’ Jean-Paul Sartre has said. A people as well” (“La Fatigue culturelle du Canada français,” 80). 4 Godbout elaborates on this idea in his essay “Novembre 1971/Ecrire.” 5 Camille Roy’s viewpoint is summarized and quoted by Lucie Robert in L’Institution du littéraire au Québec, 185. 6 This statement by Lionel Groulx is quoted in the recently published anthology of his writing (Une Anthologie, 214), which offers many similar examples. 7 Daniel Latouche outlines this perspective in his article “The Power of Words.” 8 See Maurice Lemire’s study, Les Grands Thèmes nationalistes du roman historique canadien-français. 9 See, for example, statements by François-Louis Laflèche, cited in Michel Brunet, La Présence anglaise et les Canadiens, 126. 10 Lucie Robert discusses the crucial contributions of Jeanne Lapointe to the institutionalization of literary study in Quebec (L’Institution du littéraire au Québec, 207–11).

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156 Notes to pages 12–30 11 The novels by Micheline Lachance based on the life of Julie Bruneau Papineau, especially Le Roman de Julie Papineau, have contributed greatly to a new understanding of her role in events leading to the rebellion. 12 This striking literary image, which so graphically sums up the situation of the Quebec woman in the 1930s, has been extensively analyzed by Patricia Smart in Ecrire dans la maison du père, 133. 13 Frégault’s statement is quoted in Mona-Josée Gagnon, Les Femmes vues par le Québec des hommes, 13. 14 The 1979 edition of Denise Boucher’s Les Fées ont soif gives an account of the censorship controversy (20–66). 15 This term is elaborated in my article “The Novel in Quebec: The Family Plot and the Personal Voice.” 16 In 1969 Bernier published the novel Non Monsieur, which was quite unlike her work of the 1930s. I have studied this case at greater length in the article “Inscriptions of the Feminine.” 17 Marie-Josée Des Rivières documents this in her study Le Courrier de Jovette, and in her book Châtelaine et la littérature (1960–1975), 133–48. 18 See the articles on Jovette Bernier by Lucie Robert, Lori Saint-Martin, Fernand Roy, and Christl Verduyn, as well as my own. 19 See my article on Eva Senécal in the Dictionary of Literary Biography: Canadian Writers 1890–1920. 20 Lori Saint-Martin’s view of the relationship of “meta” and “feminist” is developed in her article “Writing (Jumping) Off the Edge of the World.” 21 France Théoret develops this association in her essays in Entre raison et déraison. chapter one 1 Casgrain’s essay is translated in part in Yves Brunelle’s translation of Angeline de Montbrun, ix. 2 Angéline de Montbrun was first published in serial form in La Revue Canadienne, June 1881 – August 1882. 3 I first proposed this terminology in “The ‘Literary Feminists’ and the Fight for Women’s Writing in Quebec.” 4 The importance of family in encouraging women’s writing is discussed by Lucie Robert in her article “D’Angéline de Montbrun à La Chair décevante.” 5 Jules Tardivel, La Vérité, 11 February 1893. Tardivel’s phrase is cited by Denis Monière, Le Développement des idéologies, 217. 6 While the first edition of the book gives Angéline a tumour, a later edition speaks of a disfiguring operation.

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157 Notes to pages 34–56 7 This aspect of Angéline de Montbrun is also commented on by Lucie Robert in “D’Angéline de Montbrun à La Chair décevante,” 45. 8 Pierre Nepveu has also observed the importance of this connection in permitting the expression of feelings of solitude and emptiness that were an essential, if often obscured, element of the response to the settlement of the New World (Intérieurs du Nouveau Monde, 31–41, 85). 9 Eugénie de Guérin’s Journal, published in 1855, covers the period 1834– 41. Nicole de Bourbonnais indicates numerous points of similarity with Laure Conan’s work in “Angéline de Montbrun de Laure Conan: œuvre palimpseste,” as does Valerie Raoul in “Cette autre-moi.” 10 Valerie Raoul’s suggestion that Conan’s Maurice might be named after the brother of Eugénie de Guérin seems quite plausible (Distinctly Narcissistic, 61). Nicole de Bourbonnais also insists on the importance of this onomastic identity. 11 Valerie Raoul provides background on these issues in Distinctly Narcissistic, especially pages 7 and 45. 12 In their introduction to the 1990 Bibliothèque Québécoise edition of Angéline de Montbrun, Fernand Roy and Louise Milot convincingly situate Conan’s references to Garneau as a means of establishing her own identity as a writer of history narratives. 13 In Aux jours de Maisonneuve there is a scene in which Lambert Closse shows Elisabeth Moyen how to fire a gun. 14 Camille Roy’s comments appear in Romanciers de chez nous, 105. 15 L’Histoire des femmes au Québec reports an increasing separation of public and private (masculine and feminine) spheres in the course of the nineteenth century. 16 Gaëtane de Montreuil (pseudonym of Marie-Georgine Bélanger) was the author of the historical novel Fleur des ondes (1912), as well as other fiction and poetry. chapter two 1 This concept is further developed in my article “The Novel in Québec: The Family Plot and the Personal Voice.” 2 Michel Brunet, La Présence anglaise et les Canadiens, 126. Cited by Denis Monière in Le Développement des Idéologies, 18. 3 The controversy is admirably described in Gilles Lamontagne’s introduction to the 1984 edition of Fleurs champêtres, 14–15. See also Denis Monière’s description of Tardivel in Le Développement des idéologies, 215–23. 4 The novel was written in 1913 and first published in Canada in 1916. 5 She is termed “the initiator of literary regionalism” by the Dictionnaire des œuvres littéraires du Québec (ii , 1165).

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158 Notes to pages 57–61 6 Lamontagne-Beauregard’s feminism is discussed by Lucie Lequin in “Les Québécoises: une autre révolution?” The commentary by Marie Gérin-Lajoie is reprinted by David Lonergan in his anthology of the writer’s work. 7 An account of the controversial reception of Eva Senécal’s two novels is given in my article on “Eva Senécal” in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 92. 8 This character would perhaps be more at home in a world like that portrayed by Albert Laberge in his 1916 novel, La Scouine, one of the rare examples of the roman de la terre in which Quebec rural life is allowed to show the full range of effects of poverty and ignorance – and a novel that met with overt hostility and immediate repression by the clerical establishment. It is odd that a character who seems to provide an implicit intertextual reference to this scandalous text should appear in the work of Lamontagne-Beauregard, who participated so strongly in the ideology of the terroir movement. 9 Patricia Smart notes that it is particularly in Marie-Didace that Phonsine assumes a more important position, a development that was evidently disconcerting to critics (Ecrire, 154). 10 The analysis that follows is based on my initial reading of Guèvremont and Roy, published in 1979 as “Gabrielle Roy and Germaine Guèvremont: Quebec’s Daughters Face a Changing World.” What had struck me as obvious in my first encounter with the texts – that both were essentially telling the same story about similar young female protagonists – has only gradually come to be accepted by other readers, not all of them feminist. Despite the fact that they were both written by women and published in the same year, little serious critical attention had been given to a comparison of these two classic Quebec novels prior to the dossier organized by Pierre Nepveu and François Ricard, “Le Survenant et Bonheur d’occasion: rencontre de deux mondes,” published in Etudes Françaises in Winter 1997–98. 11 Other critics have also seen Roy’s women characters as reflecting a sense of powerlessness and alienation. In Pierre Popovic’s reading, for example, the image of a young woman using makeup to hide her emaciation and anemia is an appropriate representation of a much discussed feeling of “historical powerlessness” connected, in his view, to the petite bourgeoisie (“Le Différend,” 56–7). 12 The comparison with Maria Chapdelaine, in particular, became commonplace, as Max Roy makes clear in his analysis of the novel’s critical reception. 13 Lori Saint-Martin speaks of the “strange blindness” of the critics which long prevented a recognition of the feminist content of Bonheur d’occasion (“Réalisme et féminisme,” 67).

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159 Notes to pages 62–7 14 Richer praises Rose-Anna specifically for her “’really French-Canadian characteristics of stubbornness’ in the face of hardship” (cited by Max Roy, “Les positions critiques,” 193). 15 Even Gérard Bessette, in his well-known analysis of the characters of Bonheur d’occasion published in 1952, spends much of his extensive article speculating on the lack of psychological depth evident in Florentine’s seducer, Jean Lévesque. Roger Duhamel’s classic review in 1945 recognizes Florentine’s importance in the novel’s structure, but nevertheless sees Rose-Anna as “the keystone of the edifice” (45). 16 This point is demonstrated by Carole Melançon in her review of the novel’s critical reception, “Evolution de la réception de Bonheur d’occasion de 1945 à 1983.” It is yet another irony of criticism that, as related by Marie-Josée Des Rivières, this perception of the novel as an embodiment of conservative values earned it the disapproval of a new generation of critics of the 1950s, led by Jeanne Lapointe, who reproached Roy for her “social sentimentalism” (“Une analyse idéologique,” 85). 17 Jean-Charles Falardeau examines the evolution of the Quebec male protagonist in Imaginaire social et littérature, 4. 18 Even Gilles Marcotte’s perceptive reading of Florentine criticizes her actions: “she is too calculating – of necessity, assuredly – to win the full support of the reader.” But he suggests that this reaction may represent a form of self-criticism on the part of the reader, since Florentine, in Marcotte’s words, “solves her problems à la québécoise, by accepting the rigid, timid values of the nationalist petite bourgeoisie” (“Restons,” 412). 19 Patricia Smart reads Ringuet’s novel “against the grain,” foregrounding the representation of women, in Ecrire dans la maison du père. 20 Hilligje van’t Land observes that many of Roy’s characters experience the small urban apartments as places of imprisonment, even the men (“Analyse sociosémiotique des espaces,” 101–38). This would suggest a certain feminization of space in the urban milieu, in which the sense of confinement experienced by the women in the country is extended to the whole population, just as the men also come to share the women’s situation of lacking control over their lives. 21 Mary Louise Roberts offers an illuminating analysis of the relationship of feminine body type to cultural ideals of maternity in the interwar period in France, in Civilization Without Sexes. The thin, boyish “flapper” ideal of the 1920s was perceived as a rejection of motherhood. 22 When Jean confronts her in a moment of passion, he bursts out with “How thin you are!”, and this is how he first describes her to Emmanuel, who later revises the unflattering “thin” to a more feminine “delicate.” Even pregnancy does not change her figure: on her wedding day, she can rejoice in her slender waist, which conceals the shameful reality.

