Writing Herself into Being: Quebec Women's Autobiographical Writings from Marie de l'Incarnation to Nelly Arcan 9780773552654

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Writing Herself into Being

Writ in g H e rs e lf in t o B e i n g Q u e b e c Wom e n’s Autobi og raphi cal Wr it in gs f r om M ari e de l ’ Incar nati on t o N e lly A rcan

PAtri C iA SMA rt

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal and Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2017 First published in French as De Marie de l’Incarnation à Nelly Arcan © Les Éditions du Boréal 2014 ISBN 978-0-7735-5118-3 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-7735-5119-0 (paper) ISBN 978-0-7735-5265-4 (ePDF) ISBN 978-0-7735-5266-1 (ePUB) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2017 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% postconsumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, an initiative of the Roadmap for Canada’s Official Languages 2013–2018: Education, Immigration, Communities, for our translation activities. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Smart, Patricia, 1940– [De Marie de l’Incarnation à Nelly Arcan. English] Writing herself into being : Quebec women’s autobiographical writings from Marie de l’Incarnation to Nelly Arcan / Patricia Smart. Translation of: Smart, Patricia, 1940–. De Marie de l’Incarnation à Nelly Arcan. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-7735-5118-3 (hardcover). – ISBN 978-0-7735-5119-0 (softcover). – ISBN 978-0-7735-5265-4 (ePDF). –ISBN 978-0-7735-5266-1 (ePUB) 1. Canadian literature (French) – Women authors – History and criticism. 2. Canadian diaries (French) – Québec (Province) – History and criticism. 3. Intimacy (Psychology) in literature. I. Title. II. Title: De Marie de l’Incarnation à Nelly Arcan. English PS8103.W6S6213 2017

C840.9’9287

This book was typeset by Sandra Friesen in 10.5/13 Minion.

C2017-904387-0 C2017-904388-9

To my husband John, with love and thanks, and to the memory of my beloved sister Judy Hamelin (1938–2017)

Co n t ent s

Acknowledgments Author’s Note on the English Translation Introduction

ix xi 3

PA rt O n e L i v i n g A n d W r itin g fOr gOd : th e M yS t i C A L er A

13

1 A Place for the Spirit: Canada as Dream and Reality in the Autobiographical Writings of the Women of New France 2 Writing the Annihilation of Self: Marie de l’Incarnation PA rt t WO W r i t i n g f O r the O the r : CO r r eS P O n d en Ce S, 1 7 4 8 –1862

3 Writing “To Tell You I’m Here”: The Correspondence of Élisabeth Bégon 4 One Is Not Born a Mother, One Becomes One: Julie Papineau’s Journey PA rt t h r ee W r i t i n g f Or On eSe Lf: th e P r i vAt e di A ry, 1 8 4 3 – 1964

5 Girls’ Diaries: Steps towards an Autonomous Self 6 Two Nineteenth-Century Rebels: Henriette Dessaulles and Joséphine Marchand 7 Diaries of “Queens of the Hearth” PA rt f O u r W r i t i n g O n e Se Lf in t O hiSt Ory: th e Ag e O f Au t Obi O g r A Phy, 1965–2012

8 Claire Martin: The Courage of the Autobiographical “I”

17 33 67 70 88 115 121 146 165 189 193

Contents • viii

9 Growing Up Poor in Montreal, 1930–1960: Lise Payette, France Théoret, Denise Bombardier, Marcelle Brisson, and Adèle Lauzon 10 Giving Birth to Oneself in Writing: The Struggle with the Mother 11 Trapped in the Image: Nelly Arcan’s Autofictions Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

210 229 256 276 281 297 311

A c kn o wl edgm ent s

I am grateful to the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program for a generous translation grant which made my work on this English-language version of my book possible. Sincere thanks also to the excellent team at McGill-Queen’s University Press, especially Mark Abley, Colleen Gray, Ryan Van Huijstee, and Philip Cercone, who steered the book through its various phases with great care, expertise, generosity, and patience. My thanks again to those who helped with the original French edition published by Éditions du Boréal in 2014, especially my editor Jean Bernier, and to Lori Saint-Martin, Andrée Lévesque, and Yvan Lamonde, who read and commented on the original manuscript.

Au thor ’s N o te on th e E ngl i sh Transl a t i on

This book is my own translation of a work I originally wrote in French, which was published by Éditions du Boréal in 2014 under the title De Marie de l’Incarnation à Nelly Arcan: Se dire, se faire par l’écriture intime. A study of Quebec women’s autobiographical writings from New France to the present day, it aims to make these writings (many of which are unpublished) visible and accessible, to be read not only for what they reveal about women’s lives, but for the perspective they offer on Quebec history. The title of the work draws attention to the two important writers who open and close my study: Marie de l’Incarnation, the seventeenth-century mystic and founder of the Quebec Ursulines, and Nelly Arcan, the brilliant young woman who achieved notoriety and star status in Quebec and France with the publication of her autobiographical novel Putain (Whore) in 2001, and who committed suicide in 2009, at the age of thirty-six. I have made very few modifications to the French text, cutting at most a paragraph or two which seemed unnecessarily complicated for English-language readers and adding notes or brief descriptions in the text to identify public figures or cultural phenomena which might be unfamiliar to anglophones. As many if not all the texts I discuss are relatively unknown, I have quoted from them at length in order to allow my readers to hear the voices of these women who have been silenced by history for so long. When English translations of the texts were available, I have quoted from them. All other translations are my own.

Writing Herself into Being

I n troduct i on

This book grew out of a desire to explore the experiences of the women who lived through and made possible the key moments of Quebec’s history: the arrival of the French in the New World, the years preceding the British Conquest and the two centuries of Church-dominated submission that followed it, and, finally, the period of individual and collective freedom that began with the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. Feminist historians have described the reality of these women’s lives,1 in particular of those exceptions among them who broke out of the private sphere and became actors in the public realm, but we rarely hear their own voices or get a glimpse of their inner struggles or their perspective on the world around them. My original plan was to write a study of women’s autobiography in Quebec, but I soon became aware of the surprising fact that there are no autobiographies by women in the three centuries that separate Marie de l’Incarnation’s spiritual autobiography, written in 1654, and Claire Martin’s In an Iron Glove, published in 1965. Coincidentally, Martin’s autobiography devotes considerable space to a depiction of the Ursuline convent in Quebec City founded by Marie de l’Incarnation in 1639, where she was a boarder as a child in the 1920s. While in Marie de l’Incarnation’s work the convent is presented as the backdrop to an adventure of spiritual growth and love, as the sisters welcome their native pupils and learn their languages, Claire Martin portrays it as a prison-like institution run by narrow-minded, sadistic nuns bent on crushing out all traces of individuality in their pupils. Struck by the contrast between these two landmark autobiographical works, I began to search for material that would shed light on the ideological developments and personal repressions that took place in the intervening centuries, shifting my focus to women’s correspondences and private diaries.

Writing her self into being • 4

In the initial stages of my research, the title that seemed logical for the book that was taking shape was a depressing one – “Absence d’autobiographies, autobiographies de l’absence” (“Absence of Autobiographies, Autobiographies of Absence”) – for not only are there relatively few autobiographies by women in the Quebec tradition, those that do exist tend to exhibit a psychic fragility which is quite the opposite of the robust sense of self one instinctively associates with autobiography. And yet, from the beginning, women were writing: their testimonies appear in the annals of the religious communities and in the correspondences and diaries that were for so long the only forms of writing deemed acceptable for their sex. As I turned to these other forms of writing the self, the pieces of the puzzle initially posed by the absence of female voices began to come together. In New France, the annals of the Sisters of the Hôtel-Dieu of Quebec and of Montreal, as well as the fragments that remain of a memoir written by Marguerite Bourgeoys and, most importantly, the correspondence of Marie de l’Incarnation, give an idea of the motivations that led these nuns to leave the security of their for the most part cloistered lives in France and evoke the very different lives they led after arriving in a country defined by cold, snow, vast spaces, and the constant threat of Iroquois attacks. After the Conquest, in spite of increasing pressures of censorship and self-censorship as women’s role came to be defined more and more restrictively, women and girls found expression in letters or diaries, leaving behind writings hidden away in drawers and passed on in some families from generation to generation, but all too often lost or destroyed with the passage of time. The book is organized in a way that allows for analysis of these different genres of personal writing but also advances chronologically from colonial times to the present. In part 1, “Living and Writing for God: The Mystical Era,” we will see a concept of self and writing that gravitates around the divine presence both in content and form – most strikingly in Marie de l’Incarnation’s autobiography, which is addressed to her divine lover and structured around the action of his grace in her life. In all of these texts, even in the impersonal style that characterizes the annals of the religious communities, one detects a female voice or tone quite different from that of the other major source of information on this period of spiritual effervescence, the Jesuit Relations. While sharing in the missionary ardour and desire for sacrifice and martyrdom of their male counterparts, these women offer a different perspective on New France, a point of view attentive to the concrete details of their daily routines, to their emotional reactions, and even (in the case of Marie de l’Incarnation) to the most intimate nuances of the interior life. Their writings show that

introduction • 5

the New World offered them a paradoxical realization of self, anchored in a project of self-abnegation that flies in the face of our modern concepts of identity. The legacy of these seventeenth-century women – intense and passionate, but ruled by a dualistic mentality that devalues the body and all of the characteristics habitually associated with women – must have weighed heavily on the girls and women of subsequent generations, to whom the founding mothers were presented as models. Often throughout this study I refer to the “Jansenist” Catholicism of traditional French Canada, characterized by a fear of and contempt for the body, in particular of women’s bodies. Jansenism had its origins in seventeenth-century France and flourished during the decades (1630–60) when the religious founders of New France were migrating to the New World. Although condemned as a heresy by the Church in the early eighteenth century, it continued to dominate the Catholicism of French Canada, especially after the Conquest of 1763 and the French Revolution of 1792, both of which events contributed to French-Canadian isolation from outside influences and domination by the Church. For the reader interested in autobiography as a genre, the most striking paradox of these documents is the almost complete absence of any sense of the importance of the individual self. In them the narrating (or narrated) self yearns above all for self-annihilation; yet at the same time they bear out the view of theoreticians of women’s autobiography that for women the boundaries of the self are permeable, and that the female “I” often takes shape in relationship and even fusion with an “Other,” whether mother, children, husband, friends, or God.2 As Marie de l’Incarnation beautifully put it: “The soul, attached to God as the centre of its rest and its pleasure, acquires extraordinary power” (Corr., 747). Elsewhere, even more graphically, she says of God: “C’est mon moi,” “He is my self.”3 Part 2, “Writing for the Other: Correspondences (1748–1862),” looks at the missives of two women who observed their society from a privileged point of view: Élisabeth Bégon and Julie Bruneau Papineau. Taken together, the letters of the two women cover the period from the final years of the French Régime up until the Rebellions of 1837–38 and beyond, an era during which, following its defeat by the English, French-Canadian society turns in on itself and builds a value system based on faith and the family, both areas seen as women’s domain. As we move from Élisabeth Bégon’s correspondence with her son-in-law (1748–54) to Julie Papineau’s letters to her husband and other members of her family (1823–62), we see women becoming increasingly deprived of agency and restricted to the maternal role. Both Madame Bégon and Julie Papineau are strong women with definite and often critical views of their society as well as dominant

Writing her self into being • 6

roles within their families. But their letters reveal an inner fragility, strikingly different from the unshakable faith of the nuns of New France. Unlike the nuns, for whom the new country provided a space where dreams could come true, these women often dream of being elsewhere (“I am only at ease in places I’m not in,”4 writes the young Julie Papineau to her husband) and seem uncertain of their identity. Given the fact that we are dealing with correspondences, it is not surprising that this identity is expressed in relation to another. But the epistolary form is only one of the elements that contribute to the impression one has, on reading these letters, that the male interlocutor of these women is perceived as a stronger and more solid Other compensating for a certain emptiness, lack of satisfaction, or insecurity on the part of the letter writer. In the place formerly occupied by God, we now find a man – whether a husband, a son, or another member of the family. Around the mid-nineteenth century, the private diary began to come into fashion, offering a new means of self-expression for girls and women. In part 3, “Writing for Oneself: The Private Diary (1843–1964),” I look at more than a dozen of these, of which only two – the diaries of Henriette Dessaulles (1874–81) and Joséphine Marchand (1880–97) – have been published. These diaries offer multiple perspectives on the lives of women and young girls during a period when conservative Catholicism dominated all aspects of life and of the educational system. For the first time, girls and women could explore all facets of their personal lives and their situations in the world for themselves, and no longer solely in relation to another person. In the jottings in their notebooks we see the emergence of the question “Who am I?” – a preoccupation with identity and purpose that will, all too often, prove incompatible with the roles of wife, mother, or nun that each of the diarists will eventually have to accept. These often multivolume diaries – from the one in which Angélique Hay Des Rivières (the wife of an important landowner in the Eastern Townships) records the events of the daily life of her family and community from 1843 to 1872 with barely a mention of her own feelings to the twenty volumes to which novelist Michelle Le Normand confided her joys, doubts, and anxieties from 1909 to 1964 – trace an evolution towards modernity that touches every aspect of women’s lives, even as the image of the “queen of the hearth” (the mythical, all-powerful mother exalted in the pulpits and in political discourse) becomes more and more firmly entrenched in the public consciousness. Behind this monolithic image imposed on women, the diaries reveal the infinitely varied reactions of girls and women, ranging from conformity to rebellion, from total fulfilment in the mother role (Lady Lacoste) to the activism of a pioneer of women’s rights (Joséphine Marchand).

introduction • 7

In part 4, “Writing Oneself into History: The Age of Autobiography (1965–2012),” I trace the evolution of women’s autobiography since the Quiet Revolution, from Claire Martin’s In an Iron Glove to the brilliant autofictional works of the recent and tragically deceased young Nelly Arcan. While Claire Martin’s autobiography gave rise to controversy because of her searing account of the violence and hypocrisy of early twentieth-century French Canada, Arcan’s autofictions Whore and Hysteric expose an equally scandalous hypocrisy and violence, seen from the point of view of a young woman who plays the game of postmodern consumer society to the point of her own destruction. Both Martin and Arcan portray the immense difficulty for women in achieving self-expression and agency, whether because of the social and religious pressures of the era Martin depicts or the objectification of women in the images that dominate contemporary society as reflected in Arcan’s work. Between the chapters devoted to the work of these two authors, I have placed two thematic chapters, which illustrate in a more general way this difficult quest for autonomy. The first (“Growing Up Poor in Montreal, 1930–60”) examines works by five women – Lise Payette, Denise Bombardier, France Théoret, Marcelle Brisson, and Adèle Lauzon – who entered the middle class thanks to the social changes of the Quiet Revolution, becoming the first representatives in this book of a class other than the bourgeoisie. The second (“Giving Birth to Oneself in Writing: The Struggle with the Mother”) deals with a preoccupation common to almost all women’s autobiographies: the relationship of the authors/narrators with their mothers. In all these texts, one is struck by the immense struggle required of these women in order to achieve personal freedom and escape the influence of powerful and stifling mothers, often trapped in the mother role themselves and determined not to let their daughters escape it. The best known of these works is Gabrielle Roy’s magnificent autobiography Enchantment and Sorrow, written in the final years of the author’s life. The chapter opens with a brief look at two autobiographical films dealing with the mother-daughter relationship: Anne-Claire Poirier’s Tu as crié LET ME GO (You cried LET ME GO) (1996) and Paule Baillargeon’s Trente tableaux (Thirty images) (2012). As well, it examines the autobiographies or autobiographical novels of six other writers – Thérèse Renaud, Paule Saint-Onge, Denise Desautels, Diane-Monique Daviau, France Théoret, and Francine Noël. What, exactly, is autobiography, then, and how have women changed it over the centuries? I will look at these questions in more detail in chapter 8, on Claire Martin, restricting myself for the moment to some general observations about autobiography, its cultural context, and

Writing her self into being • 8

women’s relationship to it. The first spiritual autobiography of the Western tradition, Saint Augustine’s Confessions, written in the fourth century, had an enormous influence on the post-Renaissance period, giving rise to numerous spiritual autobiographies, of which the most famous was written by a sixteenth-century woman and saint, Teresa of Avila. But the sixteenth century is also the period when subjectivity begins to be considered apart from the relationship with God (in France, the appearance of Montaigne’s Essays in 1580 marks a key moment in this evolution of the concept of self). According to George Gusdorf, autobiography as a literary genre is indissociable from this historical moment when it became possible for an individual to reflect on the meaning of his temporal existence.5 Theoreticians of women’s autobiography have argued, however, that Gusdorf ’s “individual” is decidedly male and that women’s identity has been constructed in terms of her relationships rather than in isolation from them. On the level of literary form, this “relationality” so important to women leads to works in which the author/narrator often speaks of herself indirectly, through the filter of the others (mother, husband, or children) to whom she has been conditioned to subordinate her own needs and desires. When placed in the context of the whole body of personal writings (by men as well as women) in French Canada, the absence of autobiographies by women for three centuries becomes less shocking than it first appeared. Two important research tools – the critical bibliography Je me souviens: La littérature personnelle au Québec (1860–1980) by Yvan Lamonde6 and La littérature intime du Québec by Françoise Van RoeyRoux, a thematic overview of the same material – stress the impersonal tone of all these writings, noting that the authors speak more readily of historical events or cultural practices than of their own experiences or feelings. Almost all these texts are written by men (Lamonde lists only 33 works by women out of a total number of 366 for the period before 1980), and Van Roey-Roux deplores the consequences of this disequilibrium in terms of our knowledge of women’s lives. “We know almost nothing about what a woman before 1950 really thought or felt. No one has ever told us,”7 she writes. According to Pierre Hébert, this absence, or fear, of expressing oneself in writing, often identifiable by the substitution of “we” for “I” in the narrative perspective, seems to enter the collective consciousness after the Conquest and is the symptom of a colonized mentality. Hébert’s study deals only with the personal diary, for which he establishes a periodization demonstrating that a more or less autonomous “I” emerges in the 1930s and has gained considerable strength by the 1950s: “Beaten down, denied, burned, resurrected, the self is like a cork that can be pushed

introduction • 9

under the water, but can pop up again at any time. And the more it is pushed down, the stronger it gets.”8 In order for an autobiography to exist, there must not only be a subject with a strong enough sense of self to be able to affirm his or her difference from the surrounding world, but also an audience capable of appreciating or supporting such self-revelation. In their imposing volume L’autobiographie,9 Jacques Lecarme and Éliane Lecarme-Tabone remind us that the first great autobiographer of the modern period, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was Protestant, and note that autobiography is a genre more suited to that religion, with its emphasis on the individual examination of conscience, than to Catholicism, with its more authoritarian and secret practice of confession. As Gusdorf argued, autobiography is the product of cultures that value the individual. And, as Pierre Vadeboncœur suggests in La ligne du risque, such a culture was unthinkable in Quebec before the dramatic break signalled by the publication of Paul-Émile Borduas’s manifesto Refus global in 1948. Vadeboncœur argues that the period between the Rebellion of 1837 and Refus global was a time during which spirit or mind (defined broadly as intellectual curiosity, spiritual values, the creative urge, and a questioning of both the divine and the human) was repressed in favour of an all-embracing conformity: “We sacrificed freedom of mind to immobility […] We were children crushed by an authoritarian father,”10 he writes. This image of children crushed by an authoritarian father, which for Vadeboncœur represents the situation of all French Canadians before the Quiet Revolution, is also at the heart of Claire Martin’s autobiography, and perhaps explains its extraordinary impact.11 At a time when French-Canadian society was commonly referred to as a “matriarchy,” Martin foregrounded the father, a tyrannical figure allied with the clergy who denied his wife and children any possibility of freedom or self-expression. Recounting her own childhood, she was speaking on behalf of a whole people. Similarly, France Théoret, whose entire literary output (poetry, novels, short stories, and nonfiction) is anchored in autobiographical experience, denounces the destructive effect of traditional French-Canadian culture on the individual self. That culture, characterized by a “refusal of the first person,” she argues, “failed to tolerate even the slightest suggestion of individuality.”12 Théoret’s tenacious struggle for self-expression against the seemingly insurmountable obstacles created by her family, her economic situation, and the fact of being female is emblematic of the struggle of all the women whose writings will be examined in this book. In her autobiographical novel Une belle education (Such a Good Education), the protagonist recalls the atmosphere of the pre-Quiet Revolution years, a time when it

Writing her self into being • 10

was “impossible to speak of oneself […] Those who speak of themselves are vain and boastful, self-centred egotists.”13 As well, far earlier than Claire Martin and France Théoret, the young nineteenth-century diarist Henriette Dessaulles had observed with remarkable lucidity the irresolvable conflict between the needs of her self and the demands of her society: “Poor little me, you will be ogled, supervised, looked after, babied! They will try to mold you, shape you, perfect you! They will take everything from you, your time, your will, your tastes, they’ll try to steal your impressions, direct your affections, soften your character […] And what will that lead to? […] Alas! If they succeed you will no longer be yourself and if they fail you’ll be the most miserable of little girls, because you’ll be the most persecuted!”14 The works that will be examined in the following chapters are not necessarily “representative” of women’s voices; they are, quite simply, the voices of women who dared to express themselves in writing and whose writings were preserved, often because the authors were the daughters or wives of influential men. There are, however, certain themes or preoccupations that recur across the generations, notably motherhood and the constant struggle for girls and women to reconcile the demands of self and other, body and spirit. In a very real sense, all the girls and women we will meet in these pages can be considered “daughters of Marie de l’Incarnation” because of the similar convent school education they received. Despite their differences in temperament, family background, and era, all had instilled in them a set of values supposedly inspired by the nuns of New France and the expectation that they would live up to these impossible ideals. Even our contemporary Nelly Arcan presents her choice of becoming a prostitute as the logical consequence of the education she received from the nuns: “Dry women, exalted by the sacrifice they had made of their lives, women whom I was made to call mothers.”15 According to E.D. Blodgett, there are two narratives, one of which originated with the Jesuits and the other with Marie de l’Incarnation, that run through traditional French-Canadian culture and are presented as the only roles worthy of aspiration: for men, to imitate the life of the Eternal Son, and for women, to become the transcendant Mother.16 In the area of maternity, as in all others, Marie de l’Incarnation is a paradoxical model. By abandoning her young son when she entered the Ursulines in 1631, she transgressed the ultimate taboo for women, choosing to break with the maternal role in order to accomplish her own destiny. And yet she was presented to young girls as the model of spiritual maternity, with no attention paid to the guilt about abandoning her son that haunted her all her life. The image of the Virgin and Child at the heart of the dream

introduction • 11

that first predicted she would travel to New France17 became the powerful and intimidating model against which the girls and young women of future generations were expected to measure themselves. One senses an echo of this model in the melancholy love, as maternal as it is passionate, expressed by Élisabeth Bégon in her letters to the absent son-in-law she addresses as “dear son,” written during the final years of the French Regime in Canada. By the last half of the nineteenth century, a woman’s role had been precisely defined as that of wife and mother – the reine du foyer, “queen of the hearth,” condemned to multiple pregnancies and responsible for the Catholic education of her children. Even as it denied them autonomy, this role gave women a compensatory power within the family, one that was frequently used at the expense of their husbands and children. The young Julie Papineau complains constantly about the restrictions of her life as the mother of a large family, confined to her house in Old Montreal while her husband Louis-Joseph enjoys a much more interesting existence in Quebec City as head of the government of Lower Canada. But her letters reveal how, over time, she gradually becomes a version of the dominating mother figure familiar in French-Canadian mythology, externalizing her own frustrations through constant criticisms of her husband and children. After her, for more than a century, a long list of young girls and women will complain in their diaries and autobiographies about the overpowering influence of these mothers, disappointed by life, who attempt to maintain their power by denying freedom to their daughters. The texts examined in this book speak all too often of crushed or repressed selves that – like Pierre Hébert’s cork, which pops up to the surface each time it is pushed underwater – nonetheless refuse to abandon their struggle for existence. For all the women who wrote them, the act of putting pen to paper was an essential part of the search for self and for agency. While important for the glimpses of social reality they offer, their writings are equally significant as works of literature.

PART O NE

• Li v i n g an d Wri t i ng for G od: T h e M y s t i cal E ra

Modern autobiography and the adventure of New France have their origins in the same epistemological crisis, one which shook sixteenthcentury Europe to its foundations, demolishing the old religious, scientific, and geographical certainties and opening up a space for the expression of the individual self. Torn apart by bloody religious wars, new scientific discoveries, and the awareness of faraway territories to explore, the closed and hierarchical medieval universe collapsed. Thanks to the existence of the printing press, people had access for the first time to the stories of others and began to believe in the legitimacy of their own points of view on the world around them. According to historian Yves Krumenacker, “the frame of everyday existence begins to change and people are forced to look within themselves for certainty. It is for this reason that the question of the subject becomes central to consciousness. Truth is no longer to be found in the world, which seems fragile and even illusory, but within the self […] It is on the basis of the self that the universe can be reconstructed.”1 In France, in the first decades of the seventeenth century, the reforms of the Catholic Counter Reformation were affecting all aspects of religious life, and there was a mystical fervour in the air. By the 1630s, thanks in large part to the accounts of New France circulated in the Jesuit Relations, the cloistered nuns who would later be the foundresses of New France were beginning to envisage the possibility of religious lives other than the extremely restricted ones imposed on them by the Council of Trent in 1615. Inflamed by love of God, they began to dream of sacrificing their lives in the missions of New France, bringing the “Savages” of these unknown lands into the arms of Christ. In spite of the many changes in their lives that accompanied their arrival in the New World, the nuns brought with them the practice of writing, recording the principal events

Par t One • 14

and activities of their communities in Annales, or annual reports, which are the first women’s writings in the Quebec literary tradition. I will examine these annals of the religious orders in chapter 1, seeking to extract from them a sense of the motivations, accomplishments, and disappointments of these women and attempting to determine what, if anything, might constitute the gender specificity of their writing. Despite the great interest in spiritual autobiography that characterized the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the idea that women might record their spiritual experiences in writing was far from being accepted. On the rare occasions when women dared to take up the pen to speak of themselves, whether in correspondences or autobiographies, they invariably excused themselves for their audacity, using misogynistic formulas such as those frequently employed by Marie de l’Incarnation, whose boldest demands on the authorities during the years when she was seeking support for the unprecedented idea that a woman should go to New France are always accompanied by apologies for her gender. Later, near the end of her voluminous spiritual autobiography of 1654, she states that she could have written “a large volume” had she not been limited by “the awareness of my indignity and the lowliness of my sex.”2 Since the Middle Ages, numerous women had become known for their extraordinary spiritual experiences, but the works in which these experiences were recounted were invariably presented and made legitimate by a male author (usually the woman’s spiritual director). Often, if a spiritual director ordered a woman to write an account of her spiritual experiences, it was to confirm that her story had nothing heretical about it or to protect her against attacks of heresy (as was the case for Teresa of Avila, who wrote her famous spiritual autobiography at the height of the Spanish Inquisition in the sixteenth century). It is not surprising that many of the great mystics of the Middle Ages and early modern period were women, given their exclusion from the educational systems which initiated men into the language of hierarchy, reason, and logic that dominated the spiritual discourse of the times. Françoise Collin reminds us that the female mystics were strong women who often struggled against authority, founded communities, and dared to think for themselves: “By relating to God directly, they could forego the need to depend on men. Given women’s lack of ability to control their human alliances and their lack of autonomy in the domestic sphere, choosing to marry God was to choose freedom.”3 Teresa of Avila, whom Marie de l’Incarnation read as a young girl, is clearly vaunting the freedom offered by religious life as opposed to the constraints of marriage when

Living and Writing for g od • 15

she says to her novices: “Here, they say, is what the woman who wants to live in harmony with her husband has to do: if he is sad, she must appear sad; if he is happy she must act happy too, even if she only knows sadness. Consider in passing, my sisters, what subjection you are freed from. For here, without the shadow of a doubt, is the way Our Lord acts with us. He makes himself your subject and desires that you should be sovereign. He submits to your desires. Are you happy? Contemplate him resurrected. Are you frustrated or sad? Think of him in the Garden of Olives.”4 The two autobiographical Relations of Marie de l’Incarnation, which will be examined in chapter 2, were written under the orders or insistence of men, and the document that combines the two versions, published in Paris in 1677 by her son, Dom Claude Martin, five years after the death of his mother, is introduced, edited, and modified to some extent by him in order to make it acceptable to a religious milieu which had become extremely suspicious of mysticism by the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Thanks in part to this strategy on the part of her son, Marie’s account of her experiences is the only spiritual autobiography by a woman except that of Teresa of Avila to have escaped the wrath of the powerful French bishop, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, who goes so far as to call Marie “the Teresa of our times and of the New World.”5 Although it may seem regrettable that the extraordinary writings of this woman are only accessible to us as filtered through a male gaze, we must be grateful to Claude Martin, without whom they would be unknown to us today. For without the insistence of her son, Marie would never have undertaken the 1654 autobiography. Like many women who have dared to write over the centuries she was horrified by the idea of exposing the secrets of her inner life. On being asked by one of her former confessors for information about her spiritual experiences, she replied: “I will tell you because you ask, but please respect my secrets, and burn this paper, I beg you.”6 The following two chapters highlight the apparent contradiction between the remarkable strength these women attained thanks to their faith in God and the self-abasement associated with being a woman so often found in their writings. The contradiction is pushed to its limits in Marie de l’Incarnation’s autobiographies, which recount the painful journey towards the mystical goal of self-annihilation as experienced by a strong woman, linked by every fiber of her being to her earthly loves. Pierre Nepveu perceptively describes these writings as “an interior adventure in which a woman ceaselessly analyses herself, recalling the minutest details of her spiritual progress and the subtlest reactions of her body.”7 Marie’s desire for self-annihilation is echoed, to a lesser degree, in the

Par t One • 16

writings of the other foundresses. All of these women display an admirable strength and commitment in their writings, but one is struck by their constant insistence on their desire to suffer, to die, and to lose themselves in God – a problematic way for an autobiographical tradition to begin.

C h ap t e r 1

A P la c e fo r th e S p i r i t : C anada as D ream a n d Re ali ty i n the Aut obi o g rap hi cal Wr i ti n g s o f the Wom en of Ne w France

Canada was described to us as a place of horror, people [in France] called it the suburbs of hell, and said that a more contemptible society did not exist. Our experience is the opposite, for we find here a Paradise. Marie de l’Incarnation, 4 September 1640 What God had not willed in Troyes, He would perhaps bring to pass in Montreal. Marguerite Bourgeoys, Écrits, 1697

At the origins of the autobiographical tradition in Quebec literature are the writings of four women, all members of religious orders, who played major roles in seventeenth-century New France. Two of these women were born in France: Marie de l’Incarnation, the great mystic and foundress of the Quebec Ursuline order, and Marguerite Bourgeoys, the colony’s first teacher, who came to New France as a layperson but later founded the uncloistered institution of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame to ensure the continuity of her work and mutual support for the women who had joined her in her mission. Marie’s writings include her spiritual autobiography of 16541 (Écrits) and a voluminous correspondence (Corr.);2 Marguerite Bourgeoys is the author of a volume of memoirs, composed in 1697 at the age of seventy-eight (MB).3 The two others – Sisters Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau de Saint-Ignace of the Hospitalières de Saint-Augustin and Marie Morin of the Hospitalières de Saint-Joseph – are the Canadian-born authors, respectively, of the Annales of the HôtelDieu of Quebec (1636–1716) (Juchereau)4 and of Montreal (1659–1725) (Morin).5 Their Annales, written primarily as records of the history of their communities, rely on oral history as well as on documents conserved

Living and Writing for g od • 18

within the community to recount the migration from France to the New World as experienced by their founding members. Juchereau’s Annales in particular is a layered work: it quotes at length from the written account of the early years by Mère Marie de Saint-Bonaventure (Marie Forestier), one of the three Hospitalières de Saint-Augustin (Augustinian) sisters who emigrated along with Marie de l’Incarnation and two other Ursulines in 1639, and it was completed and prepared for publication by another member of the order, Marie-Andrée Duplessis de Sainte-Hélène, who was born in France but emigrated to Quebec in 1702, at the age of fifteen. With the exception of the spiritual autobiography and the letters of Marie de l’Incarnation, these accounts are much closer to the traditional definition of memoir than they are to autobiography. Their aim is to record historical events, and their authors rarely indulge in the expression of personal feelings or individual reflections. Often, particularly in the Annales, the “we” that narrates them seems to be the collective voice of the community, distilled from the individual voices of all the members whose stories have been passed on from generation to generation. Written either for younger sisters of the religious communities or for readers in France whose support had to be enlisted for the missionary venture, they are often edifying in tone and intent, and present an idealized view of reality. Taken together, though, they provide a woman-centred view of migration from France to Canada, narrated with a down-to-earth quality and even a humour that contrasts with the heroic and tragic tone of the male-authored Jesuit Relations. in fr An Ce : the dreAM tAKeS Sh APe

Although many of the women’s religious orders in France were founded as noncloistered teaching or nursing orders in the sixteenth century or earlier, by the early seventeenth century the reforms of the Catholic Counter Reformation had imposed strict rules of clausura or cloistering on them. As Elizabeth Rapley explains, this regulation, formalized by the Council of Trent in 1615, came at a time of spiritual effervescence, when many women were caught up in the mysticism that had swept through Europe during the Counter Reformation and were experimenting with new forms of religious life. The Council, however, saw female religious above all as virgins who must be sealed off from the world, reducing female sanctity to a single characteristic: chastity. According to the new regulations, the walls of women’s monasteries must be “high enough to close off any view, either from within or from without. The entrances were to be locked and double-locked, [and] spaces where the nuns came close to the outside

Autobiographical Writings of the Women of new france • 19

world – the parlour, the church – were to be protected by narrow-meshed grilles.”6 No men were allowed to enter the cloister, not even priests; nor were mature women, who were seen as worldly and therefore as objects of temptation. Rapley mentions that when Marie de l’Incarnation entered the Ursuline monastery in Tours in 1631 at the age of thirty-one, all fifty-eight of the other nuns in the convent were under the age of sixteen. Such an emphasis on radical separation from the world at an early age made for submissive nuns, treated as children by their bishops, women who tended to regard the world outside the convent walls as corrupt and dangerous – a view borne out by reality in the case of the Augustinian nun Mère Jeanne de Sainte-Marie, a beautiful young woman who had entered the convent for protection after being kidnapped and raped by a nobleman (Juchereau, 32). The challenge to the practice of cloistering posed by New France came less from any awareness of its injustice to women than from the necessities of the colonial venture. Like all the other colonizing nations in the New World, France wanted to create a country in its own image. But unlike the others, it saw the native peoples not as enemies to be exploited or exterminated, nor even primarily as trading partners, but rather as “barbarian brothers to be brought into the circle of the family and civilized by the Gospel.”7 The missionary aim made France unique as well in having women in the New World not only in the traditional roles of wife and mother, but as active and central partners in the colonial enterprise, which was seen as “a work of spiritual maternity.”8 By the 1630s the Jesuit missionaries had become aware that the Indian boys and men they were attempting to educate would fall back into “barbarianism” unless their women were also educated into the French way of life. Because of the rules of the cloister, there was no question of inviting French nuns to emigrate; but in his Relation of 1634 the Jesuit superior Paul Le Jeune made an impassioned plea for some generous laywomen to offer their services to the colony as teachers and hospital workers. A year later, he comments with amazement on the huge response he has received – not from laywomen, but from within the convents of France: “All the women consecrated to Our Lord want to be part of our venture, surmounting the fear natural to their sex, to help the poor daughters and wives of the Savages. There are so many of them who write to us, and from so many monasteries […] that you would say they are competing to see who can be the first to mock the difficulties of the sea, the mutinies of the ocean, and the savageness of the land.”9 The written accounts of Marie de l’Incarnation and the other nuns who would emigrate to Canada give an idea of the excitement generated within the convents at the possibility of a missionary vocation. Surprisingly, for