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160 Notes to pages 68–75 23 In Of Woman Born Rich introduces the concept of “matrophobia,” the fear of becoming like one’s mother. 24 Patricia Smart comments that both Roy and Guèvremont, while showing the impasse of traditional feminine roles, do not succeed in envisioning new possibilities for women (“Changer la vie,” 19). 25 A poignant commentary on the reality of this type of mother-daughter conflict is reported by Patricia Smart in Les Femmes du Refus global. One of these women, Madeleine Arbour, reports that her mother, on her deathbed, told her, “You always did exactly what you wanted, I have always admired you.” The daughter asked, “Why didn’t you ever tell me?” to which the mother replied, “I couldn’t” (29). 26 Dennis Drummond shares a similar perception of the relevance of Sartrean existentialism to the universe of Bonheur d’occasion (“Identité d’occasion,” 85–102). 27 This understanding of Florentine’s behaviour has only recently emerged in studies by feminist critics; Lori Saint-Martin makes a similar analysis in “Réalisme et féminisme”(78). 28 The social displacement from country to city was already taking place in the pre-World War i period in which Guèvremont had set her novel, but it was even more evident in the World War ii era in which she was writing. It is significant that Guèvremont has found it advisable to put her one traditional woman character on an island, “l’île de Grâce,” where she is presumably less vulnerable to the attacks of the modern world. Interestingly, Roy does the same thing with her traditional mother figure, Luzina Tousignant, in La Petite Poule d’eau, published a few years later. 29 Louis Pelletier-Dlamini, “Germaine Guèvremont. Rencontre avec l’auteur du Survenant,” quoted by Yvan G. Lepage in his introduction to the critical edition, 31. chapter three 1 Patricia Smart has analyzed the participation of women in this groundbreaking intellectual movement in Les Femmes du Refus global. 2 The title of Jacques Berque’s 1963 book, La Dépossession du monde, provides an uncanny echo of Hébert’s opening statement. 3 Jeanne Lapointe’s views are cited by Marie-Josée Des Rivières, “Une analyse idéologique,” 85. 4 Suzanne Paradis has commented on this irony in Femme fictive, femme réelle, 65. 5 Freud develops this scenario in his essays on “Femininity,” “Female Sexuality,” and “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinctions between the Sexes.”

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161 Notes to pages 77–88 6 Much fiction by writers like Louise Maheux-Forcier, Andrée Maillet, Michèle Mailhot, and many others has been re-issued in the 1980s, largely as a result of new interest by feminist critics and readers. 7 This interview is quoted in Robert Harvey’s Kamouraska d’Anne Hébert, 141. 8 This process corroborates the view of American sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, who has pointed out that Québécois, like anglophone Canadians, possess a strong sense of continuity with the past that distinguishes them from their American neighbours. 9 Jennifer Waelti-Walters develops this comparison in the chapter “Cinderella and Mad Shadows,” in her Fairy Tales and the Female Imagination. Important analogies with fairy tales are also developed by Barbara Godard (“Blais’ La Belle Bête: Infernal Fairy Tale”) and Béatrice Slama (“La Belle Bête ou la double scène”). 10 This point is also stressed by Françoise Iqbal in her article “Sur-vivre et sous-vivre.” 11 Excerpts from this projected sequel have been published as “Le Testament de Jean-le-Maigre à ses frères” and the first story in the collection L’Exilé. 12 In the French version, the second volume bears the title Vivre! Vivre! and the third Les Apparences. 13 For a further development of this point, see my article, “Structures of Liberation.” 14 In an early comparison of the autobiographies by Vallières and Blais, James Kraft sees the concerns of Vallières as political, those of Blais as more universal. 15 In her groundbreaking study of women’s autobiography, Estelle Jelinek has pointed out that autobiographies written by women have often been considered fragmented and “formless,” because of their failure to follow the models of autobiographies by men. 16 See, for example, the article by Karen Gould, “The Censored Word and the Body Politic.” 17 The Ardeners’ theories are used as a model for feminist criticism by Elaine Showalter in “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness.” 18 Personal interview with Marie-Claire Blais, New Orleans, April 1989. 19 All quotations from Michèle Lalonde are taken from the transcript of an unpublished interview conducted by Renée Foisy on May 12, 1988. I am indebted to the research which Renée Foisy conducted under my direction in preparing her 1988 senior Honors Thesis at Dartmouth College, entitled “Michèle Lalonde: Poète Québécoise, Nationaliste … et Féministe?” 20 Exceptionally, in a poem first published in 1969, variously entitled “La mère patrie” or “Apatrie,” the poet identifies both herself and her country as female.

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162 Notes to pages 88–102 21 Robert Schwartzwald introduced this concept in his doctoral dissertation Institution littéraire, modernité et question nationale au Québec (215) and develops it further in his article “(Homo)sexualité et problématique identitaire.” 22 In her pioneering study of Quebec women’s fiction Femme fictive, femme réelle, Suzanne Paradis places the first fictional treatment of lesbianism by a women writer in 1961 (223). 23 The historical background of this incident is provided in articles by Françoise Dufresne (“Le Drame de Kamouraska”) and Sylvio Leblond (“Le Drame de Kamouraska d’après les documents de l’époque”). 24 The rebellion began when a group of French-Canadian legislators under the leadership of Louis-Joseph Papineau tried to assert what they saw as their democratic rights. When the parliamentary process was blocked by the British governor, small groups of men in the Montreal region, calling themselves Patriots, took up arms, and several largely unsuccessful engagements were fought with British troops during the winter of l837 and again in l838. 25 Both Lori Saint-Martin and Patricia Smart have called attention to the violence against women that characterizes masculine identity in narratives of the 1960s. See n. 21, ch. 4. 26 As Marilyn Randall and her colleagues suggested in their presentation at a conference of the American Council for Quebec Studies in November 1998, Lalonde’s conclusion, as well as the analysis of Julie Papineau by Charlotte Savary that appears in the same issue of Liberté, were heavily influenced by the work of Fernand Ouellet, and all seem to participate in a historical reading common in indépendantiste circles of the 1960s that condemned Papineau and other parliamentarians for their hesitancy and valourized those who urged decisive action against anglophone domination, a course also recommended for the contemporary scene. 27 Memmi discusses this point in his lecture, “Les Canadiens français sont-ils des colonisés?” reprinted in L’Homme dominé. 28 Luc Lacourcière traces the oral history of the Corriveau legend in “Présence de la Corriveau.” 29 Another reason is suggested by Karen McPherson, who points out that the parloir is, literally, “a ‘speaking room’ where the heretofore unspoken will finally be articulated” (Incriminations, 104). 30 As Luc Lacourcière recounts, only ten years before, in 1955, someone had proposed making an ice statue of la Corriveau for Quebec’s Winter Carnival, to go along with a folkloric theme. A series of nasty letters in the press made clear just how bad an idea this was: a statue of the infamous Corriveau could not be imagined standing near the monument in honour of Cardinal Taschereau. The project was hastily

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163 Notes to pages 102–15 dropped. In 1966, the Quiet Revolution having intervened, la Corriveau emerged as the heroine of a ballet. Twenty years after that, she has, among other things, given her name to a tourist gift shop in the same square in Quebec City where they refused to have her as the subject of an ice sculpture in 1955. 31 Elaine Showalter develops this concept in “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness.” chapter four 1 Quebec is known within the francophone world for its willingness to embrace gender-equal terms for the professions, a practice that is still resisted in France by the Académie Française. When Louise Beaudoin was named to head the Quebec Delegation in Paris, she immediately changed her title to “déléguée générale,” but continued to be addressed by French officials as “Madame le délégué.” 2 Lori Saint-Martin develops this concept in her article “Writing (Jumping) Off the Edge,” especially on page 287. 3 Karen Gould gives an account of this process in Writing in the Feminine, 10–13. 4 I have relied on the translations from Entre raison et déraison by A.J. Holden Verburg that appeared in the selection entitled “Writing in the Feminine” in A Mazing Space (cited in the bibliography under Théoret). 5 An example of this loose and informal association is the collection La Théorie un dimanche, the product of weekly meetings involving Théoret, Brossard, Louky Bersianik, Louise Cotnoir, Louise Dupré, and Gail Scott (cited in the bibliography under Bersianik). 6 This issue is discussed by Gould in Writing in the Feminine, 21. 7 Théoret made this comment in a discussion held at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, on February 27, 1990. 8 Théoret identified the 74-year-old woman thus during a discussion of the novel at Dartmouth College on February 27, 1990. 9 During Théoret’s childhood, her family lived in Maisonneuve, SaintHenri, and Saint-Colomban. 10 The apparent historical realism and deceptively simple narrative line of Maryse certainly contributed to its commercial success, but these very features seemed to prevent Noël’s text from being taken seriously by the Quebec academic establishment. Although it was favourably reviewed by such leading intellectuals as Lise Gauvin and France Théoret, it took three years for the first serious study of Noël’s play with language to reach the prestigious Quebec literary journal Voix et Images, a study that stood virtually alone, along with Georgiana

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164 Notes to pages 115–26

11

12

13

14 15

16

17 18 19 20

21 22

23 24

Colville’s 1990 article in the American journal Québec Studies, until Jacques Pelletier’s 1993 dossier on Francine Noël in Voix et Images elicited a serious reconsideration of her work in Quebec. I remember being handed my first copy of the novel shortly after its publication in 1984 by a Quebec woman graduate student at Berkeley, with the recommendation “you must read this.” She had herself been sent the novel by friends in Quebec. In her introduction to the 1987 re-issue of Maryse, Lise Gauvin calls it “l’histoire d’une generation” (13). For other comments of this type, see the study by Lucie Joubert. “Maryse de Francine Noël (1983) pose marginalement et de façon fort intéressante la question d’une lecture au féminin” (162, Entre raison et déraison). This aspect of the story has been stressed by a number of critics, including Francesca D. Benedict and Lucie Joubert. In her interview with Jacques Pelletier and Lori Saint-Martin in Voix et Images, Noël comments: “The autobiographical aspect is very limited, for example, the death of the father, who leaves a plot of land … I think I managed to avoid this [autobiographical] dimension, or at least I sufficiently transposed it” (226). Lucie Joubert observes amusingly that early critics, many of them university professors, were reluctant to comment on Noël’s biting parodies of academic discourse. The expression pure laine (literally “100% wool”) refers to Québécois directly descended from the original settlers of New France. See her interview with Jacques Pelletier and Lori Saint-Martin, 231. The article by Stéphanie Nutting comments specifically on these parallels. The literary image of the murder of a woman is recurring motif in Smart’s work, which she discusses particularly in reference to the Quiet Revolution era. See also the article by Lori Saint-Martin, “Mise à mort de la femme et ‘libération’ de l’homme: Godbout, Aquin, Beaulieu.” Sherry Simon wonders if the hegemonic character of the discourse examined by Cambron is not dependent on the choice of textual objects (47). See, for example, Andrée Lévesque, La Norme et les déviantes; Nadia Fahmy-Eid and Micheline Dumont, Maîtresses de maison, maîtresses d’école; Micheline Dumont and Nadia Fahmy-Eid, Les Couventines; Denise Lemieux and Lucie Mercier, Les Femmes au tournant du siècle; and many more. I cannot agree with Laure Neuville’s dismissal of Cousture’s work for obeying the canons of its genre (33). Both Janine Boynard-Frot and Patricia Smart note the passivity of the women in the roman de la terre (see chapter 2).

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165 Notes to pages 126–39 25 In Les Femmes au tournant du siècle Denise Lemieux and Lucie Mercier report that, even in autobiographical sources, it is unusual for mothers of large families to give detailed descriptions of the birth of each child (220). 26 Marianne Hirsch reaches this conclusion in The Mother/Daughter Plot, and Karen Gould illustrates it in contemporary Quebec women’s texts in “Refiguring the Mother.” 27 Orsini was quoted in L’Actualité, 1 septembre 1992, 129. 28 In her article “Power Relations,” Jane Moss sees the end of the novel as a replacement of the patriarchal discourse by a discourse of desire and the senses, dreams, and imagination; the end of the book would thus be the dawn of the eighth day of creation mentioned in the novel’s full title. I find her arguments persuasive but cannot share her optimistic view of the conclusion. 29 See Janet Paterson’s discussion in Moments postmodernes dans le roman québécois. 30 Her subsequent historically inspired work, L’Eté de l’Ile de Grâce, is quite different and shows none of the concern for the problematics of historiography. 31 This insight is closely related to the work of Hayden White. See especially his essay “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact” in Tropics of Discourse. 32 At least at the time of my visit in the summer of 1996, the Maison Trestler was open to visitors and served as a site for concerts and weddings. chapter five 1 This statement from the initial edition of La Parole Métèque is quoted by Pierre L’Hérault in Fictions de l’identitaire, 85. 2 Patricia Smart has published an admirably lucid account of this controversy in “The ‘Pure Laine’ Debate,” Canadian Forum, November 1997, 15–19. 3 Robin also comments on this issue in her afterword to The Wanderer, 181. 4 Quebec has not yet developed a significant number of the second- and third-generation “ethnic” women writers who are more common in the United States. 5 See also the articles on Nous avons tous découvert l’Amérique by Caroline Barrett, Claudine Potvin, and Ginette Michaud. 6 The results of this survey were included with the article by Jacques Allard, “Romans: une littérature souveraine,” 39. 7 This image may have been suggested by a related passage in Ying Chen’s Les Lettres chinoises.

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166 Notes to pages 139–53 8 Fredric Jameson has described this hotel in “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” 9 Critics have identified Fève as “Anatolian,” and his character may well have been a reference to the deportation of Turkish refugees in the late 1980s, an episode specifically referred to in Nous avons tous découvert l’Amérique. 10 In her afterword to The Wanderer, Robin attributes the following sentiments to her Quebec critics: “as soon as she talks about Paris, she waxes lyrical and has a tremor in her voice, but when she talks about us in Quebec, there’s always something she doesn’t like’“ (173). 11 Robin’s postface to the 1993 francophone re-issue of La Québécoite by xyz uses the term “patchwork” in a positive sense, to describe a sort of multicultural mix. But the tone of the francophone postface contrasts sharply with the more acerbic afterword to the English translation. 12 La Québécoite, 89. The phrase “ville schizophrène” is not translated literally in the English version. 13 In Madeleine Frédéric’s reading as well, Robin’s text sees values in the creation of community, an ethnic community or one created by political action: in Frédéric’s words, “the only possible solution is in solidarity” (“L’Ecriture mutant,” 500). 14 As stated, for example, in her article “Sortir de l’ethnicité,” Robin claims she cannot take refuge in Jewish identity, since she is alienated by language from the primarily anglophone Eastern European Jewish community in Montreal, and by tradition from the francophone Jewish community, which is primarily Sephardic. While my reading would not force her into conformity with either of these communities, or with the Hassidic group with whom she indicates even less affinity, I would argue that she has constructed her own personal version of Jewish identity. 15 Falardeau’s words are cited by Sherry Simon in “Espaces incertains de la culture,” 37. 16 Farhoud’s theatre has been examined by Jane Moss and Celita Lamar. 17 Lucie Lequin has analyzed Latif-Ghattas’s previous novels in “Mona Latif-Ghattas: Une mélopée orientale.” 18 Quoted by Pierre L’Hérault in Fictions de l’identitaire, 79.

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appendix Original French Text

chapter one a “elle en vint à la poignante conviction que son fiancé ne l’aimait plus. Elle crut que c’était l’honneur et la pitié qui le retenaient près d’elle. Et sa résolution bientôt prise, fut fermement exécutée” (Angéline de Montbrun, 156). b “Mais, ainsi qu’on a dit, dans l’amour d’un homme, même quand il semble profond comme l’océan, il y a des pauvretés, des sècheresses subites. Et lorsque sa fiancée eut perdu le charme enchanteur de sa beauté, le cœur de Maurice Darville se refroidit” (Angéline, 156). c “Ma fille … il vaudrait autant pleurer un songe. Connaissez-vous le cœur de l’homme et pourriez-vous compter les inconstances de son désir?” (Angéline, 210) d “quoi qu’il nous en semble à certains moments, c’est le froid, c’est l’aride, c’est le terne qui fait le fond de la mer, et ce n’est pas l’amour qui fait le fond de la vie” (Angéline, 144). e “vous cachez tout ce qu’il faut pour n’aimer jamais qu’un homme qui ait du caractère, de la dignité de la délicatesse, et, – j’en demande pardon à ces messieurs – tout cela me semble bien rare” (Angéline, 145). f “je mourrai avant de l’oublier” (Angéline, 170). g “Et pourtant que la vie avec vous me serait douce encore!” (Angéline, 240). h “à cet endroit où son fils raconte qu’elle ne l’embrassa jamais – pas même à son départ pour le Canada, – alors qu’elle savait lui dire adieu pour toujours” (Angéline, 171–2).

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168 Appendix i “J’ai d’elle [Mme de Montbrun] une lettre écrite après la cession … C’est une fière lettre. ‘Ils ont donné tout le sang de leurs veines dit-elle en parlant de son mari et de ses fils, moi, j’ai donné celui de mon cœur; j’ai versé toutes mes larmes. Mais ce qui est triste, c’est de savoir le pays perdu.’ La noble femme se trompait. Comme disait le chevalier de Lorimier, à la veille de monter sur l’échafaud: ‘Le sang et les larmes versés sur l’autel de la patrie sont une source de vie pour les peuples,’ et la Canada vivra. Ah! j’espère” (Angéline, 219). j “Pour moi, j’ai toujours regretté de n’être pas née dans les premiers temps de la colonie, alors que chaque Canadien était un héros. N’en doute pas, c’était le beau temps des Canadiennes. Il est vrai qu’elles apprenaient parfois que leurs amis avaient été scalpés mais n’importe, ceux d’alors valaient la peine d’être pleurés. Là-dessus, Angéline partage tous mes sentiments” (Angéline, 108). k “Nous sommes toujours en péril. Ce poste, sans cesse attaqué, ne se soutient que par une sorte de miracle … C’est une colonie d’apôtres, de héros, qui semble une seule famille … Ils vivent comme les fidèles de la primitive Eglise vivaient, en attendant l’heure du martyre” (L’Oublié, 253). l “environnée de la lumière divine comme d’un soleil” (L’Oublié, 241). m “je suis venu ici pour combattre et pour mourir … je veux disparaître tout entier … oublié de tous … excepté d’Elle” (L’Oublié, 261). n “Et sottement je me berce de rêves d’action, de bienfaisance … je m’arrache à l’abjecte réalité, je me réfugie dans le rêve, je me compose une vie à mon goût, et si haute, si belle, si douce” (L’Obscure Souffrance, 71). chapter two a “Mais il ne suffit pas à une vraie femme que l’ordre règne autour des meubles et dans la nourriture, il faut encore qu’il règne sur les esprits. Autrement, la maison penche” (Marie-Didace, 103). b “jamais elle ne s’était penchée sur aucun d’eux avec une flamme claire et joyeuse au fond de ses durs yeux gris fer” (Bonheur d’occasion, 198). c “En hiver, sauf une veillée ici et là et la messe d’obligation, les sorties n’abondaient pas chez les paysans. Les femmes surtout demeuraient casanières” (En Pleine Terre, 23). d “les mêmes images saintes, les mêmes portraits de famille se superposaient sur des murs qui venaient à la suite se placer devant elle comme pour l’emprisonner” (Bonheur, 254).

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169 Appendix e “Elle se faisait l’effet d’être emprisonnée entre ces quatre murs rien que pour souffrir, pas autre chose” (Bonheur, 360). f “elle ne voyait plus que le piège qui avait été tendu à sa faiblesse, … elle éprouvait, plus fort encore que sa peur, un indicible mépris pour sa condition de femme” (Bonheur, 253). g “A la vérité les hommes trouvaient reposante cette femme au front lisse qui les laissait fumer en paix, quand ils en avaient le goût, ou causer paisiblement sans jamais les interrompre ni leur poser de questions” (Marie-Didace, 39). h “Mince et hardie, elle avait l’air d’un garçon” (Bonheur, 170). i “Les patates, portées à fleurir, s’étaient délayées en une purée grisâtre, peu appétissante” (Le Survenant, 201). j “c’est qu’elle apercevait la vie de sa mère comme un long voyage gris, terne, que jamais, elle, Florentine, n’accomplirait” (Bonheur, 120). k “Vinguienne, sa mère, vous trouvez pas qu’on est assez?” (Bonheur, 89). l “Marie-Amanda apportait à tous ses gestes une ampleur, une importance qui donnaient au moindre d’entre eux quelque chose de définitif. Même les objets semblaient lui obéir. Jamais elle ne renversait rien” (Marie-Didace, 33). m “on fait pas comme on veut dans la vie” (Bonheur, 90). n “Moi, je ferai comme je voudrai” (Bonheur, 90). chapter three a “J’étais un enfant dépossédé du monde” (“Le Torrent,” 9). b “[t]enu à l’écart de l’évolution universelle de la pensée pleine de risques et de dangers” (Refus global, 27). c “à nous l’imprévisible passion; à nous le risque total dans le refus global” (Refus global, 38). d “le gros enfant des premiers appétits, suspendu à son sein, exploitant sous toutes sortes de gestes et d’emportements … la soif, la grande soif du premier jour, malheureusement inassouvie” (Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel, 161). e “Pendant qu’il écoute sa fille, cette pauvre histoire débitée d’une voix saccadée, monsieur Bélisle entend aussi, comme en sourdine, ou plutôt, comme s’il venait de brancher sa radio sur deux postes à la fois, des phrases alarmantes au possible: durant la prochaine décennie, le canada français courra sa dernière chance de survie … après les nègres des états-unis, les canadiens français constituent la main-d’œuvre la moins bien rémunérée de toute l’amérique du nord. nous ne sommes pas maîtres chez nous” (Les Montréalais, 22–3).