Living and Writing for g od • 20

these women who sought union with God through the total abnegation of self, the vast and forbidding expanses of the New World represented not an escape from the cloistered way of life but an extreme and exotic extension of it. Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau writes, for example, of the founding mothers of her community that “they were convinced that they could only satisfy their zeal and fulfil their vocation in Canada by following the Barbarians into the woods as the missionary fathers did; taking pleasure in living hidden from the world, unknown, in complete separation and total abnegation of all things, entirely abandoned to the care of Providence; and finally, expecting and hoping to find nothing loveable except God in this country of the cross” (Juchereau, 12). The opportunity for sacrifice and even martyrdom stoked the fires of imaginations already attuned to excess by the baroque sensibilities of their era and practised in the discipline of self-mortification. Marie de l’Incarnation wrote to her spiritual director in 1635: “I envisage the hardships, both on the sea and in the country, I envisage what it is to live with Barbarians, the danger of dying there of hunger or cold, the many occasions when one might be seized […] and I find no change at all in the disposition of my spirit” (Corr., 27). And the three Augustinian nuns who would emigrate with her and two other Ursulines in 1639, far from being deterred by the rumours they had heard that the indigenous peoples were “mangeurs d’hommes,” “cannibals,” “thought only of their desire to sacrifice themselves for God, and […] encouraged each other by heroic stories, considering themselves exiles for the glory of God” (Juchereau, 12). These rumours were more than idle imaginings; Marie de l’Incarnation had received letters from Jesuits telling of their near escapes from death at the hands of the natives, and the Jesuit Relations of the 1640s contained lurid descriptions of captives of the Iroquois who had been eaten, as well as of the torture and execution of Isaac Jogues and several other Jesuits. By 1659, at the height of the Iroquois raids on Montreal, Marie Morin reports that the three Hospitalières de Saint-Joseph preparing for their voyage to that city paid little attention to the material things that would be needed in their new life, “thinking only of abandoning everything.” Others in the community looked after the practical details, “not wanting these victims to have any thoughts other than that of their immolation, of preparing themselves to suffer martyrdom by the Iroquois” (Morin, 86). Morin mentions the pain felt by the members of the French order at seeing three of their best novices depart for Canada, “which had the reputation of being a lost country for which even the best people felt horror” (Morin, 87). And Marie de l’Incarnation, writing to her son six years after her arrival in New France, recalls the fear of the nuns in France associated with the idea

Autobiographical Writings of the Women of new france • 21

of the New World: “I knew nothing about Canada, and when I heard the word I believed it had been invented to frighten children” (Corr., 270). Often strengthened by dreams or visions in which God or the Virgin Mary clarified the direction they should take, these women braved incredible obstacles even before leaving France – not only the opposition of many of their families and of church authorities, but a generalized social disapproval of women who dared to travel, even within France. Marie Morin comments on the heroism of one of the nuns, Sœur Macé, for whom it was literally a torture to leave the cloister: “When I think that sœur Macé was determined to come out of her cloister and come to Canada, it seems to me a supernatural marvel, for it involved being seen on the roads and on the sea, and being among laypeople both day and night. Yes, my sisters, with the temperament she had, that was a true martyrdom and a totally heroic act” (Morin, 91). She tells as well of the superior of one of the order’s convents, Sœur Pilon, who had been refused permission to go to Canada despite the fact that she had been praying and fasting for several months in the hope of such a permission. As she bids goodbye to the other nuns, Sœur Pilon says, “Yes, my sister[s], yes, I will go to Canada and soon. Men are refusing me this grace, but God will grant it to me.” Eight days later, the nuns learn of her death and are informed that, against the advice of her superiors, she had made arrangements in secret for a man and a horse to transport her to La Rochelle, where she would join the others. Blocked in her attempt, “she died a few days later of the sadness and frustration of not being able to go to Canada, which she regarded as a country of holiness and perpetual martyrdom” (Morin, 88). In the writings of both Marie de l’Incarnation and Marguerite Bourgeoys one senses an awareness of the fact that they are radically transgressing traditional gender roles. Marie writes incessantly to those who are in a position to help her achieve her desire to go to New France, always apologizing for her temerity in daring to aspire to such a calling. “Forgive me, my dear Father, if the violent desire that has taken hold of me makes me say things I’m ashamed even to imagine because of my lowliness,” she writes to her spiritual director, insisting on the “shame” she feels “for having feelings that were inappropriate to my sex and my condition” (Corr., 26–7). In 1636, she wrote to Paul Le Jeune of her desire to go to Canada: “If such be the will of God, there is nothing in this world that can stop me, even if I were to be overcome by waves on the voyage” (Corr., 60). Marguerite Bourgeoys is similarly fortified in her moments of doubt by a sense of supernatural intervention. Reading between the lines of her memoirs, one senses the immense fear and hesitation she must have felt when Paul de Chomedy de Maisonneuve, the first governor of

Living and Writing for g od • 22

Montreal, announced that if she accepted his invitation she would be the sole woman to accompany the 108 men he was taking with him to the New World. Somewhat reassured by her confessor about the advisability of setting out for “the ends of the earth” with this man she barely knows, she still hesitates, until, she writes: “One morning, when I was completely awake, [I saw] a tall woman dressed in a white serge dress, [who] said distinctly to me: ‘Go, I will not abandon you’; and I knew that it was the Blessed Virgin, although I didn’t see her face. This reassured me about the voyage, gave me great courage, and I didn’t find anything difficult after that” (MB, 27–8). Marguerite’s description of her experiences travelling by coach in 1653 from Troyes to Paris and then on to Orléans and Nantes in preparation for embarcation, provides a vivid picture of the social disapproval and dangers to which travelling women were subjected in mid-seventeenth-century France. Once again, it is necessary to “read between the lines” to get a full sense of her courage, resourcefulness, and sense of humour. She left Troyes, she writes, “without a cent and without a suitcase, with only a small package that I could carry under my arm.” Not until she was in the carriage did she announce to the uncle who had agreed to accompany her to Paris that she was leaving for Canada; his reaction is that she is joking. Upon arrival in Paris, she takes legal steps to give up entitlement to her inheritance, and notes with relief the departure of her uncle: “I was freed of unpleasantness from that direction” (MB, 28). In Orléans, she is refused lodging and forced to remain in the carriage while the male travellers sleep in the inn, all the while being subjected to what she calls “objectionable” talk from the men. In another inn she is the object of an attempt at rape: she barricades the door of her room and sleeps fully dressed, only to discover on awakening that her room is separated by only a curtain from “a pile of men sleeping on the floor after a night of debauchery” (MB, 29). The final obstacle placed in her way is an intervention from the provincial father of the Carmelite Order, whose convent in Troyes had refused her admittance several years earlier. Now, undoubtedly alerted by her family that she is to be stopped in her mad venture, he tells her she will be welcomed by the Carmelites; in fact he has written to de Maisonneuve to inform him that this is Marguerite’s true vocation. Feeling intense pressure and guilt, she visits the Capuchin chapel in Nantes where she finds the Blessed Sacrament exposed. “In an instant,” she writes, “all my troubles were over. I received then a very great strength and a strong certainty that I must go to Canada” (MB, 30).

Autobiographical Writings of the Women of new france • 23 ne W fr AnC e : the JOy fOund i n Suffe ri ng

While these women had dreamed of great and dramatic sacrifice, the hardships of the day-to-day reality that awaited them in Canada must have come as a surprise to them. Some of the details of this reality are captured in the diary of Mère de Saint-Bonaventure (Marie Forestier), quoted in Juchereau’s Annales, which notes that, when their ship was delayed after its arrival at Tadoussac in July 1639, the six nuns, the Ursuline patron, Mme de la Peltrie, and six Jesuits prevailed upon the captain of a small codfishing boat to find room for them aboard his vessel. “Nothing seemed difficult to us as long as it brought us closer to our loveable place of habitation,” writes Mère de Saint-Bonaventure: “So we got onto the boat and found a place for ourselves on the upper deck, as the rest of the boat was full of cod, which filled the entire boat with quite a bad odour. For several days and nights we suffered a great deal. Lacking bread, we were obliged to scrape up crumbs from the baggage hold, which contained more rat droppings than biscuit; we picked through them to find bits that were edible, and ate them with pieces of dried cod that were raw, as we had no means of cooking them. We were also given a sort of plant, very hard, that grew on the rocks beside the river. When one is very hungry, all of these things taste good” (Juchereau, 17). In Quebec, the Hospitalières de Saint-Augustin sleep for the first few weeks on branches brought in from the woods, which turn out to be “so full of caterpillars that we were covered in them” (Juchereau, 20). Their first patients are some Algonquins infected with smallpox, and they use up all their own linen, even the wimples and cuffs from their habits, to dress the ulcers on their bodies. Nights are spent washing the bedding, which the French women of the colony refuse to touch for fear of contagion. Before the end of the first winter, all three nuns have fallen ill from exhaustion. In what is certainly a prefeminist observation, Mère de Saint-Bonaventure describes the state of the hospital, which has been looked after by the Jesuits during the nuns’ absence, on the return of the first of the nuns to get well: “She found a ménage d’homme [an example of men’s housekeeping], that is, everything was filthy and in disorder: the linens were thrown in all directions, rotten and spoiled, and everything was so full of dirt that she had a terrible time trying to get things clean again” (Juchereau, 24). Having set out for New France with the goal of transforming it into a more spiritual image of the France they had left behind, a place in which the native peoples would be granted the “privilege” of being assimilated into the fold of the Catholic religion and French culture, these women

Living and Writing for god • 24

encountered instead a radical otherness of climate, geography, and culture. Many of their accounts contain vivid descriptions of the extreme cold of Canadian winters and tell of the new kinds of food to which they gradually became accustomed. (The traditional French-Canadian dish of fèves au lard obviously had its origins at this time, when pork and beans were among the few staples available.) Writing to a close friend in Tours at the end of her first year in New France, Marie de l’Incarnation is enthusiastic about the fact that they have survived so well in spite of their extreme poverty, strenuous living conditions, and the unfamiliar food: “We spent the winter as sweetly as in France; and, although we were crammed together in a tiny hole where there was no air, we weren’t sick at all, and never have I felt so strong. If in France we only ate pork fat and salted fish as we do here, we would be ill and we’d have no voice; [but] we are very healthy and we sing better than you do in France. The air is excellent; indeed, this is an earthly Paradise where crosses and thorns arrive so lovingly that the more one is pierced, the more one’s heart is filled with sweetness” (Corr., 109–10). The account of the following winter contained in the Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec reveals the brutal reality behind such an idealized account of the living conditions of these nuns. More exposed than the Ursulines because of their hospital work to the raging epidemic of smallpox that was sweeping through the Algonquin community, two of the tiny group of Hospitalières de Saint-Augustin are gravely ill and coughing blood by the winter of 1641, and their only food is bread, pork, peas, and a few plums and grapes, none of which the sick nuns can tolerate. The sisters spend fifty francs of their meagre savings on a “scrawny calf that wasn’t worth two écus [the equivalent of three francs], but our need for making broth was so desperate that we’d have paid even more for it” (Juchereau, 31). A servant sent to the country to find eggs returns at the end of the day with only one egg, by now frozen, with which the sick nuns profess to be delighted. By March, Mère Jeanne de Sainte-Marie (the nun who had been kidnapped in France) is dead at the age of twentyeight. Mère de Saint-Bonaventure writes of her: “One could say that she experienced nothing but bitterness in Canada, and yet she expressed great joy about the privilege of dying here. She had been here for less than eight months; her weak constitution was unable to stand the rigour of the climate for even a year” (Juchereau, 32). Marie Morin’s description of the conditions in which the Hospitalières de Saint-Joseph sisters lived is even more detailed. She too speaks of their food – small quantities of wheat, pork, peas, beans, and salted eel, with pumpkin for dessert – and concludes that “the love of penance and

Autobiographical Writings of the Women of new france • 25

holy poverty added seasoning to these foods and made them taste good” (Morin, 102–3). Morin writes that “the cold of this country can only be understood by those who have suffered from it.” For more than twentyeight years, she says, the Hospitalières lived in a house with more than two hundred holes in it, with wind and snow filling not only their cells but the stairway, the attic, and the chapel. The first act of the morning was to take shovels and brooms and get rid of the snow blocking the doors and windows. No food was free of the danger of freezing: bread had to be roasted on the fire before each meal, water and wine placed on the table for drinking would be frozen within fifteen minutes, and food served hot would be cold and almost frozen by the time one had finished eating (Morin, 104). Only the mystic Marie de l’Incarnation writes of the spiritual dimensions of Canadian nature. For her, the attraction of Canada was precisely that it represented the space of “admirable nothingness” for which she had always yearned. “It’s true that in Canada the senses do not sustain one; the spirit detaches itself from nature in the pure crosses that are found here,” she writes (Corr., 151). And elsewhere: “Did you know that hearts here have quite different feelings than they do in France? Not sensual feelings, as there are no objects here that flatter the senses; but completely spiritual and divine feelings, for here God wants the heart stripped of all things […] We see […] here a sort of necessity of becoming a saint; either you die, or you assent to it” (Corr., 122); “to truly live the Canadian vocation it is necessary to die to everything; if the soul doesn’t force itself to do this, God will bring it about and will mercilessly crush our nature until it is reduced to this death […] It is impossible for me to express to you what it costs one to reach this point […] But it must be reached, and one must not envisage the possibility of living in this land of blessings except with a new spirit” (Corr., 140–1). In spite of (or perhaps because of) the hardships they endured, it is clear that New France offered these women a space of freedom and self-realization unavailable to them in seventeenth-century France. Marguerite Bourgeoys would found an uncloistered institution open to women of all social groups and financial means, devoted to teaching and counselling the girls and women of the Montreal region, especially the poor. And cloister, while it remained precious and essential for the other orders, was necessarily relaxed somewhat in Canada. Recalling a time during the Iroquois raids of 1644 when the Hospitalières de Saint-Augustin sisters were forced to move out of their convent in Sillery and live for a time in an abandoned house near Quebec, Mère de Saint-Bonaventure reports that they recreated as much as possible the conditions of cloister,

Living and Writing for g od • 26

but languished without the presence of the Blessed Sacrament in their temporary chapel: “It is impossible to imagine how painful it is for nuns to live in the state we were in, without cloister and deprived of all the sweetnesses that are part of regular convent life” (Juchereau, 50). All of these nuns were forced to fight against the ecclesiastical authorities at various points in the development of their communities, however, often in order to convince them that their situation in Canada was different from that of religious communities in France and required different rules. Marie de l’Incarnation realized within a few years of her arrival that the Quebec Ursulines needed their own constitution: “We need one that is specific to this country, not only because we have our own rules, but because there are things that cannot be dealt with in the French manner: the climate, the food, and other circumstances are entirely different,” she wrote to her son (Corr., 229). By 1647 they would have that constitution, which, among other things, allowed all members of the order to speak briefly and show affection to their native pupils, unlike non-teaching members of the community in France, who were allowed no contact with students.10 Many years later, all of Marie’s legendary diplomatic skills would be required in order to prevent Bishop Laval from modifying that constitution. “He has given us eight months or a year to think about it,” she wrote to her superior in Tours in 1661. “But, my dear Mother, the affair is already thought out and the resolution all made: we will not accept it unless at the extremity of obedience. We are not saying a word, however, so as not to make matters worse; for we are dealing with a prelate who, being of very great piety, once he is persuaded that the glory of God is at stake, will never change his mind” (Corr., 653). The Hospitalières de Saint-Joseph, founded in 1634 in France as a noncloistered confrérie or lay association devoted to nursing, were forced to accept clausura in 1659, the same year that three members of the order set sail for Montreal. The three arrived in Montreal committed to cloister, but not to wearing a religious habit or to taking solemn vows, both of which were imposed on them in 1672 after a twelve-year battle with Bishop Laval and Monseigneur de Queylus, the superior of the Sulpicians, who now owned the properties of the entire island of Montreal. And the nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu de Québec fought with Laval’s successor, Bishop Saint-Vallier, for over a decade and were eventually forced to capitulate (in 1701) to his insistence that they follow French practice and extend their apostolate from the simple care of the sick to that of the poor and the marginalized.11 Certainly the fearful view of the corrupt “outside world” that many of the nuns had held in France was transformed by the Canadian experience. All of the writers describe an atmosphere of fervour and devotion

Autobiographical Writings of the Women of new france • 27

that animated the entire society of New France, at least in the early years. Juchereau mentions the pious widow of one of the governors, Mme Daillebout, who decides not to return to France after her husband’s death in 1651 because, “belonging entirely to God, she judged that she would be better off here, especially since at that time in New France one breathed nothing but devotion” (Juchereau, 82). In her letters of the 1640s, Marie de l’Incarnation constantly compares the atmosphere of the Canadian mission to that of the early Christian Church. “We see in our primitive Church, the zeal and the ardour of the early Church members who were converted by the apostles,” she writes in 1640 (Corr., 104). A year later, she refers to “our new Church; […] one sees in it a completely new spirit which breathes a mysterious something of the divine that delights my heart” (Corr., 139). The analogy with the early Church is present as well in all of the other texts, and – even taking into account the tendency towards idealization which characterizes most of them – it points to the existence of an extraordinary sense of community among the early inhabitants of New France. In 1659, according to Juchereau, “fervour was growing daily among the Savages, and Our Lord was pouring his graces so abundantly on Canada that all lived in a simplicity, a good faith, and a unity that was very close to what we admired in the early Christians” (Juchereau, 104). Marie Morin is even more glowing in her account of the early years in Montreal. She describes a society united by the danger of the Iroquois raids, living in an atmosphere of openness and conviviality, free of the scorn for independent single women that characterized French society, and grateful to the women who have come to offer medical services to their community: All of them lived as saints, in a piety and spirituality such as one finds today only among the best nuns and priests. Those who hadn’t heard Mass on a workday were regarded by the others almost as excommunicated, unless they had reasons as strong as those required today from those who miss Mass on Sunday. All the working men went to the first Mass of the day, held before daybreak in the winter and at 4 a.m. in the summer […] and all the women went to another, at 8 a.m. […] Nothing was locked in those days, neither houses nor chests nor basements; everything was open and nothing was ever stolen. Those who had enough goods helped those who had less, without waiting to be asked […] When impatience had made someone speak harshly to his neighbour or someone else, the person would not go to bed without asking forgiveness on his knees. And one never heard any mention of the sin of impurity, which was

Living and Writing for god • 28

considered with horror even by the least devout. In all, this dear Montreal in its early days was an image of the primitive Church. (Morin, 96) Finally, the analogy with the early Church was central to Marguerite Bourgeoys’s vision of the noncloistered order she was founding, for it represented a time when women were as active as men in the spreading of the Gospel. Among her favourite images were those of “the travelling Virgin” and of Martha and Mary, the sisters of Lazarus. “The Blessed Virgin was not cloistered, but she everywhere preserved an internal solitude, and she never refused to be where charity or necessity required help,” she wrote (MB, 82). A different WAy O f W riti ng – A nd Seei ng

If there is a gender specificity in these writings, it is certainly linked to the interiority of their view of the world. Composed in the closed spaces of cloisters, convents, and hospitals and anchored in the concrete reality of daily routines, they nonetheless embrace an infinite vastness, not only in terms of the limitless ambitions and accomplishments of their protagonists, but also because of the huge geographical spaces and the decisive historical events they record (often with a “human” perspective absent from other records). In all of them, matter and spirit are closely intertwined, with external events presented as the results of a divine providence which confers meaning on painful or chaotic experiences. According to Ginette Michaud, the literary interest of Marie Morin’s account of the founding of Montreal lies in its “mixture of styles […] the constant movement between the descriptive and the mythic, the objective and the lyrical, the historic and the marvellous in which the dividing line between fiction and reality is blurred.”12 A similar observation could be made of Marie de l’Incarnation’s long description of the Charlevoix earthquake of 1663, which affected all of the eastern part of the continent. In it, the disorder caused by the earthquake is given spiritual significance by signs, premonitions, and visions predicting that “God was ready to punish the country for the sins committed in it” (Corr., 687–8). The account is full of striking images which emphasize the chaos of the event and the terror it inspired: the earth opening “as if to swallow us up,” church bells that begin to ring by themselves, houses “shaken like trees in the wind,” the “terrifying rumble of carriages set adrift on paving stones and careening in all directions” (Corr., 689). Thanks in part to the documentation available to Marie through the Jesuit Relations, it is also a valuable historical record.

Autobiographical Writings of the Women of new france • 29

For example, she notes geological changes observed in several regions of the colony, such as chasms emitting sulfuric vapours, new hills and rivers, and the disappearance of entire forests: “But nothing astonished us more than seeing the huge Saint Lawrence River, which never changes because of its prodigious depth, take on the colour of sulfur and retain it for a week” (Corr., 693–4). To arrive at any precise conclusions regarding the gender specificity of these texts, they would have to be read alongside the Jesuit Relations, a comparison that would certainly reveal significant differences, particularly regarding relations with the native peoples.13 Although both the Ursulines and the Augustinians came to Canada because of the Jesuit influence and worked closely with the Jesuits after they had arrived, their teaching and nursing duties (and the more sedentary role required of them as women) led them to a different relationship with their native charges than that of the Jesuit “soldiers of Christ.” Unlike the priests, who often express disapproval of native ways and discouragement about the possibility of converting them, the nuns typically exhibit respect, affection, and admiration for the exemplary Christianity of their converts. Given the fact that their goal was to convert the native peoples to Christianity, it would be an anachronism to describe their attitude as “respect for cultural difference,” and yet their openness to native habits and culture indicates a “relational” tendency similar to that observed in much women’s writing.14 Marie de l’Incarnation frequently (and favourably) compares her native charges to the French Catholics she has left behind. “I have never seen any French girls as ardent to be instructed or to pray to God as our seminarians,” she writes to Paul Le Jeune in 1640 (Corr., 93). For her, the poverty and simplicity of the natives is far preferable to the civilized ways of the French, and their superiority over the French in matters of the spirit is incontestable. To an Ursuline friend in Tours she writes: “O my dear Sister! What a pleasure to find oneself with a large group of Savage women and girls, whose poor clothing, which is only a bit of skin or a piece of an old blanket, doesn’t smell as good as those of the Ladies of France! But the candour and simplicity of their spirit is so delightful that it can’t be described” (Corr., 108). And, to her former superior: “We have here Savage dévots and dévotes, as you have polite ones in France: the difference is that, while they are not as subtle or refined as some of yours, they have a childlike honesty that clearly shows they are souls newly reborn” (Corr., 139). Explaining her work to her son, she makes it clear that the educative process is not aimed at “Frenchifying” the native girls: “Are our Savages as perfect as I make them out to be? As for their customs, they lack French politeness: I mean to say the ability to give compliments

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and to act as the French do. We have not aimed at instilling such things in them, but rather at instructing them well in the commandments of God and the Church [and] in all the other religious activities” (Corr., 221). In spite of the difficulty of the native languages, the ardent missionary faith and real affection felt for their pupils and patients were powerful motivations for the nuns to learn them. Mère de Saint-Bonaventure writes of the joy experienced by the hospital sisters at being able to converse with their Algonquin patients: “We were still learning their language, and our diligence gave them pleasure; our habit of listening to them gave us the facility to express ourselves; so that we were instructing them as missionaries” (Juchereau, 52). Marie de l’Incarnation admits that it is difficult for a woman of her age to learn new languages (foreign words are like stones rolling around in her mouth, she says), but she will master several of them thanks to her strong motivation: “I confess that there are many thorns on the path of learning a language so different from ours […] But believe me, the desire to speak makes a big difference: I would like to let my heart speak through my words to tell our dear converts what it feels about God’s love” (Corr., 125). The difficulty of mastering these complex languages offers a further chance to suffer for Christ and is thus transformed into “divine sweetness” (Corr., 140). Small wonder, then, that the nuns perceive the native communities as welcoming and docile, grateful, as Marie de l’Incarnation says, that “for the love of their nation we left our country and through pure charity we are dressing and feeding their daughters as if they were our own” (Corr., 108). Gradually, however, the nuns come to recognize the irreconcilable cultural differences that block their project of large-scale conversions, and begin to shift their focus to educating and caring for the French settlers. The realities of Iroquois violence (the martyrdom of Isaac Jogues, Jean de Brébeuf, and five other Jesuits, many of them close friends of the Quebec nuns, in the 1640s as well as the terrifying Iroquois raids on the French and the indigenous peoples of Trois-Rivières, Montreal, and the Quebec area in subsequent years), and the death of many of the converted natives by smallpox are early signs of what will be the ultimate failure of the missionary project. Marie de l’Incarnation accepts the defeat of their mission with sorrow but also with equanimity, fortified by her belief that the Ursulines were also called to New France to ensure the spiritual health of the French community there. She feels privileged to work with the French as well as the natives, she writes in 1653, for “the Son of God gave himself equally for the souls of both. Without the education we give the older French girls, they would be worse than the Savages within six months” (Corr., 507). Still, in the final years of her long life, it is her native

Autobiographical Writings of the Women of new france • 31

pupils that Marie thinks of as her greatest joy and satisfaction: “They are the delights of our hearts, and because of them we find a sweetness in our day-to-day work that we wouldn’t exchange for an Empire” (Corr., 903). TAKIN G ROO T

Overall, these autobiographical accounts attest to the fact that for all these women authentic selfhood (and even sainthood) was attained through a configuration of self, alterity, and the divine made possible by the space of New France. While they look back with affection on the sweetness and ease of their lives in France, they refuse to exchange the challenging spirituality of the Canadian space they have created for a return to such comfort. In 1649, two of the Augustinian hospital nuns, exhausted by months spent caring for the large numbers of Hurons who have taken refuge in Quebec following the death of Brébeuf and his companions, decide to return to France, and the judgment of them in the Annales suggests that their fellow nuns see their departure as a weakness and even a betrayal (Juchereau, 75–6). In Montreal, the Hospitalières de Saint-Joseph, ignoring the advice of the Sulpicians, who encourage them to return to France after the death of their founder, Jérome le Royer de la Dauversière, in 1659, decide, in spite of their extreme poverty, to “live and die in this dear country and land of Ville Marie, in the confidence that her divine providence would provide for them” (Morin, 107). Marie de l’Incarnation often insists on her attachment to the country, which she sees as the centre of her soul and of her spiritual life: “It seems to me that nothing under heaven could shake me or detach me from my centre, which is how I think of Canada” (Corr., 569). In response to an Ursuline friend in Tours who has asked whether she might return to France before she dies, she writes: “You are right to believe that I want to die in this new Church: I assure you that my heart is so attached to it that, unless God removes it, it will not let go either in life or in death” (Corr., 734). •  •  • In a letter written less than two years before her death, Marie de l’Incarnation speaks of the rigours of the previous winter, the worst she has seen since her arrival in the New World: “There was still ice in our garden in June: all our beautiful fruit trees and grafts were dead. The whole country suffered the same devastation.” For her, the destruction brought about by nature offers a possibility for mortification, and thus a reminder of the reasons for which she left her native country: “Only the trees bearing

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wild fruit were spared; in this way God, by depriving us of delicacies and leaving us the necessities, wants us to remain in our mortification and do without the sweetnesses we were looking forward to. We’re used to it after thirty-one years in this country; we’ve had time to forget the sweetnesses and delights of old France” (Corr., 877–8). This image of nuns in a garden, grafting shoots to provide new beauty in an austere climate and yet accepting with serenity the destruction of their efforts by nature, strong in their faith and optimism and more aware of the sufferings of others than of their own, captures the tone and message of the writings of all of New France’s founding mothers. Unlike the old country, with its sweetnesses and delights, New France has forced these women to do without superfluous things and to direct their efforts towards what they consider essential. In this sense, and thanks to their own courage, perseverance, and hard work, the new country has proved to be the “place for the spirit” they had dreamed of in France.

C h ap t e r 2

Wr i ti n g th e A n n ihi l a t i on of S el f : M a r i e d e l’Incar na t i on

The founding paradox of the autobiographical tradition in Quebec is that it begins with a work in which the author’s goal is the annihilation of the self. This ideal, which is at the heart of the missionary entreprise in New France, finds eloquent expression in the writings of the great explorer of interiority Marie Guyart de l’Incarnation (1599–1672). Presented to generations of French Canadians as a model and canonized by the Church in 2015, Marie de l’Incarnation remains an enigma for our modern sensibilities. How can we understand or sympathize with a woman who abandoned her only son when he was eleven years old in order to enter the Ursuline convent in Tours, and who, for several years before that, subjected her body to horrific mortifications? Although the self-hatred, the passivity, and the burning eroticism of her mystical relationship with her divine lover, all products of a seventeenth-century spirituality focussed on denial of self, make Marie de l’Incarnation’s autobiography an unsettling read at times, the beauty of her writing and the power of her narrative are compelling. Marie de l’Incarnation seeks the dissolution of her self in divine alterity, but her strong personality asserts itself constantly, creating an unresolved tension in the narrative between the divine and the human. Despite her intimate relationship with the spiritual realm, Marie de l’Incarnation is totally grounded in her body, as the name she chose for herself in religion suggests. A passionate and intense woman, she experienced emotional upheavals so violent that they were “impossible to describe.” When reproached by her confessor for her impetuosity in trying to organize a group of nuns to leave for New France at a time when no women had ventured there, she replied: “It is only the violent who can storm heaven” (Corr., 46). And yet her writings and actions indicate that she was also well balanced, confident, and solidly rooted in her

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everyday life, including her life as a mother. “God never guided me by a spirit of fear, but by one of love and confidence,” she wrote to her son from New France near the end of her life (Corr., 826). Her two spiritual autobiographies or “relations”1 (R 1633 and R 1654) and her voluminous correspondence2 (Corr.), especially the many letters she exchanged with her son throughout her long life, reveal the contradictions between these two aspects of her character. Marie identifies with her body and evokes it constantly: a body that is in turn joyful, possessed, broken, or ready to explode from the pressure of the immense love that inhabits it, but which remains the anchor of her identity through each stage of her evolution. She lives in it instinctively, expressing the joy she feels by singing, jumping, and even throwing herself to the ground to “exhale” the passion that has taken possession of her. After entering the Ursulines she excels at concrete activities like singing and embroidery, both of which she takes with her to New France, where they are still part of the tradition of the Ursuline order. “We are most healthy and we sing better here than we did in France. The air is excellent,” she writes in one of her first letters from New France (Corr., 109–10). Twenty years later, when she is defending the Ursuline constitution against the powerful new bishop of Quebec François de Laval (also canonized in 2015), it is partly their right to sing that she is fighting to preserve. “He is afraid that singing will make us vain […] We no longer sing at Mass because he says it distracts the priest,” she confides to her former superior in Tours (Corr., 652–3).3 In the context of the dualistic Catholicism of Marie’s era, the body was the enemy of the spirit, the seat of the self which had to be disavowed and punished if one was to attain the heights of spirituality. This is why, in the years of her great mystical experiences, Marie mortifies her body cruelly, seeking to break the links with it in order to dissolve into the divine. This unresolved tension between the divine and the human (the spirit and the body, the self and its annihilation) runs through the whole of Marie de l’Incarnation’s spiritual autobiography and contributes to the singularity of the author’s voice. Critic Alessandra Ferraro goes so far as to suggest that Marie’s autobiography displays “a valorisation of self that is incompatible with Christian belief,”4 making the work a remarkable product of the period of transition in which spiritual writings were gradually disappearing and autobiographies were beginning to emerge.5 According to Ferraro, the very act of writing one’s life, an obligation imposed on many mystical women by their spiritual directors, is in contradiction with the abnegation of self they were expected to exhibit in their writings:

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“The mystic must write about herself and her intimate experience, but she is not allowed to have a voice of her own […] All recognition is denied to her, as it is God who is speaking through her writing.”6 Marie’s 1654 Relation displays this contradiction to the full, opening with the humble affirmation that her text is solely an expression of the divine word,7 even as her irrepressible personality asserts itself. According to Ferraro, this strong presence of a self in contradiction with orthodox practice can be explained by the fact that the Relation was written, not in obedience to her spiritual director as were most women’s spiritual writings, but at the urging of the son she had left behind in France and to whom she felt the need to justify herself: “An acting subject is substituted for a subject which is acted upon. It is the tension, the combat, between these two subjects – the first of whom must disappear before God’s voice and the second of whom wants to tell her story in order to defend and justify herself to a man – that the Relation puts before us.”8 However, an earlier autobiography by Marie de l’Incarnation, written in 1633 at the command of her spiritual director, is equally marked by the tension between the divine and the human, and is in some ways a more moving document than the “official” autobiography of 1654, especially in the parts where Marie describes abandoning her son when she entered the convent in 1631, an act still fresh in her memory at the time of writing. This combat between two subjects – one passive and one active, one drawn powerfully towards the divine presence and the other resisting the attraction that seeks to swallow her up – is part of a complex network of elements that make up the “incarnational” dimension of her narrative: the importance accorded to bodily manifestations at each stage of the spiritual evolution, the strength of character of the protagonist, her confident sense of equality with her divine lover, displayed in what she herself calls the “boldness” with which she addresses him and, finally, the down-toearth quality of many of her images and comparisons (the obstacles that face Marie after her entry into the Ursulines are compared to “showers of hail [which], if I tried to stop and argue them away […] returned with even greater force the next time” (R 1633, 328); and in 1647, after a long and difficult period of adaptation following her arrival in New France, her sufferings are finally taken from her, “lifted off me like a piece of clothing being removed” (R 1654, 308). While tracing the path towards annihilation of self as Marie presents it in her autobiography, I will draw attention to these elements which counteract the intended direction of the narrative, demonstrating her human qualities and the physical groundedness of her spirituality.