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170 Appendix f “Ça me faisait quelque chose de te voir partir si vite” (Les Montréalais, 29). g “avant d’être catholique, avant d’être Canadien français, monsieur Bélisle est un père; ceci est une admirable certitude” (Les Montréalais, 29). h “Quelle créature dévouée et attentive, une vraie sainte, monsieur Rolland. Et jolie avec ça, une princesse” (Kamouraska, 15). i “Dans un champ aride, sous les pierres, on a déterré une femme noire, vivante, datant d’une époque reculée et sauvage” (Kamouraska, 250). j “Habiter toute sa chair intacte, comme le sang libre et joyeux” (Kamouraska, 23). k “La reine contre Elisabeth d’Aulnières, quelle absurdité. Comment ose-t-on m’accuser d’avoir offensé la reine? Lorsqu’il est prouvé que je lui ressemble, comme une sœur, avec tous mes enfants autour de moi. Je ressemble à la reine d’Angleterre. Je me calque sur la reine d’Angleterre. Je suis fascinée par l’image de Victoria et de ses enfants. Mimétisme profond. Qui me convaincra de péché?” (Kamouraska, 34). l “La voix flûtée de la petite Anne-Marie s’élève soudain. – Mais maman est en robe de chambre! Ses cheveux sont en désordre. Et puis son visage a l’air tout rouge! Quelle peste que cette petite fille sage et trop lucide. En en clin d’œil le charme est rompu, la fausse représentation démasquée” (Kamouraska, 34). m “je lui ressemble … avec tous mes enfants autour de moi” (Kamouraska, 34). n “Délivrer la princesse suppliciée, terrasser le dragon féroce qui la tient captive” (Kamouraska, 164). o “Il faut tuer Antoine!” (Kamouraska, 149). p “je lui ressemble, comme une sœur” (Kamouraska, 34). q “C’était du temps que tout ce pays Etait trahi envahi conquis L’Anglais vainqueur était maître et roi Etait le juge et faisait sa loi” (La Corriveau). chapter four a “une identité dure comme fer” (Nous parlerons comme on écrit, 168). b “Elle a 74 ans. Elle me raconte…” (Nous parlerons, 15, 40, 102, 115, 123, 136). c “Lorsque passe la mort, je dis présente. A ma montre, il est toujours l’heure. Le plein et le dénoué” (Nous parlerons, 9). d “une toute jeune fille recommence d’apprendre à vivre” (Nous parlerons, 9). e “elle bégaie, hésite quand elle parle” (Nous parlerons, 9). f “La rue des briques, escaliers en fer” (Nous parlerons, 9).

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171 Appendix g “Entre l’Abitibi et les Cantons de l’Est, dans les quartiers Maisonneuve et Saint-Henri et aux quatre coins de Saint-Colomban où les chiens jappent après la lune. La communauté … me rejoint partout où que je sois” (Nous parlerons, 10). h “j’ai dans mes veines les générations antérieures” (Nous parlerons, 10). i “Dans la ville je circule brisée” (Nous parlerons, 10). j “une identité dure comme fer” (Nous parlerons, 168). k “j’ai dans mes veines les générations antérieures” (Nous parlerons, 10). l “Je me confonds attirée et portée par des regards brisés. Les vieilles femmes qui parlent toutes seules, les robineux et les débiles. Un même espace mental ouvert” (Nous parlerons, 10). m “Le rhythme d’une correspondance. L’échange. Un réseau de paroles” (Nous parlerons, 78). n “Tour à tour voix d’homme, voix de femme, entrée instrumentale au moment où les voix s’estompent, une finale comme un commencement … Alternance, la voix humaine devient instrument et l’instrument interpelle à son tour. Morte la rivalité. Entier tissu musical. Eclat soudain d’un chœur. Et le chœur reprend” (Nous parlerons, 20). o “Un petit lieu où ce qui s’appelle rigueur et exactitude n’est autrement nommé que rigidité. Encore c’est le lieu où des familles entières sont écrasées d’enfants, chargées de survivre en nombre avant tout et où chacun masque son désarroi” (Nous parlerons, 119). p “En octobre, des gens au regard éveillé ont été incarcérés. Chaque emportement est menacé. Tout emportement est une menace” (Nous parlerons, 172). q “– T’es vraient colonisée-dominée, avait répondu Michel, tu ne peux pas parler du sujet sans t’impliquer personnellement et tout ramener à une dimension triviale!” (Maryse, 342). r “Je vais me fabriquer une lectrice idéale, une fille comme dans la publicité, avec des yeux marrons et des seins gros comme son nez; elle sera mon confessional, mon psychanalyste, ma silencieuse, ma dévoreuse, je lui apprendrai la saleté. Elle boira mes mots comme si c’était du Pepsi glacé; elle sourira, deviendra généreuse comme un enfant de cinq ans” (Salut Galarneau!, 147). s “cette grande francité-francitude qui nous englobe comme du mâchemallow” (Maryse, 114). t “L’Histoire avec un grand h , c’était d’abord un genre littéraire, doté d’un style, de règles, de procédés d’écriture. C’était de toutes les histoires possibles, celle que l’on choisissait à des fins qui ne se révélaient que plus tard” (La Maison Trestler, 239). u “la fascination de mort qui contamine nos archives, nos lois, notre mémoire” (Trestler, 133).

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172 Appendix v “Je cherche à reconstituer une histoire qui échapperait à leur appétit d’anéantissement. Une chronique de la vie quotidienne, peut-être, d’une extrême simplicité, qui pourrait exercer une emprise analogue sur l’instinct de survivance et la volonté de création” (Trestler, 133). w “Mon premier aïeul repoussa Phipps à Rivière-Ouelle avec ses trois fils en 1691, mais je ne connais toujours rien de ses filles” (Trestler, 18). x “Sur cette notice biographique, leur vie tient en quatre lignes. Deux pour la naissance, deux pour la mort” (Trestler, 43). y “une continuité inscrite dans la mémore du sang” (Trestler, 250). z “Dans ces moments, la vie était une matière chaude qui collait aux doigts. Le bonheur, un paysage indéfiniment recommencé pour le plaisir du corps” (Trestler, 16). aa “Cet appétit de terre chaude qu’elle satisfait dès qu’elle échappe à leur emprise, courant vers les champs où elle s’étire au soleil, goûtant le jeu liquide des veines, le mûrissement de la peau” (Trestler, 40). bb “Le récit s’organisera autour d’odeurs chaudes. La soupe et les légumes languissant sur le poêle de fonte, les ragoûts mijotant de longs avant midi, les rôtis de porc ficelés dont le gras me donnait des haut-lecœur” (Trestler, 41). cc “A deux cents ans d’intervalle, nous partageons la même sagesse suspecte” (Trestler, 43). dd “Dans la nuit, je rêve de Catherine. Je suis Catherine” (Trestler, 53). ee “une première voix suivie d’une deuxième, puis d’une troisième et d’une quatrième qui se fondent en une seule coulée” (Trestler, 160). ff “[un] projet qui me fit absorber cette vie pour la souder à la mienne” (Trestler, 272). gg “Cette nuit, j’entendais tousser Eva à travers mon sommeil, et j’avais la certitude que … Catherine avait déjà souffert d’une maladie respiratoire dans des circonstances analogues, que ma santé s’en trouvait affectée” (Trestler, 109). hh “[j]e, c’est aussi les autres” (La Tentation de dire, 46). ii “rebelle qui défia son père à cause d’un homme et lui intenta un procès afin de récupérer la part de l’héritage maternel dont il voulait la spolier” (Trestler, 14). chapter five a “Pour elle, les voisins sont des personnes importantes et elle glisse à chacun un mot dans sa langue d’origine: elle sait quelques phrases en portugais, en grec, en ukrainien meme! Elle est à l’aise dans ce quartier cosmopolite, et j’aime bien m’y promener en sa compagnie; les gens nous sourient avec bienveillance” (Nous avons tous découvert l’Amérique, 129).

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173 Appendix b “Le projet de Babel consiste a se rassembler dans une Cite pour ’se faire un nom.’ Ce que j’interprète comme un désir de se définir soi-même plutôt que de l’être par une entité supérieure. Ici, nulle transcendance mais un modèle de société civile, païenne, autonome et parfaitement viable. Les peuples constructeurs sont à la fois différentes et semblables, et leur rassemblement est possible car, littéralement, ils sont parlables. C’est une utopie, celle de la communication dans le respect des différences” (Nous avons tous, 158). c “Défendre le Montréal français contre les Envahisseurs” (Les Aurores Montréales, 160). d “Sa mère habite le quartier grec limitrophe du quartier hassidim, tient un magasin d’aliments naturels chez les Anglais, fait ses emplettes chez les Italiens et couche avec un Chilien. Dans le livre de Laurel, elle s’appellera Iouniverselle et disparaîtra précocement, victime d’assassinat ou d’assimilation” (Les Aurores, 158). e “Je vais, comme les clients de Canadian Tire, directement où je crois qu’il me faut aller, sans attendre de soutien, j’ai le pouvoir de traverser les étalages surabondants sans rien acheter. Ce n’est pas facile de comprendre tout à coup ce qu’est la liberté, la douloureuse et magnifique liberté” (Les Aurores, 57). f “J’ai trouve mon lieu, grand-mère, celui au centre de moi qui donne la solidité pour avancer, j’ai trouvé mon milieu” (Les Aurores, 57). g “Je ne retourne pas à Kanahwake. Je reste ici à Montréal, dans cette vieille Hochelaga où vivaient mes ancêtres blottis aux flancs de la montagne … Cette terre bruyante peuplée de créatures bavardes et ces forêts sans arbres sont tout ce qui nous reste: il faut apprendre à y enfouir de nouvelle racines ou accepter de disparaître” (Les Aurores, 194, 195–6). h “La beauté, Manu. La beauté blanche qui tombait à plein ciel, absolument blanche partout où c’était gris. Ah, dure assez longtemps, Manu, fais durer ta vie de chien jusqu’à ce que je puisse te faire venir ici, avec moi, pour jouer dans la neige” (Les Aurores, 9). i “Quand la neige est vraiment blanche, c’est là que c’est facile, c’est là qu’on peut marcher en imaginant que c’est du sable, que la main de Flore Saint-Dieu dans la mienne est redevenue douce, que c’est du sable qui mène à la mer tiède et parfumée” (Les Aurores, 144). j “Sur les vitres, les grands froids avaient tracé des forêts de givre qui emprisonnaient ses regards dans leurs ramures” (Une Femme à sa fenêtre, 56). k “Le grand parc en face de la maison … se transforme, l’hiver venu, en un cimetière d’arbres, un asile de géants vaincus par le froid. Je m’attriste en les voyant. J’imagine, contemplant leurs longs bras décharnés aux griffes nues dressés vers le ciel, qu’ils sont en train de