Living and Writing for god • 36 MArie And he r SOn

According to Elisja Schulte Van Kessel, female mystics experienced their union with God in a more bodily way than their male counterparts. “They lived their physical union with an incarnate God more frequently and directly because they were more familiar with the body: with birth and death, with food, physical care and consolation, with milk, with blood and with tears.”9 Marie Guyart was certainly familiar with all these things in the years of her great mystical experiences. Married at seventeen to Claude Martin, a master silk manufacturer, she gave birth to her son Claude two years later, in 1619, then faced the death of her husband and the bankruptcy of his business the same year. Eleven years later, no longer able to live with “her heart in the cloister and her body in the world” (R 1654, 104), she entered the Ursuline convent in Tours, confiding the care of her son to her older sister. For many who have only a vague familiarity with Marie de l’Incarnation’s story, it is this image of the mother who abandoned her eleven-year-old son and of the son who (according to his mother’s autobiography) came every day with his friends to pound on the convent door shouting, “Give me back my mother!” that sticks in the mind and makes Marie seem a perfect image of the “monstrous mother.” There is no doubt that the young Claude’s continuing rebellion, her family’s disapproval (especially when she distanced herself even more definitively from her son by sailing for New France in 1639), and Marie’s own lifelong feelings of guilt make the relationship between her and her son a central element not only in her life but in her mystical experience. Claude is, literally, her incarnation: the bodily and terrestrial part of herself that she cannot, and will not, give up, although God seems to be calling her to do so. Before entering the Ursulines she resists this call for several years, telling herself that the idea of leaving him is a temptation from the devil. “I complained of it to God, telling him ‘Alas, my Beloved, take this thought from me, I pray you […] I have a son I must take care of ’” (R 1633, 261–2). Although they are not able to stay together, Marie and Claude will write to each other for over thirty years, in letters that follow the rhythm of the semiannual departure of ships between France and New France, letters in which the very human emotions of anger, resentment, and guilt will gradually give way to forgiveness and reconciliation. If it were not for the insistence of Claude, who is constantly reproaching his mother for having abandoned him and who demands of her in return an account of her spiritual experiences, Marie de l’Incarnation’s life and writings would almost certainly be unknown to us today. For it was Claude Martin who, after his

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mother’s death in 1672, assembled her numerous writings and published them in Paris in 1677, under the title La Vie de la vénérable Mère Marie de l’Incarnation, Première Supérieure des Ursulines de la Nouvelle-France, tirée de ses Lettres et de ses Écrits.10 MAternity: An indiSSOLubL e b Ond

By leaving her son, Marie de l’Incarnation broke with the restrictions imposed on women by the maternal role in order to achieve her own subjectivity: the possibility of living out the implications of the great passion for God that had taken hold of her life. However, she never ceased loving her son or attempting to explain to him all the contradictory aspects of the choice she had made. Several times in their correspondence she describes the separation from him as a veritable tearing apart of her body: “When I left you, not yet twelve years old, I did so with strange convulsions that only God was aware of. It was necessary to obey His divine will” (Corr., 130); “And when I embarked for Canada […] it seemed to me that my bones were coming out of their sockets, so painful was the feeling of abandoning you” (Corr., 725); “Let me tell you once more how, by separating myself from you, I was literally making myself die while still living […] Leaving you, I felt as if my soul was being separated from my body with excessive pain” (Corr., 836–7). And she never ceases giving him advice about how he, too, can attain the great joy of a life dedicated to Christ. Writing to Claude, now a Benedictine monk, in 1645, she expresses her desire that he should die a martyr in terms that were surely influenced by her knowledge of Jesuit sufferings at the hands of the Iroquois, but that, seen from the perspective of our present-day values, are almost unimaginable: “O my dear son, I would be so consoled if I were to be told that you had lost your life for Jesus Christ. If ever I found myself in the position of seeing that happen to you, I can only pray that our divine Spouse would give me the courage to push you back into the fire or under the hatchet if you were showing human weakness, for I know that by so doing I would be offering you a great service” (Corr., 270). Another letter, written the same day and addressed to the subprioress of the Ursulines in Tours, reveals the logic of this dualistic world view, in which it was necessary to crush earthly values in order to allow those of the spirit to flourish. In it Marie expresses her great joy on learning that her beloved niece has entered the Ursulines, but urges the nun to impose mortifications on her: “Don’t fear to kill anything that is too lively in her, for such a death will make her soul doubly alive” (Corr., 264). Marie’s letters reveal that she never abandoned her motherly responsibility for Claude. In the first letter she writes him from New France, one

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senses her anger against this rebellious son who did not bother to contact her before her departure and who continues to avoid embracing the religious vocation she has always wanted for him: “I don’t want to act the same way with you as you have done with me. Really! How could you have let the ships depart without giving me the consolation of a word from you? Others did contact me, otherwise I would have known nothing about your whereabouts,” she reproaches him. “It’s time for you to grow up and think about where your life is going. Others have helped you through the years, now it’s time for you to take responsibility for yourself […] Give up your cowardice, my dear son, and face up to the fact that you will gain nothing without an effort” (Corr., 115). As for Claude, even if he did bend to his mother’s will and enter the Benedictines in 1641, one suspects that the wound of the maternal abandonment never actually healed. Up until his mother’s death in 1672, he will write to her of his anguish, his lack of confidence, and the sexual temptations that sometimes torment him, seeking to receive twice a year, when the mail arrives from New France, the advice and support that were denied to him in his youth. Between the two, reconciliation will come through writing: not only through their letters, but also through the spiritual autobiography that Marie writes in 1654, finally giving in to her son’s request that she record her mystical experiences. It is clear that Claude sees his mother’s writings as a compensation for the suffering she has inflicted on him, just as she sees his religious vocation as a justification for her act of abandoning him. The moving letter she writes him in 1647 marks a turning point in their relationship, for in it Marie promises to send Claude all her future spiritual writings and asks for his forgiveness. The fault, she claims, was not hers, but that of a God who separates beings from their natural attachments and who inflicted on both of them an almost intolerable suffering: Your reproaches cause me pain and require a response […] Indeed, you have a right to complain that I abandoned you. And I would willingly complain as well, if I were allowed to do so, of the One who came and brought a sword to the earth, creating strange and unnatural divisions. It is true that, while you were the one thing in the world that my heart was attached to, He desired to separate us even while I was still nursing you, and that in order to hold on to you I fought for almost twelve years […] Finally I had to give in to the force of divine love and suffer the unspeakable pain of being torn away from you. But that has not stopped me from constantly judging myself the cruelest of mothers. I beg your forgiveness for this, my very dear son, for I have been the cause of great suffering in your life. (Corr., 316)

Marie de l’incar nation • 39

Seven years later, in the letter that accompanies the 1654 autobiography, she asks herself whether the extraordinary graces God has bestowed on her were not given to her precisely because she made the ultimate sacrifice of giving up her son: “If there is any reason for these graces, the only one I can think of is that I abandoned you for love of Him at a time when you most needed me […] If there are other causes for his gifts to me, I am unaware of them” (Corr., 526–7). “there iS MO re thAn One AuthO r, there A re tWO”: the SO n AS hiS MO the r’S edit Or

Like most other women’s writings of the period, Marie de l’Incarnation’s autobiography was made accessible through the mediation of a male voice: that of her son. Claude Martin’s Vie de la vénérable Mère Marie de l’Incarnation is a combination of his own words and those of his mother, structured around the Relation she sent him in 1654. It also includes his own commentaries, long quotes from his mother’s letters, and fragments of an earlier autobiography written in Tours in 1633, with extensive critical remarks from him about his own memories of the events recounted. In his preface Claude rightly states: “There is more than one author, there are two, and both were necessary to complete the work. This great servant of God worked on it herself and her son produced the final version, attempting to serve simply as an echo responding to what she says.”11 The echo is, however, much more than a simple reproduction of his mother’s voice, especially in regard to the fragments of the 1633 autobiography, available to the reader in the order chosen by Claude and accompanied by his memories and comments.12 In a sense, the most interesting part of the book is these two intertwined autobiographies, that of the mother and the son, which cover the eleven years between Claude’s birth and his mother’s entry into the Ursulines. In assuming the role of editor of his mother’s writings, Claude Martin is following a tradition that goes back to medieval times, in which authorship is solely a male preserve. Although his presentation of his mother’s life and work is a gesture of love and homage, it is not exempt from the prejudices of his age regarding women. “We see many illustrious women and girls,” he writes, “but few of them are free of the weaknesses characteristic of their sex. There was nothing ignoble or effeminate about her.”13 Writing near the end of the classical age in France, he felt obliged to “polish” the language of his mother, who had lived most of her adult life in the New World: “As for her style, I admit it is not as polished as it might be and lacks the delicacy of our contemporary works.”14 As well,

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he sometimes modifies the text to make it conform to the Catholic orthodoxy of his time, in which mysticism had come to appear somewhat suspect.15 Fortunately, thanks to the existence of a manuscript of Marie’s Relation found in the Ursuline convent in Trois-Rivières and to the magnificent critical edition produced by Dom Albert Jamet, we have as accurate a version of Marie’s original manuscript as possible. S tePS t OWA rd the di SSOLutiOn Of Se Lf: THE RELATIONS Of 1 6 3 3 And 1 6 5 4

The 1654 Relation describes the stages in the author’s evolution towards the intense mystical experiences of her twenties, her subsequent entry into the cloister, and the call to travel to “the ends of the earth” in order to convert the “Savages” of New France and bring them into the arms of her divine lover. An earlier account of the mystical experiences, written in 1633, gives a slightly different version of events. While the 1654 version is at once a spiritual autobiography and a commentary on the nature of mystical experience, that of 1633 obviously covers a shorter period of Marie’s life and tends to be a more direct and detailed account of some of the events of her young adult life, in particular her practices of mortification, the anguish of having to leave her son, and her early years in the cloister. I will use the 1654 autobiography as my primary source in tracing the stages of the author’s evolution, and refer to the 1633 account for details or emotions not covered in the later version. The 1654 version (which I will refer to as “the autobiography”) is divided into thirteen long chapters which the author calls “states of prayer.” The story advances in spiral fashion, with each state of prayer corresponding to a further step towards the “bottomless depth” of the self, where the ego dissolves into infinite love. As in all autobiographies, there is a back and forth movement between the inner and the outer world, but it is absolutely clear that the author is primarily interested in recounting her spiritual experience and that outer events are of relevance only to provide a context for this path towards God. The plan for the book which Marie wrote in 1653, with chapter titles such as “How God leads the soul away from affection for worldly things,” shows that God is without a doubt the primary protagonist of this work. But its interest as an autobiography resides in the finesse with which Marie traces her response to the action of God in her soul: the irresistible attraction, but also the confusion, the resistance, the indignation, and even the anger she feels at this force which is carrying her forward, often against her will.

Marie de l’incar nation • 41 A We LL- bALA n Ced yO ung gi r L

Often spiritual autobiographies begin with a conversion experience, a dramatic change in the life of the author after a divine illumination or intervention. Saint Augustine’s Confessions, much read in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, are the original model for this type of work, but by Marie de l’Incarnation’s time there were many other examples: the soldier, Ignatius of Loyola, renouncing his life in the world and consecrating himself to God after a serious wound in battle; the Carmelite, Teresa of Avila, who describes her life as worldly and superficial up until a long illness which leaves her temporarily paralyzed and during which God reveals Himself to her; Blaise Pascal and the unforgettable “night of fire” in which he becomes aware of God’s presence. But in Marie Guyart’s case, the first overwhelming revelation of God’s presence exists in perfect continuity with the innocent and happy child she has always been. At the age of seven, she has a dream in which she gives herself to a Christ figure as attractive as a fairytale hero. All of Marie’s strong personality is captured in this dream which opens her autobiography: her confidence, her frankness, her simplicity, and, above all, her strong sense of being specially chosen and loved. Playing with a friend in the schoolyard, she sees the sky open and Jesus approaching, and cries out to her friend: “It’s Our Lord! It’s to me that he’s coming!” As he comes closer she feels her heart “inflamed with his love” and opens her arms to embrace him, while he, “the most beautiful of all the children of men, with a face full of gentleness and an unspeakable attraction, embraced me and kissed me lovingly, and asked: ‘Do you wish to be mine?’ I answered ‘Yes’” (R 1654, 46–7). All of Marie’s life as an adolescent and a young woman will be a deepening of this pact she has concluded and a gradual expansion of the immense love that inhabits her. Even as a young child she had been attracted by the good, admiring the humility of those she saw praying in church and loving God with simplicity. After the dream this natural attraction to goodness continues, and she becomes more and more conscious of being guided by an inner presence. Gradually she loses interest in the normal activities of girls her age, preferring to “stay alone in the house and read books of piety,” and astonishing those who had always seen her as a “carefree young girl” by her new practice of going to Mass each day. “They didn’t see what I was experiencing within, and I myself didn’t understand, except that I was following his attraction” (R 1654, 49–50). At sixteen, she will have a first sign that God is leading her in a direction that goes against her natural instincts, and she will not be pleased.

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It happens in the confessional, where, in spite of knowing she has done nothing wrong, she is overwhelmed by remorse: “Feelings of guilt assailed me in confession, and I began to suspect that God wanted me to leave behind my childish preoccupations […] But still I was convinced I hadn’t done anything to offend Him, knowing that sin is impossible unless you are conscious of doing wrong” (R 1654, 48). Another time, finding herself in the confessional with a priest who did nothing but question her routinely, she finds she is incapable of revealing her inner thoughts and experiences: “My heart closed up […] I simply answered his questions and listened to his remonstrances, but was incapable of saying a word to him” (R 1654, 53). She knows instinctively that what matters is her private relationship with God, and that her inner peace depends on this relationship and not on the rules and formalistic practices sometimes imposed on her by the clergy. The confidence and good sense displayed in these anecdotes give an idea of the type of relationship Marie will have with the Church throughout her life. While fully respecting clerical authority, she will always display an independence of mind and a diplomatic skill that will allow her to achieve her goals without openly contesting the Church’s authority (talents she will notably have to put to use after the arrival of the powerful François de Laval as bishop of Quebec in 1659, twenty years after she and the first Ursulines had arrived in the city). For her, as for all Catholics, the mediation of the Church and the sacraments are an absolutely fundamental part of the relationship with God, and she is quite sincere when she writes to her confessor, Dom Raymond, in 1635: “I admit to you, Reverend Father, that my mistrust of my own instincts and weaknesses often makes me apprehensive about what you will say to me. When I see myself this way, I try to enter into the dispositions you are proposing to me, abandoning myself to someone who can give me something of his own solidity of spirit and calm the impetuosity of mine.” However, she adds, characteristically: “But tell me, Reverend Father, do you really want me to hide what I’m feeling in my deepest self?” (Corr., 45). i nundAted by the inf i ni te: the e ArLy M yStiCAL yeA rS

Although she dreams of a religious vocation, Marie does not resist her mother’s insistence that she is too joyous a person for the life of the cloister. And so, by the age of nineteen, she finds herself married, mother of a six-month-old son, and soon a widow faced with the bankrupcy of her husband’s business and a mysterious scandal associated with his personal

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life. For the next two years she will live with her father, having confided the care of her infant son to a wet nurse, and, shortly after that, she will move with little Claude into the home of her sister and brother-in-law, soon becoming an indispensable part of their marine transporting business. (Her legendary business skills will later serve her well as the superior and administrator of the Ursuline order in New France.) During this period Marie will have her first experience of mystical rapture, a “piercing of love […] so deep and inexorable that its pain could not be erased, even if I had been able to throw myself into a fire to extinguish it” (R 1654, 69). Walking down the street on 24 March 1620, she is suddenly overwhelmed by the sensation of being plunged into blood (immediately recognized by her as the Precious Blood of Christ), and by a new and acute awareness of sin: “In that moment, the eyes of my spirit were opened and all the faults, sins, and imperfections I had committed in my entire life became visible to me in precise detail” (R 1654, 68). This is the event that she will forever afterward describe as her “conversion.” She has literally become other, a new person: “I returned home, changed into a new creature, so powerfully changed that I could no longer recognize myself ” (R 1654, 71). If Marie’s childhood dream of Christ’s coming to her had a fairytale atmosphere, her life now, after this decisive experience, becomes that of a young woman totally and exuberantly in love: “I had so much interior vivacity that, when I was walking in the street, I would sometimes make little jumps, and if anyone had seen me they’d have thought I was crazy […] I felt a lightness such as I had never known, doing everything for my Beloved” (R 1633, 164, 167). And she adds, in an exquisite and concrete formulation: “When he took away his graces and his incredibly strong support, I was like a bird in the air without a branch to hold onto” (R 1633, 165). She no longer has any desire except to be “swallowed up in that great sea of purity” which has engulfed her being, distracting her from the multitude of duties and responsibilities of her everyday life: “Whether I was cooking or cleaning, hearing the shouts of more than twenty vulgar and ill-instructed servants or looking after all the details of my brother-inlaw’s business, none of that could distract me, and it seemed to me that the great ocean had broken its bonds and washed over me. I was completely submerged in it” (R 1633, 158). It is during this period, when the fullness of her love is so great that it seems to want to explode the prison of her body, that she discovers the outlet of writing: “When I had fully sung his praises, I took up a pen and wrote of my passionate love in order to evaporate the fervour of my spirit, for otherwise my nature could not have survived such suffering” (R 1633, 165).

Living and Writing for g od • 44 beCOM ing “Li Ke irO n in the hA ndS Of A b L ACKSM ith ”: ASCeti CAL P rACti C e S (1 6 2 0 –1 6 2 5 )

When she comes to her senses after the Precious Blood experience, Marie realizes she is in front of a church run by the Feuillant fathers, a reformed religious order which had recently arrived in Tours. On going into the church, she encounters a priest and asks him to hear her confession, and he, realizing the extraordinary nature of what the young woman is telling him, invites her to come back the next day and talk further. From then on this priest, Dom François de Saint-Bernard, will be her spiritual director, replaced a few years later by another Feuillant father, Dom Raymond de Saint-Bernard. The Feuillants, known for their tendency to encourage extreme practices of mortification, will thus be her directors throughout the years of her great mystical experiences. These are the years during which Marie will learn hatred of self, the necessary complement of love of God according to the dualistic spirituality of her era: “I followed this inclination, which produced a greater and greater hatred of myself, a neglect of my own interests and those of my son, and a distaste for the world” (R 1654, 73–4). She makes her indifference to female fashion clear by wearing unattractive clothes, a practice which has the further advantage of discouraging any would-be suitors: “I dressed ridiculously to convince everyone I had nothing more to do with the world” (R 1654, 73). During the first year she takes a vow of chastity, duly consecrated by Dom François, and begins to experiment with mortifications of the type that pious young women of her acquaintance talk about, whispering that you have to get a priest’s permission before undertaking such practices: “My sight was mortified, my ears were closed to the language of the world, I rarely spoke, able only to talk of God and of virtue” (R 1654, 74). One cannot help wondering what must have been the effect of such strange practices on little Claude, who later recalls these years with the tone of admiration appropriate for a hagiography: “She always had her eyes closed, even during times of recreation, except when she had to work or needed them open for other reasons […] When she walked in the streets, she always looked down and walked with a regular step and a humble gravity that made everyone admire her. People in their houses and shops interrupted their work to watch her go by […] raising their eyes to heaven and saying adoringly: ‘It’s Madame Martin.’”16 Soon she advances to more rigorous practices, beating herself with handfuls of nettles, which give her the sensation of being “in a pot of boiling water.” Already she eats very little. According to Claude, “her life was a continual fast [and] one wondered how she could stay alive and maintain

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the strength needed to keep up the work she was doing all day and sometimes all night.”17 But now she begins to put absinth on her tongue before eating meat, “not just to take away its taste, but to make the experience of eating it disgusting and disagreable to the mouth.”18 She wears a hair shirt and sleeps on wooden planks while wearing it, wounding her flesh. And yet, she claims in her autobiography, she was never sick during these years of mortification. On the contrary, “I felt a new strength and energy growing in me, allowing me to do more and more, and the Spirit kept pushing me towards new mortifications […] I was insatiable and unable to find enough instruments of mortification to satisfy my desire” (R 1633, 177). Such practices were widespread in France in the early years of the seventeenth century, especially among women, and their aim was not only to imitate Christ’s suffering, but to abolish the self in its very foundation: the body. According to Hélène Trépanier, the theme of self-annihilation is omnipresent in the spiritual treatises of the times and, especially in the case of women, gave rise to practices of mortification and the idealization of physical suffering.19 For historian Barbara Diefendorf, the phenomenon is related to the apocalyptic mentality of the years following the wars of religion, a period during which women often desired to suffer as much as their men had done during the terrible times of war. As well, as almost all the paths open to men seeking to devote their lives to the imitation of Christ were closed to them, women paradoxically triumphed over these limitations by undertaking bodily self-punishment: “Behind the lure of asceticism lay a complex tension between obedience and autonomy, abdication of will and self-control,” writes Diefendorf.20 During this turbulent period, Marie is conscious of being acted on by an irresistible force which seems to go against her nature, a force that is breaking her down “like iron in the hands of a blacksmith” (R 1633, 179), particularly in her body, where her sense of self is lodged: “My poor body was being led around like a dead person and suffered everything without saying a word, for it was overcome by the Spirit of grace” (R 1654, 98). Inspired by this inner force, she adds to her earlier vow of chastity those of poverty and obedience: a poverty which involves the future of her son more than her own interests, as she possesses nothing but what her sister gives her, and an obedience to her spiritual director as well as to her sister and brother-in-law, “whom I obeyed as if they were my superiors, as a child would obey its mother and father” (R 1654, 107). These vows cost her dearly, however, and her ego resists and rebels against them. Suddenly it seems to her that the horrific mortifications she has been imposing on her body are senseless, especially as others around her seem capable of living as good Christians without tormenting

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themselves in such a fashion: “As far as my body was concerned, the devil […] led me to think that I was crazy to have made it suffer so much and that there were many other Christians who kept God’s commandments and would be saved without going through such things.” She suffers as well from her vow of obedience, asking herself, “what good is served by this submisssion to one’s director; […] it was far too difficult and […] there was nothing wrong with following one’s own inclinations.” She hates being treated like a servant in her sister’s home in spite of all the contributions she makes to it and to the family business. And the vow of poverty weighs on her, as she is extremely worried about how it will affect her son’s future. One day, assailed by all these torments, she confides to a friend: “What good are all these things I’m doing? I can’t stand being imprisoned like this any longer.” “Finally I was defeated in every possible way,” she concludes. “I was like the poor beggars who go trembling from door to door” (R 1654, 110–12). But this is only the beginning of her trials. In order to empty herself entirely of ego, she must lose the admiration of others as well as her own self-esteem. “Pressed on by the Spirit,” she comes up with an idea that terrifies her: that she must publicly display a list of her sins on the church door, “and that her name must be attached to this list, so that everyone would know how disloyal she had been to her God.” Fortunately for her, her spiritual director, Dom Raymond, intervenes at this point, takes the paper from her and burns it (R 1654, 98). It would seem that the annihilation of the self is close to being realized, and certainly Marie seems unable to see anything at this point but her own indignity. As Hélène Trépanier points out, the goal of identifying with “être rien,”21 “nothingness” was the key concept in early seventeenth-century French spiritual treatises, and Marie would seem to have achieved it: “I found myself so useless and empty […] that I recognized I was truly nothing […] The truth of my nothingness was like a flame that I saw all around me” (R 1633, 190–1). To inscribe this realization indelibly on her consciousness, she contemplates the corpse of a dog on the road she takes to go to daily Mass, reflecting on the putrification of all being and the nothingness of all things: “I stopped every day to look at and contemplate this infection. After a few days it was full of worms, and then, later, it faded into nothing. The sight remained so firmly engraved in my mind that never, in the years since then, have I felt a sense of pride without immediately humiliating myself before God, saying, ‘Ah! I am nothing more than a dead dog.’ […] The vision of the dog gave me such a great hatred of myself that it has always remained with me, so that I never look at myself without self-hatred and without considering that I am my own greatest enemy” (R 1633, 191).

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The closer Marie gets to God, the more her self-hatred increases: “I could see nothing more worthy of scorn and rejection than myself ” (R 1654, 95). She is now ready to enter the state for which she has been “constantly yearning,” in which she will at last be able to say that her God and her deepest self are one and the same reality: “He is my good, he is my self, he is my entire life” (R 1654, 101). t O WA it And t O burn: the “betrO th AL” Peri Od ( 1 6 2 5 –1 6 2 7 )

Marie is now twenty-five, and there are two activities that sustain her during this chaotic period of her life: acts of charity and daily Communion. Aware of her generosity, the poor arrive in large numbers at her sister’s door, knowing that she will find some way to help them. She cares for the sick and bandages their wounds, until her sister and brother-inlaw, fearing contagion during these years when the plague was raging in Tours and elsewhere, forbid her to indulge in such dangerous interventions. She arouses the disapproval of her petit bourgeois milieu not only by visiting a man in prison accused of a crime of which she is convinced he is innocent, but also by mounting a public campaign in his favour and making presentations to the judges in his court case, which lead to his acquittal. It is as if the fullness of love that inhabits her is spilling out into actions in the world. Two great spiritual experiences take place in these years. On Pentecost Monday in 1625, while attending Mass in the chapel of the Feuillants, she has an illumination in which she comes to understand the mystery of the Trinity. A few months later, she has the physical sensation that “my heart was being ravished and enchained to another heart, and that these two hearts, although separate, were so closely entwined that they were one” (R 1654, 114–15). From this moment on, her story is dominated by the language of mystical love: langorous cries bemoaning the absence of the Beloved and burning with desire for an object that is constantly out of reach: “Although he was within me, it seemed that he was fleeing from me and that he inhabited an inaccessible realm of light” (R 1654, 109). The vocabulary here is inspired by the Biblical Song of Songs and originates as well, according to Denis de Rougemont, in the same sensibility as that of the medieval courtly love tradition: “The soul suffers separation and rejection even at the height of its ardour.”22 As well, the romances which were popular reading material for young girls and women and which Marie, like Teresa of Avila, had at least briefly indulged in before turning to more pious readings, may have influenced her experience of union with the

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divine. She experiences her love as physical pain, especially in the heart, so consumed by the flames of love that she must cry aloud in order to seek consolation: “The heart seems extraordinarily large and seems to contain a fire that would erupt if the heart broke […] I shut myself up in an out-ofthe-way place and lie down on the ground to stifle my sobs” (R 1654, 113). This is the stage in the path towards mystical union that is sometimes referred to as “betrothal.” The love of Christ has replaced obedience to God the Father, setting the stage for a new reciprocity between the two partners. It is the state of “pure Love,” in which, according to the feminist theorist Françoise Collin, “the Other doesn’t give orders; he is more the Son than the Father.”23 Marie understands this well and explains it to Dom Raymond in a letter (probably written in 1626) which displays an enormous amount of confidence for a twenty-six-year-old woman writing to her aged spiritual director. As she explains to him, the respect for God’s majesty has now been replaced by a true and loving exchange with the Son, who is as much her captive as she is his: “But love […] charmed my soul to such an extent that it forgot about respect and majesty [….] Inflamed with love, it could see only love. It could see only the Word, the object of its passion, which delighted and captivated the heart […] She [the soul] was the captive of this love, but love too [that is, the Spouse] was equally her captive” (Corr., 3). Marie de l’Incarnation’s strong individuality is particularly notable in the language she uses to address her divine lover during this period. Often she uses the familiar “tu” rather than the more formal “vous,” as in the following passage, where she reproaches him for all the pain he is causing her: “Is what you want for me that I should die, my Love? […] I no longer know what I am saying or doing, I am so lost to myself, and you are the cause. Ah! I ask you not for treasures or riches, but only that I should be allowed to die for love” (R 1633, 212, 215). She continues her mortifications, asking her divine lover to give her strength to punish herself: “And he helped me so greatly that my blows tore at my body; then I put on a hair shirt so I would feel the wounds even more strongly” (R 1654, 109). According to psychoanalyst Catherine Millot, such extreme practices play an indispensable role in the dissolution of self sought by the mystics: “The mystical transformation is not achieved without cost. It involves the abolition of everything in us that tends towards closure: the ego and all its attributes […] This is perhaps what explains the immense appetite for suffering that suddenly awakens, as if suffering will allow us to burn even more strongly […] The aim is to reconstitute the self in a new way, making it totally open […] Asceticism seeks to make us coincide with the abyss that we are in God.”24

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Now fully open, the self seeks only dissolution in the Other. Marie’s language becomes more and more centred on love, and her images more oceanic, evoking a “labyrinth of love in which one is intoxicated and blessedly enchanted” (R 1633, 210), an “ocean of love which swallows up its chosen ones” (R 1633, 210), and an “abyss without a bottom or shores” (R 1633, 234). Ready to throw herself into this abyss, she awaits with impatience the moment of complete union: “Content, but not yet satisfied […] she aspires to disappear into this abyss and to be so lost in it that only her Beloved will be visible, for, through his love, he will have transformed her into himself ” (R 1654, 125). VOUS ÊTES MON MOI , “ yO u A re My S eLf” : the PA r AdOX O f MySti C AL uniO n

In the seventh of her thirteen chapters (and thus in the precise centre of her autobiography), Marie de l’Incarnation describes her accession to the state of “mystical marriage.” This is the moment in which the self dissolves into the infinite, and yet it is a reciprocal union, beautifully described in Marie’s ecstatic words to her divine lover: “You are my self, you are my very own” (R 1654, 142). Yet, even at this stage, one is struck in Marie’s account by a paradoxical insistence on her own individuality: her sense of the equality of her relationship with her Beloved and her resistance to being torn away from her earthly moorings. The pages in which she describes her mystical union with Christ are among the most erotic in all of Quebec literature, as passionate and even more intimate in the telling than Teresa of Avila’s famous accounts of her own mystical experiences. Was the fact that Marie had already had sexual experience in marriage a factor in her ability to live and to write about this passion? There is no way of knowing. But the familiarity of the language with which she adresses her divine lover, often reproaching him or arguing with him when not expressing her undying passion, makes her voice unique in the literature of mysticism: more concrete and down-to-earth than others, and more insistent on the claims of the body and the earth to coexist with the divine rather than being simply absorbed by it. Marie attains the heights of mystical experience in the spring of 1627, at the age of twenty-seven: “This adorable Person took hold of my soul, and, embracing it with an inexplicable love, united it to him and took me as his spouse” (R 1654, 138). The fusion is so total that the self is not only penetrated by the lover but transformed into him, in an erotic caress of infinite tenderness: “It was through divine touches and penetrations of him into me and, in an admirable manner of reciprocal return, of me into him. No

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longer myself, I became him in an intimate and loving union, in such a way that, lost to myself, I could no longer see who I was, having become him by participation” (R 1654, 138–9). Now bathed in the happiness of a being who no longer has any desire, for “she possesses the One she loves” (R 1654, 141), Marie redoubles her acts of charity and calls together her brother-in-law’s servants to talk to them about God, treating them like naughty children in somewhat the same way as she will later treat her beloved native girls in New France: “I corrected them frankly, in such a way that these poor people became as submissive to me as children. When some of them went to bed without saying their prayers, I made them get up again” (R 1654, 142). She stands up for their rights to her brother-in-law when they are dissatisfied with their working conditions, cares for them when they are ill, cleans them and makes their beds, recalling with humour that, during those weeks and months, her sister’s house was “like a hospital in which I was the nurse” (R 1654, 143). She lives in a state of perfect beatitude which she describes in a letter to her confessor as “like a Heaven, in which [the soul] enjoys God, [in] a concert and harmony which can only be tasted and heard by those who have had this experience.” This state, she explains, in spite of its appearance of sensuality, has nothing to do with the realm of the senses: “He makes the senses die, and, recalling the soul into union with him, absorbs it in pleasures and charms which surpass anything the human mind can imagine” (Corr., 4). This is the moment of mystical marriage, in which the self disappears totally into the Other, and yet, paradoxically, increases in strength due to the infused love that now fuels and directs it: “She embraces him and speaks to him mouth to mouth, saying, ‘You are my self, you are my very own’” (R 1654, 141–2). Marie has now achieved the annihilation of self she has constantly sought and to which she will forever remain faithful. The eroticism of the union with the Beloved is marked both by extreme gentleness and by violence: “She is completely possessed and penetrated by him. His love and caresses consume her and make her expire in him, suffering the gentlest of deaths, but these deaths are the very essence of sweetness” (R 1654, 141). And yet, at other times, the caresses are so violent that she admits, in a letter to Dom Raymond that, “I could probably talk to you about it, but I can’t bring myself to write it down.” In the same letter, she does, however, attempt to describe her experience: “I was completely outside myself and it seemed to me that my very chaste Spouse was taking pleasure in overwhelming me and in adding new flames to the ardour that already consumed me, even as he was leading me to speak […] more and more boldly of my love for him.” The intensity of

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the experience was so great, she writes, that it did violence to nature: “He revealed himself so powerfully to my spirit and consumed me so totally […] that my soul seemed to want to break the links that attached it to nature” (Corr., 12). Marie’s account suggests, however, that she is not willing to break her links with nature: on the contrary, she is determined to remain herself even as she lives this love to the fullest. “The divine Spirit, jealously wanting to possess her totally, wrenched her away from her self ” (R 1654, 147), she writes. She resents being torn away from her work and her responsibilities in the world and has trouble concentrating on what people are saying to her, to the point that her brother-in-law begins to tease her about being so distracted. When she tries to sleep and is awakened by the words of love she hears in the depths of her soul, “I prayed with confidence to my Beloved One, asking him to let me sleep, since I needed the rest” (R 1633, 228). If she tries to read, he distracts her to the point where she gets a headache, and yet, she recalls: “What I was reading was beautiful. If I had had my way, I’d have wanted to continue reflecting on it” (R 1654, 145). She can no longer even concentrate on her prayers: “As soon as I started my rosary, when I heard the words of the prayers, my spirit was carried away towards God” (R 1654, 146). If she is alone in her brotherin-law’s country house, she finds some comfort in singing the words of her prayers or looking at the landscape, or even in running to escape from the “plenitude” which is torturing her body: “I would run in order to distract myself, but my body would not let me go. Without thinking, I would run into the woods or the vineyards like a madwoman, and afterwards, coming back to my senses, I would fall to the ground, beaten down by the Spirit” (R 1654, 148). And always, she is afraid that people will notice: “I went everywhere without a candle, trying to keep hidden and silent. The basement, the attics, the courtyard, and the stable were the places I hid. At night, I put myself in danger of being hurt. I was blind to everything. As long as I could find a place to hide, I would be satisfied” (R 1654, 149–50). It is in the moments of resistance to this overwhelming of her self that Marie’s vocabulary takes on its greatest boldness and originality. “Oh, my Love! I pray you, give me some time to think about what I must do for others, and afterwards I will caress you” (R 1633, 221). At times, she complains to him as if to a too ardent lover who does not realize how tired she is or does not respect her autonomy: “Oh my Love, I can’t stand it any longer! Leave me alone for a while, my Beloved One!” (R 1654, 143); “My Beloved, let me finish this piece of work and then I will devote all my time to embracing you” (R 1654, 145). “In my prayers and in the streets, no matter where I was, I was dying of love and yet I was enjoying the fullness of

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love […] I don’t know how to express it. One suffers, one languishes, one enjoys” (R 1633, 232–3), she writes. “But, no matter how great the pain is, one doesn’t want to be delivered from it, for it is so charming that it seems that the heart is the target into which the Beloved is shooting his arrows and that he wants to pierce in every direction” (R 1633, 238). This is l’amour fou, a love so overwhelming that it can only be accompanied by a certain amount of agressivity against the one who so imprisons the self. “But he is taking pleasure in making me suffer so much and the suffering soul necessarily wants to inflict similar pain on her Beloved” (R 1633, 233). These moments of combined adoration and aggressivity are the most violently erotic in Marie’s account, with the relationship between the two lovers resembling a game of reciprocal love and vengeance: “She cries: O my Love, you have taken pleasure in inflicting pain on me; now I must have my revenge by causing you similar wounds […] Then, it seemed to me that thunderbolts leaped from my heart towards the Beloved, and wounded him. After that the soul, full of languishing desire, collapses onto the breast of the lover and expires in ecstasy” (R 1654, 148–9). b e C OM ing An urS uLine : fALLing “frOM A high MO untA in int O A n A b ySS O f MiSe ry”

After this period of great ecstasy, Marie is so physically exhausted that she falls ill. Having reached what is often referred to as “the end of her mystical itinerary,” she enters into a state of permanent union with God which will sustain her for the rest of her life. She has now penetrated to the deepest level of self and of integration with the divine, and lives in a state of simplicity and perpetual praise: “Since then my soul has remained in its centre which is God, and this centre is in the soul, where it is beyond all sentiment. It is such a simple and delicate thing it cannot be expressed. One can speak about all things, read, write, work, and do anything one wants, and yet […] the soul never ceases being united with God” (R 1633, 240). The need to enter the cloister now becomes more and more pressing. Marie had resisted it for several years, telling God she had a son who needed her. But now Claude is almost twelve years old, and, she writes, “an interior voice was haunting me, telling me that it was time and I must hurry, that there was nothing further for me to do in the world” (R 1654, 158). A distressing event which takes place two weeks before the day agreed on for her entry into the Ursulines shows, however, how attached she remains to the things of the world. Her son runs away, and Marie experiences the overwhelming agony of a mother who has lost her child:

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“I was sure he had drowned or been taken away by some wandering man […] I sent several people into the country to search for him, but in vain. Oh God! Never would I have believed that the pain of the loss of a child could be so terrible for a mother. I had seen him ill almost to the point of death, and then I had willingly given him up to Our Lord, but to lose him in this way was beyond my understanding.” Even the inner peace she continues to experience in her relationship with God does nothing to counter “the overwhelming sadness of such a loss […] of being deprived of the thing I loved most” (R 1633, 276–7). This drama increases the already considerable criticism circulating in Marie’s milieu about her plan to leave her child, but after three days the young boy returns home and, on 25 January 1631, Marie finally enters the cloister. At the moment of bidding her son goodbye she laughs, as if to send him courage, but her description of the moment in the Relation written two years later shows the extent to which she lived her last day in the world preoccupied by her son’s pain: “As I left our home to enter God’s house, the child came with me, all resigned. He didn’t dare show me his affliction, but I could see the tears flowing from his eyes […] He aroused such a great compassion in me that it seemed to me that my soul was being ripped from me; but God was dearer to me than all that. Leaving him in God’s hands, I said goodbye and laughed as I did so. Then, receiving the blessing of my confessor, I threw myself at the feet of the Mother Superior” (R 1633, 284–5). As in each of the earlier stages, Marie has found her direction by listening to her inner voice, has conquered her doubts and triumphed over the obstacles in her path. But yet again she will learn that it is not she, but God, who is in charge, and that her journey towards annihilation of self is far from having ended. In the 1654 autobiography, she recalls the years of her noviciate as joyful ones, during which she discovered that she possessed an instinctive understanding of Holy Scripture and adored singing in the choir of novices. “Singing soothed my soul and allowed it to breathe, as well as touching the senses […] so that I would sometimes jump or clap my hands to get others involved in singing the praises of such a great God” (R 1654, 174). However, in the 1633 version, much closer in time to the events recounted, the first three years of Marie’s noviciate are presented as a time of anguish and depression, during which she is faced with a reality far different than the illusions she had had about herself and about convent life. From the moment of her arrival, disoriented by the loss of the structure of her previous life, she is overwhelmed by a sense of “no longer having any willpower or self-control” (R 1633, 293). Claude and his noisy friends come regularly to the convent door, and her son’s desolate cry, “Give me

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back my mother!,” intensifies her feelings of guilt and makes her fear she will be sent away from the convent. She hears of gossip circulating among the other novices “that I was a cruel and heartless mother who had abandoned my son for my own self-satisfaction, [and that] I would soon be dismissed from the community, as the others were not willing to put up with all the noise” (R 1633, 297). A week before taking the veil, Marie has a vision foretelling even greater trials ahead: “I still had engraved in my mind and heart the consciousness of being nothing in face of the great All […] My soul could see itself in this great All as if in a very clear mirror, where it saw a reflection of all its defects” (R 1633, 308, 312). The vision marks the beginning of a period of intense moral isolation and self-doubt that will last for almost three years, during which she will be obsessed by her imperfections, convinced that the other sisters hate her, tempted by things that had no interest for her when she was in the world, and unable to remember the content of the prayers and readings required for the young novices. Once, she is even tempted by suicide: “When I was close to a window, I was tempted to throw myself through it to the ground. The thought was so horrifying that I withdrew even further into myself ” (R 1633, 321). Faced with God’s silence, she begins to doubt his existence: “I convinced myself that it was madness to believe there was a God, that everything that was said about him was a fantasy [and] that all the graces I thought I had received were pure madness on my part […] It was a temptation to despair, the greatest I have ever known” (R 1633, 337–8). The memory of the heights from which she has fallen makes her distress all the greater: “To see oneself in such a wretched state and so far from what one has known in the past is more humiliating than I can say” (R 1633, 322). Many of these feelings – lack of confidence, difficulty in communicating with others, loss of memory, a sense of emptiness – correspond to what today are considered symptoms of depression, and there are certainly events in Marie’s life during this period sufficiently wrenching to have plunged her into such a state. Six months after her entry into the cloister, her father dies, followed by the death of her brother-in-law, Paul Buisson, six months later. Her son’s conduct becomes more and more problematic, and Marie blames herself for it. Her sense of isolation is doubtlessly exacerbated by the fact that the oldest of the other novices is only sixteen, and that these naïve young girls tend to chatter and gossip about the scandalous fact that, unlike them, Marie has known marriage and motherhood. A final blow is the departure of her beloved spiritual director, Dom Raymond, and his replacement by a cold, condescending

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priest who makes fun of her spiritual experiences and intimidates her to the point that she hardly dares open her mouth in his presence. While all of these factors provide a psychological explanation for Marie’s distress, from the perspective of her 1633 narrative each of them is a step on the painful journey towards the realization of her own nothingness. The ups and downs of Marie’s life during this period are numerous and exhausting: she lives the day of her profession of vows in the spring of 1633 “plunged in an ocean of love” (R 1633, 330), only to find herself a week later back in “the abyss of my crosses” (R 1633, 332). Like all who suffer from depression, she is convinced that nothing will change and that no one can help her. Gradually, however, she begins to sense that the humiliations she is experiencing are part of a divine plan: “A powerful instinct told me to continue seeking self-abasement, to sink to the bottom of this feeling of nothingness and accept being forgotten by all” (R 1633, 332–3). With the arrival of a new spiritual director, the Jesuit Georges de la Haye, Marie finds once again a person in whom she can confide, and it is under his direction that she begins to write the text now known as the Relation of 1633.25 However, her rebelliousness remains strong even as she is writing it. Not only does she threaten to stop working on it and to burn the pages already written (R 1633, 338), but she begins to hate her formerly beloved superior, imagining her guilty of various crimes. Only gradually does she realize that God is leading her towards detachment from this woman to whom she was extraordinarily close, “desiring that I should be attached only to him” (R 1633, 339). The difficult period of apprenticeship is drawing to a close. One evening, while walking in the convent garden, Marie asks God’s pardon and is overwhelmed by a sense of peace: “In the same moment, all my temptations, crosses and inner pain evaporated, as if I had never known them, and I was filled with a great sense of peace” (R 1633, 341). Through the three years of her noviciate, Marie has evolved from being an exalted and tormented young woman into a true religious. No longer does she spend her time in the horrific mortifications she inflicted upon herself in her twenties, and, when she speaks of God, it is now more often in terms of “contentment” than of ecstasy. The heights and depths of her emotional life have been transformed into “a simple attention to God” which provides her with “nourishment for all things” (R 1633, 345). Her own conclusion about these years is that she has now learned the necessity of suffering if one is to achieve “interior purity.” In fact, she reflects, if she were obliged to choose between the ecstasies of her former life and the crosses she has suffered, “I would willingly take all my crosses” (R 1633, 342).