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174 Appendix

l

m

n

o

p q r s

t u

v

w

prier, d’implorer tous les saints, pour leur demander de mettre fin à leur souffrance” (La Dot de Sara, 52). “Le Sherbrooke où l’on ne va jamais, où l’on ne parle que le français, le Sherbrooke triste, où la neige est grise même après la tempête, où les pensées sont grises comme la vie” (La Québécoite, 82). “Ville schizophrène patchwork linguistique purée de cultures disloquées folklorisées figées pizza souvlaki paella” (La Québécoite, 64) “Tout est pris dans la graisse, l’huile, la margarine américaine – vous assaisonnez vos salades avec le Kraft dressing sucré” (La Québécoite, 82). “Un jour elle aurait décidé de partir. Mime Yente n’aurait même pas essayé de la retenir. Elle aurait pris un 747 Air France. Départ de Mirabel à 20 h. 45” (La Québécoite, 89, 167, 206). “On quitte un ghetto pour un autre … Que des ghettos” (La Québécoite, 190). “exils juxtaposés,/ de solitudes amoncelées qui se côtoient sans se voir” (La Québécoite, 192–3). “La Place du Québec est à Saint-Germain-des-Prés” (La Québécoite, 206). “Je ne suis plus ni française ni espagnole, je suis probablement devenue québécoise. Si j’ai une place en ce monde, c’est à Montréal, avec vous. Je n’y suis pas toujours à l’aise, mais j’y suis moins mal qu’en Europe… Chaque culture a ses limites, mais, tout compte fait, système pour système, je préfère le Québec: les barrières y sont friables, et le rêve, encore permis” (Nous avons tous, 243–4). “L’écriture, sans doute le véritable pays de ces femmes en quête d’un pays” (La Québécoite, 138). “Tout doucement, sans rien faire, sans se le formuler clairement, ils sentiraient les choses changer autour d’eux. Le Québec tout doucement s’en irait vers une société plurielle sans qu’il y paraisse. Témoins de cette métamorphose inconsciente, ils en seraient aussi les obscurs et anonymes artisans” (La Québécoite, 202). “Giselle se tenait en retrait, un peu gênée par notre conversation qui a l’air de surprendre tous les patients sagement assis dans la salle d’attente. Ce que les gens sont sages ici… Nous dérangeons le silence de ce lieu” (La Dot, 73). “Cette image de ma vie, telle une anguille que je m’acharnais à vouloir guider mais qui s’en allait de tous côtés” (La Dot, 23).

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175 Appendix x “Je réponds par un dicton, un proverbe ou une phrase toute faite quand mes enfants me posent une question sur mon passé, c’est plus facile que d’avoir à chercher la vérité, à la dire, à la revivre …” (Le Bonheur à la queue glissante, 30). y “mes mots se transforment en grains de blé, de riz, en feuilles de vigne et en feuilles de chou … mes pensées se changent en huile d’olive et en jus de citron” (Le Bonheur, 16). z “Mon pays, ce n’est pas le pays de mes ancêtres ni même le village de mon enfance, mon pays, c’est là où mes enfants sont heureux … Mon pays, c’est mes petits-enfants qui s’accrochent à mon cou, qui m’appellent sitto Dounia… dans ma langue” (Le Bonheur, 22). aa “C’étaient des visages non seulement fermés, mais aussi muets. Ils ne disaient pas bonjour. Leurs lèvres n’arrivaient pas à bouger” (La Dot, 28). bb “Les rues de ton pays ne reconnaissent pas le bruit de mes pas” (La Dot, 170). cc “Mais ne voilà-t-il pas qu’ici je ne reconnais presque plus les rues, ce pays aussi a peut-être perdu toute trace de mon souvenir” (La Dot, 170). dd “Peut-être que Salim a raison, je suis une barbare, comme les Grecs appellent les étrangers. Il a sûrement raison, je suis barbare depuis si longtemps que je m’y suis habituée… et cela me plaît” (Le Bonheur, 115). ee “Au Liban, on nous appelait ‘les Américains’; au Canada, les premières années, on nous appelait ‘les Syriens’; au village de mon mari, on m’appelait par le nom de mon village. Quand j’y pense, je n’ai été appelée Dounia que dans mon village natal” (Le Bonheur, 115). ff “Ils veulent avoir leur propre maison, même si elle est plus petite. Nous, les immigrants, on devrait comprendre ce que cela veut dire ne pas avoir un pays à soi, se sentir minoritaires, étrangers” (Le Bonheur, 51). gg “Dans mon pays, il y a des lois qui protègent les femmes. Ici, tu es au Québec. Réveille-toi.” (Le Bonheur, 198).

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185 Bibliography Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Writing A Woman’s Life. New York: Ballantine Books 1988 Hémon, Louis. Maria Chapdelaine. Montreal: Fides 1975. Translated by W.H. Blake under the title Maria Chapdelaine: A Tale of the Lake St John Country New York: Modern Library 1934) Hirsch, Marianne. The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1989 Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York and London: Routledge 1988 Iqbal, Françoise. “Sur-vivre et sous-vivre: la sexualité dans Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel.” Incidences N.s. 4, nos. 2–3 (May-December 1980): 85–99 Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146: 53–92 – “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text (Fall 1986): 65–88 Jean, Michèle, ed. Québécoises du 20e siècle. Montreal: Quinze 1977 Jean de l’Immaculée (Sœur). “Angéline de Montbrun.” In Le Roman canadienfrançais, edited by Paul Wyczynski et al. Archives des lettres canadiennes 3. Montreal: Fides 1974, 105–31 Jelinek, Estelle C., ed. Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1980 Joubert, Lucie. “La lecture de Maryse: du portrait social à la prise de parole.” Voix et Images 53 (Winter 1993): 273–86 Le Journal de Françoise [periodical edited by Robertine Barry, 1902–1909] Kelley, Mary. Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in NineteenthCentury America. New York: Oxford University Press 1984 Klementowicz, Michael. “Jacques Godbout’s Salut Galarneau!: Identity and Violence Towards Women.” Québec Studies 14 (1992): 83–91 Kraft, James. “Fiction as Autobiography in Québec: Notes on Pierre Vallières and Marie-Claire Blais.” Novel 6, no. 1 (Fall 1972): 73–8 Laberge, Albert. La Scouine. Montreal: Quinze 1981 Lachance, Micheline. Le Roman de Julie Papineau. Montreal: Québec/ Amérique 1995 Lacourcière, Luc. “Présence de la Corriveau.” Les Cahiers des Dix 35 (1970): 229–64 Laflèche, François-Louis. Quelques considérations sur les rapports de la société civile avec la religion et la famille. Montreal: E. Senécal 1866 LaFrance, Jeanne. Les Personnages dans le roman canadien-français (1837–1862). Thèse de Ph.D., Université de Sherbrooke 1977 Lalonde, Michèle. Défense et illustration de la langue québécoise suivie de prose et poèmes. Paris: Editions Seghers/Laffont 1979 – “La Femme de 1837–38.” Liberté 7, nos. 1–2 (January-April 1965): 146–73

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186 Bibliography Lamar, Celita. “Resetting the Margins: Abla Farhoud’s Dramatization of the Female Immigrant Experience in Quebec.” In Women by Women: The Treatment of Female Characters by Women Writers of Fiction in Quebec since 1980, edited by Roseanna Lewis Dufault. Madison, nj: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press 1997, 136–46 Lamontagne, Gilles. Introduction to Fleurs champêtres by Françoise. Montreal: Fides 1984, 13–23 Lamore, Jean. “Transculturation: Naissance d’un mot.” In Métamorphoses d’une utopie, edited by Jean-Michel Lacroix and Fulvio Caccia. Paris/ Montreal: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle/Editions Triptyque 1992, 43–7 Lamoureux, Diane. Fragments et collages. Montreal: Editions du remueménage 1986 – “La Posture du fils.” In Malaises identitaires: Echanges féministes autour d’un Québec incertain, edited by Diane Lamoureux, Chantal Maillé, and Micheline de Sève. Montreal: Editions du remue-ménage 1999, 25–51 LaRue, Monique. L’Arpenteur et le navigateur. Montreal: Fides, cetuq 1996 Latouche, Daniel. “The Power of Words: the State as Literary Creation.” Québec Studies 3 (1985): 12–31 Leblond, Sylvio. “Le Drame de Kamouraska d’après les documents de l’époque.” Les Cahiers des Dix, no. 37 (1972): 239–73 Leclerc, Rita. Germaine Guèvremont. Ottawa: Fides 1963 Le Goff, Jacques. Histoire et mémoire. Paris: Folio 1988 Lejeune, Philippe. L’Autobiographie en France. Paris: Armand Colin 1971 – On Autobiography, translated by Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1989 Lemieux, Denise, and Lucie Mercier. Les Femmes au tournant du siècle 1880– 1940. Quebec: Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture 1989 Lemire, Maurice. “Un Cœur fidèle.” In Dictionnaire des œuvres littéraires du Québec ii, 1900 à 1939. Montreal: Fides 1980, 1105–6 – Les Grands Thèmes nationalistes du roman historique canadien-français. Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval 1970 LeMoine, Roger. Introduction to Angéline de Montbrun, A l’œuvre et à l’épreuve, L’Oublié, and La Sève Immortelle. Œuvres romanesques de Laure Conan, I , II , III . Montreal: Fides 1974, 1975 Le Moyne, Jean. Convergences. Montreal: hmh 1961 Lepage, Yvan. Livres et Auteurs Québécois 1969. Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval 1969 Lepage, Yves G. Introduction to Le Survenant by Germaine Guèvremont. Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal 1989 Lequin, Lucie. “L’Epreuve de l’exil et la traversée des frontières: des voix de femmes.” Québec Studies 14 (1992): 31–9 – “Mona Latif-Ghattas: Une mélopée orientale dans un espace blanc.” Québec Studies 19 (1995): 133–41

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187 Bibliography – “Les Québécoises, une autre révolution?” In Paroles Rebelles. Montreal: Editions du remue-ménage 1992, 219–40 Lévesque, Andrée. La Norme et les déviantes: Les femmes au Québec pendant l’entre-deux-guerres. Montreal: Editions du remue-ménage 1989 Lewis, Paula Gilbert. “From Shattered Reflections to Female Bonding: Mirroring in Marie-Claire Blais’s Visions d’Anna.” Québec Studies 2 (1984): 94–103 – The Literary Vision of Gabrielle Roy: An Analysis of Her Works. Birmingham, Alabama: Summa Publications 1984 L’Hérault, Pierre. “Pour une cartographie de l’hétérogène: dérives identitaires des années 1980.” In Fictions de l’identitaire au Québec, edited by Sherry Simon, Pierre L’Hérault, Robert Schwartzwald, and Alexis Nouss. Montreal: xyz 1991, 55–114 Linteau, Paul-André, René Durocher, and Jean-Claude Robert. Histoire du Québec contemporain: De la Confédération à la crise (1867–1929). Montreal: Boréal 1979 Linteau, Paul-André, René Durocher, Jean-Claude Robert, and François Ricard. Histoire du Québec contemporain: Le Québec depuis 1930. Montreal: Boréal 1986 Lipset, Seymour Martin. “Revolution and Counterrevolution: The United States and Canada.” In Revolution and Counterrevolution. Garden City, ny: Anchor Books 1970 Lonergan, David. Anthologie de Blanche Lamontagne-Beauregard. Montreal: Guérin 1989 Maheu, Pierre. “L’Oedipe colonial.” Parti pris 1 (9–11): 19–29 Major, André. “Chénier, mon ancêtre.” Liberté 7, nos. 1–2 (January-April 1965): 94–5 Makward, Christiane. “Quebec Women Writers,” Women and Literature 7, no. 1 (Winter 1979): 3 Marcotte, Gilles. “Bonheur d’occasion et le «grand réalisme»,” Voix et Images 42 (Spring 1989): 408–13 – Une Littérature qui se fait. Montreal: hmh 1962 – “«Restons traditionnels et progressifs» disait Onésime Gagnon.” Etudes Françaises 33, no.3 (Winter 1997–98): 5–14 – “Le Roman.” Cahiers de l’Académie Canadienne-Française 3 (1958): 44–5 – Le Roman à l’imparfait, La “Révolution tranquille” du roman québécois. Montreal: L’Hexagone 1989 Martin, Claire. “Notre roman, image de notre milieu.” Revue Dominicaine 66.2 (July-August 1960): 20 Mason, Mary G. “The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers.” In Life/Lines, edited by Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1988, 19–44 McPherson, Karen S. Incriminations: Guilty Women/Telling Stories. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1994

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188 Bibliography McRoberts, Kenneth, and Dale Posgate. Quebec: Social Change and Political Crisis. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1980 Médam, Alain. “Ethnicité et cité entre le «co» et le «dis», le «trans»?” In Métamorphoses d’une utopie, edited by Jean-Michel Lacroix and Fulvio Caccia. Paris/Montreal: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle/Editions Triptyque 1992, 49–61 Melançon, Carole. “Evolution de la réception de Bonheur d’occasion de 1945 à 1983 au Canada français.” Etudes littéraires 17, no. 3 (Winter 1984): 457–68 Memmi, Albert. “Les Canadiens français sont-ils des colonisés?” In L’Homme dominé. Paris: Gallimard 1968, 87–95 – Portrait du colonisé. Paris: Payot 1973 Michaud, Ginette. “Mille plateaux: topographie et typographie d’un quartier,” Voix et Images 42 (Spring 1989): 462–82 Miller, Nancy K. Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing. New York: Columbia University Press 1988 Miron, Gaston. L’Homme rapaillé. Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal 1970 Monière, Denis. Le Développement des idéologies au Québec des origines à nos jours. Montreal: Québec/Amérique 1977 Moss, Jane. “Multiculturalism and Postmodern Theater: Staging Québec’s Otherness,” Mosaic 29, no. 3 (September 1996): 75–96 – “Power Relations in La Maison Trestler,” Québec Studies 12 (1991): 59–65 Nepveu, Pierre. L’Ecologie du réel. Montreal: Boréal 1988 – Intérieurs du Nouveau Monde: Essais sur les littératures du Québec et des Amériques. Montreal: Boréal 1998 Nepveu, Pierre, and François Ricard, ed. “Le Survenant et Bonheur d’occasion: rencontre de deux mondes.” Etudes Françaises 33.3 (Winter 1997–98): 3–104 Neuville, Laure. “Ecrire pour ‘vivre le temps à l’envers’: Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska et Francine Noël.” In Le Roman québécois au féminin (1980– 1995), edited by Gabrielle Pascal. Montreal: Editions Triptyque 1995, 33–45 Noël, Francine. “«Je suis une femme dans un pays». Entretien avec Francine Noël.” by Jacques Pelletier and Lori Saint-Martin. Voix et Images 53 (Winter 1993): 224–38 Noiseux, Henri. “L’Action malsaine du roman,” Revue Canadienne (1891): 63– 9 Nora, Pierre. “Entre mémoire et histoire: La problématique des lieux,” Les Lieux de mémoire i. Paris: Gallimard 1984, xvii-xxiii Nutting, Stéphanie. “Bonheur d’occasion et Maryse: lectures croisées, lecture en ronds.” Voix et Images 53 (Winter 1993): 253–63 Ouellette-Michalska, Madeleine. “Entrevue.” Lettres Québécoises 35 (Autumn 1984): 21–2 – Le Féminin comme lieu d’inscription scripturale. Mémoire de maîtrise. Université du Québec à Montréal 1978

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189 Bibliography – La Tentation de dire. Montreal: Québec/Amérique 1985 Pagé, Pierre. Anne Hébert. Ottawa: Fides 1965 Paradis, Suzanne. Femme fictive, femme réelle: Le personnage féminin dans le roman féminin canadien français 1884–1966. Ottawa: Garneau 1966 Paterson, Janet. Moments postmodernes dans le roman québécois. Ottawa: Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa 1990 Pelletier, Jacques. “Présentation.” Voix et Images 53 (Winter 1993): 216–17 – Le Roman national: Néo-nationalisme et roman québécois contemporain. Montreal: vlb 1991 Popovic, Pierre. “Le Différend des cultures et des savoirs dans l’incipit de Bonheur d’occasion.” In Bonheur d’occasion au pluriel: lectures et approches critiques, edited by Marie-Andrée Beaudet. Montreal: Nota bene 1999, 15-62 Potvin, Claudine. “De l’Eden à Babel: écrire l’utopie.” Voix et Images 53 (Winter 1993): 287–303 Raoul, Valerie. “Cette autre-moi: hantise du double disparu dans le journal fictif féminin, de Conan à Monette et Noël.” Voix et Images 64 (Autumn 1996): 38–64 – Distinctly Narcissistic: Diary Fiction in Quebec. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1993 Reid, Malcolm. The Shouting Signpainters. New York: Monthly Review Press 1972 Ricard, François. Gabrielle Roy: Une Vie. Montreal: Boréal 1996 Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Norton 1976 – “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision.” In On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. New York: W.W. Norton 1979, 33-50 Ricœur, Paul. Time and Narrative iii. Translated by Kathleen Blarney and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1988 Ringuet [Philippe Panneton]. Trente arpents. Montreal: Fides 1976 Robert, Lucie. “D’Angéline de Montbrun à La Chair décevante: la naissance d’une parole féminine autonome dans la littérature québécoise.” In L’Autre lecture i, edited by Lori Saint-Martin. Montreal: xyz 1992, 41–50 – L’Institution du littéraire au Québec. Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval 1989 Roberts, Katharine A. “Découvrir, fonder, survivre: les romans historiques de Laure Conan.” Voix et Images 71 (Winter 1999): 351–71 Roberts, Mary Louise. Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927 Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1994 Robin, Régine. “A propos de la notion Kafkaïenne de “littérature mineure”: Quelques questions posée à la littérature Québécoise.” Paragraphes 2: 5–14 – Le Roman mémoriel: de l’histoire à l’écriture du hors-lieu. Montreal: Editions du Préambule 1989

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190 Bibliography – “Sortir de l’ethnicité.” In Métamorphoses d’une utopie, edited by Jean-Michel Lacroix and Fulvio Caccia. Paris/Montreal: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle/Editions Triptyque, 1992 25–41 Rowan, Mary M. “Conversion and Reconversion in the Writings of Marie de l’Incarnation.” Québec Studies 6 (1988): 65–77 Roy, Camille. “L’Oublié.” In Romanciers de chez nous. Montreal: Beauchemin 1935 Roy, Fernand. “L’interaction de l’anecdote et de l’écriture: le double exemple de Jovette Bernier (La chair décevante) et Suzanne Lamy (La convention).” Québec Studies 17 (1994): 143–50 Roy, Fernand, and Louise Milot. “La réception critique du premier roman québécois au féminin.” In Angéline de Montbrun. Montreal: Bibliothèque Québécoise 1990, 7-10 Roy, Gabrielle. La Détresse et l’enchantement. Montreal: Boréal 1984 – Le Temps qui m’a manqué. Montreal: Boréal 1997 Roy, Max. “Les positions critiques dans les lectures successives de Bonheur d’occasion.” In Bonheur d’occasion au pluriel: lectures et approches critiques, edited by Marie-Andrée Beaudet. Montreal: Nota bene 1999, 189–227 Saint-Martin, Lori. “La Chair décevante de Jovette Bernier: le nom de la mère.” Tangence 47 (March 1995): 112–24 – “Histoire(s) de femme(s) chez Francine Noël.” Voix et Images 53 (Winter 1993): 239–52 – “Mise à mort de la femme et ‘libération’ de l’homme: Godbout, Aquin, Beaulieu.” Voix et Images 10, no. 1 (Autumn 1984): 107–17 – Le Nom de la mère: Mères, filles et écriture dans la littérature québécoise au féminin. Montreal: Nota bene 1999 – “Les premières mères, Le Premier Jardin.” Voix et Images 60 (Spring 1995): 667–81 – “Réalisme et féminisme: une lecture au féminin de Bonheur d’occasion.” In Bonheur d’occasion au pluriel: lectures et approches critiques, edited by MarieAndrée Beaudet. Montreal: Nota bene 1999, 63–99 – “Sexe, pouvoir et dialogue.” Etudes Françaises 33, no. 3 (Winter 1997–98): 37–52 – “Writing (Jumping) Off the Edge of the World: Metafeminism and New Women Writers of Quebec.” In Postcolonial Subjects: Francophone Women Writers, edited by Mary Jean Green, Karen Gould, Micheline Rice-Maximin, Keith L. Walker, and Jack A. Yeager. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press 1996, 285–303 Sainte-Marie Eleuthère (Sœur). La Mère dans le roman canadien français. Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval 1964 Savard, Félix-Antoine. Menaud, maître-draveur. Montreal: Fides 1982 Schwartzwald, Robert. “(Homo)sexualité et problématique identitaire.” In Fictions de l’identitaire au Québec, edited by Sherry Simon, Pierre L’Hérault, Robert Schwartzwald, and Alexis Nouss. Montreal: xyz 1991, 117–50.