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Although each of Marie’s chapters (or “states of prayer”) ends in a state of serenity, that fact does not exclude the possibility of further change. Around Christmas 1633, the young Ursuline has a dream which she does not understand, but which foretells her apostolic vocation in Canada. It will take her five years of struggle with various authorities – including the most intimidating of all, God the Father, whom she will confront with her usual boldness – before she will succeed in embarking for the New World. Once again, just as, six years earlier, she had felt “[her] heart in the cloister and [her] body in the world” (R 1654, 104), she describes a feeling of dislocation between body and spirit, saying of these years: “My body was in our monastery but my spirit, linked to the Spirit of Jesus, could not bear to be enclosed” (R 1654, 198). In her dream, Marie sees herself in the company of an unknown woman with whom she is walking on a road strewn with obstacles. They arrive at a delightful place “open to the sky […] and full of a silence that contributed to its beauty” (R 1654, 190). In the distance they see a small church and, seated on it, the Blessed Virgin holding the Child Jesus and gazing at “a large and vast country, full of mountains, valleys, and thick fog,” a country “as terrifying as it was desolate.” Letting go of her companion’s hand, Marie runs to the Virgin, who seems to be speaking to her child “of this country and of me, saying that she had a plan for me” (R 1654, 193). The Virgin then turns towards Marie and kisses her three times, while the companion observes the scene from a distance. One is struck here by the resemblance to the childhood dream with which Marie opens her 1654 autobiography. Once again she is with a companion, and once again she senses that it is she, and not her companion, who is being singled out for special graces: “It seemed to me that this little girl had some imperfection and that, even though she was a good girl, he had chosen me rather than her” (R 1654, 46), she writes of the earlier dream. Did Marie perhaps have a tendency to see others as rivals? If so, such competitiveness could explain the hostility of other nuns mentioned in the 1633 account of her noviciate years, and, in the later text, in the description of her early years in New France. Certainly the fact of seeing herself as the preferred one indicates her unshakable conviction that she has an extraordinary relationship with God, a conviction that gives her the courage to triumph over all obstacles. The 1633 dream marks the first significant reference to the Virgin Mary in Marie de l’Incarnation’s writings, and it is perhaps worth noting that the Virgin appears “as she was at the age when she was nursing

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the adorable child Jesus” (R 1654, 193). As she nears the end of her painful years in the noviciate and comes close to accepting the separation from her son, Marie’s unconscious is perhaps suggesting the possibility of a new state of spiritual maternity for her. Indeed, the images she uses to describe her Canadian mission are often ones that suggest maternity. “I ardently love all my little Savages, and I have the feeling of carrying them in my heart,” she writes to Dom Raymond shortly after her arrival in Quebec (Corr., 24). Filled with the apostolic spirit, Marie now dreams only of spreading the love of Christ throughout the world: “The Spirit carried my mind to India, to Japan, to America, to the East, and the West, to all parts of Canada and the Hurons, and to every part of the inhabitable earth where there were souls I imagined belonging to Jesus Christ” (R 1654, 198). She becomes jealous, even enraged, when – in another maternal image – she imagines these souls in the hands of the devil: “I couldn’t bear it any longer, I kissed all these poor souls and held them to my breast” (R 1654, 198). Although she claims not to have heard of Canada at the time of her dream, she will hear of it more and more in the following years, thanks to her links to the Jesuits. Her unconscious will therefore be open to welcoming the words of God that come to her in an ecstasy in 1635: “It was Canada that I showed you; you must go there and make a house for Jesus and Mary” (R 1654, 203). From then on, the obsession with Canada will not leave her: “I still travelled in spirit throughout the world, but the parts of Canada were my resting place and my country” (R 1654, 204). In the numerous letters Marie sends to people of influence from 1634 to 1636, seeking support for her “mad” idea of founding an Ursuline convent in New France, one is struck by the frequent use of self-deprecating terms (“lowliness,” “imbecility,” “indignity”) related to her sex. Consumed by an apostolic fire which is driving her to transgress the gender boundaries of her time, she knows she must carefully choose language that will not provoke the opposition of those on whom she relies to make her venture possible, even as she hides her plans from others who would be scandalized by the idea of a cloistered nun daring to venture out into the world: “I didn’t dare speak of it to anyone […] as it was such an extraordinary enterprise, in fact an unprecedented one, [and] far from what was seen as appropriate for me” (R 1654, 205). It is impossible to tell whether the self-deprecating terms related to being a woman are simply a rhetorical strategy or whether Marie, like other women of her time, has internalized the misogynistic attitudes of her milieu. “Pardon me, my dear Father, if the violent instinct which is driving me forward is making me say things I am even ashamed of thinking, given my lowliness,” she writes to Dom

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Raymond. “When I was doing my spiritual exercises, I was quite ashamed to confront my deepest feelings, which were not at all appropriate for a person of my sex and situation in life” (Corr., 26–7). Later, she writes to him: “It is possible that our dear Jesus seeks to take glory from things that are lowly, vile, contemptible, and deserving of scorn, in other words, from us poor nuns” (Corr., 40). Finally Marie realizes that her project is in the hands of God, and the moment of abandoning herself to his will is one of mystical ecstasy: “This adorable Majesty cast his gaze on me, letting me know that I had desired to subjugate his will to my own, but that, through love, he desired to subjugate mine […] And then my soul was transported by a divine agony. Barely breathing, it confessed itself conquered, saying and signifying by its breaths: ‘Ah! My Love! O my great God! I desire nothing, I can desire nothing. You have ravished my will!’” (R 1654, 212–13). Following this moment, she enters into a state of serenity which lasts a year, until she feels God telling her that the time for action has come. She reveals her secret plan to Jesuit friends with links to the Canadian mission and through them comes into contact with Madeleine de la Peltrie, a rich woman seeking to finance a group of nuns willing to go to New France. When the two women meet, in January 1639, Marie immediately recognizes Mme de la Peltrie as the companion of her 1633 dream. Four weeks later Marie and another sister leave Tours for Paris, where they join Mme de la Peltrie and two other Ursulines who will accompany them on the journey to New France. Two visions Marie has during the days preceding her departure reveal to her that the adventure in Canada will be the final step in her journey towards the annihilation of self. In the first, she sees an immense building in an unknown city, “built, not of stone, but of crucified persons” (R 1654, 236–7). The second vision, which lasts for three days, terrifies her: “I had a vision of what was going to happen to me in Canada. I saw endless crosses, a terrible abandonment by God and by other people and entry into a hidden and unknown life. It seemed to me that God in his Majesty was saying deep within me: ‘Now you must serve me at the expense of your self; go and show me the proof of the fidelity you owe me’” (R 1654, 236). So conscious is she of the “horrifying solitude of the spirit” God has in store for her that Marie says her goodbyes to her loved ones and her country in an almost “unfeeling” state (R 1654, 237). And yet, she recalls, as she stepped into the rowboat that would take her to the ship on 4 May 1639, she had the feeling of “entering paradise” (R 1654, 242). Up until the point when the ship leaves the English Channel, she continues to write letters which she gives to fishermen to take back to France. Later, she will recall

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that during the three months of the voyage, “there was so much to suffer for those of our sex and condition that you would have to experience it to believe it” (R 1654, 246). She is constantly thirsty, barely sleeps, and suffers throughout the voyage from “such an extreme headache that I’d have died if it were any worse” (R 1654, 246). Near the coast of Newfoundland the ship passes so close to an immense iceberg that all on board prepare for the death that seems inevitable. A general absolution is given, and Mme de la Peltrie holds onto Marie, “so that we would die together.” Efficient as always, Marie arranges her habit “in such a way that I would be decent when the bodies were washed ashore.” Calm in face of her possible death, she nonetheless remains optimistic: “I didn’t feel a single moment of terror, but rather […] the awareness that I was offering God the ultimate sacrifice in being denied the joy of seeing our dear Savages. [However] I still felt deep within my soul that we would reach Quebec” (R 1654, 244– 5). Saved by “an obvious miracle,” they do in fact arrive in Quebec, on 1 August 1639. n e W fr A nCe : LA nd O f deS ire And nO thingneSS

In his book Intérieurs du Nouveau Monde, Pierre Nepveu describes the paradoxical feeling of extreme deprivation experienced by the first European settlers of the Americas: after the moment of discovery, in which “the landscape is perceived as a field of infinite possibility,” comes a turning in on oneself, a sense of the need for refuge in face of “this foreign and hostile world.” According to Nepveu, the writings of Marie de l’Incarnation offer a privileged point of view on this experience of the New World as both “lack and supreme intensity.”26 And indeed, it is hard to imagine a more vivid description than Marie’s of the simultaneous sense of exhilaration and deprivation evoked by the reality of New France. All the risk and madness of the North American adventure, all the vast space and the teeming life of the colony are brought to life in the numerous letters she finds the time to write from her cloister despite her busy life as an administrator, teacher, and confidante of almost all the major actors of her era. The image of herself projected by these letters is that of a woman who has found self-realization and a vehicle for the expression of her overflowing energy. There is a sense of optimism and of the exaltation of the missionary project: the joy of sharing in such an important venture with equally committed female and male companions, the discovery of a culture radically different from her own and the acquisition of its languages, and, finally, the challenge of adapting to the hardships of the new country. And yet, behind this panorama of her projects and her society, in the “depths

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of the soul” where the essence of Marie’s story always lies, she is living a “crucifying” drama whose stages and meaning are revealed in the pages of her autobiography. Upon her arrival in Canada, Marie recognizes the country she had seen in her dream six years earlier: “The huge mountains, the vast spaces and the geography were exactly as I remembered them, except that there were fewer mists than in my dream”27 (R 1654, 259). New France is indeed the country of her dreams, for it will not only allow her to realize her apostolic mission, but will offer her a freedom and autonomy that would have been unimaginable in France. In the early years of the mission, large numbers of Algonquins are baptized and several of them, encouraged and aided by the Jesuits, agree to give up their nomadic lives in order to clear the land around Lévis, located on the south shore of the Saint Lawrence River opposite Quebec, and settle there. Marie observes that their piety and enthusiasm resemble those of the early Christians. “No souls could be more zealous and pure in their observance of God’s law. I admire them when I see how submissive they are to those who teach them” (Corr., 119). The comparison of the native peoples with children is frequent, and there is little doubt that Marie is more than comfortable in the position of authority she has assumed in God’s name: “I see generous and brave native captains fall to their knees at my feet, begging me to pray to God with them before they eat. They join their hands like children and I make them say whatever I want” (Corr., 108). In spite of the wars with the Iroquois and the very real dangers to which her Jesuit friends were exposed, Marie’s account of these early years is full of optimism. Most of the indigenous peoples seem docile and welcoming, thirsting as they are (according to Marie’s perspective) for the God the French are bringing to them. A 1642 letter contains a beautiful portrait, biblical in inspiration,28 of a group of Algonquins who arrive at the convent in the middle of winter, walking on the ice of the Saint Lawrence River “as if on a beautiful plain”: “They were thirsting like deer with the desire to hear Mass and to receive the Blessed Sacrament, having been deprived of both for almost four months” (Corr., 160). Doubtless the need for food and lodging also contributes to the enthusiasm of the new converts: the Ursulines recognize this, and offer hot meals to all who arrive at their door. Marie speaks of “a great number of travellers who were constantly at the grille of the cloister asking for both physical and spiritual nourishment […] with the result that there was always a pot on the fire; as one was being emptied, another was being made ready” (Corr., 159). For more than three years the Ursulines live in a tiny house with two rooms that serve as kitchen, refectory, dormitory, parlour, choir, and

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classroom. In one of her letters, Marie mentions that it is often impossible for them to keep a candle lit because of the wind that passes through the house, and that at night they can see the stars through the gaps between the roof boards (Corr., 98). Their primary task is the instruction of native girls, with a few French girls added as day students. After the order and discipline of cloistered life in France, it is not hard to imagine the shock which such a total absence of private space and constant immersion in the chaotic lifestyle of the native girls must have represented for the nuns. “The dirtiness of the Savage girls who weren’t yet used to French cleanliness meant that we would sometimes find a shoe in our pot, and every day there would be hairs and pieces of charcoal in it,” Marie recalls in her autobiography. Yet she insists on the fact that, far from provoking disgust on the part of the nuns, the dirtiness of the little “orphan Savages […] was an unimaginable delight for us” (R 1654, 260). The deep contentment experienced by Marie de l’Incarnation in her new life can only be fully understood in the context of her goal of selfannihilation, for which Canada proved to be the ideal space and location. In the vision that preceded her departure from France she had understood she was leaving for a place where she would finally learn “how to serve God at [her] own expense” (R 1654, 264). And now, in spite of the success of the little Ursuline establishment, she enters into a period of anxiety and loss which, in mystical terms, corresponds to the “dark night of the soul” described by Saint John of the Cross. Worse than the depression she had suffered in her early years in the cloister, this excruciatingly painful period will last seven years. From Marie’s point of view as expressed in the Relation, these sufferings are “crucifying” steps towards the total loss of self-esteem. Once again she finds herself in an abyss or state of nothingness which God will eventually fill: “I saw myself as the lowest and most debased of beings, deserving of nothing but scorn” (R 1654, 264). But the modern reader will recognize in this lack of confidence a possible symptom of exhaustion and culture shock. In addition to living twenty-four hours a day in two small, badly heated rooms and sharing that space with their native students, Marie and her companions are faced with a disastrous financial situation, beginning in the fall of 1642, when their founder, Mme de la Peltrie, decides to leave for Montreal with Jeanne Mance, withdraws her financial support from the Ursulines, and even takes with her a considerable amount of furniture. Marie writes frenetically to other possible benefactors begging for aid, especially as she has committed herself to the construction of a monastery for the Ursulines, but her requests meet with no success. With their debts accumulating and their future appearing

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more and more uncertain, it would not be surprising if the other nuns in their panic began to question the decisions of their superior. According to Claude Martin, “they blamed her behind her back for faults of which she was innocent and treated her as if she were guilty of some crime. No matter what she did or to whom she turned for support, she met with nothing but coldness.”29 Far from the familiar milieu of Tours and the great mystical experiences of her twenties, Marie now goes through a period of inner devastation during which, perhaps more than in any other part of her autobiography, she reveals herself as fully human and even imperfect, although undoubtedly not as “unworthy” as she feels herself to be. She has always experienced life as a succession of ups and downs, and now, in the absence of God, she is constantly at the mercy of her moods: “I passed from an abyss of light and love into an abyss of darkness and pain, and felt myself plunged into a hell full of sadness and bitterness. And, from the depths of this darkness, without my understanding its cause, there came a temptation to despair” (R 1654, 265–6). She even desires to throw herself into the flames of Hell “to displease God, whom this state of feeling had led me to hate” (R 1654, 266). During these seven years of torment, Marie de l’Incarnation continues to function efficiently, keeping her anguish secret from all except a few trusted friends: “They said I was gentle and patient; but I who carried this misery around with me found myself far from perfect, and when a friend I could trust visited me I could speak of nothing but these problems, thus humiliating myself even further” (R 1654, 286). Living in a state of “habitual bitterness which made me feel nothing but aversion for others” (R 1654, 285), she loses all self-esteem. But on 15 August 1647, the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, she prays to the Blessed Mother and suddenly feels all her burdens “lifted from [her] like a piece of clothing,” and peace pouring into “the sensitive part of the soul” as her aversion towards others is transformed into “a cordial love of all those towards whom I had felt bitterness” (R 1654, 308). the eM ergen Ce Of the fe Mi ni ne

In her thirteenth and final chapter, Marie summarizes the external and internal events of her life during the seven years since the 1647 transformation. In a state of serenity, animated by a strength originating in the depths of her soul, she traverses two tragic events which, for many, are signs that the time has come to abandon the mission and return to France: the martyrdom of her Jesuit friends Jean de Brébeuf, Charles Garnier, and

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Gabriel Lalement at Sainte-Marie Among the Hurons in 1649 and a fire that destroys the recently built Ursuline convent the following year. These years are also a period in which, for the first time, she centres herself in the feminine principle embodied in the Virgin Mary and in a new recognition of her own strength as a woman.30 Her love of Holy Scripture guides her through the chaos of these events and provides her with an indefatigable strength: “Since I have been in Canada, working with people of varied conditions and backgrounds, there have been several delicate matters I have had to deal with. These divine maxims have given me strength and sustenance […] teaching me how to forget myself and focus on God […] accomplishing things and taking risks that go far beyond what a person of my sex can normally do” (R 1654, 313, 316). She recognizes that she has now arrived at a state of fusion between self and divinity which gives her an indomitable strength: “God possessed me through the maxims of his adorable Son, acting through me in all I had to do” (R 1654, 318). It is not an exaggeration to see the disastrous events of 1649 and 1650 as external manifestations of the state of self-annihilation which Marie de l’Incarnation has now attained. The death of the Jesuits at Sainte-Marie Among the Hurons signals the defeat of the great missionary dream which had brought Marie to America, and, on a more intimate level, the disappearance of close friends who have lived the sacrificial adventure to its ultimate conclusion. The arrival in Quebec of the few survivors of the Huron mission is an “extreme blow”: “It was the most pitiable thing that had happened in our new Church. The Reverend Fathers who remained alive had suffered more than those who had died. One could see that they were beings who were burnt to the core, in whom Jesus Christ lived more than they lived in themselves. Their saintliness was so visible that everyone who saw them was overcome” (R 1654, 319). Now fifty years old, Marie turns for the first time to the study of the Huron language, as the Ursulines have agreed to undertake the education of the newly arrived Huron girls. But, less than a year later, this new beginning will come to a premature end. During the night of 30 December 1650, after a lay sister goes to bed forgetting the piece of hot charcoal she has put into her yeast so that it will not freeze before morning, the new convent Marie had put immense effort into building burns to the ground. All the belongings of the nuns, including their habits and shoes, are swallowed up by the fire. Marie manages to save the papers of the community by throwing them out a window, but decides to allow the autobiographical manuscript she has been working on for her son to burn rather than risk the possibility of it being picked up and read by a passerby. In a subsequent

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letter to him, she wryly compares the situation of the nuns on that dreadful night, trembling with cold in their nightgowns, their bare feet in the snow, to “the nudity of Job, not on a pile of manure but on the snow, in a night of extreme cold” (Corr., 414). In another letter she quotes an observer of the scene who remarked: “Either these girls are crazy or they are filled with the love of God” (Corr., 414). Marie reflects, however, that the difference between the situation of the Ursulines and that of Job is the charity that comes to the nuns from all quarters. “Compassion came to us even from the very poor: one person offered us a towel, another a shirt, and yet another a coat. Someone gave us a chicken and someone else a few eggs […] This country is very poor, as you know, but its charity is even greater than its poverty.”31 Discussing this disaster in her autobiography, Marie praises God for having reduced all the fruits of her labours in New France to nothingness: “His plan was accomplished through our annihilation, especially as far as I was concerned, for it was I who had built this house and put a great deal of work into bringing it to the state it was in [at the time of the fire].” “It is you who have done this, my chaste Spouse. May you be blessed! You have done well,” she concludes (R 1654, 325). There is a striking contrast between the way Marie faces these tragedies and the long periods of depression set in motion by other difficult moments in her life. This time, rather than turning in on herself to reflect on her anxieties and wounds, she turns immediately to the practical tasks necessary to assure the survival of her community, refusing to entertain the possibility of a return to France: “I felt a total aversion to the idea of returning to France, unless we recognized that it was God’s will that we do so” (R 1654, 327). This strength coincides with the new centrality of the Blessed Virgin in her spiritual life, made clear in her account of the work she undertakes on building a new convent (the one that still stands on the Rue du Parloir in Quebec). The closeness of her relationship with the Blessed Virgin, with whom she walks around the construction site, consulting her about the decisions she must make, recalls her familiarity with her “more than adorable Beloved” in her younger days in France: “I had hardly started when I felt her assistance in an extraordinary way: that is, she was continually present to me […] I felt her near me without seeing her, accompanying me everywhere as I went back and forth … from the beginning of the demolition of what was left of the old building until the completion of the work. And as we walked, I chatted with her, saying, ‘Come on, Divine Mother, let’s go and see our workers’” (R 1654, 331).

Marie de l’incar nation • 65 A WOMA n ’S Writi ng

The Relation ends with a summary of the stages through which God, having seduced the soul by pleasure, has led it to the annihilation of everything in it that did not participate in the divine. Marie now lives in an “extraordinary clarity” born of her certainty that God is love: “I am ceaselessly in commerce with the divine, in such a simple, delicate, and intense way that it cannot be described. It is not an act, it is not a breath, it is such a gentle sensation in the centre of the soul where God dwells that […] I can find no words for it” (R 1654, 352–3). Her life, her speech, and her writing are now, more than ever, an expression of God’s presence in her: “It is through him that I speak” (R 1654, 352–3). Reiterating her conviction that she has only arrived at this point through God’s mercy and her desire to live according to the spirit of the Gospel, and that she still fears other future “infidelities,” she closes her autobiography with the following words: “I am closing these notebooks on the 4th day of August, shortly after completing my spiritual exercises” (R 1654, 356). To what extent is it possible to detect characteristics related to gender in this extraordinary document? The author herself highlights one of the differences between her own work and that of her male contemporaries when she mentions that she could have written a longer account of her life, but “the awareness of the lowliness and indignity of my sex kept me from doing so” (R 1654, 317). In an era when the right to express oneself in writing was denied to women, only the insistence of her various spiritual directors and of her son allowed her to overcome this fear of unworthiness, and her numerous attempts to protect the confidentiality of her writings are a further sign of the social constraints regarding women and writing. And yet she writes constantly, snatching moments by the fire in the midst of her many responsibilities to do so, as if writing provides her release from the intensity of her experience or a necessary means of self-analysis. As well, if one judges by the beauty and originality of her images, she writes purely for the pleasure of putting words on the page. Certainly there is nothing approaching the interiority of Marie de l’Incarnation’s works in the masculine writing of the same period. The attention she pays to the intimate movements of her body and soul, the sometimes painful complexity of the human relationships she describes, and, above all, the maternal love and guilt which traverse her pages, make her work a model of feminine writing whose echoes will be felt in the correspondences, diaries, and autobiographies of women who will follow. Her obsession with her own unworthiness, particularly as a woman, will also be part of her legacy, and, regrettably, it is this self-denial, rather than

Living and Writing for g od • 66

her passion, her rebelliousness, and her warm human qualities, that will be emphasized by teachers and clerical authorities seeking to instill the values of submissiveness and self-abnegation in young girls in preparation for their role as perfect wives and mothers.32

PART TWO

• Wr i ti n g for th e Other: C or resp ondences, 1 7 4 8 –1862

Before the end of the seventeenth century, the age of mystical passion had ended, and, with it, the possibility for the self-realization it represented for at least part of the female population. In France, at the time when Claude Martin was publishing his mother’s spiritual autobiography, the bitter debate on Quietism was at its height, and Mme Jeanne Guyon, the most radical and individualistic of all the French mystics, was imprisoned for five years in the Bastille, condemned by both the king and the Church for refusing to submit to their authority.1 In New France, it would seem that the aridity of the living conditions of the nuns – the very conditions that had made the country a space for possible sainthood in the eyes of their predecessors – had begun to harden their minds and psyches, leading to an increasingly austere moralism. A letter written in 1720 by Mère Marie-Andrée Duplessis, the Superior of the Hospitalières de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, to a friend in France describes Canada as a country that is “sterile in all things that could be pleasing” and capable of producing only vulgarity.2 The contrast with the observations of earlier members of the same community is all the more striking when one reflects on the fact that the Annales de l’Hôtel Dieu de Québec, in which these observations were recorded, were edited by Mère Duplessis herself. The beginning of the eighteenth century also marks an evolution in the concept of self and the forms of life writing. The principal mode of written self-expression for women was now correspondence, whether private letters, business letters, or letters sent to newspapers.3 Educated women were now expected to master the epistolary arts, and manuals on letter writing, ornate writing tables, and shops devoted entirely to the sale of pens and writing paper were common in European countries.4 According to Marie-Claire Grassi, “the letter becomes a privileged place for daily self-expression […] For the woman, be she mother, lover, or friend, the

Par t two • 68

letter is the sole means of expression at her disposal […] In her confidences, woman speaks of the difficulty of being a woman in the eighteenth century.”5 A place for reflection and self-examination, the letter differs from other genres of personal writing in that the self constructed in it is necessarily in relationship. According to Georges Gusdorf, “in the letter, no matter how intimate, the subject expresses him/herself for another, in relation to a ‘you.’ […] The aim is to attract attention, to capture the sympathy of the other person, whose absent presence illumines the entire field of speech […] Exposed to the gaze or the intuitions of the other, I am invited to discover myself in turn […] Identity is deepened and completed through reciprocity.”6 For Brigitte Diaz, “the paradox of correspondence [is that] one addresses the other in order to find oneself.”7 Dena Goodman demonstrates through a number of case studies that letter writing in the early eighteenth century “shaped the way women established and maintained relations with others [and] emerged as women’s primary site of reflection and self-reflection; in letters women were able to articulate a gendered subjectivity at a time when gender expectations were changing and often contradictory.”8 Correspondence also has a temporality which is particular to it and which can affect the feelings of the letter writer. Béatrice Didier reminds us that in the eighteenth century, “a period in which faxes and emails were unknown,” it took time for a letter to reach its destination: “Between the time a letter is written and the time the response to it arrives, several days can pass, a time of possible anguish or disapproval which may find expression in the following letter. In any case, feelings can change between these two times, new events can take place, other correspondences can intervene.”9 This lack of coincidence between the time of writing and reception was particularly dramatic in New France, where at least six months separated the departure of letters on the last ships setting out in the fall from the arrival of replies to them in the spring. The melancholy tone of the letters written by Élisabeth Bégon to her son-in-law Michel de Villebois de la Rouvillière between 1748 and 1753 – the only surviving writings by a laywoman from the years preceding the Conquest – is at least partly a function of the temporal and geographical distance separating the letter writer from the object of her affection. Almost a century later, in the era of Julie Papineau’s letters to her husband Louis-Joseph Papineau (1823–62), distances are shorter and postal delays less extreme, but the inevitable time lapse between the writing and the reception of the letters nonetheless gives rise at times to serious misunderstandings and irritations between the two correspondents.

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The letters of these two women – the only women’s correspondences from the period to have been published – provide a window into the evolution of women’s subjectivity between the mid-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Unlike the foundresses of New France, each of the two women is, or has been, a wife and mother, and it is striking to note how fragile or rigidly conformist their sense of self can be. In moments snatched from the busy routine of her life as a widow, grandmother, and society matron, Madame Bégon writes to her son-in-law in order to feel that she exists as a person, and the melancholy tone of her letters is, in part, a result of the apparent lack of reciprocity in this intimate relationship. The four decades covered by Julie Papineau’s correspondence reveal the stages in the evolution of a woman who never succeeds in reconciling her own desires with the demands placed on her as a wife and mother. The hesitant young woman of the 1820s, who follows her husband’s advice in all things, is succeeded in the decade of the 1837–38 Rebellion by a mature woman with radical political ideas, very frustrated by the constraints of her maternal role. During the years after the Rebellion, when her husband is in exile in France, Julie appears as a strong woman determined to keep her family together and responsible for their economic survival. But the portrait of her in her final letters is that of a woman disappointed by life, clinging to her rigid religious beliefs in order to survive and, too often, a bitter and domineering wife and mother: the negative underside of the French-Canadian reine du foyer, or “queen of the hearth.” As well as providing a detailed look at two women’s inner lives, these correspondences contain perceptive portraits of social and political life in their respective eras. Eloquent female expressions of self and the world, they cannot be seen as typical or representative of women’s lives in the century that followed the Conquest. Taken together, however, they trace the gradual diminishing of women’s possibilities in that era and their transformation into the sacrificial mothers exalted by the dominant ideology.