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191 Bibliography – Institution littéraire, modernité et question nationale au Québec (1940 à 1976). Thèse de Ph.D. Université Laval 1985 Servais-Maquoi, Mireille. Le Roman de la terre au Québec. Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval 1974 Shek, Ben-Zion. French-Canadian and Québécois Novels. Toronto: Oxford University Press 1991 – Social Realism in the French-Canadian Novel. Montreal: Harvest House 1977 Showalter, Elaine. “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness.” In Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory, edited by Elaine Showalter. New York: Pantheon Books 1985 – A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing. London: Virago Press 1982 Simon, Sherry. “Espaces incertains de la culture.” In Fictions de l’identitaire au Québec, edited by Sherry Simon, Pierre L’Hérault, Robert Schwartzwald, and Alexis Nouss. Montreal: xyz 1991, 15–52 Slama, Béatrice. “La Belle Bête ou la double scène.” Voix et Images 8, no. 2 (Winter 1983): 211–28 Smart, Patricia. “«Changer la vie» ou «changer le monde».” Etudes Françaises 33, no. 3 (Winter 1997–98): 15–22 – Ecrire dans la maison du père: L’émergence du féminin dans la tradition littéraire du Québec. Montreal: Québec/Amérique 1988. Translated by the author as Writing in the Father’s House: The Emergence of the Feminine in the Quebec Literary Tradition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1991) – Les Femmes du Refus global. Montreal: Boréal 1998 – “The ‘Pure Laine’ Debate.” Canadium Forum. November 1997: 15–19 Spacks, Patricia Meyer. The Female Imagination. New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1975 Stanton, Domna C., ed. The Female Autograph. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1984 Taschereau, Louis Alexandre. “De l’influence de la femme sur nos destinées nationales.” In Québécoises du 20e siècle, edited by Michèle Jean. Montreal: Quinze 1977, 208–19 Théoret, France. Entre raison et déraison. Montreal: Les Herbes Rouges, 1987. Partially translated by A.J. Holden Verburg under the title “Writing in the Feminine: Voicing Consensus, Practicing Difference.” In A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing, edited by Shirley Neuman and Smaro Kamboureli. Edmonton: Longspoon/NeWest 1986 – “Le fantasme de la bj, c’est la théorie, entrevue avec France Théoret.” Voix et Images 10, no. 2 (Winter 85): 87–91 Tougas, Gérard. Histoire de la littérature canadienne-française. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France 1964 Vadeboncœur, Pierre. La Ligne du risque. Montreal: hmh 1977 Vallières, Pierre. Nègres blancs d’Amérique. Montreal: Québec/Amérique 1979 Vanasse, André. “L’Ecriture et l’ambivalence, entrevue avec Anne Hébert.” Voix et Images 7:3 (Spring 1983): 441–8

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192 Bibliography van Schendel, Michel. “L’Amour dans la littérature canadienne-française.” In Littérature et société canadienne-françaises, edited by Fernand Dumont and Jean-Charles Falardeau. Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval 1964 van’t Land, Hilligje. “Analyse sociosémiotique des espaces romanesques dans Bonheur d’occasion.” In Bonheur d’occasion au pluriel: lectures et approches critiques, edited by Marie-Andrée Beaudet. Montreal: Nota bene 1999, 101–38 Verduyn, Christl. “La prose féminine québécoise des années trente.” In L’Autre lecture i, edited by Lori Saint-Martin. Montreal: xyz, 1992, 57-71 Verthuy, Maïr. “Femmes et patrie dans l’œuvre romanesque de Laure Conan.” In L’Autre lecture i, edited by Lori Saint-Martin. Montreal: xyz, 1992, 31–41 Viola. “Les Femmes auteurs.” La revue canadienne 3rd ser. i (1888): 223–31 Waelti-Walters, Jennifer. Fairy Tales and the Female Imagination. Montreal: Eden Press 1982 White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1987 – Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1978 Wilson, Edmund. Introduction to A Season in the Life of Emmanuel, translated by Derek Coltman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1980 – “Marie-Claire Blais.” In O Canada, An American’s Notes on Canadian Culture. New York: The Noonday Press, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1964, 147–57 Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1957

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Index

L’Actualité, 138 Agnant, Marie-Célie, 20, 140, 147–8, 150–1 agriculturalism, 11, 52 Allard, Jacques, 165n6 Anderson, Benedict, 7 Angers, Félicité. See Laure Conan Aquin, Hubert, 7, 11, 12, 89, 94, 95, 96, 108, 114, 134; Prochain épisode, 11, 95, 96, 108; Trou de mémoire, 94, 119 Ardener, Shirley and Edward, 87 Arnaud, Mère Angélique, 42 Aubert de Gaspé, Philippe (Les Anciens Canadiens), 22, 40, 101, 138 Autant de façons d’être Québécois, 135, 141 autobiography, 17, 84–5, 108–10, 112, 132–3 Bâ, Mariama, 109–10 Baby, Eliza, 37 Barbeau, Victor, 61 La Barre du Jour, 105

Barrett, Caroline, 165n5 Barry, Robertine. See Françoise Baym, Nina, 23 Beauchemin, Yves, 104 Beaudoin, Louise, 163n1 Beauty and the Beast, 81, 99 Benedict, Francesca D., 164n14 Bernier, Jovette (La Chair décevante), 17, 58, 82 Berque, Jacques, 74, 97, 160n2 Berrouët-Oriel, Robert, 137 Bersianik, Louky, 106, 108, 163n5 Bessette, Gérard, 159n15 Bettelheim, Bruno, 81, 99 Bhabha, Homi, 4–5 Bibaud, Adèle, 11, 26, 39, 47 Bibeau, Michel, 39 Bissonnette, Lise, 136 Blais, Marie-Claire, 3, 4, 73, 88–9, 102; La Belle Bête, 11, 19, 75, 78–82, 90; Manuscrits de Pauline Archange, 19, 77, 84–5; Une Saison dans la

vie d’Emmanuel, 11, 19, 75, 76, 78–84, 105 Boose, Lynda, 86 Bordeleau, Francine, 123 Bosco, Monique, 90 Boucher, Denise, 15, 106 Bourassa, Henri, 15 Bourbonnais, Nicole de, 157n9, 157n10 Bourgeois, Marguerite, 45 Boynard-Frot, Janine, 32, 50, 52, 57–8, 126–7, 164n24 Braidotti, Rosi, 145 British conquest, 16, 39, 92, 100–2 British North America Act, 14 Brodzki, Bella, 108–9 Brossard, Nicole, 3, 4, 18, 19, 105–10, 116, 122, 163n5 Brunelle, Yves, 156n1 Brunet, Manon, 155n2 Brunet, Michel, 155n9, 157n2 Bujold, Geneviève, 92 Cambron, Micheline, 104, 120, 137

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194 Index Casgrain, Henri-Raymond, 3, 5–9, 11, 13–14, 16, 21–2, 33, 35, 37, 38, 45, 87 Césaire, Aimé, 74, 97 Chamberland, Paul, 94, 95 La Chanson de Roland, 44 Charbonneau, Robert, 65 Châtelaine, 17 Chateaubriand, René de, 33 Chen, Ying, 139, 144, 165n7 Chénier, Jean, 94 Chevalier de Lorimier, François-Marie Thomas, 38 Chodorow, Nancy, 80, 109 Cinderella, 82, 99 Cliche, Anne Elaine, 121 Closse, Lambert, 39, 43–6 Le Coin du Feu, 24–9, 53 Collectif Clio (L’Histoire des femmes au Québec), 25, 31–2, 122, 124, 157n15 Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle, 113–14 Colvile, Georgiana, 163– 4n10 Conan, Laure (Félicité Angers), 4, 11, 16–17, 26, 27, 28; A l’œuvre et à l’épreuve, 40–2; Angéline de Montbrun, 5–6, 16, 21–2, 24, 27, 29–38, 41, 43, 44, 45, 47, 57, 58, 72, 87, 114; Aux Jours de Maisonneuve, 42–3; L’Obscure Souffrance, 47; L’Oublié, 39–41, 42–7; La Sève immortelle, 16, 47–8; Un Amour vrai, 40–1 Conley, Katharine, 138 Corriveau, MarieJosephte (la Corriveau), 100–2, 114 Cotnam, Jacques, 30, 31 Cotnoir, Louise, 163n5

Cousture, Arlette (Les Filles de Caleb), 11, 20, 108, 115, 124–8, 134, 146 D’Alfonso, Antonio, 153 Dandurand, Joséphine Marchand, 24–29 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 35 de Gaulle, Charles, 9 de l’Immaculée, Sœur Jean, 31 den Tandt, Catherine, 114 Deschamps, Nicole, 55 Des Rivières, Marie-Josée, 156n17, 159n16, 160n3 Dessaules, Henriette, 37, 124 Le Devoir, 15, 56 Djebar, Assia, 110 Drummond, Dennis, 160n26 Dufresne, Françoise, 162n23 Duhamel, Roger, 61, 85, 159n15 Dumont, Micheline, 26, 164n22 Dupré, Louise, 163n5 Durham Report (1840), 28, 93 Durocher, René (Histoire du Québec contemporain), 123, 125 Duval-Thibault, Anna, 25 l’écriture au féminin, 103– 10, 115 Eliot, George, 30 Fahmy-Eid, Nadia, 164n22 fairy tales, 81–2 Falardeau, Jean-Charles, 50, 159n17 family plot, 17, 18, 49, 53, 108 family policies. See la revanche des berceaux Fanon, Frantz, 74, 97 Farhoud, Abla, 20, 135, 140–1, 147–51

female plot, 30, 81, 125 Feminism, of Blanche BeauregardLamontagne, 56–7; in nineteenth century (the “literary feminists”), 24–9; in 1970s, 19, 101, 102–10; in 1980s, 19–20, 110–54; metafeminism, 19, 104 Foisy, Renée, 161n19 Fournier, Robert, 137 Franc, Louis, 27 Françoise (Robertine Barry), 25, 26, 29; Fleurs champêtres, 49, 51–5, 63; Le Journal de Françoise, 24–9, 51 Fréchette, Louis, 28, 53 Frédéric, Madeleine, 143, 146, 166n13 Frégault, Guy, 14 Freud, Sigmund, 74, 75, 80 Front de Libération des Femmes (flf), 105 Front de Libération du Québec (flq), 105 Gagnon, Madeleine, 30, 32–3, 106, 122 Gagnon, Mona-Josée, 15, 156n13 Garigue, Philippe, 50 Garneau, François-Xavier, 22, 38 Garnier, Charles, 41–2, 43 Gauvin, Lise, 120, 163n10, 164n12 Gauvreau, Claude, 114 Gérin-Lajoie, Antoine (Jean Rivard), 54, 55 Gérin-Lajoie, Marie, 24, 57 Gilbert, Sandra, 4, 5 Gilligan, Carol, 109 Godard, Barbara, 161n9 Godbout, Jacques, 3, 7, 9– 13, 89; Salut Galarneau!, 9, 11, 119–21; Un Couteau sur la table, 94, 119 Goldmann, Lucien, 75, 76, 79, 81

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195 Index Gould, Karen, 104, 106, 108, 109, 161n16, 163n3, 165n26 Grandpré, Pierre de, 90 Grignon, Claude-Henri (Un homme et son péché), 12, 52, 59 Groulx, Lionel, 9, 14, 49 Gubar, Susan, 4, 5 Guérin, Eugénie de, 36–7 Guèvremont, Germaine, 3, 4, 50–2, 125; En Pleine Terre, 65, 18; Le Survenant/Marie-Didace, 11, 18, 19, 54, 56, 58–73, 78, 115, 124, 127 Haldemann, Verena, 148 Harel, Simon, 141–2, 143, 146 Harvey, Robert, 161n7 Hayne, David, 23 Hébert, Anne, 3, 4, 73, 88, 89, 102, 125, 146, 153; Les Chambres de bois, 90; Les Enfants du sabbat, 101; Kamouraska, 19, 76, 91–102, 123, 129, 131; Le Premier Jardin, 122–3; “Le Torrent,” 11, 19, 74–5, 77–9, 125 Hébert, Louis, 123 Heilbrun, Carolyn, 6, 109, 115 Hémon, Louis (Maria Chapdelaine), 49, 52, 55– 62, 68 Héroux, Raymonde, 55 Hirsch, Marianne, 165n26 historical novel, 4, 11, 13, 19, 28, 37–8, 38–48, 76, 91, 122–4, 129–31 Holmes, George, 90–2, 95 Hutcheon, Linda, 129 identity narrative, 3, 4, 8, 10, 11, 19 immigrant literature (la littérature migrante), 10, 135–54

L’Institut canadien, 106 Iqbal, Françoise, 161n10 Jameson, Fredric, 8, 139 Jeanne de Chantal, 36 Jelinek, Estelle, 161n15 joual, 115, 121 Joubert, Lucie, 115, 164nn12, 14, 16 Le Journal de Françoise. See Françoise Julien, Pauline, 101 Jutra, Claude, 92 Kelley, Mary, 15 Klementowicz, Michael, 119 Kraft, James, 161n14 Laberge, Albert, 158n8 Lachance, Micheline, 156n11 Lacombe Patrice (La Terre paternelle), 52, 60 Lacourcière, Luc, 162n28, 162n30 Lafayette, Comtesse de Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, 30 Laferrière, Dany, 139, 147 Laflèche, Monseigneur François-Louis, 13–14, 49, 53, 56, 155n9 LaFrance, Jeanne, 40 Lalonde, Michèle, 12, 102, 105; “Speak White,” 77, 88, 89, 95–6, 115 Lamar, Celita, 166n16 Lamontagne, Gilles, 157n3 Lamontagne-Beauregard, Blanche (Un Cœur fidèle), 18, 56–8 Lapointe, Jeanne, 12, 75, 159n16 Larivière, Jules, 17 LaRue, Monique, 10, 20, 135–6, 153 Latif-Ghattas, Mona, 20; Le Double Conte de l’exil,

140–1; Les Lunes de miel, 147–8, 152–3 Latouche, Daniel, 9 Leblond, Sylvio, 162n23 Leclerc, Rita, 72 Le Goff, Jacques, 124, 128 Lejeune, Philippe, 112 Lemieux, Denise, 164n22, 165n25 Lemire, Maurice, 155n8 LeMoine, Roger, 31, 41, 46, 48 Le Moyne, Jean, 12, 15, 75, 78 Lepage, Yvan G., 85, 160n29 LePen, Jean-Marie, 136 Lequin, Lucie, 57, 158n6, 166n17 Lévesque, Albert, 17 Lévesque, Andrée, 164n22 Lévesque, René, 103 Lewis, Paula Gilbert, 63 L’Hérault, Pierre, 146, 165n1, 166n18 Liberté, 12, 79, 88, 89, 90, 94–5, 106 Linteau, Paul André (Histoire du Québec contemporain), 123, 125 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 161n8 Lonergan, David, 57, 158n6 Loranger, Françoise, 75 McPherson, Karen, 162n29 Maheu, Pierre, 80 Maheux-Forcier, Louise, 90–1, 161n6 Mailhot, Michèle, 90–1, 161n6 Maillet, Andrée, 85–6, 161n6 Maisonneuve, Paul de Chomedey de, 45 Major, André, 94 Makward, Christiane, 155n2

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196 Index Mance, Jeanne, 12, 18, 43, 45, 46 Marcotte, Gilles, 61, 78, 79, 90–1, 159n18 Marie de l’Incarnation (Marie Guyart), 12, 28, 34–6, 37, 38, 45 Martin, Claire, 84, 89, 90 Martin, Claude, 35 Mason, Mary, 133 Médam, Alain, 153 Médicis (Prix), 79 Melançon, Carole, 159n16 Memmi, Albert, 74, 97–8 Mercier, Lucie, 164n22, 165n25 Michaud, Ginette, 46, 165n7 Micone, Marco, 139 Miller, Nancy, 6, 30–1, 68, 125 Milot, Louise, 157n12 Miron, Gaston, 88–9, 119 Monière, Denis, 14–15, 156n5, 157nn2, 3 Montreal, 60, 65, 68, 70–1, 111–12, 137–43; as Ville-Marie, 39, 42–6 Montreal Local Council of Women, 24 Montreuil, Gaëtane de (Marie-Georgina Bélanger), 47 Morrison, Toni, 4 Moss, Jane, 165n28, 166n16 the mother, ideal in traditional ideology, 15–16, 28; representations in Guèvremont and Roy, 62–73; in Quiet Revolution period, 74–81; in Kamouraska, 99; in Les Filles de Caleb, 126, 128; mother-daughter relationships, 60, 67–73, 75, 80–1, 128, 146–54 Moyen, Elisabeth, 39, 43– 6, 47 Mullins-Leprohon, Rosanna, 11, 23, 39

narrative identity, 8 “national literature” (Casgrain), 4, 22 “national text” (Godbout), 3, 9 La Nef des sorcières, 101, 106 Nelligan, Emile, 52 Nelson, Robert, 92–3 Nelson, Wolfred, 92–3 Nepveu, Pierre, 39, 146, 157n8, 158n10 Neuville, Laure, 164n23 Noël, Francine, 20, 108, 110, 142, 143, 146, 153; Maryse, 115–22, 124, 144; Myriam première, 122; Nous avons tous décovert l’Amérique, 137–8, 139, 144 Nora, Pierre, 133 Nutting, Stéphanie, 164n19 October Crisis (1970), 114 Ollivier, Emile, 147 Orsini, Marina, 128 Ouellet, Fernand, 162n26 Ouellette-Michalska, Madeleine, 20, 110, 137, 146, 153; La Maison Trestler, 128–34 La Parole Métèque, 136 Papineau, Julie Bruneau, 12, 37, 124, 162n26 Papineau, Louis-Joseph, 39, 93, 162n24 Paradis, Suzanne, 30, 62, 63, 77, 160n4, 162n22 Parizeau, Jacques, 135 Parti pris, 88, 106, 121 Parti Québécois, 103–4 Paterson, Janet, 165n29 Pelletier, Jacques, 10, 116, 120, 163–4n10 Pelletier-Dlamini, Louis, 160n29 Popovic, Pierre, 158n11 Potvin, Claudine, 165n5 Proulx, Monique (Les Aurores Montréales), 20,

137, 138–40, 142, 143, 144 pseudonyms, as used by women writers, 25–6 Quebec (city), 100–2, 122– 3 Quebec Patriotic School, 8, 22, 106 Québécois(es) (adjective of identity), 11, 103, 106, 107, 135–6, 137 Quiet Revolution, 7, 9, 11–13, 19–20, 51, 74– 102, 103–6, 125, 163n30 Randall, Marilyn, 162n26 Raoul, Valerie, 37, 157nn9, 10, 11 Rebellion of 1837, 12, 19, 37, 38, 39, 91, 92–5, 99, 102 Referendum of 1980, 103– 4, 117, 135 Referendum of 1995, 135 Refus global, 19, 74 Les Relations des Jésuites, 42 La Relève, 17 Renaud, Jacques, 119 la revanche des berceaux (revenge of the cradle), 15, 16, 50, 77, 81, 96, 99, 114 La Revue Canadienne, 27 Ricard, François, 51, 72, 158n10 Rich, Adrienne, 3 Richer, Julia, 61 Ricœur, Paul, 8 Ringuet (Philippe Panneton) (Trente Arpents), 52, 56, 59, 61–2 Robert, Jean-Claude (Histoire du Québec contemporain), 123, 125 Robert, Lucie, 8, 155nn5, 10, 156nn4, 18, 157n7 Roberts, Katharine, 47 Roberts, Mary Louise, 159n21

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197 Index Robin, Régine, 7, 20, 135, 136, 137; La Québécoite, 141–7, 148, 150, 151 Rollet-Hébert, Marie, 123 roman de la terre (rural novel), 11, 13, 17–19, 32, 37, 48, 49–73, 74, 78–9, 123, 125–7 roman du terroir. See roman de la terre Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 27, 53–5, 108 Rowan, Mary, 36 Roy, Camille, 9, 43, 45 Roy, Fernand, 156n18, 157n12 Roy, Gabrielle, 3, 4, 49, 50, 51, 125; Bonheur d’occasion, 11, 18, 19, 59–73, 75, 78, 117–19, 138; La Détresse et l’enchantement, 72; La Petite Poule d’eau, 160n28; La Route d’Altamont, 72; Rue Deschambault, 72 Roy, Max, 158n12 Roy, Mélina, 72 Saint Denis, 93 Saint Eustache, 93, 94 Saint-Martin, Lori, 19, 52, 66, 116, 119, 156n18, 158n13, 160n27, 162n25, 164n20 Sand, George, 23, 27, 28 Savard, Félix-Antoine (Menaud maître-draveur), 52, 55, 56, 59, 126 Savary, Charlotte, 162n26 Schenk, Celeste, 108–9 Schwartzwald, Robert, 88

Scott, Gail, 163n5 Senécal, Eva (Dans les ombres, Mon Jacques), 17, 57–8 Sévigné, Marquise de Marie de RabutinChantal, 37 Shek, Ben-Zion, 61 Showalter, Elaine, 23, 102, 161n17 Simon, Sherry, 146, 164n21, 166n15 Slama, Béatrice, 161n9 Smart, Patricia, 32, 62, 86, 88, 107, 119, 136, 156n12, 158n9, 159n19, 160n25, 160n1, 162n25, 164n24 Snow White, 82, 99 Sorel, 60, 93 Sroka, Ghila, 136 Stanton, Domna, 109 survivance ideology, 9, 14– 15, 26, 50, 62, 96 Sylvestre, Anne, 101 Taché, Achille, 91–2 Taché, JosephteJoséphine, 95 Taché, Marguerite-Marie Elisabeth, 95 Tardivel, Jules-Paul, 27, 49, 52–5 Taschereau, LouisAlexandre, 15 Le Terroir, 56 Les Têtes de Pioche, 106 Théoret, France, 7, 20, 103, 105–10, 116, 124, 129, 137, 153–4, 163n5, 163n10; L’Homme qui peignait Staline, 108;

Nous parlerons comme on écrit, 104, 110–15, 137, 143, 144; Une Voix pour Odile, 110, 146 Thérèse d’Avila, 36 Tirol, Marcel, 23 Transcultural exchange, 153 Trestler, Catherine, 129, 133–4 La Tribune Juive, 136 Vadeboncœur, Pierre, 75 Vallières, Pierre (Nègres blancs d’Amérique), 84, 86, 91, 108, 119 van Schendel, Michel, 90 van’t Land, Hilligje, 159n20 Verburg, A.J. Holden, 163n4 Verduyn, Christl, 156n18 Verthuy, Maïr, 42, 48 Victoria, queen of England, 98–9 Vigneault, Gilles, 101–2 Villeneuve, Normand, 55 Waelti-Walters, Jennifer, 161n9 White, Hayden, 130 Wilson, Edmund, 78–9 witchcraft, 100–2 women’s history, 104, 122–34, 146 Woolf, Virginia, 28, 80, 114 Yanacopolo, Andrée, 136 Zagolin, Bianca, 140 Zola, Emile, 17, 54, 78

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