C h ap t er 3

Wr i ti n g “To Te ll You I’ m Here”: T h e Cor re s p on de n c e o f É l i sa bet h B égon

What a great amount of snow, absence, and death! What a huge expanse of uncrossable space! And what an infinite sadness, except for the parts that are sheer folly: the love, in spite of everything, of this “Iroquois woman” for a selfish outlander […] And, above all, what rich experience not only of a woman’s life but of a decisive period in our history – all of it expressed in a voice ignorant of its own creative power. Nicole Deschamps, “Avant-propos,” Lettres au cher fils

Written to preserve a precarious love from the ravages of time and distance, the letters sent by Élisabeth Bégon to her son-in-law Michel de Villebois de la Rouvillière from 1748 to 1753 were discovered in 1932, after almost two centuries of neglect, in the attic of the Countess of Rancougne, a French descendant of the Bégon family. Published two years later,1 they are now in the collection of Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec. Until their reissue in book form in 1972, under the title Lettres au cher fils,2 prefaced by Nicole Deschamps, they had mostly interested scholars for their observations of daily life in New France in the years preceding the Conquest. However, as Martin Robitaille points out, these letters “are much more than a chronicle of society and family life in the eighteenth century; they also have the characteristics of love letters, of the private diary and of women’s writing.”3 Like Marie de l’Incarnation, Élisabeth Bégon was a passionate woman, willing to risk all for love. But while Marie achieved fulfilment by rejecting the traditional mother role, Élisabeth combines the roles of mother and lover in a somewhat unsettling way, at least according to Deschamps’s

t he Cor respondence of Élisabeth bégon • 71

interpretation of the letters: “What an image of the Quebec mother this woman offers us, with her combination of passion and martyrdom, smiling and suffering, at once the brilliant society hostess and the pious follower of the Third Order […] madly in love with her son-in-law.”4 Élisabeth had revealed her passionate and independent nature long before her relationship with her son-in-law, however. Born Marie-Élisabeth Rocbert de la Morandière in Montreal in 1696, she was the eldest of six children. At the age of seventeen, she fell in love with Claude-Michel Bégon de la Cour, a descendant of a noble family in France and the younger brother of the colony’s intendant. Claude-Michel was a war hero whose battle wounds, according to Deschamps, included a “caved-in chest,” some “mutilated fingers,” and “a missing right eye.”5 In face of the Bégon family’s opposition, the two lovers scandalized their milieu by marrying “à la gaumine,” that is, by simple mutual consent before two witnesses, a practice that was vigorously condemned at the time by Msgr de Saint-Vallier, the bishop of Quebec. The marriage was regularized in 1718, and in subsequent years Claude-Michel Bégon occupied several positions in the colonial administration, finally becoming governor of Trois-Rivières in 1743. By this time, Élisabeth had given birth to four children, of whom only a daughter (Marie-Catherine-Elisabeth, born in 1719) and a son (Claude-Michel-Jérôme, born in 1732) survived. In 1737, at the age of eighteen, the daughter, Marie-Catherine, married another French nobleman and member of the colonial administration, Michel de Villebois de la Rouvillière (to whom Madame Bégon’s letters will later be addressed). Three years later, in 1740, Marie-Catherine died of tuberculosis, leaving two children: a son (who was raised by relatives in France) and a daughter (raised by her grandmother Élisabeth Bégon). Between 1743 and 1748, Élisabeth and her husband acquire a reputation for the grace and elegance of the dinners and receptions they host, often for distinguished guests travelling through Trois-Rivières on the new road between Montreal and Quebec. It is probably during these same years that a loving friendship forms between Élisabeth and her son-inlaw Michel. But in 1748, Élisabeth suffers the loss of both these men. In April, her husband dies, and, a few months later, her son-in-law leaves for France, planning to proceed from there to what he hopes will be a better paid and more prestigious position in the colonial administration of Louisiana. After the death of her husband, Élisabeth leaves Trois-Rivières and moves into a house on Rue Saint-Paul in Montreal with her father, her granddaughter Marie-Catherine, an elderly friend she calls “Mater,” her adolescent niece Tilly (whose parents are in France and who has been brought up by her aunt, Élisabeth Bégon), and a number of servants. Her

Writing for the Other • 72

correspondence with her son-in-law begins in this house, six months after the death of her husband. Already melancholy during this period of mourning her husband, Élisabeth is further disturbed by the great distance separating her from her son-in-law, and by the fact that for several months she is unaware whether he is in France or in America. “What are you doing, dear son, and where are you? That is what I don’t know and will not know for a long time, a fact which distresses me greatly,” she writes on 15 February 1749 (113). And on 12 March: “But where should I write you, dear son? […] I write to you in Mississippi when you’re in France, and I shall perhaps write to you in France this spring when you’ll no longer be there!”(129). She writes to him almost every day: short letters in which she sums up the day’s events, gives him news of little Marie-Catherine (whom she calls “our dear daughter”) and other family members, and shares the latest gossip. “At last I’m free after a number of tiresome writings,” she confides to him in her first letter, “and can now chat with you with the same satisfaction I’ve always had. I plan to do so every day, and I repeat to you a hundred times that it is the only consolation left to me. You know, dear son, how hard it is for me to bear your absence” (43). For her, the daily letters are not only a way to make the beloved son-in-law present but also to feel that she herself exists, thanks to the relationship with him: “Goodbye, that’s enough for you,” she says in closing the next day’s letter. “As far as news of me is concerned, I have no desire other than to tell you that I’m here” (44). The letters begin in November 1748, and Élisabeth, knowing that she will be unable to post them until the arrival of the ships the following spring, decides to bind them together in notebooks that she ties up with a ribbon. Thus, several decades before the private diary becomes a common practice,6 she creates a sort of diary in which she records the thoughts, emotions, and events of her life each day. The correspondence, which covers the period from November 1748 to January 1753 (scarcely two weeks after Michel de Villebois’s death in New Orleans), is made up of nine of these notebooks or letter-diaries, of which the first five were written in Montreal. The last four, as well as sixty-one letters in more conventional form, were written in France, where Élisabeth Bégon moved in late 1749, hoping to be reunited there with her “dear son.” WOM en ’S Writing : A S PAC e fOr O ne Se Lf

Over the centuries, women have turned to writing to strengthen their sense of self, taking time to explore their thoughts and feelings in the midst of days filled by their duties and responsibilities as wives, mothers,

t he Cor respondence of Élisabeth bégon • 73

or daughters. Jean Le Moyne, one of the first and most lucid observers of women’s condition in French Canada, sees in Élisabeth Bégon’s letters the reflection of a society where women’s living space is beginning to be confined within the maternal role. “The time of the amazons is over and the Canadienne is tired of the sword […] Within the lower classes and the petite bourgeoisie, woman is starting to take on the solitary maternity of her mythical image; she is becoming the mother, too much the mother.”7 Well educated (she often translates English texts for the colonial administration) and wielding considerable influence in society thanks to her friendship with the Marquis de La Galissonière, the acting governor of the colony, Élisabeth is far from conforming to the myth of the fertile and self-sacrificing mother which will implant itself in the collective psyche after the Conquest. And yet her letters reveal a woman who identifies entirely with her roles of mother, spouse, and daughter and has played them to perfection, to the point where the passion she feels for her sonin-law is inextricably bound to a feeling of maternal duty. As well, she constantly worries about her father’s health, devotes herself every day to the education of her granddaughter, and manages all aspects of the household. In the centre of this world she animates and which constitutes her raison d’être, Élisabeth Bégon nonetheless feels the need to withdraw every day into the solitude of writing, exchanging with an absent interlocutor who offers her a protection against sadness and a harbinger of better days to come. The impossibility of receiving a reply in the predictable future creates the conditions that link her writing to that of the private diary. Already in November 1748, less than three weeks after the start of the correspondence, she notes that she will be deprived of news of Michel “for perhaps more than a year” (55), and she has in fact had no reply from him when the final Montreal “notebook” ends, in June 1749. Yet her desire to write is so strong that she does so regularly, in spite of the lack of a reply and the frequent thought that she has nothing interesting to say. In a sense, she admits, she is writing for herself: “Goodbye, dear son, I’ll talk with you again tomorrow if I can find something amusing to tell you, for what I write isn’t worth your time and patience, although it is the only satisfaction I have” (66–7). The pleasure she finds in writing is indissociable from that of expressing her love for the one who will read her, whose “absent presence [to quote Gusdorf] illumines the entire field of speech.”8 Thus she can write to Michel in December 1748 that he has no need to read her letters if he does not want to; for her, the pleasure and necessity of communicating with him are sufficient justification for the act of writing: “I sometimes worry about boring you with the poor things I recount,

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my dear son. I have the satisfaction of writing to you and of telling you, at least on paper, what I wish I could say in person: that I have no other pleasure today, gentle son, than chatting with you” (60–1). Six months later, still having had no answer from him, she declares that she will be unable to sleep unless she tells him of her love for him: “I confess to you, dear son, that if I didn’t enjoy writing to you so much I would give it up, since I have nothing to say that would amuse you. But I wouldn’t sleep well if I hadn’t at least told you that I love you. A small satisfaction for you, but an important one for me, since I can’t see you. At least I have the satisfaction of chatting with you for a moment” (187). Reading between the lines of this correspondence, one is struck by the lack of love that was, finally, the fate of this woman who devoted herself entirely to the needs of her family. Not on the part of her beloved father (although she worries about his hesitation to move to France with her and about his rapid aging after their arrival in a country in which he feels himself a foreigner), but of the ungrateful and much loved “dear son,” of her niece Tilly who, once reunited with her parents in France, rejects the aunt who raised her, and finally of her elderly friend “Mater,” who does not accompany the family to France and gravely wounds Élisabeth by not writing to her in the following years. However – and this is what is so moving about Élisabeth – she notes these slights in passing, without feeling sorry for herself (except perhaps in the case of her abandonment by Mater). What matters to her above all is not to upset the “dear son” who so rarely replies to her letters, and to remain the charming and witty society woman who had inspired his complicity in the years they were together. g OSS iP On A bACKgrOund Of SA dneSS: A C hrO ni CL e Of L ife in neW frAnCe

Writing to amuse her absent interlocutor, Élisabeth becomes a chronicler almost in spite of herself, recreating on paper the conversations of earlier years during which she and her son-in-law had grown closer by making fun of the people around them. From her house on Rue Saint-Paul, close to that of her protector and friend La Galissonière, she observes the comings and goings of people who often stop by her house to ask her for a good word with the governor or to share the latest news and gossip. She also talks about her family – the education she is giving little Marie-Catherine or her worries about her aging father – and about the religious practices (or lack of them) of her compatriots. The tone is witty and light, but as the weeks and months go by without a reply from her son-in-law, one senses behind the banter a growing anguish: a feeling of

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terror caused by the pitiless climate and an increasing worry about her own uncertain fate and that of the colony in these years leading up to its defeat by the English in 1759. Whether her distance from her milieu is due to her period of mourning or to an artistic temperament, Élisabeth shows herself to be a perceptive observer of her society. Among the actors who cross her stage are the most important members of the colonial administration – the governor La Galissonière, who adores Élisabeth’s granddaughter and often comes to the house to chat with her; her ambitious neighbour Longueuil,9 who drinks too much and covets the governor’s post, and whose numerous hypocrisies are not lost on Élisabeth; and the intendant François Bigot who travels from Quebec City to Montreal with a fleet of ships carrying his silverware so that he can impress Montreal society by the pomp of his parties and receptions. As well, there are servants, members of the military, and authoritarian priests, enraged by the profligate lifestyle of the members of their congregations. One senses in this society the malaise of a colony still somewhat unsure of itself, knowing it is not seen as “civilized” by the mother country and aspiring to be so. Families in New France send their sons to the old country to be educated and to work: Élisabeth’s own son and grandson were both raised in France and have remained there, and her sister and brother-in-law have moved there, leaving their daughter Tilly with her. It is a society still characterized by the roughness and energy of the age of exploration and wars with the indigenous peoples, and one is not surprised to learn that Élisabeth’s French in-laws, once she has arrived in their country, pejoratively refer to her as “the Iroquois.” Several generations of proximity to the native peoples have left their mark on the colony: Élisabeth often mentions visits of native chiefs to the governor and speaks of negotiations between the colonial administration and the native peoples regarding the exchange of prisoners. She even has a native servant, Alida, whose presence she tolerates in order to please her spoiled granddaughter: “Alida […] is still as bad as ever. I have often wanted to get rid of her, or at least to send her back to her father, but your daughter won’t allow it. This innocent child adores the dirty little woman more than she deserves, and that convinces me to keep her” (65–6). Corruption in this society is the rule rather than the exception. Élisabeth mentions that her neighbour Longueuil demands bottles of wine from those who seek his favours and that he has “bought a suit of embossed velvet using government revenues” (63–4). Elsewhere, she speaks of a government employee who has “redone his home from top to bottom, the ceilings, fireplaces, and floors all replaced and new plaster

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mantelpieces throughout […] And, according to the workmen, it is all paid for using certificates meant for repairing the king’s houses and the fortifications” (50–1). To distract themselves during the interminable winters when they are cut off from the mother country, people eat, drink, and dance, often at parties that last until six or seven in the morning. “There were some great benders at M. de Lantagnac’s dinner last night. I was told, dear son, that they all tried to dance a minuet but couldn’t manage it, and then it was decided they would go to Deschambault’s place and have onion soup. A lot more wine was drunk […] They put Noyan into a car sleigh and took him home” (94). There are balls almost every night, even during Advent, a practice which enrages the curés: “Would you believe it, dear son, the devout Mme Verchères had people dancing at her house for the whole night? Our priests will have lots to preach about: imagine having a ball on the feast of Our Lady, in Advent! The best part is that tomorrow there’s a ball at Mme Lavaltrie’s place, and the day after that at Mme Bragelogne’s. M. le curé will be very upset” (62). During the Easter period, people dance all night and sleep during the day “while the Blessed Sacrament is exposed” (112). After the festivities they search desperately for a priest who will be indulgent enough to give them absolution, but such priests are not easy to find, as the bishops have threatened them with excommunication: “Everyone is looking for a confessor and no one is getting absolution unless they promise never to go to another ball. As you can imagine, that is too great a sacrifice to make” (143). To all appearances, the missionary fervour that originally dominated New France has given way to an authoritarian Church mocked by the majority of the faithful. Élisabeth tells the story of a young priest, just arrived from France, who, as part of the marriage ritual, asks the young couple if they understand the implications of the sacrament they are about to receive: “They said no, but that in four days they could tell him more about it if he was curious. The poor priest bent his head and said nothing more” (106–7). And she approvingly reports her granddaughter’s reply to a priest who has given her permission to read Don Quixote: “It’s just as well that you gave me permission, since I really only need my grandmother’s. I think she is capable of judging whether or not I can read a book, and no one else needs to bother about what I should read” (80). Thanks to such distractions Élisabeth maintains a surface calm, but her frustration is obvious, especially in the winter, when the ships have left and the colony is settling into the lethargy of a long winter. “Everything is peaceful and quiet. I alone have no tranquility, overcome as I am by the knowledge that I am far from everything,” she writes in November

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1748 (53). She hates the snow and the cold, which isolate her, cutting off all contact with the world for several interminable months: “A foot of snow fell last night, dear son, and made me groan when I got up this morning. You are so lucky to be in a country free of this terrible cold! I tremble in advance at the thought that we’ll be stuck in snow for nine more months” (47), she writes in November. By mid-May, nothing has changed: “It’s terribly cold, it’s snowing, it’s raining, it’s hailing, and I think winter is starting over again. We have a fire on in every part of the house and we’re freezing. All the trees are in blossom and I think they’ll be damaged” (169). The price of firewood worries her (“It is no longer possible to live in Canada […] we would be crazy to stay in a country where we have to spend all our money on keeping warm”); and she constantly fears during the long periods of cold that a fire will start in one of the houses, all of which are lit by candles. These worries increase her desire to be in France, safe from the cold and the inconveniences of the Canadian winter: “Dear son, I would so love to be in France […] At least there I wouldn’t be exposed to the possibility of freezing and dying in a pile of snow” (76). In the five Montreal notebooks (covering the period from November 1748 to mid-June 1749), the idea of leaving for France, where Élisabeth hopes to be reunited with her son-in-law, her son, and her grandson, recurs constantly. Her granddaughter, who shares her desire to go to France, uses the bitterness of the Canadian climate as a way to convince her great-grandfather to leave: “I think he’s afraid to complain of the cold or of the other frustrations caused by the climate in front of her, for she always replies: “Well, dear papa, wouldn’t you be better off in France?” (83). Élisabeth’s desire to leave is also fuelled by the knowledge that her friend La Galissonière will be departing in the autumn of 1749, and that without him she will lose her privileged place in society. She comments with irony on the fact that people who used to look down on her and Michel now go out of their way to please her, thanks to her friendship with the governor: “You know how they think in this country. They are always willing to kowtow to those who are close to power […] Every day I see faces that bore me and […] I know that they only come to see me because they think it will pave their way to meeting the governor” (48, 54). The hypocrisy of it makes her cynical, and, more and more often, she blames the country for these attitudes: “I see everyone, dear son, and I trust no one: I know my country too well to do otherwise” (85). And elsewhere: “Nothing new, dear son. I don’t believe there is anything more sterile than our poor country” (132).

Writing for the Other • 78 L Ov i ng With Out reASO n: ÉL iSAb e th And MiC heL

What makes these letters unforgettable is the infinite nostalgia that emanates from them, the vastness of the unknown space into which they seem to be thrown, at the mercy of the winds and the tides. The voice of a woman speaks to us across all this distance, sighing words of love into the surrounding silence, words that evoke the fragility, but also the absolute necessity, of this link to the other that attaches the letter writer to life and to hope. Reading them, one would like to know more about this Michel de Villebois de la Rouvillière, the “dear son” who is the object of so much passion, but few details of his life have been retained by history. According to Nicole Deschamps, Michel was “ugly, obese, and of fragile health,”10 an idealistic and always unsatisfied reformer who, during his time in Louisiana, fell into a state of paranoia in which he felt persecuted not only by his superiors and colleagues, but also by the members of his family. In the final months of his life, his hostility against his mother-in-law Élisabeth is so great that he denies her custody of his daughter Marie-Catherine and severs the business relationship he has with her. Is he the “ungrateful son” described by Nicole Deschamps? Or rather a young man seeking to regain control of his life against a domineering mother-in-law? As his letters to Élisabeth no longer exist, we can only speculate on the nature of their relationship based on her words. In her presentation, Deschamps states that “the tone of the correspondence leaves no room for doubt: these are certainly love letters.”11 Noting that Michel is closer in age to his mother-in-law than to his deceased wife (at the beginning of the correspondence he is forty-six and Élisabeth is fifty-two), she suggests that what she calls the “strange affection” between them was of a sexual (and œdipal) nature, even if the customs of the time and Élisabeth’s piety meant that it was never fully lived out: “Is it natural that in the eighteenth century a proper mother-in-law would call her ‘dear son’ ‘my plump angel’ or ‘my fat pig’? […] The saddest aspect of this adventure is perhaps how repressed it was. If Élisabeth Bégon is a new Jocasta, she is a wounded one. And Michel, who seems never to have really dared to be an Œdipus, is hardly even tragic. Basically he is no more than an absent person with a bad character, whose charm remains inexplicable.”12 According to Deschamps, Élisabeth is “a Mater dolorosa who perhaps prefigures the generations of our sacrificial mothers,”13 close to masochism in her refusal to renounce her love in the face of Michel’s silence: “Can it even be considered love to spend your life writing to someone who doesn’t love you? It is a sterile and cruel occupation which would

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exhaust even the most exacerbated masochism.”14 Seen in relation to this supposedly overpowering mother, Michel appears as the impotent son, prefiguring all the “bitter and disappointing, far away and silent heroes” of Quebec literature. “Where, when and how will the son, victim of an abusive mother, cease trying to escape?”15 To put such interpretations into perspective, it is important to remember the vast distances, the postal uncertainties, and the moves of the two letter writers, not to speak of Michel’s illness – all of which offer convincing explanations of the gaps and silences in the correspondence. It is clear that both Élisabeth and Michel are aware of the difficulties that beset their attempts to communicate. On 26 March 1750, when Élisabeth has already been in France for five months, she writes to Michel that she has not heard from him in over a year (235). A few weeks later, having finally received a letter from him, she writes: “What a joy for me to see your handwriting! But when I saw the date I was devastated! How can it take six months for a letter to go from you to me?” (239). She reproaches him for not having mentioned receiving “all the letters we sent you from the North country over the last two years. You must have received several when you arrived there, from my dear father, from your daughter, and from me” (240). But, just as Élisabeth was unaware for more than a year whether Michel was in France or Louisiana, he, for his part, has been sending her letters to Canada, not knowing she has already arrived in France. In September 1750, she notes not only receiving a letter sent from him in Louisiana and dated 3 July 1750, in which he says he has received no letters from her (276), but also a packet of letters that he had sent to her Canadian address eighteen months earlier: “I have just received a packet from you dated 26 June 1749, which apparently comes from Canada” (280). The following year, she encloses a note addressed by little Marie-Catherine to her father: “I am so upset that I haven’t had any news of you! You haven’t written to us for more than eight months. I beg of you, please write us” (352). In addition to all these geographical obstacles, there is the risk of an accident at sea: in October 1752, Élisabeth mentions the shipwreck of a vessel coming from Louisiana which would probably have been carrying letters from her sonin-law (280). Despite these difficulties, several comments in Élisabeth’s letters indicate that her son-in-law is eager to conserve links with her and with his family. “You tell me not to let you languish,” she writes, “so I’ve taken advantage of the first chance I’ve had to give you news of us” (242); “you assure me that you love your poor mother […] Don’t you think, dear son, that our separation is harder on you than it is on us, especially on me?” (248). At times Élisabeth apologizes for all the details in her letters, adding

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that she is only writing this way because he has asked her to: “You have urged me to write you. Aren’t you getting tired of my scribblings?” (250); “I think that I would be ashamed to have you read all my follies; but you tell me that we must tell each other everything we think since we can’t see each other” (295). There is no doubt that the atmosphere of loving complicity which surrounds Élisabeth’s evocations of Michel is closely tied to a maternal feeling, but the text offers a less scandalous interpretation of her loving words than the one proposed by Deschamps. Not only are the modes of discourse in eighteenth-century correspondences extremely sentimental, as Catherine Rubinger explains, but Madame Bégon’s language must be understood in the context of the network of family relationships that defines her and constitutes her raison d’être.16 A mother who has lost all her children – the two who have died in early childhood, the adolescent son from whom she has been separated for many years, and her beloved daughter, dead of tuberculosis – she is also in the midst of a period of mourning for her husband. The “loving friendship” she shares with her son-in-law probably dates back to the period after her daughter’s death, when the young widower moved into the house of his parents-in-law in Trois-Rivières along with his two small children. Since then, the grandson has been sent to live with his other grandparents in France, but Michel and his daughter have remained with the Bégons, becoming the “dear son” and “dear daughter” to whom Élisabeth so often refers. According to Rubinger, the endearing terms Élisabeth uses, while they may seem somewhat incestuous to a modern reader, should be understood in the context of an era in which family structures were often modified by premature deaths. For Élisabeth, Michel is her “favourite child,” the missing link in the network of family love upon which she depends: “You know, dear son, that your poor mother isn’t good for much except for loving her children. So you can imagine how much I suffer at being separated from you” (121); “I prayed [to Saint-Xavier] this morning, with all my heart, to look after my dear children, including you, whom I certainly consider the dearest of all” (124). Small wonder, then, that Élisabeth so values this relationship with a son by marriage who is also a friend and a confidant of many years. “These people are really ridiculous,” she writes him. “How I would laugh if you were here! But I dare not confide in anyone” (139). Filled with panic by the idea of another long winter to go through, she remembers how her son-inlaw would reassure her: “Our river is full of ice and will overflow if this cold season lasts much longer. Dear son, you know how I used to worry during these cold spells and how you were the only thing that kept me calm. But now I’m alone and must reassure myself no matter what comes” (72).

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Élisabeth is truly a mother for Michel, worrying about his situation in Louisiana, encouraging him to keep up his religious practices, and sharing with him her great sorrow at the death of her husband, a sorrow she dares not reveal in the presence of her father and granddaughter: “I confess, my son, that I feel weighed down on all sides. All I can do is sigh, sometimes about your absence and sometimes about what the Lord has taken from me and for which there is no consolation” (56). Gradually, as the months pass, we begin to hear a language of self-pity in her letters, one that will become familiar in the discourse of future generations of French-Canadian mothers – complaints and reproaches that will amplify in frequency and volume after her move to France. e Xi L e in the MO ther COuntry: “eve rythi ng i S e e MAK eS Me M iSS My OWn C O untry”

On 4 November 1749, after a difficult voyage, the Bégons arrive at the home of Michel’s brother in Brest, France. The next day, Élisabeth writes to Michel: “I must love you greatly to have undertaken such a terrible voyage! Nothing could make me want to go back” (197). But the France she had idealized earlier will turn out to be a disappointment. She soon becomes aware of her many differences from the French, both in the way she perceives them and in the way they see her. By the following January, still at the home of the Villebois de la Rouvillières, she has had time to become aware of the snobbishness of her hosts and their condescending attitude to her: “It seems that I have no idea how one should behave and that I’m just an Iroquois. I don’t say anything, but I would so much like to have my own place to live!” (205). Everything in France seems to her inferior to what she had in Canada. In Montreal, people dropped in on her constantly; here, given the distances and the poor condition of the roads, visits are difficult to arrange: “I’m terrified by those miserable roads and won’t soon go back in that carriage, but you can’t get anywhere on foot. Here, the paving stones kill my feet and, if I want to go out, it costs a fortune to be carried in a chair […] so I stay in my room most of the time. Feel sorry for me, my dear son, for I deserve your pity” (210). Surprisingly, she suffers from the cold more than she did in Canada, and reproaches her son-in-law for having so praised the climate of his country of birth: “Every day I have occasion to question your judgment about the weather in France. You always talked about how beautiful it was here in April! It’s horribly cold, even worse than it was in March. We have the heat on more often than we did in Canada and it is certainly costing us more, but I would rather do without new clothes

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and spend my money on keeping warm” (215). The cost of living is higher than in New France, and she claims to be “weighed down by debts” (255). Unable to find a good pen for writing, she decides she will have to order one from Canada (227). Workers and servants seem incompetent to her: “None of them know what they’re doing. You have to do everything yourself, even the servants’ work. I have only one miserable servant and all she does is run around. And they tell me I’m lucky to have her!” (292). Even the religious processions are less impressive than those of New France: “I’ve never seen anything as pathetic as that procession. No clergy, no people you’d want to spend time with, no one but the poor, they’re the only ones who have any faith here” (236). Élisabeth suffers from the loss of the social status she enjoyed in New France: “It is sad, after being served as I used to be, to be reduced to this,” she laments after complaining yet again about the servants: “We are served like dogs and if I don’t check on my soup a hundred times, we wouldn’t eat at all” (313). But at the same time she is scandalized by the materialism and superficiality of her hosts: “All they talk about in this house is how to make more money” (207), she writes. It is a milieu obsessed by hierarchy and riven by jealousies, where those who get promotions are envied while those who do not are the objects of scorn: “The only pleasant thing in this country is the climate. In everything else – fame, envy, jealousy, and all that is socially undesirable – it is worse than Canada. Only money and the rich are appreciated […] which makes it a wretched place I would leave with pleasure if it weren’t for the hope of seeing you here” (223). Élisabeth feels more and more isolated, unable to be sociable with people “who are always putting on airs and lack the qualities one looks for in a friend” (366). Her own sister (the mother of her niece Tilly), a sickly and petty woman, rejects both her daughter and the aunt who raised her in New France: “Our Tilly is less esteemed in this house than Alida was with us. They say she is sulky and badly brought up. I reply that I did my best” (303). Later, she will reveal that her sister’s family, including their daughter Tilly, have broken with her because of jealousies caused by Élisabeth’s close relationship with her father: “Envy and jealousy destroy everything. They think that everything I eat and drink has been stolen from them and that my dear father loves no one but me. Their daughter, whom I raised, is of the same opinion and only comes here with her sister to see my father” (382). More and more, Élisabeth’s vocabulary becomes one of complaint and self-pity, peppered by words like “misery,” “old age,” and “crosses to bear”: “Peas have been in season for two weeks now, and I still haven’t been able to get any, which makes me nostalgic for our country, where I wasn’t always the last to get good things. Ah, poor

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old mother that I am, in the time when I should be having some sweetness in my life there is only misery! […] I have so many crosses to bear!” (245). The more she is disappointed by France, the more she becomes nostalgic for Canada: “I am angry, dear son, that so many people sang the praises of France to me. Every time I face a setback I say to myself: If I were in Canada this wouldn’t be happening to me” (295). the finAL yeArS

Élisabeth Bégon’s final years are marked by the tragedy of a rupture with her son-in-law, whom she will nonetheless continue to love until the end. Michel falls into what was seen by his superiors as a mental disturbance, characterized by aggressivity and paranoia. On learning of this from friends in the colonial administration and from Michel’s own letters, Élisabeth tries to control the situation as much as possible, giving him advice in her letters and intervening in his favour with influential friends in France. Although Michel de Villebois de la Rouvillière’s letters to Élisabeth have never been found, the numerous missives he sent to the Ministry of the Marine in France during his time in Louisiana still exist, and are cited at some length in historian Guy Frégault’s study of the years during which the Marquis de Vaudreuil was governor of Louisiana.17 In those letters Michel appears egotistical, angry, and perpetually dissatisfied. Two of the accusations he makes are echoed in Élisabeth’s letters. First, he bitterly criticizes Governor Vaudreuil and his family, who are close friends of Élisabeth, and second, he denounces the practice common among colonial civil servants of enriching themselves by private ventures even as they continue to work as representatives of the king, a practice which Élisabeth Bégon defends constantly in her letters to him. Are these the paranoid imaginings of a sick man, or is there a grain of truth in his numerous complaints? Probably both interpretations have some validity. Some of Élisabeth’s observations indicate that she is aware of the accuracy of his criticisms of Vaudreuil and of his feeling that she and other members of his family have sided with corrupt colonial administrators to make him abandon his principles: “I won’t comment on what you have written about the way we have all conspired in making you play a role that doesn’t suit you […] I suffer as much as you do from all this, dear son, but you will be free of it all next fall. I don’t know yet who will be replacing M. de Vaudreuil, but I have been told he has been named governor of Canada” (381). Vaudreuil is an old friend of Élisabeth Bégon. He was governor of Trois-Rivières until the post passed on to her husband in 1743, and she is in constant contact with his brother in France. In fact, she writes to

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her son-in-law in November 1750 that their “dear little one,” now eleven years old, is promised in marriage to a Vaudreuil: “Your daughter is making great preparations for the balls. She is starting to dance quite nicely. She intends to marry M. de Vaudreuil in two years and he will have to ask for your permission” (319). An alliance with the Vaudreuil family is doubtless in line with Élisabeth’s own ambitions, and one can imagine her distress on learning from one of her contacts in the colonial administration of the existence of a letter from her son-in-law denouncing the governor. She writes to him immediately, expressing her great disappointment and advising him to avoid such impetuosity in future: “[The letters] you’re writing against M. de Vaudreuil can do you a great deal of harm. You complain bitterly about unimportant things and about matters that, if you had any sense, you would discuss with him in private. But to write these things, dear son? I no longer recognize you; I have never seen you so caught up in pettiness. Is there someone who is perverting you and ruining your good sense? For at the very same time as you are complaining, M. de Vaudreuil is praising you in the most generous terms […] Don’t write things on the spur of the moment” (344). In future, she tells him, if he feels he is a victim of injustice, he should write to her, for she has enough influence to help him: “The esteem that your mother has acquired in this country gives her confidence and the friendship of persons who can do much” (345). In several other letters she offers him advice: “Don’t listen to gossips” (349); “Think, dear son, on the fact that you have been put there to look after your own affairs and not to be the reformer of the governor […] I can see you groaning, but with a bit of reflection you will see that I am right” (350–1). In the course of this period in which Michel has become a more real interlocutor, and no longer the idealized and mute phantom that he was during the long months when his mother-in-law was without news from him in New France, a change of tone is perceptible in the letters. Even as Élisabeth continues to assure him of her great love for him, she begins to sound like a “mother hen,” involving herself in Michel’s affairs to the point where one can understand the anger that finally led him to break with her. She has heard from the Vaudreuils that he is living beyond his means, and she advises him not to spend too much (282); and, aware of his tendency to be overweight, she gives counsel to him about his eating habits: “I find that you go too long without eating. Skip supper, but eat a little before bed […] Maybe you’re eating enough for two meals at dinner” (271). Surrounded in France by people who explain to her the machinations they use to make money in the colonies, she encourages her son-in-law to do the same: “Don’t you see that these are the ways to make money, and that

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you’re a fool, my poor son, if you don’t take advantage of them?” (311). It would be understandable if Michel, already critical of the corruption he sees around him, were offended by his mother-in-law’s advice that he do likewise: “If you’re not interested in making money where you are, you deserve to be beaten, for […] those who have no commercial ambitions are considered stupid. I fear that you aren’t concerned enough with these matters” (315). Often she counsels him to get along better with the Vaudreuils, even if it means going against his principles: “You are right to say that the Vaudreuil family is happy. I am constantly seeing how they succeed in everything they undertake. I exhort you, dear son, to live in harmony with them […] I know it’s difficult for you, but some things have to be sacrificed” (272). The final letters are devastating in their sadness. Overcome by Michel’s constant accusations and insults, Élisabeth tries to defend herself, but the growing distance between her and her son-in-law becomes obvious when she begins to address him as “vous” rather than “tu” for the first time in the correspondence (or rather to alternate between “vous” and “tu,” for she is unable to remain angry with the “dear son” for very long). In January 1753, unaware that Michel has succumbed to an attack of apoplexy a few weeks earlier, she responds with dignity to the ultimate injury he has inflicted on her – the withdrawal of her custody over her granddaughter: “As for giving your daughter to your sisters, you had only to tell me that that was your wish and that you felt she was better off with them, and I would have given her to them” (417). All of Élisabeth’s support systems have now fallen apart: not only the united family of which she had dreamed, but the much loved country, whose coming defeat can be felt in the news she receives from New France. The French have been defeated by the English at Miami and Detroit (269) and the merchants are abandoning the colony and returning to France (340). Harvests are poor (378) and the entire city of Trois-Rivières has been destroyed by fire (408). “This poor country [is] in great misery,” she writes (378). “I have been told many things that make me thank God I am no longer there” (343). So much sadness leaves its mark, and Élisabeth speaks more and more often of old age and approaching death: “I’m getting old and have less and less hope, for I’m now crippled. I can no longer do anything. If I walk, I feel sick, and if I want to work, which I often have to do, it’s the same thing. Ah! dear son, you can certainly call me ‘old grandmother’ these days!” (413). In April 1753, she writes to M. de Rostan, a civil servant who has been sympathetic to Michel, asking him to “act as a father” to her two grandchildren, now fourteen and fifteen years old: “You will understand, dear sir, that I wish

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with all my heart that I could continue looking after these dear children, but my health no longer permits it” (423). Her father dies the following year, and Élisabeth herself will pass away on the first of November 1755, at the age of fifty-nine. •  •  • After reading her correspondence, the image one retains of Élisabeth Bégon is that of her unshakable love, and of the strength, tenacity, and diplomatic skills that gained her the respect of the influential men of her time. Like Marie de l’Incarnation, she lived her life in tune with her society and was the confidante of those who held power in it. Like Marie as well, she was a woman of passion who found her own centre and sense of self in fusion with an other. “Since then, my soul has remained in its centre, which is God, and this centre is within,” wrote Marie. Élisabeth echoes these sentiments in writing to her son-in-law: “I find my own centre when I can find a moment to tell you that I love you” (313). The all too human object of her love will prove to be less solid than the divine one that sustained Marie, and without him she collapses, living her final years in a state of misery and abandonment. Yet her writing, to the end, is full of vitality, demonstrating a perceptiveness and talent for communicating the colours and movement of her inner and outer worlds. Neither Marie de l’Incarnation nor Élisabeth Bégon saw themselves as writers and, like her predecessor, Élisabeth insisted that her writings be burned in order to avoid the possibility that they might fall into the hands of someone other than their addressee. Certainly she never envisaged the possibility that they would be read by posterity: “I ask you always to burn [my letters] and not to put them in piles of paper like the ones you used to have in Canada,” she writes to Michel. “Throw all my writings into the fire and don’t keep any except those that might amuse you, if you feel like laughing at your poor mother who writes like a cat” (250). Writing nonetheless occupied an important place in her daily routine, offering her a way to record and reflect on the evolution of her thoughts, emotions, and activities, thus defying the passage of time and the certainty of death. She constantly refers to her packages of letters as a “journal”: “I’m going to begin my journal” (291); “there is a Jesuit father here who will deliver my journal to you, after I have wrapped it in a waxed cloth” (258). It is a journal paradoxically written for another and destined for him alone, a hybrid and innovative form born of the fusion of her own psyche with that of the loved one: “I give you permission not to reply to my letters, as long as you tell me you have

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received them and thrown them into the fire. That is all I demand of you, especially regarding my journal. My writings are done only for you. So please don’t keep them, I beg of you” (281). Élisabeth Bégon’s letters testify to the fact that it was possible for a woman of her era to have agency and to express herself freely, without feeling imprisoned in the mother role as later women would often be. Autonomous, elegant, and witty, she is fully engaged in the society of her time, whose hypocrisies and contradictions rarely escape her. Her ideas on the education of her granddaughter, criticized by some of her acquaintances, suggest that she may have been an anomaly for her times; certainly they seem based on a conception of the female role much broader than that imposed on girls and women after the Conquest.18 She has the child study the history of France, geography, Latin, grammar, and Roman history, all “to give her the inclination to write and a taste for learning” (87), as well as reading Corneille, La Fontaine, and Don Quixote. And she encourages her to think for herself rather than spending her time on learning embroidery: “She only likes the sciences and hates embroidery, for which I don’t criticize her, far from it; I think she will eventually learn to do work. Many condemn me for not making her work instead of studying Latin, but I ignore them: she likes these subjects and wants to learn them” (363). Bégon’s letters contain certain early signs of characteristics that will later be common among French-Canadian mothers: a tendency to want to control the lives of her children (even that of her son-in-law) in the absence of other outlets for her ambition; a feeling of anxiety, externalized in certain fears (the cold, fire, roads); and, finally, the litany of “crosses to bear” which becomes more insistent as the years go by: “But I wasn’t made to have satisfaction in this world, for it seems to me that the Lord desires to give me crosses of all sorts” (220). A century later, in Julie Papineau’s letters, these characteristics will be more pronounced and the struggle for autonomy more difficult.

C h ap t er 4

O ne I s N o t B or n a M ot her, O ne B ecom es On e : Ju li e Pa p i neau’s Jour ne y

The most voluminous of nineteenth-century correspondences in Quebec and by far the most revealing of an individual woman’s subjectivity in the first half of the century is that of Julie Bruneau Papineau (1795–1862). Almost all of her letters are addressed to her husband, Louis-Joseph Papineau, and they cover four decades (1823–62); other letters, addressed to her children, her sister-in-law Rosalie Dessaulles, and others, are also part of the collection. Compared to Élisabeth Bégon’s letters, written seventy years earlier, they give a sense of the narrowing of women’s role brought about by the ideology of “separate spheres” for men and women, which began to gain influence in the late eighteenth century in both Europe and North America.1 Another important contrast with the Bégon letters is that in the Papineau correspondence (referred to as JP and LJP) the letters of both husband and wife have been preserved and published.2 Born in Quebec City and educated by the Ursulines, Julie Bruneau was the daughter of a merchant, Pierre Bruneau, who sat in the House of Assembly of Lower Canada from 1810 to 1816, and of Marie-Anne Robitaille. In 1818, she married Louis-Joseph Papineau, seigneur of La Petite-Nation, who at the age of thirty-two was already leader of the Parti canadien and speaker of the House. As Papineau was the member for the riding of Montréal-Ouest, the couple settled into a house on Rue Bonsecours, in what is now Old Montreal. Over the next fifteen years, Julie gave birth to nine children, of whom four died in early childhood. Separated for several months a year by the sessions of the House of Assembly, which met in Quebec, and often for longer periods (notably Papineau’s year-long visit to London in 1823 and his years of exile in France after the failed Rebellions of 1837–38), the couple maintained contact thanks to a regular correspondence dominated by news of the family and of politics.

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In it Julie often speaks of her health problems, her frustrations at being separated from her husband, and the boredom of her daily routine as a mother, and, more and more as tensions increase in the years preceding the Rebellion, she expresses strong and radical views about the political situation of Lower Canada. As well as being a precious source of information on the life of a bourgeois woman of the period3 and providing a woman’s perspective on the ideologies and political events of the time, Julie’s letters reveal a female sensibility: the joys and frustrations of a woman, the feeling of melancholy that often weighed on her throughout her life, and the political and religious beliefs that sustained her within the rigidly defined roles of wife and mother that were hers. Although the immense temporal and geographic distances that affected the correspondences of Marie de l’Incarnation and Élisabeth Bégon are long gone in the nineteenth century, distance and the uncertainties of the roads and the postal system play an important role in the epistolary relationship of the Papineaus. Papineau is often absent during the Christmas period, for example, as the House of Assembly sits from the beginning of December until the end of March and travelling between Montreal and Quebec by carriage takes two or three days, often more in winter. While his letters during this season are always eloquent and full of emotion, expressing his regret for being absent and his seasonal wishes for each member of the family, those of Julie, alone with her children during this period meant for family celebration, are often sad and even bitter in tone. In spite of his busy schedule, Papineau finds the time to write Julie two or three times a week, and often reproaches her for not writing him more often, a difference that can perhaps be explained by the fact that the husband’s days are full of things to write about, while those of the wife are “always the same.” The distance that separates the correspondents can at times create heartbreaking moments, like the ones surrounding the death from croup of their four-year-old daughter Aurélie on 24 February 1830, while her father is in Quebec. On 13 February, Julie writes to her husband that “the children are well” (JP, 41), mentioning the health of their daughter Ézilda and their son Gustave, but with no mention of Aurélie. After that, there are no letters from Julie until 8 March. On 25 February (not knowing that his daughter is dead) Papineau, having learned from Julie’s brother Théophile that little Aurélie is gravely ill, sends his wife an emotional letter: “I so deplore seeing you ill, suffering and surrounded by sick people while I can’t be with you to share in caring for our poor children! Théophile is cruel to have written me a letter that worries me as much as his last one did, and not to have written again the next day to reassure me about the

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state of my sweet little Aurélie […] The dear little one can speak of her papa and miss him, but, luckily for her, she cannot be torn apart by this absence as I am in this moment of seeing her in danger without being able to be with her. I want to hear the details about you and about her, and nothing else” (LJP, 198). On 8 March, his wife sends him one of the blackest letters of the entire correspondence, reproaching him for his absence, a letter that marks the beginning of a period of depression that will last for several months: You are right to call me the mother of sorrows and afflictions: that is what I am and will be for a long time to come. I have been forced to submit to the greatest and most heartfelt of all the losses I have suffered, made all the more painful by the circumstances that accompanied it. Yes, dear friend, you can only have a vague idea of your own misfortune, compared with that of your unfortunate mother, since you didn’t see our child suffer, and what a terrible suffering it was! […] Is there anything more terrible than seeing a child gasping for breath at every moment, unable to eat or drink, and asking only that you walk with her or shake her so she can breathe a little more freely? And even this poor bit of relief was given to her by friends and strangers, as her unfortunate and tender father was absent, a fact she was aware of and even spoke about. And her poor mother, in bed herself, suffering terribly in a thousand ways, was denied the opportunity to help her and give her the care I would have been so consoled to have given her and that I can no longer hope to give. (JP, 43) hi S t O ry, fi Cti On, CO rreSPOndenCe: L OOK ing fO r the “re AL” JuLie PAP i neAu

The letters quoted above give an idea of the anger and resentment one finds in many of Julie’s letters, and of the often more gracious tone of those of her husband. Is it possible to know the “real” Julie Papineau? The couple’s correspondence has given rise to two very different interpretations of Julie’s character, by the historian Fernand Ouellet and the novelist Micheline Lachance. Ouellet’s book, Julie Papineau: Un cas de mélancolie et d’éducation janséniste (1961), in which he severely criticizes the character and personality of Julie and blames her for the many ills that befell her family, was withdrawn from bookstores and libraries after a libel suit pursued by descendants of the Papineau family.4 Lachance’s novel, the bestselling Le roman de Julie Papineau (1995), aimed at feminist readers,

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presents Julie as an intelligent and sensitive woman, a passionate Patriote and a mother devoted to her children, although often frustrated by the limitations imposed on women of her era by the maternal role. Which interpretation of the correspondence is the more believable? Fernand Ouellet, a specialist on the Rebellion of 1837 who also published several articles arguing that the French Canadians themselves were responsible for most of the problems that led to the insurrection, presented an image of Julie which historians accepted for over thirty years.5 Using a psychological approach from the 1950s called “characterology,” he describes Julie as a timid and melancholy woman, “unsuited by her character and education for dealing with the difficulties involved in the education of such a large family and the political activities of her husband.”6 “Extremely excitable,” she also had depressive tendencies and experienced maternity as a “formidable testing ground,” according to Ouellet. In the first years of her marriage, he tells us, Julie’s letters show she is incapable of caring for her two children, a situation that deteriorated further as her husband’s political life became more complicated and the number of her children increased. As well, he argues, she remained cut off from all ongoing social relationships: “Her friendships seem to have been rare and superficial […] Preoccupied above all by her malaises and personal weaknesses, she doesn’t seem to have known any real joys.”7 Strictly adhering to his “characterological” approach, Ouellet ignores the often difficult circumstances of Julie’s life, accusing her of inventing “imaginary misfortunes” and exaggerating her real causes for unhappiness (he accuses her, for example, of having been too greatly affected by the death of her daughter Aurélie in 1830). During the Rebellion, Julie was not only without news of her husband and her eldest son for several months, fearing constantly that they were dead or had been arrested by the English, but she was constantly hearing rumours accusing her husband of cowardice and treason, and it is not surprising that her letters express feelings of distress and anxiety. Ignoring their context, Ouellet reads these letters as simply the complaints of a profoundly pessimistic woman, whose negative attitudes were formed by the Jansenist-influenced religious education she received from the Ursulines. According to him, she maintained these attitudes, based on “an absolute condemnation of the world”8 until the end of her life, in spite of her husband’s constant efforts to win her over to a more optimistic view of the world. Unlike Ouellet, Micheline Lachance sees Julie as an ardent Patriote, more lucid than her husband regarding the small concessions offered by the English governor Gosford, very sure of her opinions when in the company of her numerous friends, and courageous enough to defy her cousin

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Msgr Lartigue, the bishop of Montreal, when he threatens the Patriotes with excommunication. Her Julie is a strong woman, married to a man who is exceptional in many ways, but often weak, vain, or extremely hesitant. One recognizes the couple described by Ouellet, but Lachance’s gifts as a novelist allow the reader to be touched by their courage, their suffering, and their humanity. Using exactly the same sources as Ouellet, she espouses Julie’s point of view – or at least that of the Julie she imagines. Here, for example, is how she presents the “melancholy” and the “complaints” which Ouellet argues are Julie Papineau’s principal character traits: She was sad, though. The worries of her everyday life were weighing on her. The challenge of raising a large family by herself […] of appearing cheerful when she had the blues and calm when violent incidents were happening every day in the neighbourhood. She would have loved to talk of such things with Louis-Joseph. But what was the point? He didn’t understand her melancholy. Every time she dared to complain about one of the children or to feel the least bit sorry for herself, he would blow up. She had a perfect life, he would repeat, and she had to learn not to give in to the dangerous tendency she had for worrying about misfortunes that would probably never happen. And yet he himself complained constantly in his letters […] Julie understood his frustrations and sacrifices. But she resented the fact that he never showed the same sympathy for her problems.9 In spite of Lachance’s fidelity to her sources, the image of Julie she constructs is a romanticized one. In the first chapter of her novel, we see Julie from the point of view of her husband, who admires her “slim silhouette,” “the paleness of her beautiful face,” and “her marvellous smile, for which he would have sold his soul”10 – all of this in a scene where the Papineaus, fleeing Montreal with their children during a cholera epidemic, are travelling on a road strewn with corpses. Unlike Ouellet, who insists on the many failures of the Papineau family and on Julie’s responsibility for them, Lachance offers us the portrait of an idealized family in which all the children adore their “little mother,” who adores them in turn in spite of her fatigue and the many worries associated with her maternal role. Above all, the novelistic dimension of Lachance’s account of Julie’s life relies on an imagined relationship between Julie and Robert Nelson, a doctor and Patriote, who cares for her and protects her during her husband’s absences – a loving friendship that begins with the death of little Aurélie in 1830 and the long period of pain traversed by Julie after her daughter’s death. Observing the doctor with an old aunt, Julie imagines him in his office,

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“bending over his patients, mostly women, who blushed as they confided their intimate maladies in a breathless little voice. She also thought about his wife and children, of whom he never spoke.”11 In order to provide as faithful a portrait as possible of Julie Papineau based on her letters, it is important to recall George Gusdorf ’s comments on epistolarity: “In the case of the letter […] the subject expresses himself for another, in relationship with a ‘you’ […] the letter writer’s identity is deepened and completed in reciprocity.”12 Women’s correspondences with their husbands, in particular, have to be read in light of this relationship between the letter writer and an absent and more powerful Other, whose life is more interesting than hers according to society’s standards. As well, as Trev Broughton has argued, correspondences can reveal more of the negative traits of the writer than diaries or autobiographies: “More than any other genre, letters expose – because they enact – writers’ casual disloyalties and betrayals, their moods and inconsistencies, their broken vows, flatteries, promiscuities.”13 Although Julie Papineau’s letters contain many protests and complaints, they also reveal her intelligence, her courage, her devotion to her children, and a demand for justice that colours her perspective on the events of her time. By situating her words in the context of the sometimes unequal exchange with her husband, we can explore the complexities of her character and come to a better understanding of her famous “melancholy.” une QuAL SPhereS

The epistolary relationship of Julie and Louis-Joseph Papineau is an excellent illustration of the separation between the public sphere (men’s domain) and the private sphere (that of women) which had become the norm in their time, while at the same time demonstrating how their correspondence helps each of them to break out of those separate spheres. In his letters, Louis-Joseph participates as much as he can in the decisions and daily activities of the family, giving advice to Julie on the education of the children, on renovations to their home, and so on. Julie reports to her husband on the content of the Montreal newspapers and on political activities in the city, as well as giving him her opinion on the complex network of alliances and rivalries in his political milieu. However, despite the affection and mutual respect that characterize their letters, it is clear that Julie dominates neither of the two spheres. While Papineau sees himself as the authority in all matters, often using a paternalistic tone, his wife expends much of her epistolary energy on defending her opinions and apologizing for herself, even on domestic matters.

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In the first seventeen years of her marriage, Julie Papineau is almost always pregnant or nursing a child, and she often gives birth in the absence of her husband. Four of her children – Didier (1820–21), Arthur (1824–25), Aurélie (1826–30), and Ernest (1832–34) – die during this same period. Three boys and two girls survive – Amédée (born in 1819), Lactance (born in 1822), Ézilda (born in 1828), Gustave (born in 1829), and Azélie (born in 1834). Julie’s letters reveal her to be a devoted mother, upset by the frequent illnesses of her children and often ill herself, constantly finding ways to make their absent father into a real presence in her children’s lives and reassuring her husband about their affection for him: “Amédée is getting smarter and smarter. He often speaks of you” (JP, 24); “little Gustave runs everywhere […]; he often speaks of you” (JP, 50); “Your dear Ézilda misses you so much that I sometimes have to take her on my lap to console her. Luckily at her age children move quickly from sadness to joy; as soon as a friend comes to the house she invites us to drink to the health of her dear papa” (JP, 70). For Papineau, Julie’s letters are an essential nourishment, helping him to navigate the frustrations and complications of his life in the capital. He insists on knowing all the details of domestic life and proffers constant advice about the care of the children, assuring Julie in an 1825 letter that, thanks to her letters, he feels “transported” into the intimacy of the family: You didn’t give me any details about the occupations of your little household: if Théophile or Philippe are giving you any help, if any of your friends come to help you, how are my flowers doing, etc. With the stomach weakness so many of our children suffer, you must be very careful not to let them get their feet wet when they go out and to keep Amédée in the house when the weather is bad. And you must absolutely pay attention to their diet, and consult the doctor about it […] Give me more details about the changes in Lactance’s illness, and tell me what he and Amédée are talking about: hearing their words would give me more pleasure than the most beautiful music. A line on these subjects will transport me into the family, I’ll be able to be with you more intimately and gaily than if you tell me nothing about them. (LJP, 107–8) Similarly, Papineau’s letters, full of information and opinions about political and social life in Quebec, open up an important world outside the domestic sphere to Julie. Alone in Montreal with the children, she is bored and lonely, and often complains of her situation: “I can’t go out: the

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children always need me” (JP, 27–8); “I was so lonely at the end of the day and up until bedtime, I can’t find words to express how bored I was!” (JP, 32). She excuses herself for not writing more often, saying that she doesn’t want to worry her husband by speaking of her anxieties, and insists on the joy that news of him always brings to her: “I’m sure that if I wrote you more often it would always be the same lamentations, with nothing amusing to recount to you, I would just bore you and tire you out by sharing my worries with you. For me, on the contrary, your letters are very funny and interesting […] You should know that they are the only thing that brings some consolation to your unfortunate friend” (JP, 18). She envies her husband’s activities and is often ironic about the contrast between his life and hers: “We will be having dinner in the family while you will be dining with the great” (JP, 28); “M. Jacques Viger [the mayor of Montreal and a moderate Patriote] […] came to see me yesterday […] He talked politics with me for a while, and also spoke about the pleasures of the capital at this time of year. Here, everything is sad and silent” (JP, 38). As the years go by, however, Julie becomes calmer and more confident in her role as a mother, and speaks of her melancholy less often. In 1829, she tells of the pleasure she had with other family members over the Christmas period, teasing her husband that he may disapprove of some of her activities: “We had a really good time […] At the réveillon, your father said that he must have some champagne left and had another bottle brought to the table. I’m writing this to you because I’m certain that such a thing will give you ample opportunity to give me a sermon” (JP, 33). She resists more and more strongly her husband’s exhortations about the necessity of weaning her children early so she will be less fatigued, writing him about the infant Ézilda: “As for what you’re advising me, that I should wean the little one, she is still too young and, not only that, she hasn’t any teeth yet […] I am fine and nursing her doesn’t tire me” (JP, 35). Replying to his extremely detailed instructions about renovations being done to their house in 1831, she says that he would be better advised to concentrate on political matters: “As for your plan for the interior arrangements, I don’t approve of it; I prefer the one from M. Trudeau, which is much less expensive. I see from your letter that you didn’t fully understand it […] Don’t spend any more time on it, it must tire you in the midst of your many occupations and it keeps us from having other news of you, especially about politics”(JP, 46). Often in his letters, Louis-Joseph Papineau speaks of his dream of leaving political life and being reunited with his family: “O my dear Julie, a quiet life where love and confidence reign is my highest ambition; my public life is in constant opposition to my tastes, my reflections, my heart,

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and my head” (LJP, 103). This desire will grow more pressing as the stress of the political situation increases in the 1830s, provoking a sharp reply from his wife, who is as affected as he is by political tensions that make her fear for her children’s future: You complain about public life and how wretched it is […] I am tired of both. I don’t see any beautiful side even to private life, where you believe you’ll spend your days in greater serenity. No, you’re mistaken. You would have more leisure to see and feel all the little frustrations of private life. Don’t you experience it when you’re at home? Are you happier? Are the situation and the occupations you have here enough to satisfy you? No. I’m only a woman but I get bored and tired out by all the minute and frustrating details involved in looking after a house, problems with the servants and, even more, the great task of raising a family and, besides all that, thinking about the future as this family advances in life. What a great deal of worry and sorrow are in store for us! I have all the time in the world to think about these things in my sad house where I have nothing to distract my mind. (JP, 93) “ P O Liti CS iS the On Ly thing th At inte reS tS Me ”

By the time she is thirty-five, Julie has become sure of her political ideas. Since the beginning of her marriage she has accepted the long absences of her husband as necessary sacrifices, and she has read nationalist newspapers like La Minerve to keep up on political developments. But in the French Canada of her era, even in the progressive milieu of the Patriotes, politics is not seen as women’s domain. As Allan Greer explains, the idea of separate spheres for men and women is at the heart of the republican ideal which inspired the Patriotes: Given that they oppose the existing hierarchies for reasons of equality and call for a government of “the people,” the philosophers, the Jacobins and the patriots of America must face the question of who makes up “the people.” It is obvious that it is not made up of all the human beings who inhabit a given territory […] The tendency is to exclude women in particular from direct participation in the political life of the republican City. While the declarations can be cryptic or open to multiple interpretations, full of subtexts and silences, it is nonetheless the case that, during the period of the great bourgeois

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revolutions, gender becomes the first line of demarcation between those who govern and those who are governed.14 In 1834, following this logic, the Assembly of Lower Canada, presided over by Papineau, removed women’s right to vote;15 three years later, the Patriotes announced that women would be responsible for the numerous domestic tasks (buying local products, knitting, weaving, and so on) made necessary by the boycott of British products to put pressure on London. Julie disapproves of the misogyny of the Patriotes, responding ironically to one of her husband’s numerous pieces of advice about domestic matters: “As you say, I may not have obeyed all your absolute orders; once in a while I allow myself to deviate from them, to the horror of these men who preach independence and love liberty so much, and yet demand so much submission from their wives” (JP, 51). For her, politics is a visceral commitment which frees her from the monotonous routine of her daily activities and gives her the feeling of participating in the creation of a better world. Stronger and more militant than her husband on several issues, she dialogues with him and gives him sensible advice even as she admits knowing she is going beyond the boundaries of her role in daring to speak of such matters. On occasion, Papineau reminds her that authority in the couple belongs to the husband, but he does so in a teasing way, as in this letter from 1830: “I received your good and amiable letter this morning. Although it shows a bit too much independence of spirit against the legitimate and absolute authority of your husband, I am not surprised, only afflicted. I see that the disastrous philosophy is corrupting everyone’s mind, and that Rousseau’s Social Contract is making you forget the Epistle of Saint Paul: ‘Women, submit to your husbands.’ ‘All power comes from God.’ But, beautiful as the angels, you women are, like them, inclined to revolt!” (LJP, 194). It is clear, however, that Papineau respects and admires his wife’s ideas, going so far as to admit to her: “In the matter of politics, you think and express yourself as well as [your husband]” (LJP, 310). As leader of the party in power, he is often obliged to play the role of mediator or to espouse moderate ideas, while she can take more radical positions. In the New Year’s greetings he sends to all members of the family in January 1833, he says to his wife: “As for you, I really have nothing to ask, except perhaps a bit more indulgence in your attitude to the society in which we are condemned to live. It’s not necessary to take to heart evils that can’t be corrected, as you do. I love you dearly and embrace you tenderly” (LJP, 263).

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Julie often criticizes the English administration, which she sees as “dishonest and wanting to crush us” (JP, 71). She stresses the danger of making concessions to London (JP, 70) and advises her husband not to be misled by the minimal concessions being proposed by Governor Gosford, such as the use of French before English in meetings and official receptions: “I hope that all these little favours and appearances of justice towards Canadians aren’t distracting and flattering our members too much” (JP, 95). But she excuses herself every time she expresses a strong opinion, saying for example, after having expressed her ideas on the role the Assembly should play in obtaining justice for French Canadians: “You’ll laugh at my reflections on such a subject but it interests me; I’m saying what I think, and, as I don’t dare speak of such things to others, you have to be patient enough to read my words” (JP, 69). She is caught up in her passion for politics and must speak of it, even though she is conscious of her awkwardness and intimidated by the greater sophistication of her husband in political matters: “That’s enough badly expressed political ideas: I’m writing this letter in a hurry and I’m not used to writing about these things and probably shouldn’t do so,” she states in an 1833 letter to him. “Don’t preach to me about it. Women’s ideas are always tolerated, but my head and my heart are so full of them that I can’t help spilling them out to you, Mister Censor! […] What will you say about my scribblings? Well, to console you I’ll say that I speak a bit better than I write, and certainly with more circumspection” (JP, 71). And, in 1835: “That’s enough badly expressed political ideas; they would make many who are kinder than you laugh about women who want to mix themselves up with things they don’t understand and want to be involved in them even though they don’t understand” (JP, 96). The letters of February and March 1836 show Julie’s remarkable perspicacity regarding the approaching political troubles. Papineau and his party have learned of a document secretly sent to Governor Gosford indicating that London will under no circumstances accept the idea of responsible government, and the possibility of rebellion is growing. On 8 February, Papineau writes to his wife: “The affairs of the country are becoming more and more grave, and more and more encouraging for the fiery ones who are determined not to give up any of their rights. Upper Canada is formulating the same demands as we are” (LJP, 345). A letter from Julie, dated the same day, shows that she is already aware of the legislative impasse and of the possibility of violence: “I hope that you will force the government to act; otherwise, Canadians will have to prepare themselves for a civil war” (JP, 115). But, even as Papineau and other members of his party are becoming more radical, splits appear within the party,

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especially in Montreal, where confrontations between the “constitutionals” and the “patriotes” are increasing. When Robert Nelson and a few others suggest to Papineau that he absent himself from Montreal “for a few years” so as to protect himself from an attack by the constitutionals, Julie’s stinging response will turn out to be prophetic: “If they were worthy citizens, they would be proud to have you and would be prepared to defend you in the case that anyone was infamous enough to attack you, instead of trying to convince you to run away and hide so that they will be safe. Your enemies would take advantage of that by accusing you of being a coward” (JP, 121). A year and a half later, the accusations of cowardice aimed at Papineau after his sudden departure from the battle of Saint-Denis will prove that she was right. During the same period, Julie pens a pessimistic analysis of the ambivalence of French-Canadian attitudes towards English power. Although she makes no distinction between the bourgeoisie and the people, her criticisms will prove accurate as far as the upper classes are concerned, for all of them, with the exception of Papineau, will rally to the side of the English before the rebellion breaks out. Unlike them, the members of the lower classes, especially in the Richelieu Valley and the county of Deux-Montagnes, will fight desperately, often at the cost of their lives, against the British army. Julie Papineau’s searing commentary on French-Canadian ambivalence deserves to be quoted in full, for it foreshadows ideas that will be eloquently expressed more than a century later by independentist artists like novelist Hubert Aquin16 and filmmaker Denys Arcand:17 Haven’t I always told you that I feared we would succumb because they know we lack men who are firm and resolute in their demand for justice? They are incapable of persevering with energy and especially of sacrificing their personal interest for that of the country. The foreigners, on the contrary, will be tenacious and it will be easy for them to have an advantage over us […] You don’t know French Canadians. I’ve told you over and over and I’m more and more convinced of it: when they are put to the test they are flighty and not at all effective, they are selfish and therefore jealous of the success of their compatriots, they have no public spirit; they’re big talkers and very brave when they have nothing to fear. If they are threatened, they suddenly lose courage; they lack judgment when they think they’re close to obtaining justice […] Reform will take place in Europe and in Upper Canada; but here in this little corner of the world you will be oppressed, because we believe we’re meant to be

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oppressed; and they know us better than we know ourselves […] They know all too well that they can succeed, because we help them keep our chains in place. (JP, 118–19) t h e rebe LLi On And itS eff eC tS: A L ife C ut in t WO

The Rebellions of 1837 and 1838 mark a catastrophic break in the life of the Papineaus, compromising not only their social and economic status but their relationship with their country, their compatriots, and the political ideal that had guided them for the previous two decades. The ambiguity and apparent inevitability of the events of the spring and summer of 1837 are well known: both the Patriotes and the English were led, through a series of rhetorical and real confrontations, to an armed conflict which neither side truly desired. The first battle took place on 23 November at Saint-Denis, with victory going to the Patriotes. Disguised as a farmer, Papineau escaped from Saint-Denis and managed to reach the United States, but his absence from among those who were arrested and condemned to death or exile remained a subject of controversy for the rest of his life. As for Julie, who had quietly left Montreal with her children and taken refuge at her brother’s home in Verchères, she was not only deprived of news of her husband for several months, but exposed to the rumours of cowardice and even treason that were circulating about him. Even her own disappearance gave rise to rumours: in December 1837, a newspaper article made reference to her death.18 In June 1838, she and her youngest daughter Azélie rejoined her husband and her sons Amédée and Lactance in Saratoga, leaving Ézilda and Gustave with her sisterin-law Rosalie Dessaulles in Saint-Hyacinthe. In the United States, Julie supported the group of Patriotes who urged Papineau to travel to France in order to seek French support for the Patriote cause, which he did in February 1839. In September of that year, Julie joined him in Paris with their three youngest children, Ézilda, Gustave, and Azélie, and their maid, Marguerite. In 1843 she returned to Canada with the three youngest, leaving Papineau and their son Lactance in Paris. Not until two years later, after numerous delays and hesitations, did Papineau finally return to Montreal, allowing for the family to be more or less reunited. Not surprisingly, Julie’s letters during this period are often hostile, displaying an anger and frustration about her husband’s indecisiveness that will never really disappear from her letters in future years. After his return, Papineau was twice elected to the new Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada, but he never resigned himself to the new political situation of the United Canadas or regained the popularity and prestige he had enjoyed before

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the Rebellion. The final years of the couple were spent at La Petite-Nation, in the magnificent manor house Papineau had always dreamed of having built and which Julie, who hated country life, had never wanted. The name given to the new house was Montebello. The letters of the post-Rebellion period offer the portrait of a woman who has seen her greatest passion – that of country – reduced to ashes and her husband rejected by the compatriots who had formerly adored him. In her first letter to Papineau during his exile in the United States, she describes “the aspect of this country, changed in an instant, as if metamorphosed,” with several of the Patriotes “tied up and garrotted, entering the city surrounded by their fiercest enemies, exposed to the jeers and vociferations of the foreign mob threatening them with imprisonment and the scaffold” (JP, 136). She is frank with her husband about the attacks on him in the press, describing “the despicable language in our newspapers, all with the same aim: to treat you like traitors, scoundrels, and opportunists and to imply that you were the aggressors and the authors of our misfortunes […] That is the language of the most moderate of them, judge for yourself what the others are saying” (JP, 136–7). In a letter to her sister-inlaw Rosalie Dessaulles, she speaks of “the rest of our painful career, which has already ended politically” (JP, 151). Only her religious faith gives her the strength to persevere: “How grateful we should be to providence for according us the greatest of graces: that of preserving your precious life,” she writes to her husband. “The other sacrifices are easy, compared to the possibility of losing you […] May God’s will be done! I ask Him only that we be together again” (JP, 136). A letter to her son Amédée insisting on the danger of happiness exhibits the Jansenist attitudes criticized by Fernand Ouellet in his portrait of Julie, attitudes that will become more and more pronounced in the years following the Rebellion: “You must appreciate more than ever the things I have always taught you about nothingness and the fact that happiness doesn’t last […] We escaped death and we should be grateful to Him who preserved us” (JP, 142). Despite the change in their fortunes, Julie’s devotion to the Patriote cause is unshaken. To her husband, who, fearing that the government will confiscate his properties in his absence, is hesitating to leave for France, she replies that “this sacrifice for the native land” (JP, 183) is a necessary one, even as she admits to Amédée that it is a sacrifice which is costing her dearly: “I acted as the strong woman so as not to discourage him, and if I hadn’t done so he would not have consented to go. But now it’s going to be hard for me […] If, by chance, he meets with an accident, you can imagine how I will reproach myself ” (JP, 169–70). And, to her sister-in-law Rosalie: “Our separation was cruel and, most difficult of all, I was obliged to hide

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from him what it was costing me, for if he had seen my distress he would never have left” (JP, 172). During the seven months Papineau is in Paris, before her arrival with the children, she keeps him up to date on political events at home, even though she confesses to being “more and more disgusted with what’s going on in the country and with politics” (JP, 196). After the appearance of the Durham Report (1839), which advocated the assimilation of French Canadians through a union of Upper and Lower Canada, she concludes that there is no longer any hope of reconciliation and that the people must continue to fight: “He acted as the vile instrument of the English government […] England must give in to us or we will fight. It is necessary, it is what the people want: they will do it desperately and fruitlessly. There is no other choice and it will lead to our total ruin. But since they are determined to destroy us, it is better to try to defend ourselves than to simply allow ourselves to be exterminated” (JP, 196–7). Noting the new “enthusiasm [of French Canadians] for everything that is English and their ingratitude towards France,” Julie proposes to her husband that he should make efforts to encourage French immigration to Canada: “By these means we will be rid of the British and Yankees, with whom we can never hope to live in peace if we desire to preserve our nationality and our language” (JP, 197). She constantly reminds him of the importance of his mission in France, not only for the country but for the rehabilitation of his reputation: “The country is ready, minds are inflamed, all eyes and ears are on your mission. It has revived their courage and inspired fear in our tyrants […] Consider as well, my dear, that your reputation is at stake and that it is the final stage of a long political career, and that you must try to make it end in the best interests of your country and the honour of your name. Take courage! This is no time for indecisiveness. You must decide right away” (JP, 201–2). More and more, in these years following the Rebellion, Julie assumes the role of the strong woman, looking after all the affairs of the now impoverished couple in a situation in which the danger of retribution from the English is a real one. Ouellet’s description of her as a timid woman is contradicted by the letters of these years in which she resists the advice of her father-in-law about selling or renting out the house on Rue Bonsecours, in spite of the fact that Papineau no longer has a salary and that the seigneurie of La Petite-Nation, while still costly, no longer brings in any revenues: “One reason among others why I didn’t rent out the house: if we speak of doing so, [the English] will be daring enough to put their troops into it, as they wanted to do last winter […] If I don’t get the money that is owed to us there are several articles I could sell” (JP, 135). After suggesting several ways in which her husband could raise

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funds for the Patriotes in Paris, she excuses herself for intruding in such a way into men’s domain: “I hope you will make all these efforts, and as soon as possible. You must also see whether money might not be available from Russia in the case that France doesn’t want to help us […] You will laugh at my opinions, but what does it matter? Even if I don’t know how to express myself, I know how to feel and you know exactly what I mean, even if I’m saying it very imperfectly” (JP, 191–2). Once she has arrived in Paris, however, and is cut off from her links with family and country as well as from the organizing role that had given her strength, Julie begins to mope. In her letters to Amédée she worries constantly, complaining of the expenses of life in Paris and of the interruption of the children’s education. Lactance wants to study medicine, but the Papineaus cannot affford it; as for the other children, she is trying to give them lessons at home, but without much success: “You know what a school at home without rules or restraints is like. I have never been more discouraged since the beginning of our exile” (JP, 217). Contacts with Canada are becoming more and more rare; in 1840 she confides to her son that a sum of money a friend was to send them has not arrived: “We’re at the end of our means” (JP, 220). In Paris, although they now have French and American friends, they cannot afford the carriages and fine clothes needed for life in society: “We have to live in isolation and limit ourselves to what is strictly necessary” (JP, 216). Complaints become frequent: “I regret more and more having allowed myself to be convinced to come here, where we are separated from you and where everything is so expensive […] I hardly ever go out any more. My health is so bad!” (JP, 231). Yet she insists that these revelations she is making to her son must remain confidential; the reputation of the Papineaus as a happy couple must be maintained at all costs. Even the hope of returning home begins to slip away during these years: Julie often states that she would prefer to live in the United States rather than “live in Canada before its independence” (JP, 228). Everything she hears about the country leads her to despair for its future and for the place the Papineaus might occupy within it: “We are far from wanting to return, given the state of servitude things have fallen into […] Young people will no longer be part of our lives: they too are becoming indifferent, ambitious, and materialistic, so goodbye to all bonds of affection! There are very few persons who are interested in us” (JP, 237–8). All in all, Papineau’s failure to find support in Paris and the worrisome rumours Julie hears about the situation in Canada have plunged her into a state of disillusionment: “Where are energy and patriotic virtue to be found in this century? I don’t see them put into practice anywhere; selfishness is the order of the day” (JP, 228).

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In August 1843, against the will of her husband, Julie returned to Verchères with her three youngest children, leaving Lactance with his father in Paris. The two years between her return to Canada and that of Papineau in September 1845 mark the longest period the two have been apart and the beginning of an emotional break between them that will never entirely heal. Julie decides to return to Canada primarily because of her worries about the future of her children. As for Papineau, the fact that he continually puts off the date for his return, preferring to spend his time in Paris on archival research,19 reflects his fears about returning to a country which has been transformed in his absence and in which, he rightly suspects, he will no longer have an important role to play. Julie’s letters of this period, full of anger, resentment, and reproach, justify to some extent the negative portrait of her by Fernand Ouellet. But it is clear that her reproaches are warranted and that she is accurately describing her husband when she speaks of his chronic indecisiveness. In April 1844, she writes to Lactance: “You won’t believe how much the last two letters from your father have afflicted me, for I see how indecisive he is, how much of a ditherer! […] He is inexcusable for having knowingly made us all suffer […] He has no desire to help us. I have no power over him, and he will claim that I’m responsible for my own fate, as I decided to return to Canada on my own” (JP, 284). A few weeks later, on learning that her husband is now saying he will return in the fall, she shares her doubts with Amédée: “Please God he will finally make up his mind. I would be submissive and patient if I really believed that he had; but past experience makes me fear that when September comes he will be as undecided as ever” (JP, 288). Her fears are well founded, for it is not until September 1845, a year later than originally planned, that Papineau, having just returned from a long trip to Italy, leaves the European continent he has come to adore in spite of the hardships of exile. By the end of this long period of separation, Julie’s letters are those of a bitter and complaining woman, disappointed by her fate since the troubles of 1837 and 1838. She no longer believes in the existence of a protective providence, and at times her religious faith is tenuous. All of her children have problems with health, scholarly success, or social adaptation, doubtless in part due to the constant displacements and traumas of their youth and to their father’s dramatic fall from grace. Julie blames herself for all of these problems: “Everything I’ve done for my family has contributed to their downfall,” she writes to Lactance (JP, 287). As well, she senses that her children blame her for their difficulties: “Your apathy and indifference are inexplicable,” she writes to Amédée in 1844. “I am filled with

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more sorrow than I can bear, without consolation from any member of the family” (JP, 291). To her husband, who is enjoying himself in Paris and touring Italy while she is forced by her poverty to move into a small house in which there will be boarders she will have to look after, she writes: “Everything upsets me and displeases me. And also, as you know, your sons are unkind” (JP, 301). Her anger at him for the role he has played in their misfortune is constant: “I have to be well in order to put up with the new trials and troubles caused by your constant refusal to return to this country, which I don’t approve of at all,” she writes to him, describing the disorder and filth of the new house. Even the political situation in Lower Canada seems to her to be a result of her husband’s lengthy absence: “If you had come home right after the resignation of the minister, the country would not be in the situation it’s in, for Lafontaine and his party would not have gained influence on the people and even on some of your friends, who have been duped by him” (JP, 297). When Papineau informs her in December 1844 that he will be difficult or impossible to reach by mail during his trip to Italy, she responds with a letter that recalls, but on a more bitter note, the reproaches she used to make to him when he was at the pinnacle of Quebec high society: “At least you’ll have the distractions of the trip, while all we have here is trouble, arguments, and worries about the long wait to find out what our future holds. How interminable time seems to me!” (JP, 302). The New Year’s greetings she offers him for 1845 are for “a better future, if such a thing is possible for us! I’m starting to doubt it” (JP, 303). As for Papineau, he remains the same as ever, in spite of moments of discouragement and doubt. Philosophical as always, he counsels his wife to read Seneca in order to cheer herself up (LJP, 473) and reproaches her for lacking “philosophical strength or religious resignation” in traversing the “inevitable difficulties [of life], either with me or without me” (LJP, 475). The dream he has always had of retiring to a quiet life in the country with his family seems close to becoming a reality, and he counsels his wife to prepare their daughters for such an existence: “They must acquire tastes and simple occupations that are appropriate for the country. For, after our meeting, I truly hope that I will not be caught up again in the whirlpool of political agitations, but that cultivating my garden, enjoying my books, and best of all enjoying domestic happiness and the companionship of a loving wife and loving and beloved children, I will peacefully spend the days, however long, that are left to me” (LJP, 503).

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During the seventeen years between her husband’s return from France in 1845 and her own death in 1862, Julie Papineau comes to fully inhabit the role of sorrowful mother. Dissatisfied with her life, authoritarian with her children, who disappoint her, and constantly critical of her husband’s expenses in the construction of the magnificent manor house Montebello, she represents both the positive and negative characteristics of the “queen of the hearth,” at the precise moment when this image of woman is becoming central to the dominant ideology of French Canada. Lacking real power, she tries to control all the activities of the family members even as she complains that they never listen to her: “As far as your building is concerned […] I know you won’t pay any attention to me when I tell you that it’s going to cost half as much again as what you expect, but I won’t get involved,” she writes to Papineau in a typical letter. Reading these letters, one is reminded of Fernand Ouellet’s negative assessment of Julie, particularly in her later years. “The last ten years of her life were painful,” he writes. “Bitter, anxious, tormented by scruples, pessimistic, and authoritarian, she was responsible for her own unhappiness and that of those around her […] The values she cherished above all others – family, country, and religion – were not sufficient to give her a positive taste for life.”20 However, Ouellet’s characterological approach limits his perspective, leading him to blame Julie for having “contributed in a major way to her own unhappiness”21 and to ignore other factors that contributed to her unhappiness: her political disillusionment and the disappearance of outlets for her ambition after the Rebellion, the negative effects of her husband’s political misfortunes on the lives of their children and, finally, the increasing influence, after the failure of the Rebellion, of conservative Catholicism and its emphasis on the responsibilities of the Christian mother. In June 1846, when Papineau receives the back salary due him as Speaker of the Assembly from 1832 to 1837, the couple enter a period of relative financial comfort during which Papineau can finally undertake the project of constructing his manor house. The letters between the two continue to be fairly frequent, as Julie, although she agrees to pass her summers at La Petite-Nation, prefers to spend the rest of the year in Montreal. “Do you want to know what I think of La Petite-Nation?” she writes to Amédée in July 1846. “I find it exactly as I always predicted it would be: wild, lacking embellishments, without any interest at all for the moment. And at my age, I will never see it prosperous and beautified” (JP, 319). And yet her husband’s efforts to improve the house over the years are far from

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pleasing her. In April 1856, with the construction still far from completed, she expresses her rage in a long attack on her husband, threatening to spend the summer with her son Amédée and his family in Saratoga rather than at La Petite-Nation: I learned yesterday from Amédée that you are persisting in the madness of new construction, when I told you I preferred repairs, construction that will disfigure the house and cause us torment and trouble for the whole summer. This has been going on for six years! Your idea is completely outlandish, especially at a time like this when we’re short of money […]: it kept me awake all night! I still can’t believe it! […] I refuse to go there and witness such extravagance […] I don’t know how to put this into words, but it’s going to make this place which has been so disastrous for us even more unpleasant […] You will be responsible for all the unhappiness of a family that has already been severely tested. (JP, 426) Although Papineau’s letters to his wife remain courteous, their relationship has deteriorated and they are living separate lives, without paying much attention to each other’s needs and desires. Julie’s description of their life at La Petite-Nation in a letter to Amédée makes this clear: “He must know what I’m suffering, without any consolation, but he is gayer than ever, always busy, interested in everything; except that, in the short time when he’s in the house, he gets angry at the smallest things […] Outside, he goes around the lakes, has the property surveyed, and keeps up on all the construction. He comes home in the evenings tired, eats, and sleeps. So you see what an amusing life we’re having here with our depressing thoughts!” (JP, 325). Her letter marks a sad contrast with those written two decades earlier, when she addressed her husband as “dear friend.” Now, she prefers to confide in her eldest son about her husband’s faults, thus taking her place in the constellation of mothers and sons represented by her spiritual ancestors, Marie de l’Incarnation and Élisabeth Bégon. As for Julie’s political ideas, it is not the “values of country” that have failed her, as Ouellet proposes, but rather the fact that those values have disappeared and that the possibility of bringing about independence no longer exists. Despite the fact that her husband was twice elected to the parliament of the United Canadas, Julie no longer has any illusions about his political influence, or about the possibility of improving the situation of the country. In 1854, she writes to him: “I’m glad the session is going to be short, as I’m sure you won’t accomplish anything useful” (JP, 415). Often she pesters him with the idea that he should sell his properties so

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that they can live in the United States, a country she sees as less “selfish” and “ungrateful” than Canada: I am more and more disgusted with this place and with this poor, selfish, slanderous and libellous society [ …] I repeat to you […] if I had been in the States I’d have done everything in my power to sell our properties […] I told you that in Europe, and here too […] and you should have paid serious attention to what I was saying […] I know that all you’re going to do is shrug your shoulders with pity for my ideas. I don’t care, I’m telling them to you anyway because they would make the future life of our family less bitter. We can’t hope for such a thing, though. We will have to suffer and soon die: that will be our fate! But it is the idea of leaving our children in such an ungrateful and inept country that hurts me the most. (JP, 337, 339) While in the past Julie had been courageous enough to defy the clergy in adhering to the Patriote cause, now her ideas are identical with those of the Church. Her vision of “the people” is now a moralistic one, which sees in their situation only “vice” and alcoholism, problems that would be solved by greater religious faith. “You talk to me about the demoralization of the people,” she writes to her husband in 1860. “I know about it and feel it deeply. If alcohol gets more widespread they will be seriously advancing into evil, and they will be all the more guilty because they lack the reasons for such things present in other nations. They have the help of religion, and others don’t. Their nature must be truly perverse, as nothing seems able to stop this torrent of vices! I thought of our dear curé: he must be greatly afflicted by such wrongdoing” (JP, 486–7). Little by little, the reality of the English presence starts to be felt in the life of the Papineaus. Anglicisms occasionally appear in Julie’s letters, as for example when she writes to Azélie in 1861 about baking, using the English words “grocer,” “rolls,” and “yeast,” and the French word “fleur” (flower) instead of “farine” for “flour” (JP, 492). On the occasion of the visit of the Prince of Wales to Canada in 1860, the Papineaus sent him a magnificent bouquet and decorated their house with English and French flags, seen by the prince as his boat went up the Ottawa River to the capital. Deprived of the political hopes that had nourished her early years as the wife of Lower Canada’s most important political leader, Julie now too often resembles the negative archetype of the French-Canadian mother –  complaining, impotent, and obsessed by the injustice of her fate. In 1846, she writes to her husband: “It is almost impossible [that I would not suffer excessively], given that I have a mother’s womb and the sensitivity

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of a sick woman weighed down with sorrows that have lasted for years and seem to get greater each day […] Only a mother can understand what I endure” (JP, 335–6). She has always been the mother hen, controlling the smallest details of her children’s lives and advising them of their religious duties. Yet, as the letters of this period indicate, they are almost never at home with her, even when they are gravely ill, as were Lactance (interned in an asylum in France in 1854 after eight years of mental illness), Gustave (affected in adolescence with a cardiac condition of which he died in 1851, at the age of twenty-two), and, to a lesser extent, Azélie, who also suffered from a nervous condition. In September 1846, Lactance suffers a grave nervous attack while visiting friends of the family in New York, and Gustave is worrying his parents by his rebellious and undisciplined behaviour. In a letter to their older brother Amédée, Julie complains about her two younger sons: The only satisfactions I expected in life were those that would come from my children, and that hope has been so cruelly shattered that I am left with no consolation. Gustave is […] violent, excessively weak, and selfish; he knows how much he has disappointed me, and he hasn’t written a word to me since he left. He will only do so when he needs some of his things. I did all I could to keep him happy […] I have nothing to reproach myself as far as the other one is concerned either. I did all I could for him, he has often failed me and has never recognized what I have suffered for him […] He has ruined his life and mine. There is only one thing that could console me, even in his madness, it would be to see him return to the religious beliefs he should never have abandoned. (JP, 323–4) In November, when Lactance is admitted to a mental hospital in New York State, his father goes there to consult with his doctors and to try to reassure the young man. Julie, in the meantime, writes to them disagreeing with the doctor’s advice, insisting on her own anguish, and making Lactance feel guilty about being ill: “I beg you to do all that you can to get better: your health depends on it, and also the situation of your devoted mother and the happiness of your family. Yes, if you don’t get better there will be no more happiness for us.” Invoking “the imperious duty of a Christian mother […] which I must not neglect,” she preaches to her son about the errors that have led him to this sad state, for which, she claims, there is only one remedy: a return to God. “Providence has led you by illness and affliction to this place […] In Paris, you were carried away by conversations and reading the works of misguided men whose followers

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are led from error to error, and never to happiness: I saw it happening and knew it would lead to misery for you. But God is so good and merciful. He hasn’t abandoned you […] Yes, I repeat to you, you can still be happy if you follow the advice of the mother who is so devoted to your wellbeing” (JP, 334). Her insistence on the importance of obedience and submissiveness echoes the ideas of the conservative Catholicism that has now consolidated its influence over the population: “[You must] submit to the will of God, who has sent you this illness […] God asks of you only simplicity and the docility to follow the advice of the bishop to whom I have recommended you” (JP, 343). In March and April 1847, Gustave, ill with a fever that threatens his life for several weeks, is staying at the home of his aunt, Rosalie Dessaulles, in Saint-Hyacinthe, and Louis-Joseph goes there to care for him. On learning how serious his illness is, Julie writes to her husband: “The dear child is paying for his lack of prudence […] Tell him how much I regret not being able to be with him; I am a mother who is thwarted in everything and suffers all the more because of it, but he is lucky to have such good parents […] Excuse me for such a short letter; I have a terrible headache” (JP, 345). On learning a few weeks later that her son has received the sacrament of Extreme Unction and that his health is slowly returning, she writes: “What consoles me the most is his return to piety and religion, for I’m convinced he can’t be happy without them; nor can his poor mother […] God has sent us this trial in order to be a greater consolation to us […] Prayer, supplications, and resignation have been my only refuge since I was deprived of the pleasure of looking after him myself, and it was a sad state of affairs” (JP, 346). Similarly, when Azélie, suffering from a nervous illness, is placed in boarding in a religious community in September 1856, her mother sees prayer and renunciation as the only solution to her problems: “That will bring you the grace not to give in to your thoughts and your will: […] you are starting to get on the right track by going against your inclinations” (JP, 429). As she did with her sons, she makes the young woman feel guilty for being sick, appearing more preoccupied by her own suffering than by that of her daughter. According to Ouellet, the nervous illnesses of the Papineau children are largely the result of their mother’s negative influence; Julie herself believes their problems are a result of the horrors they experienced during and after the Rebellion. Whatever the cause, she is critical, domineering, and petty in the way she seeks to control every detail of their lives, and cold in her judgments of them. In her opinion, Lactance and Gustave are timid, awkward, and “of no use for anything” (JP, 359). Ézilda,

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their unmarried daughter who is a dwarf and who will keep house for them until Papineau’s death, is also a failure in the eyes of her mother: “It’s true she’s not interesting or well educated, and her conversation shows it; besides, her timidity and modesty don’t do her any favours” (JP, 386). Other families, Julie writes to her husband, “are much happier than we are, for they have good children: mine make me unhappy […] I am so tormented by having a family whose members don’t get along with each other and can’t be together” (JP, 362). •  •  • It is tempting to see in this rigid, authoritarian woman an incarnation of what was long described as the French-Canadian “matriarchy.” However, such a perspective would miss the gradual evolution of Julie Papineau – the young woman tormented by the death of her daughter Aurélie, the convinced Patriote, more radical than her husband in many respects, and later the courageous and resourceful wife and mother who took on responsibilities unusual for a woman of her time in the years of her husband’s political misfortunes. Julie is a singular individual who doubtless dealt as best she could with the many challenges of her life. But she is also the product of her era, of the political events that put an end to her ambitions, and of a religious and social atmosphere that denied women subjectivity and an autonomous voice. The complaints, the resentment, the anger, and the frustration expressed in her letters, especially in her later years, are part of a constellation of emotions and behaviours which – judging by the private diaries written by young girls and women in the century after her death in 1862, as well as in the autobiographies of women who grew up in the years preceding the Quiet Revolution – will be passed on, from generation to generation, by Quebec mothers until the beginning of the modern era. As early as the mid-nineteenth century, the pressures imposed on women by the exaltation of the role that will come to be known as la reine du foyer, “queen of the hearth,” increase.22 Woman’s role will be the topic of sermons, pastoral letters by bishops, and newspaper articles, among them a series of misogynistic pieces by Julie Papineau’s grandson, Henri Bourassa (founder of the newspaper Le Devoir in 1905).23 The biography of Marie de l’Incarnation by the influential priest H.-R. Casgrain, depicting the foundress of the Ursulines as a submissive wife, which appeared in 1862, the year of Julie’s death, shows how the image of the women of New France was reconfigured to bolster this conservative ideology.24

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Presented by clerical leaders and educators as a continuation of the values which inspired Marie de l’Incarnation and her contemporaries, this idealization of the wife and mother for her devotion and self-sacrifice is, on the contrary, a reversal of those values. For the women of New France, abnegation of self seems, paradoxically, to have led many of them to agency: in seeking to accomplish God’s will, they found the strength to cross the ocean, found a new society, and open themselves, at least to some extent, to the culture of the indigenous peoples they were seeking to convert. Two and a half centuries later, these same ideals of sacrifice and abnegation, communicated to girls through a system of education conditioning them to aspire only to the roles of wives and mothers, became tools in denying women freedom of choice and action. Julie Papineau’s final letters, with their sentiments of overwhelming frustration and resentment and their constant complaints, are a striking illustration of the possible, and even probable, results of such conditioning. As previously noted, the epistolary genre can be a cruel lens through which to read a life, for letters (unlike the diary, for example) can expose the worst characteristics of one’s relationships with others. Julie Papineau’s correspondence gives an idea of the image she must have projected in public – gracious, polite, and elegant – when she asks her husband or her daughter-in-law to transmit her greetings to others. In private, however, she allows herself a very different language in addressing her loved ones: do this, buy me that, write us twice a week even though we never write you because we have nothing to say (JP, 433). The reader will have observed that Julie frequently uses the word “selfish” when referring to her children, her compatriots, or her society. Yet one cannot help noticing the extent to which she herself seems self-centred and incapable of empathy. The sad New Year’s greetings she sends her husband at the end of 1855 offer a poignant glimpse into the way she sees her life. More than a complaint, they are a lucid evaluation, communicated with her usual frankness, of the events that have transformed her existence, reducing her to a state in which her only consolation is her belief in the value of sacrifice and the possibility of redemption in the next world: I’m starting to write this […] so it will reach you by New Year’s Day, in order to wish us a better and happier year than those that have been so bitter for us, leaving wounds and scars that will never heal […] Our young days were happy: we were surrounded and loved by many good relatives, sincere friends, and our country. But what changes have taken place since then! All of that has disappeared and

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our personal sorrows have been extraordinary. Since 37, we have been tested in every way, with one trial succeeding another, each of them more poignant than the one before. We must therefore submit and ask for the patience to continue our sacrifice to the end: it is God’s will. (JP, 424)

PART THRE E

• Wr i ti n g for On e s e lf : T he P ri v a t e D i ar y, 1 8 4 3 – 1964

By the mid-nineteenth century, the space available to women for writing had expanded to include the private diary. Thanks to notebooks in which they could record their lives as they pleased, women could now explore their own psyches and situation in the world for themselves, and no longer solely in terms of their relationship with a divine or human Other. The intimacy of the private diary offers a mirror-space, protected from the gaze of others, where one can reveal oneself openly, search for a direction in life, evaluate one’s progress, lament one’s failures and, ideally, construct a self capable of thinking and acting in relative freedom from social constraints. For the first time, with the arrival of Romanticism and its emphasis on the individual, the question “Who am I?” begins to preoccupy girls and women. Because of their confidential nature, most of these private diaries have disappeared. Although some were doubtless stored away in drawers or attics for generations, very few have survived to the present day. Not surprisingly, most of those that still exist were written by women who belonged to influential families, often those of well-known political figures, and are found in archival collections with names like Dessaulles, McGill, Cartier, Lacoste, Marchand, Dandurand, and Laurendeau. Not only because of archival practices, but because keeping a diary was for the most part a practice of well-to-do women and girls with the education and the time to be able to write, the record they provide is that of the lives of female members of the elite. While not representative of all French-Canadian women, these diaries offer an interesting sample of voices suggesting the various preoccupations of middle- and upper-class girls and women in the last half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries and the pressures exerted on them by the dominant ideologies of the period. Historians

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have analyzed women’s role in this period as defined in sermons and other church documents and as embedded in the judicial and educational systems, but we have very little idea of what girls and women themselves actually thought and how they experienced living under these constraints. Were young girls content or rebellious during their convent school years, for example? Did church doctrines on women’s bodies and sexuality make them feel guilty or inadequate? What could it have been like for them to enter marriage with little or no knowledge of the physical aspects of conjugal union? And, once married, how did they experience the role of wife, mother, and educator so rigidly defined for them by society, and the apparent power implicit in their status as “queens of the hearth”? More important for our purposes, to what extent do these diaries display autonomy and agency on the part of their authors? Are the diarists more interested in loving and being loved than in realizing their own desires and needs? Does the reality captured in their diaries include that of the public sphere or is it confined to the domestic realm? Private diaries offer a privileged look at the lives of girls and women, but only if we learn to read them “between the lines” at times, for the amount of self-revelation in them is limited by the conventions of their era. The physical and emotional aspects of pregnancy, childbirth, puberty, and sexual experience are, for the most part, unspoken. Keeping a diary is an attempt to give form and meaning to passing days: to create through writing a sense of continuity or permanence which transcends time. Unlike autobiography, where the writer seeks to impose unity or coherence on her life by means of a retrospective gaze, the fragmented and chronological form of the diary allows for more freedom and transparency. The typical diarist has no interest in publication and therefore no need to construct an image to present to the world or even to organize what is put down on paper. On the contrary, the diary “notes life as it is, in all its variety and contradictions […] content with recording the usual events of a week or even half a day, it adapts itself to repetition and lack of progress.”1 It is a type of writing particularly suitable to the lives of traditional women, all too often repetitive, monotonous, and filled with activities deemed insignificant by others. For women whose lives were devoted to the well-being of their husbands and children, the diary offered a chance to withdraw into a private space, gather strength, and impose a direction on the apparent circularity of the daily routine. Perhaps more than any other type of autobiographical writing, diaries are concerned with identity, offering a mirror in which the diarist can watch herself live, seek to better understand her deepest motivations, analyze her actions and reactions: in other words, question and

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strengthen her self. At their most basic level, diaries are a proof that one exists in a particular time and space. Ghislaine Perrault (the future wife of André Laurendeau, journalist, politician, and future co-chair of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism), who began her diary in 1922, at the age of eight, writes her initials – GP – in nine different ways in the opening pages of her diary, as if asking herself: “Who am I?” How shall I present myself to others and to myself?” By the time she is ten, she has already started to define herself in simple terms, imagining the impression she will make on an eventual reader: “I don’t want anyone to read what I’m writing here, but if it happens, that person should know that I’m ten years old and that I’m very tall for my age” (17 December 1924). At eleven, inside the cover of her diary, she inscribes her identity as children have done for generations: Ghislaine Perrault 2155 Jeanne Mance Montreal P.Q. Canada North America World Universe During adolescence, keeping a diary can be inspired by the sense that the time has come to make important choices about one’s future. At sixteen, Michelle Le Normand, who later became a novelist, begins a diary by promising herself she will not abandon it as she has so often done with previous diaries: “For the tenth time perhaps, I’m starting a diary. Will I do with it what I’ve done with all the others? That’s possible, but it’s not my intention. At sixteen, surely it’s possible to keep the promises one makes to oneself ” (9 September 1909). From this point on, Le Normand kept a diary until her death in 1964. Joséphine Marchand, later a feminist pioneer and the wife of Senator Raoul Dandurand, begins her diary at the age of seventeen, spurred on by the awareness of passing time and the need to better define her identity: “Tonight I’m making a sudden resolution: to keep a diary, a mirror of my impressions. I’m now seventeen years old […] I’m no longer young; I’ll soon be eighteen and I must start to look seriously at what awaits me in life” (18, 30 July 1879). The role of confidant played by the diary is equally important. In her “dear diary,” the writer finds an Other to whom she can confide her hopes and anxieties, and with whom she can share her daily experiences:

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“I would like to […] translate my ideas into words or confide them to someone in an intimate way, but my inability to give a true idea of my impressions and the absence of the confidant I so desire paralyzes me. So I’ve decided to be my own confidante and write down my ideas so I’ll have them to amuse me later on,” writes Marchand (18 July 1879). Several of the young girls whose diaries have been conserved (Henriette Dessaulles and her younger sister Alice, Joséphine Marchand, Michelle Le Normand) write to assuage the psychic wounds of feeling badly loved or not understood by their mothers. The diary is a true object of affection, perceived as an ever-faithful friend: “I haven’t the slightest little flirtation to recount to you, my dear diary,” notes Marchand (30 July 1879); “For the last half hour I’ve been trying to do my philosophy homework, and now I’m coming to see you with great pleasure, dear diary,” writes Michelle Le Normand (14 February 1910). For fourteen-year-old Henriette Dessaulles, frustrated by the constant admonitions of her stepmother and her teachers, the silence of her diary is one of its most precious qualities: “And I will tell you all my little secrets, dear mute one, who receives my confidences without giving me any advice!” she notes in the first entry. Finally, diaries offer a concrete way to measure one’s progress towards a goal or make resolutions about improving oneself, especially on New Year’s Day or birthdays. The diarist can return to these resolutions later and reflect on them, a characteristic amusingly illustrated by eleven-yearold Ghislaine Perrault’s comment that her parents used to be handsome and that her brother will be handsome when he’s older, if he grows a mustache. Five years later, on rereading her diary, she notes in the margins that she was wrong: he is handsome now, in spite of the absence of a mustache. The young Michelle Le Normand, who wants to be a writer, rereads her diary entries a year after writing them, adding critical remarks like, “What a banal idea!”; “Not true!”; “I was so ridiculous!”; “I’m not like that any more”; or “What a terrible style!” in the margins. Joséphine Marchand often returns to the idea that she is writing in order to create a record to which she can refer in later years: “Here is a memory I will be able to tell my nephews about when I’m an old, unmarried lady talking about my past: about the time when I was young and charming and refused a brilliant offer for marriage” (20 July 1879). Diaries as a genre of personal writing were not originally about the expression of the individual, however; nor were they perceived as an appropriate venue for women’s writing. Samuel Pepys’s famous diary, covering the period from 1660 to 1669 but not published until 1825, chronicled the major public events of the author’s time from a personal point of view. In the eighteenth century, the appearance of “letter-diaries”

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(of which Élisabeth Bégon’s letters are an example) marked the beginning of a shift in focus towards individual thoughts and feelings, and spiritual journals aimed at tracing the progress of the soul became common, especially among Protestants. Not until the arrival of Romanticism does the term “private diary” come into usage. The movement towards interiority coincides with the split between the private and public realms which took hold at the turn of the nineteenth century, and, along with it, the growing perception of diary writing as an essentially feminine practice. The idea that a woman might write for public consumption was still far from being accepted, but jotting down a few lines for herself or the members of her family was seen as an acceptable and even enviable occupation for upper-class women. By the mid-nineteenth century, attractively bound notebooks with blank pages, often marked with the days of the year, were a popular item among girls and women.2 Of all the genres of personal writing, diaries offer the most intimate reading experience. Reading these manuscripts in which the author unveils the most secret layers of her soul, one has the feeling at times of having intruded into a forbidden and sacred realm. But as one moves slowly ahead, struggling to decipher the unfamiliar handwriting, and to read across the inkspots, the crossed-out words or sentences, and the marginal comments, one feels less like a voyeur or a judge than a confidant, perhaps the very confidant the author dreamed of while addressing her “dear diary.” One cannot help imagining her as she writes, snatching a few minutes from her busy day to record the events or thoughts she deems worthy of keeping and reflecting on. For in a sense, the diarist, by putting words on paper, becomes a character in a linguistic construction which reflects her and accompanies her in life. As a literary genre, the diary leads its reader to an identification similar to that created by a novel, with the important difference that the reader’s identification is not with a fictional character or narrator but a real person.3 As well, as in the novel, there is an element of suspense which accentuates the feeling of a shared intimacy between reader and writer, for the character/author whose daily adventures one follows, often for several years, is as ignorant as we are of what will take place in the drama – her life – from page to page. The two chapters which follow examine diaries by young girls. In chapter 5, six unpublished diaries, held in various archives and private collections in Quebec and covering the period from 1864 to 1936, will allow us to formulate some hypotheses about the development of the sense of self in girls during that period. In chapter 6, we will look at two superb diaries, both published – those of Henriette Dessaulles (1874–1881) and Joséphine Marchand (1879–1900) – stressing the tension in each

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of the diaries between the expression of a strong individuality and the need to conform to social dictates. Finally, chapter 7 will focus on private diaries by married women in the years between 1843 (Angélique Hay Des Rivières) and 1964 (Michelle Le Normand).

C h ap t e r 5

Gi rls ’ D i ar i e s : S t ep s t o w ards an Au ton om ous S el f

I’ve come to the end of you, my poor little notebook. How I have marked you up and told you my secrets! You will join your brothers in my chest of secrets – you will be burned when I’m older; I’ll reread you before that, perhaps with a bit of scorn for you and for me, and yet, there is something of me in you – a little piece of a young girl’s soul – it may be a rare thing to find little girls who amuse themselves by writing! Henriette Dessaulles, Journal, 24 August 1876

In the diaries of young girls, which became popular along with the arrival of Romanticism in Quebec in the 1860s, the individual self finds expression for the first time and diaries become truly “private.” The vogue for diary writing owed much to the 1862 publication of the diary of Eugénie Guérin, written in the 1830s by a pious young French woman. “Diaries are the latest craze and there are secrets everywhere,” notes Henriette Dessaulles in her own diary in January 1877. In some cases, diaries were the continuation of the journals girls were expected to keep for spiritual or pedagogical reasons. In France at this time, according to Philippe Lejeune, girls began to keep diaries at about the age of ten, in preparation for their First Communion, and often, once they had acquired the habit, moved on to more personal diaries at about fourteen years of age.1 At times, keeping a diary was recommended to girls as an exercise in spelling, handwriting, or grammar. Whether spiritual or pedagogical, such diaries were meant to be read by others: by teachers or by the young girl’s mother, as indicated by this note on the first page of the diary Ghislaine Perrault began at the age of eight: “Thank you for letting me read your diary. I liked it very much. Mom.” The content and

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tone of the diary kept by Alice Dessaulles (Henriette’s younger sister) at boarding school in February 1880 are evidently dictated by the fact that she must show it to one of the nuns. Judging by Henriette Dessaulles’s testimony, girls’ diaries were considered dangerous and were sometimes even forbidden by the nuns: “My little notebook, you’re in danger here. People here are very indiscreet, they call it supervision […] Keeping a diary is forbidden. I find that amusing and I know how to protect myself from such virtuous curiosity!” (20 September 1876). A few months later, she notes with consternation that the nuns have confiscated the diaries of her cousin and of one of her friends: “They got hold of the journals of Augustine [Bourassa] and Emma. They were indiscreet enough to read them and arbitrary enough to burn them without consulting the poor authors. There is very little respect for one’s rights in this holy house” (23 January 1877). The six unpublished diaries examined in this chapter include those of Marie-Louise Globensky (1864–66); Alice Dessaulles (1880); the diaries of George-Étienne Cartier’s daughters Joséphine and Hortense, from 1871 to 1873; the first two volumes of the diary that novelist Michelle Le Normand kept from 1908, when she was sixteen, until her death in 1964; and, finally, the diary of Ghislaine Perrault (1922–35). Taken together, they give a good idea of the hopes and concerns of young girls of the period, as well as of the possibilities offered and the constraints exerted on them by their milieu. It would be an oversimplification to suppose that one can trace a linear or chronological progress towards autonomy by moving from one of these diaires to the next, however. Differences in the age and even the temperament of the diarists can have at least as much influence as the era or the milieu in which they are writing. For this reason, the diary of Alice Dessaulles, written during the month of February 1880 under the watchful eyes of the nuns of the Convent of the Presentation in Saint-Hyacinthe, will be examined before those of the Cartier sisters, who were, respectively, twenty-three and twenty-one years old when they began their diaries in 1871 and who were preoccupied above all else with finding husbands. Although the order of presentation of the six diaries is mostly chronological, it is also influenced by the degree of independence of each of the authors. t h e di Ary O f A WeLL- brOught-u P yO ung gir L: MA rie -LO ui Se g LO benSKy (1 8 6 4 –1 8 6 6 )

Closer to a chronicle or a spiritual diary than to our present-day concept of a private diary, the five notebooks filled by Marie-Louise Globensky (1849–1919) between 7 July 1864 and 14 February 1866 document

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the activities of the young girl and her family with no sign of the sort of self-questioning or self-exploration that would indicate a distance between the author and her social and religious milieu. Marie-Louise records the almost daily visits of Louis-Joseph Papineau, a close friend of her parents, to the family home, describes in detail the six weeks she and her friend Éliza Chauveau2 spent at Papineau’s manor house Montebello in the summer of 1864, and notes her activities at home and in convent school during the following months. The manuscript of this diary, along with one that Globensky kept from 1912 to 1919, is found in Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec in Montreal.3 A typed copy of her diary – along with a few other documents, including a short diary kept by Globensky in February 1866 and a copy of all the diaries signed Lady Lacoste (1889–1919) after her marriage to Alexandre Lacoste – is in the Centre de Référence de l’Amérique française in Quebec.4 The daughter of Léon Globensky, a Montreal merchant who later became a customs officer, and Angélique Limoges, Marie-Louise is, at fifteen, a pious young girl, content with her life as an upper middle-class Catholic student. Except for the friendship with Louis-Joseph Papineau which dominates the first two notebooks,5 her daily activities seem typical of those of the girls of her social milieu: shopping, balls, music lessons, and a party at her house in which young men and women enjoy themselves until one in the morning (23 October 1864). The last two notebooks are mainly devoted to her religious activities: attending Mass on the first Monday of each month as a Child of Mary, vespers, novenas, retreats, and attendance at the Forty Hours of Adoration during Holy Week. The political and cultural sympathies of the Globenskys were liberal and patriotic, as the first lines of the diary indicate: “Mr. Papineau and Mr. Chauveau are coming for dinner” (7 July 1864). They had been friends of the Papineaus for several years: a letter from Julie Papineau to her husband, dated 19 November 1857, refers to “an agreeable day” spent with “this interesting family,” and in May 1862 she mentions the visit to Montreal of “Miss Globensky’s fiancé” (Alfred Garneau, son of the historian FrançoisXavier Garneau, married Marie-Louise’s older sister Élodie in 1862). During the six weeks spent at Montebello, Marie-Louise writes in her diary almost every day. She notes that on her arrival at La Petite-Nation with Éliza Chauveau, Papineau, his son-in-law Napoléon Bourassa, and his granddaughter Augustine Bourassa, the party is met by Papineau’s daughter Ézilda, and she describes the manor house and property in detail, finding them “magnificent.” Among the daily activities she records are walks in the woods with Papineau; games of “beggamon” (backgammon), whist, and cards with Mme Benjamin Papineau; embroidery,

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reading, and letter writing. One Sunday, after attending Mass and a First Communion ceremony, she notes in her diary that several of the children at Mass were natives and that all of them were poor. Another Sunday, she sings at High Mass with Napoléon Bourassa and afterwards accompanies him to his studio, where he paints her portrait.6 Papineau is very attentive to his young visitors, bringing them flowers from his vast gardens and weaving earrings and crowns of them for the girls. Among the books he reads to them is the novel Charles Guérin,7 written by Éliza’s father, which makes them cry (31 July 1864). On 18 August, the last day of their stay at Montebello, Marie-Louise notes: “Today is the anniversary of Mme Papineau’s death.” In the last two notebooks, which cover the period from 17 October 1864 to 25 May 1865, almost all of the entries are devoted to religious events or sentiments. Unlike the young girls who will keep diaries fifteen or twenty years later, Marie-Louise Globensky never addresses her diary directly (a practice which would indicate a certain individuality and the possibility of having secrets to confide), but she does, occasionally, address comments or exclamations to God and even to the Catholic religion. On 8 December 1864, the day of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, she writes: “I went to Communion at seven o’clock this morning, and I am so happy to say, my Beloved belongs to me, I possess Him. O sweet Jesus, it is so lovely to speak to you in this way.” A few weeks later, she mentions a party where “we talked all evening about the happiness of practising our holy religion, for in it the poet finds superb subjects, the artist delightful pictures, and the orphan finds a mother.” She exclaims: “Oh beloved religion I want to live and die for your glory” (26 December 1864). Such total adhesion to the protective and reassuring universe of faith gives her a joyful confidence, present in this lyrical passage from 1 May 1865: “What a beautiful day it is today, I’d like to shout it loudly so everyone would hear, it’s the first day of May, the month of Mary, this month is consecrated to the memory of my good Mother. Oh, what gentle joy irradiates my forehead at this thought. This morning at eight o’clock we had the Mass of the Children of Mary.”8 But several of the diary entries suggest that this cosy religion-centred existence is surrounded by interdictions and maintained by fear. During a retreat, a lecture given by Marie-Louise’s aunt (a nun) stressing “the importance of listening to God’s word at all times” is followed by a sermon on “the frightful state of a soul in mortal sin,” which Marie-Louise summarizes in detail, and by the story of the atrocious death of Saint Agnes, a martyr of chastity (17 October 1864). Elsewhere, she mentions a sermon on “dances such as Polka, waltzes, etc. etc.” (26 December 1864). The copy

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of a letter to an unknown recipient (probably Papineau) is inserted in the diary at the beginning of fall 1864. Unable to decide whether to return to the convent for another year or to stay at home, as her parents would like her to do, she speaks of her fear of the world that awaits her outside the convent: “I’m afraid of being seduced by this deceitful world because the most beautiful illusions often turn out to be cruel disappointments, we want to gather the roses but we find that they contain a lot of thorns. True happiness is only found at the foot of the tabernacle; that is where the afflicted soul goes to lay down its sorrows and that is where it finds consolation.” A third file in the collection contains other documents related to religion: a typed summary of the contents of a religion course, a “Prayer [to the Blessed Virgin] to be recited for thirty days in order to obtain a special favour,” and a description of the discipline to which a Child of Mary was expected to submit in order to fulfil her religious duties. Entitled “Rule I want to follow in order to enjoy eternal happiness,” and dated June 1864, it outlines a rigid spiritual routine beginning the moment one wakes up in the morning: “On awakening I will make the sign of the Cross; I will offer my heart to God; I will dedicate all my actions to him and say an Ave Maria in honour of the Blessed Virgin’s chastity so she will keep me pure, then I will say my rosary […] After that I will get out of bed promptly and dress as modestly as possible, then I will kneel down and say my morning prayer.” Other activities mentioned are meditation (“at least a quarter of an hour each day beginning at 7 o’clock”), Mass (“every Sunday and Holy Day and as often as possible during the week”), spiritual reading (“at least a quarter of an hour each day”), and confession, followed by Communion, each month. Under the title “Rules for Life,” Marie-Louise adds: “Never go to the theatre […] Never read dangerous books … Never wear low-cut dresses.” Other rules are added the following year: “I will never go to balls or shows, and in the entertainments that are allowed to me I will never wear clothes that could offend modesty, oh no never, may God preserve me from that […] Finally, I will spend my days reading, writing, and attending to the housework (except during the hours of prayer)” (3 March 1865). At the beginning of February 1866, Marie-Louise meets a young lawyer, Alexandre Lacoste, and the short diary she starts at that point indicates that her preoccupations have changed considerably. The desire to begin a new diary is apparently linked to the fact that she is on the verge of her seventeenth birthday: “Today I’m starting a small journal because I’ll be seventeen tomorrow and I can already see that a great change is taking place in me; since I’d like to keep track of my ideas at this age, I’ll try to write in it every day” (1 February 1866). But already in this first entry she

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mentions a party which took place the night before, at which a certain Mr. A. Lacoste was present, and the following day she writes: “Ah! how happy I’d be if he loved me” (2 February 1866). Soon she speaks only of him: “His image follows me all the time […] I love him so much how can I not love him” (7 February 1866); “If only he knew – I love him more than myself ” (14 February 1866). On 8 May, only three months after their first meeting, she weds her beloved, who will, over the course of the years, become a member of the Senate and chief justice of Quebec’s Court of Appeal. In 1889, now officially known as “Lady Lacoste” and soon to give birth to her tenth child, Marie-Louise will begin her diary again and continue to write in it until her death in 1919. W riting under Surve iLLAnC e: AL iCe deSSAu LLeS (6–2 9 februAry 1 8 8 0 )

From Alice Dessaulles (1862–1934), we have only the fragment of a journal begun at the Convent of the Presentation in Saint-Hyacinthe in February 1880,9 just before her eighteenth birthday. The journal opens on 6 February, the twentieth birthday of her older sister, Henriette, whom Alice has not seen since arriving at the convent in September. The manuscript is accompanied by a sheet of paper containing the following dedication, obviously addressed to Henriette Dessaulles after Alice’s death: Papineauville 22 July A legacy for you while I’m still alive: a relic of youth from our dear Alice. The first page made me think that I should leave it to you. Later, you can give it to someone who would appreciate it or destroy it, if you think that would be better. Best wishes to you in all your endeavours. Adine Bourassa10 Since the time, two years earlier, when Henriette Dessaulles had seen her friends’ diaries confiscated by the nuns at the same convent, the rules seem to have changed, for Alice has the right to keep a diary if she agrees to have it read by one of the nuns. Aware that such an intrusion is antithetical to the whole idea of journal writing, she resists, and succeeds in negotiating a compromise with the nun in question: “I want to write. Last night I asked Sister Sainte-Étienne for permission not to show her my journal, and told her I prefer to keep it for myself. She told me that if I show her just a few lines, that will be enough. So that I can say I’m showing it to her if anyone asks” (7 February). But the very fact of

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writing under supervision influences the content and tone of the journal to such an extent that as one reads the outpouring of edifying thoughts and feelings in this diary, it is difficult, if not impossible, to know which of them are authentic and which are invented for the consumption of Sister Sainte-Étienne. This is a diary which must be read for the tension between what it hides and what it reveals. In so doing, one discovers a young woman troubled by a vague sadness, which she tries in vain to escape by clinging to her religious beliefs. Alice “scribbles” in her diary two or three times a week, before filling in for an absent teacher or, surrounded by noise, in study hall in the evening. “There’s a frightful racket going on around me, but I’m taking out my notebook to record my impressions of being 18” (7 February). Her writing seems motivated by the desire to take stock of her life: in a few days she will be eighteen, the age at which one feels obliged to determine one’s direction in life, and she is strongly tending towards the idea of a religious vocation. The diary serves as the confidant she needs, especially as she is feeling particularly alone and lost: “My heart needs to love someone as one would love a mother,” she writes (6 February). Like her sister Henriette, Alice seems overwhelmed by the pain of an unresolved period of mourning which goes back to the death of her mother sixteen years earlier, and tormented by the feeling of being rejected by her stepmother (whom she calls “Maman”): “I still remember Maman, how we called her Cousine when she was young. Some time before her marriage, she asked me if I wanted her to be my mother […] I said yes […] I felt the need for my mother. A mother! Oh God, you took mine away from me! It was your will. The older I get, the more I feel the need to have Maman to myself, these days Maman is still dear to me, but I can’t talk to her or show her the affection I feel, and I am generally shy with her, and that makes me suffer” (6 February). The approach of her birthday makes her serious, almost to the point of trembling, as she thinks of the decisions that await her, and she turns to God for reassurance. At eighteen, she still feels like “a baby” compared to other girls of her age, and yet she knows that the coming year will be a decisive one: “The day after tomorrow I’ll be 18! That is so old! I can hardly believe I’ll be 18, for all the other girls seem much older than I do. I feel like such a baby. What will this year bring to me? All I know is that nothing will happen to me except what God wills. Here I am, God, do with me what you will” (7 February). Her birthday provokes a reflection on the passage of time and awakens memories of her Catholic childhood, a period of calm followed by several more turbulent years: “It is almost sixteen years now since our dear mother left us, and since then there have

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been so many changes. I was a child and then I became an adolescent, and tomorrow I will be a young adult. Oh beautiful years, you are disappearing so fast […] 18 years! Tomorrow. Goodbye, my 17 years; I regret seeing you go. Will you ever come back, sweet impressions of my Communions, retreats, and readings, and the innocent joys of boarding school? Will you ever return and give me back the calm my poor heart has lost?” (8 February). At this stage of her life, Alice seems convinced (or is trying to convince herself) that she is destined for a religious vocation (in reality, she will marry seven years later and will give birth to seven children). She likes teaching and anticipates with pleasure the time when she will have pupils of her own: “I taught again today; Sister Sainte-Cécile didn’t show up. I’m her substitute. I really like teaching. I imagine the days when I’ll have my own pupils and be able to measure their progress. Oh! I’m going to love teaching!” (7 February). The feeling of being “chosen” by God gives her a sense of belonging that is doubtless linked to the feelings of rejection and loneliness that torment her: “All are not called to the same path […] and it’s a serious choice. O my God, a thousand thanks for the favour you have given me of making my choice here, far from the distractions of the world […] You have brought me into solitude and spoken to my heart; you have said: It is here that I want you to be; it is here, in the humble habit of a nun, that you will finish your course. Oh, the best of all possibilities has been given to me. I will follow the spotless Lamb” (8 February). The awareness that one’s writing will be read by those in authority must surely have led to rivalries and hypocrisy on the part of the students, each seeking to appear more pious than her classmates. It is hard to believe, for example, that the following sentences were not written to impress the nun who would read them: “I gave some more lessons today […] I like helping my teachers. Sometimes there is so little we can do to show them our appreciation. We also have prayer. Oh! That is what I love most. I turn to Him who possesses all treasures and all happiness and I ask him to bestow them on the spiritual director who showed me the path to follow and the teachers who exhaust themselves instructing me and surround me with such tender affection” (12 February). Just as harmful to students’ sense of self as the intrusion into the confidentiality of their diaries were the compositions they were expected to read aloud in class. Alice hates exposing herself in this way and has difficulty writing them: We read our compositions this morning. I can’t help wondering how my classmates manage to go on about their subjects so easily. I can’t do it, I try and I never succeed, even when I write in these

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little notebooks. I’m not good at displaying my impressions or reflections, like Dine, for example. She is so lucky to be able to write beautifully, some of her pages are little masterpieces. I like hearing her talk about Jesus, whom she loves so much. This morning she read us a lovely composition about the sanctuary lamp; her pages were full of pious, tender, and delicate sentiments. I would have liked to know what Sister Sainte-Étienne thought of her composition, once again she will be convinced of the real piety of my dear friend. (8 February) Five days later, though, Alice speaks of Dine again, this time in a way suggesting that she is writing for Sister Sainte-Étienne. It is hard not to see a betrayal of her friend in Alice’s revelation of Dine’s true feelings about her faith. After explaining that Dine no longer likes her English course and wants to go home, and that she has also refused to go to confession, a fact of which the nuns are unaware, she writes: “My God, it makes me suffer to see her forget this Jesus she used to love so much and that she still pretends to love. Please don’t punish her” (13 February). At its most basic level, the religion that dominates all of Alice’s thoughts is one that refuses life and exalts death, creating extreme confusion in the young woman. On one hand, she writes that she wants to die in order to be reunited with her dead mother; on the other, she is conscious of an instinctual desire to live. Only one solution allows her to reconcile these opposing desires: to live in order to suffer while awaiting death: “Do I want to die? No, no, not now; if it is God’s will I want to live. Not to enjoy life, for it’s not beautiful, but to suffer […] I want to live […] in order to learn to desire death and the happiness of seeing God. I want to live in order to fulfil the mission God has given me here below” (20 February). For those familiar with the fiery and rebellious diary of Alice’s older sister, Henriette Dessaulles,11 the confusion and apparent hypocrisy present in Alice’s diary can only come as a surprise. Such characteristics are doubtless in large part the result of a very effective system of surveillance which, by playing on the desire of young girls to please and be accepted, denies them the possibility of true self-expression. Alice becomes conscious of this in the final passage of her journal, where she finally rebels, stating that what she writes concerns only her, and not Sister Sainte-Étienne. It is a sad and inconclusive rebellion, however, for, lacking real freedom of expression, she can only envisage one solution – that she will abandon writing for the time being and come back to it later, when she has found subjects more suitable to be revealed to others: “I’m trying to decide whether to show these scribblings to Sister Sainte-Étienne or limit

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myself to a few lines. Why should I show her everything? It’s not that I lack confidence; I can’t really say why I’m hesitating. Maybe because I don’t want her to know the little thing that I prefer to hide. But maybe it’s because this writing is for me. I can see that I’m not in the mood for writing tonight. I’ve finished my notebook. Tomorrow, when I start a new one, I’ll show it to her” (29 February). fitting One ’S L ife int O A SOC iAL diA ry: J O S ÉP hine And h O rten S e C Artier (1 8 7 1 –1 8 7 3 )

The diaries that Josephine Cartier (1847–1886) and her sister Hortense (1849–1941) kept between 1871 and 187312 are primarily a record of the social activities of these two young women who were related to some of the most influential political and ecclesiastical personages of their time. Their father, Sir George-Étienne Cartier – a lawyer and businessman as well as a politician – was a former Patriote who had chosen to support the reformer Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine and his party after the Act of Union13 in 1841. As leader of the moderate Parti bleu, he had been prime minister of the United Canadas from 1857 to 1862 and later became one of the principal architects of Confederation. Their mother, Hortense Fabre (Lady Cartier), was from an equally prominent family. Her father was the Patriote bookseller, Édouard-Raymond Fabre, who had been mayor of Montreal from 1849 to 1851, and her brothers were Msgr Édouard-Charles Fabre, secretary of the powerful bishop, Ignace Bourget, (Fabre would himself become bishop of Montreal in 1873), and the journalist Hector Fabre (later a Canadian senator and diplomat). Joséphine is twenty-three and Hortense twenty-one on the first of January 1871, when they begin their diaries. The two diaries overlap, often recounting the same events from differing perspectives. Beginning on 1 December 1871, when the two young women leave Montreal for Europe with their mother, their journals become travel diaries, even as their authors continue to note the whirlwind of social activities and visits to important people that mark their extended stay in England and France. In October 1872, Cartier, having lost his seat in the federal election of the previous month and now gravely ill, joins his wife and daughters in England. Hortense’s diary ends on 1 March 1873 and Josephine’s on 11 May of the same year (the same day as their uncle is consecrated bishop of Montreal). Nine days later, on 20 May 1873, their father succumbs to Bright’s disease. Written in pencil or pen in small notebooks (five by eight inches), often with spelling mistakes, the entries in the two journals are usually short and factual, although they sometimes contain brief commentaries

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or descriptive adjectives. On 7 January 1871, Hortense writes: “Sliding party at the Citadel – charming lunch at the citadel – the others went sliding while we watched”; while her sister, who participated in the same activities, contents herself with writing: “Bored to tears by the constant presence of the Marquis.” Two days later, Josephine notes: “(Flora) & Paul behave like the vulgar people they are. Party at the Cauchons dull enough to put you to sleep,” while Hortense limits herself to a “boring dancing party at the Cauchons” (12 January 1871). When their days seem dull or empty, they summarize them in brief phrases: “Nothing new. Still frustrating” (29 January 1871); “In the car. Still life paintings. Boring” (14 April 1871), writes Josephine; and Hortense notes: “Boring paintings by Mr. Porter” (14 March 1871); “Nada” (16 March 1871); “Nothing” (19 March 1871). It is clear from the first entries on that there are tensions in the family and that the two young women do not appreciate the obligations that go with their social status. Josephine begins her journal by evoking the difficult year that has just ended and expressing the hope that the next one will be better: “Alleluia. End of the year ’70 which was full of so many bitter frustrations for us; with a sort of superstitious fascination, H. [Hortense] & I see the arrival [of a new one] with a singular joy, and truly what I have to write here seems to fulfil our desires. First, after much discussion, Papa is allowing the purchase of a necklace – $50.” About the New Year’s dinner, she comments: “A family supper. Everyone pretending to get along.” Hortense, more rebellious than her sister, gives a more detailed description: “Inevitable family meal seasoned by epigrams and severe looks from the abbé [their uncle], who wants us to get married. Thanks to my skilful diplomacy, I succeeded in making peace with my aunt Lévesque whom I can’t stand at the moment” (1 January 1871). The next day, describing an afternoon spent with her uncle, Canon Fabre, and another priest, she deplores “the necessity of talking to boring people of all ages and conditions” (2 January 1871). The activities of the Cartier girls are typical of those of young women of upper-class families: keeping busy and amusing themselves by a succession of visits, balls, teas, a play rehearsal, sleigh rides, walks, sewing, and embroidery as they wait for marriage. In February 1871, at the worst moment of the Franco-Prussian war, they start German lessons. “Three times a week a German teacher comes and bores us to death,” notes Hortense. And Josephine adds: “The Prussians are entering Paris. Tonight I’m starting to learn German pronunciation by reading. May the errors I commit insult this barbaric language” (1 March 1871). In their descriptions of their numerous social activities, the diarists (especially Hortense) emphasize what preoccupies them most: young

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men. “The officers were perfect to us,” she writes after a reception at the Citadel (7 January 1871); and, two weeks later: “Last night a good ball – danced with Coulson, Holbech, Biddell – I have a complete crush on Biddell” (23 January 1871). On 19 February: “Saw M. Walpole at the door of the parish church – he was superb – in the afternoon, a walk with Jos and Dr. Hingston – in the evening M. Walpole et Mons. Williams dined here – they stayed until 11:30.” And, on 28 June: “A snack at the Citadel in the room of a little man who is madly in love with one of us – but which one???” On arriving in London, Hortense is immediately struck by “the devotion of English Catholics and the number of attractive young men who belong to that religion” (17 December 1871). In fact, if there is a theme which confers a certain unity on these journals, it is that of the desire and the necessity to find an acceptable husband. Neither of the young women gets along with their father, whom they call “Captain.” For several years, Cartier has been living with his mistress, Luce Cuvillier, and he rarely comes home. The entry for Monday 30 January 1871 in Hortense’s journal reads: “The Captain left – only good news of the day.” In April, Josephine notes: “The Capt. is staying here” (19 April), and, two days later: “Nothing unusual except the Capt’s departure” (21 April). There is little doubt that the “bitter frustrations” she evokes in her entry of 1 January are related to the open hostility between her parents, an untenable and publicly humiliating situation that will convince Lady Cartier to leave for Europe with her two daughters before the end of the year. In Europe – at least if we rely solely on Hortense’s diary – life continues more or less as it had been in Canada, interspersed with visits to Westminster Abbey, the Champs-Élysées, the Louvre, Versailles, and the Bois de Boulogne. There are visits to relatives and friends in France and England, evenings at the theatre and the opera, and even – after their father’s arrival in England – the honour of being presented to the Queen. “An invitation to court arrived like a thunderbolt,” announces Josephine on 15 February 1873. During the following days there are dresses to choose, visits to the hairdresser, and numerous other preparations. When the day arrives, she notices above all the interesting men who are present: “Presentation. Big fuss with our makeup and dresses. Maman is ravishing […] We notice the handsomest of all the handsome men from the French embassy. Ditto a superb Prince of Wales. And a very good-looking Edinborough. A trio to make one dream” (27 February 1873). Hortense, summarizing the two weeks leading up to the presentation in a single entry, gives a bit more detail: “Nothing but comings and goings as we got ready for our presentation at court, which went off better than I had expected – the Queen is short, plump, red, and gracious – the Princess is a

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nice, fat mother – the Prince of Wales is superbly handsome – my attractive Edinborough is very deep” (1 March 1873). But Josephine, more melancholy than her sister, gives a picture in her diary of the sadness of a journey without end, which is not only expensive, but seems to have no goal other than that of escaping from their situation in Canada. To finance their trip, the Cartier women depend on money sent to them irregularly by Cartier’s lawyer and, at the beginning of their trip, Josephine notes: “Our lodgings are very bad” (9 January 1872). The anxiety of living this way is apparent in a comment she makes on 4 March 1872: “Henri gives us the news that the Capt. is sending us some money. It’s the first time we’ve heard any mention of it. We only had 12£ left. We were terribly worried, and the news was like a branch held out to a person who’s drowning. Our days weren’t too bad, but the silence of the night was interrupted by our tears and our feverish agitations. I didn’t dare speak of it to them, but my fear was that we had been abandoned.” When, at the end of summer 1872, they leave France for England, her diary gives a sense of the chaotic feelings aroused by a long and disorganized trip: “Departure for England. First frustration. They charge us 25 francs for our extra baggage. In the train, I’m overcome by a feeling of despair. Why, I wondered, are we going there?” (26 August 1872). An obligatory stop at Brighton for the famous baths is enveloped in a sadness made worse by their financial worries: “The hotel is expensive and not very clean. We search for a lodging. Find one for 2 guineas, a less than acceptable hole […] I return with the terrible feeling that a morbid destiny is hanging over me” (10 September 1872). As is often the case in women’s diaries of this era, intimate events and feelings are expressed, if at all, in a veiled fashion. For example, Josephine writes “A quarrel follows” (3 February 1872) without giving any detail about the content of the quarrel; and elsewhere: “No new or exciting emotions to report on here […] As I’m totally exhausted, I’m not going to write about the thoughts that were occupying my mind” (5 April 1871). But, reading between the lines of these two journals, one can detect the traces of falling in love and of broken hearts. After a stay at a resort in Cacouna (on the Gaspé peninsula) with her family, Josephine notes: “Departure from Cacouna. Spoke to Dr. Thomas for the last time the night before we left. He alone will know the story of my time of love and folly with Dupuy” (6 September 1871). In Europe, she will nostalgically remember a certain “M.W.” (perhaps the elegant Mr Walpole who is mentioned several times in the two diaries in the spring of 1871). In the entries between April and September 1872, there is the indication of a number of failed attempts to connect with M.W., either in France or in England, and

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the vague suspicion that the young man’s parents disapprove of a liaison with the Cartier family. By the end of the summer, Josephine has given up hope: “I feel horribly sad because I can now see that we won’t see him in England. What a disaster! He was a man both Hortense and I would have married with our eyes closed, as he has so many fine qualities” (29 August 1872). In the meantime, Hortense has received a marriage proposal from Henri Salles, a French cousin of the Fabre family. There are numerous mentions of Henri in both diaries, beginning with the arrival of the Cartier girls in France, but little by little Hortense becomes more intimate with him: “Henri came and put a flower in my room” (19 July 1872); “I dined in a restaurant with Henri, then we bought some music – in the evening, sat out with Henri on the balcony smoking” (24 July 1872). The day before their departure for England, Josephine notes: “A walk at Passy with Henri who distinguishes himself by a formal proposal of marriage to Hortense” (25 August 1872). Two weeks later, however, Hortense writes: “Received a letter from Henri – very bad news from Canada” (5 September 1872). It is difficult, if not impossible, to determine what this bad news consists of, but a long entry in Josephine’s diary dated 5 September recounts the drama which surrounded the reception of this letter: A day of disaster! I woke up when Maman called me and, unlike my usual habit in London, I’ve been waiting for the arrival of the mail. Maman is always saying there are letters and it would be better for us if there weren’t so many. Hortense grabs the parcel from Liverpool and over her shoulder I read the hard truth. I burst into tears, which makes me feel a bit better. What an upheaval for all three of us. It was for this conclusion that we saved so much money and spent so many of our precious moments hanging about in the countryside!!! […] Why in the world does he have to get mixed up in our affairs this way? (5 September 1872) One can only guess at the content of the letter which so upset the Cartier women, but it seems probable that their father has refused to give his consent for Hortense’s marriage – a supposition borne out by Cartier’s will, which states that the small amount of money he has set aside for his daughters is based on the condition that neither of them will marry “a member or an ally of the Fabre family.”14 In October, Cartier arrives in England and it is clear that the question of the marriage of the two girls is a source of tension in the family. “The capt says he feels better but he’s changed a lot. He runs errands for us and is obsessed with […] the desire to see us married,” writes Hortense on 24 October 1872. On Christmas

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night, after a tension-filled day, a long, furious notation in her diary reveals the immense frustration of a young woman who is conscious of the fact that her fate and that of her sister depend entirely on their ability to find a husband acceptable to their father: I continue to be responsible for the rainy weather and the fact that there isn’t any sun. Here’s a way to make peace with your children: a warning for fathers! Have two of them and accuse them every day of being two too many, always talk to them about yourself, scold them constantly, if they’re girls, get rid of all the young men who would love to take them off your hands by marrying them, and then accuse them of remaining old maids, speak in front of them of all their friends who are getting married, be sure that your daughters will never desire either marriage or the convent or even the scaffold in order to get free of your charming company […] This is written on a really merry Christmas 25 December 1872. The fate of the Cartier sisters, who seem to have been prepared for nothing in life except a desirable marriage, and whose diaries recount, more than anything else, their frantic search for a husband, is a sad one. In the end, neither of the two sisters married. After their father’s death, they moved with their mother to Cannes, where Josephine died of pleurisy in 1886, at the age of thirty-nine, and their mother twelve years later. Hortense lived in Cannes until the beginning of World War II. During the Occupation she moved to England, where she died in 1941, at the age of ninety-two. Writing t O “figure O ut […] W hAt i AM” : Mi Che LL e Le n OrMA nd ( 1 9 0 9 –1 9 1 1 ) Ah ! I wish I could define my self – but am I capable of doing so? I change so often that I don’t understand myself at all […] I’m almost certain that this diary I’m writing now will shock me when I read it later […] for, whether I like it or not, I’m not always all “me” in these pages! Diary of Michelle Le Normand, 20 December 1910

In 1909, at the age of sixteen, Michelle Le Normand (1893–1964), born Marie-Antoinette Tardif,15 began to keep a diary, a practice to which she would be faithful for the rest of her life. Twenty notebooks containing her diaries, covering the periods from 1909 to 1911 and from 1918 until her death in 1964, are in the Fonds Le Normand-Desrosiers at Bibliothèque et

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Archives nationales du Québec in Montreal. The early notebooks (1909– 11) begin as a handwriting exercise, but soon develop into the record of a search for self entirely new in the history of the private diary in Quebec. Unlike the diarists before her, Le Normand tries to capture the moods and states of mind of a self that is constantly changing and no longer rigidly defined by traditional feminine roles – a situation which perhaps accounts for the anguish and uncertainty so present in her diary. The first notebook begins on 9 September 1909 and ends on 18 June 1911. Inside it, there is a folded and undated sheet of paper which contains the following sentences: “Yesterday’s woman or today’s woman – But it’s today’s woman one must prefer! – Our grandmothers were good, wise […] simple.” Whether written as part of a school composition or simply a personal reflection, the passage reminds us that the young Michelle Le Normand lives in a world that has changed considerably for women since the “scribblings” of the young girls of the nineteenth century. An example among others of this evolution is the fact that two of the diarists of earlier decades (Henriette Dessaulles and Joséphine Marchand), along with several other women, became journalists or authors at the turn of the twentieth century, offering new role models for young women. An entry in Le Normand’s diary, recalling a conversation with a friend about their plans for the future, makes this clear: “We’d like to be old maids – we’re afraid of the religious vocation – and as far as marriage goes, we wouldn’t mind it, but we don’t want to have children,” she writes (26 November 1910). Full of doubt, contradictions, and dramatic changes of mood, Le Normand’s diary seems symptomatic of an age of transition, in which the old beliefs and roles no longer offer a reassuring framework of life for an adolescent girl. For example, she resists the message of sacrifice and abnegation contained in the novel Angéline de Montbrun by Laure Conan, which appeared in 1882 and quickly became a classic, without knowing what values could replace the ones she rejects. “I’m reading Laure Conan these days […] and asking myself what great sacrifice she must have had to make that would explain why she only sees the sad side of life,” she writes. Not only does Angéline de Montbrun’s protracted period of mourning after the death of her father seem unrealistic to Le Normand, but the heroine’s refusal of marriage goes against her own instincts: “I love Papa very much but I can’t understand why a young woman would miss her father so much that she would give up her own future and wallow in her pain […] Maybe she is crying without reasoning […] It’s fine that Laure Conan likes sacrifice, but why does it have to be in the religious vocation or celibacy? I don’t agree.” However, her own freedom of choice increases her fear of the future: “Between you and me, I wouldn’t want to

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have a religious vocation […] and I think about it often […] There is a great need for doing good in the world […] But I’d rather not think too much about the future” (14 January 1910). The first pages of the journal, contained in an exercise book bearing the title “Music Theory Homework,” are penned in an ornate and somewhat stilted handwriting, but after about four pages the writing becomes more natural and the author starts to note her impressions and moods. The style is dreamy and romantic, and the content superficial: these are the pages to which Le Normand will return a year later, writing critical comments in the margins like: “This is so banal!”; “I was mad!”; “I’m rereading these pages and I find them very poor for the beginning of a diary […] I don’t know if it’s because I’ve changed […] but it’s not me, not at all!” (2 November 1910). She writes about nature, the melacholy of the month of October, and her feelings of sadness, boredom, and emptiness. She worries about the fact that she is no longer interested in her studies and is going to lose her first place in class. Often close to a state of depression, she complains about the fact that nothing is happening in her life and that she therefore has nothing to write about in her journal. It is clear that the diary functions as a means of warding off sadness and provides her with a space where she can analyze her torments: “In a few days it will be December. I feel so tired of everything […] No, not really […] but I only feel good when I’m alone […] I don’t know why. It’s 5.30 in the morning […] I’m up and everyone else is sleeping […] and I feel peaceful. Soon I’ll get nervous and impatient again […] Ah ! if only someone could tell me what I’m made of […] and whether there’s a remedy for this need for solitude” (28 November 1909). Like many other adolescents, she feels misunderstood and unloved. Trying to understand “this feeling of isolation I have always sensed in our family […] ever since I was a little girl” (2 November 1910), she, like many of the young diarists who have gone before her, identifies the problem as a coldness and distance in her relationship with her mother: “Between Maman and me, there is a feeling of constraint that I don’t understand […] and that is why I feel sad so often […] and have such a great need to be loved […] Yes, to have someone who would think the way I do, and who would at least understand me […] It is a dream that agitates my imagination and preoccupies me all the time. Oh, how I wish I could know how my life will turn out” (2 November 1910). A student at the Académie Saint-Léon in Montreal, a school run by the nuns of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame, Le Normand is bored with school work, but spends time with a group of friends who are equally bored with what she calls “convent school time.” “I have certainly never

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been this lazy before,” she writes at the end of a school term (12 December 1909). The free time that comes with the holidays only makes her more uncomfortable: “I’m on holidays! At last! And yet tonight I’m still not happy” (23 December 1909). Nothing seems to be happening in her life, and the books she reads are dreadfully dull: “I’ve just finished a book by Roger Dombre; amusing but a bit too funny. Too much ridiculousness” (23 December 1909). Only snowshoeing or skating with her friends distract her from her lethargy: “There is nothing more pleasant than being on the mountain on a snowy day” (10 February 1910). Totally new in relation to the diaries of the nineteenth century are the anguish, the constant questioning, and the fear of the future that characterize this journal. Although Le Normand enjoys the idea of being a “woman of today,” the price of this freedom seems to be constant uncertainty: “Ah! if only I could unravel exactly what I am,” she writes on 3 December 1910. Feelings of melancholy and despair (which she calls her “black butterflies”) run through the diary like a leitmotif: “I am tired, so tired, and tonight I feel terribly sad […] Why am I assailed by so many black ideas? Why does the future frighten me?” (29 December 1909); “It’s dreadful how often I have sad thoughts and how rarely I feel that it’s good to be alive” (11 March 1911). For Le Normand, writing – her diary, but also other texts – gradually fills this emptiness and strengthens her desire for a professional writing career. Little by little, new horizons open up for her. In March 1910, she enrols in a writing course given by René du Roure, a young professor from France, at the Montreal campus of Laval University,16 and the compliments of her teacher increase her confidence and heighten her desire to be a writer. “By the way, I have literary ambitions; I’d love to write for a newspaper; I’ve even taken some steps in that direction lately and I’m waiting for the results – I would be so happy!” she writes on 11 December 1910. And, two weeks later: “I have become a journalist. Two articles by me, signed Claude, have already appeared in L’Avenir du Nord, the SaintJérôme newspaper” (28 September 1910). For the next three years, while writing occasional articles for L’Avenir du Nord, she enrolled in literature courses at the University of Montreal, from which she received a diploma in literary studies in 1913. As Michel Lemaire notes, she is one of the first women in Quebec to pursue graduate studies in literature.17 Fed by her readings, Le Normand’s desire for love becomes ardent during her eighteenth year. “I’ve been reading a bit these last few days and it makes me want to be loved. I’m thirsty for love!” she writes on 5 October 1910. On Christmas Day of that year, irritated by the presence of her older sister and her husband, who are constantly kissing and who speak only

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of money and food, she confides to her journal: “I want an intellectual husband […] who has a sense of values and doesn’t think about money all the time, but about God and society; [someone who would choose to] live above all for his faith […] and also for his country.” Idealistic, romantic, and mad about literature, she is thus entirely ready for the great love which will arrive in her life in June 1911, in the person of the crippled poet Albert Lozeau. The story of Le Normand and Lozeau’s love affair is now known, thanks to the publication in 2006 of the letters written to her by the poet between 1911 and 1921.18 Paralyzed by tuberculosis of the spinal column, Lozeau is thirty-two when he meets the young Michelle Le Normand. Already a celebrated author since the publication of his collection of poems L’âme solitaire in 1907, he contributes a regular column to the newspaper Le Devoir, founded in 1910. He lives with his parents on Rue Laval, near the Square Saint-Louis, and often spends his afternoons on the balcony in his wheelchair, watching the passersby. On 22 May 1911, Le Normand writes: “I’ve seen Albert Lozeau four times since Saturday, on his balcony. And now I’m obsessed with a new infatuation. If I followed my impulses I’d write to him. My heart gives me so much misery and so many worries!” She screws up her courage and sends him an anonymous letter, noting in her diary on 12 June: “I was desperate to write to Albert Lozeau. I did it on Wednesday the 7th and on Saturday he replied to me in Le Devoir,” adding a handwritten copy of Lozeau’s column – a long poem followed by a request that his admirer reveal her name. She replies to him with a long letter, also transcribed in her journal, containing her name and address. In the final entry of her journal, she writes: “Received a good letter from Albert Lozeau on Tuesday the 13th, my 18th birthday. I was happy for the whole day. I replied to it in the evening – and I soon got another letter – and another one yesterday with his portrait enclosed. He has offered me his friendship and he’s now occuying all my thoughts. Where will all of this lead? Will he disappear from my affections like all the others, or is this one for life? I can’t […]” (18 June 1911). Passionate and reciprocal, the love of Le Normand and Lozeau will last for several years. Le Normand has finally found the mentor she craved: a sensitive and intelligent man who adores her, shares her tastes in reading, corrects her texts, and finds her employment at Le Devoir, where she starts writing in 1915, briefly becoming editor of the women’s pages in 1918. From 1915 on, she uses the pen name Michelle Le Normand, publishing a series of articles on her childhood which appear in book form in 1916, to great success, under the title Autour de la Maison. Because of his illness, Lozeau grants his “dear Marie-Antoinette” total freedom to live

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as she pleases and have relationships with other men, and Le Normand’s diary for 1918 reveals that she has, indeed, fallen in love with another man.19 As for Lozeau, always generous to this woman he will love until his death in 1924, he continues to write to her until July 1921, a year before her marriage to Léo-Paul Desrosiers, Quebec writer and journalist. But the love she formerly felt for Lozeau has changed to pity. Now calling him her “poor poet,” she notes, after a visit to him in 1919: “I loved him very much in the past […] but I don’t love him at all any more […] I pray for him, out of pity. I find it unjust that I no longer feel anything for him. What a terribly sad fate!” (7 April 1919). the Se Cret S O f hAPPine SS: ghi SLA ine Perr AuLt ( 1 9 2 2 –1 9 3 6 )

The diary of Ghislaine Perrault (1914–76), preserved in the Fonds Familles Laurendeau et Perrault of Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec,20 begins when she is eight years old and ends with this entry, the only one for 1936: “Paris, Friday 12 June 1936: Madame Laurendeau is embarking today on the Alaunia, the same ship we sailed on. Our baby was baptized in the same grey and blue baptismal gown that both André and his mother wore.” From her own childhood until the beginning of her years as a mother, Ghislaine Perrault notes what appear to her to be the principal events of a happy life: a privileged existence, to be sure, but also, in a more general sense, completely “normal.” The daughter of Marguerite Mousseau and of Antonio Perrault, dean of the Faculty of Law at the Montreal campus of Laval University and author of several books on law and social justice, she attended the Académie Saint-Urbain and later the University of Montreal. With her future husband, André Laurendeau, journalist, she attended courses given by Abbé Lionel Groulx,21 who soon became a friend and advisor of the young couple, and later, in 1934, Ghislaine’s spiritual director. The first two notebooks (1922–30), written between the ages of eight and fifteen, are bound in leather; the first, with the embossed title “Daily Journal 1914,” may have belonged to the author’s mother. The two notebooks are followed by four others, covering the years from 1930 to 1936 and recounting, among other things, the engagement and marriage of Ghislaine and André Laurendeau. An interesting aspect of the last three notebooks is that they are conceived as being not only Ghislaine’s journal, but that of the couple. On the cover of the first (extending over the period from 4 September 1932 to 17 November 1933), “André Laurendeau” is written in Ghislaine’s handwriting. The second, which goes from 19 November

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1933 to 16 June 1935, bears the title “Diary: André and Ghislaine,” and contains about twenty pages written by Laurendeau; the third, covering the period from 17 July 1935 to 12 June 1936, is titled “Our diary: André and Ghislaine,” and contains a few entries by Laurendeau. Throughout her journal, Ghislaine Perrault writes knowing she may well be read by others, with or without her consent: her mother (whose comments indicating she has read the diary have already been quoted), her fiancé, or other eventual readers. The content, closer to that of a chronicle than to the intimate revelations of some young girls’ diaries, reflects this awareness, most explicitly in the entry which closes the second notebook: Monday, 30 June 1930 I think I will stop this journal here. Now that I’ve finished my studies at the convent, I’m going to start a new notebook […] This diary doesn’t contain many impressions. My method is to relate only the facts: that way, the impressions aren’t known to others, and they come back to me clearly when I reread the facts. I will probably continue using this tactic. Maybe, for example, if I meet a boy who pleases me I won’t hesitate to say he’s “adorable,” unlike the silence I would have kept here not so long ago … So goodbye to this first journal. Ghislaine Perrault P.S. My new pen writes nicely, doesn’t it? The first notebook, with only occasional entries, communicates the freshness and innocence of the existence of a little girl with an apparent gift for happiness. The occasional spelling mistakes and the purely descriptive character of the entries recall the pedagogical aim of girls’ diaries of the period, but they are also a sign of the literary tastes and ambitions of the young diarist. “I woke up on this happy morning,” she writes, adding what she had for breakfast, “and then I played the piano and did my homework” (4 February 1923). “Finally! I’m starting my diary again. There are many things that have changed,” she writes two years later, noting the alterations in the furniture of the room she shares with her sister, Francine, and the Christmas presents she received (23 January 1925). Too young to define herself in psychological terms, she often evokes her physical characteristics: “I have a strange nose, neither big nor small, turned up in a funny way. Brown hair that is wavy when I brush it but messy half an hour later” (10 October 1925). At thirteen, she notes her height: “I’m in seventh grade […] I measure 5 feet 8 inches in my low

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heels” (13 March 1927). The first notebook also contains the plots of two novels she plans to write, full of exotic elements, in which she imagines herself as a soldier and speaks of a voyage to Turkey, but also accords a great deal of importance to friendship (4 February 1925). Happiness is a recurrent theme, as in the charming passage which ends the first notebook: “My diary isn’t really a diary, because I don’t write in it regularly. Excuse me if my writing is dancing, but the cat is rubbing up against my face and distracting me. In my grammar homework there was a sentence: ‘Happiness is somewhere, but can never be found.’ I think the beginning of it is ridiculous: ‘Happiness is somewhere.’ Of course happiness is […]” [the following pages are ripped out] (25 February 1925). Two years later, in a long entry, perhaps the draft of a school composition, she returns to the subject, treating it with surprising maturity for a girl of her age. Happiness is not an impossible goal, she writes. It can be found in the texture of everyday life, with its struggles and disappointments: the routine of life at the convent, waiting for Friday (“a distracting and passionate obsession”), buying a new house, practising the piano, the certainty that her best friend Madeleine will be at the lake during the coming holidays. “I may be the only person who understands happiness this way, but I also think that, thanks to the way of seeing things God has given me, I’m the only one who’s right. That’s why I’m happy while everyone else is complaining,” she concludes (27 May 1927). The whole of the second notebook, written between the ages of eleven and fifteen, bathes in this atmosphere of happiness, and the perfume of past days emanates from the cherished objects conserved between its pages: dried flowers and leaves, found in the spot which Ghislaine and her friend Madeleine have designated their “secret place”; birthday cards and Valentines; a ribbon from her sister’s graduation bouquet; a list of maxims copied from her grammar book. The notebook also contains some poems written by Ghislaine and a newspaper clipping with a story entitled, “The Legend of the Lilacs,” signed “Ghislaine,” with the dedication “To my soul sister Madeleine.” A description of a winter landscape, written at the age of eleven, suggests that the young girl has some literary talent (7 November 1925). At twelve, her love of the French language leads her to found a group of friends she calls “The Canadian academy of the French language” (a suitable activity for the future wife of André Laurendeau). At fourteen, she is delighted when her father brings her an anthology of French poetry on returning from a trip to Europe (27 July 1928); and at fifteen, thanks to a friend who is a medical student and has worked at the mental hospital Saint-Jean-de-Dieu, she receives a letter from the poet Émile Nelligan, which she copies into her diary. A year later, the same

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friend gives her a notebook containing poems which Nelligan has written down from memory. The love of music and nature are also sources of creativity for this young girl with romantic tastes, who has a piano even at the cottage and dreams of playing it in harmony with nature: “A beautiful moonlit night. I wish I could take my piano out into the woods, to make music at night in the middle of nature […] Music has given me so much! Beethoven has received my sadness, Chopin has seen his elegies become enraged, and dear Brahms has helped put a smile back on my face after Grieg advised me to work on myself. Oh, dear piano, what would I be without you?” (23 July 1928). And, a few days later: “When I play Beethoven for example, I seem to hear a soul in solitary nature. The woods and the sky make me think of music, and vice versa” (27 July 1928). Religious practices occupy a large place in young Ghislaine’s life, though she is not excessively pious. Triduums, novenas, and retreats are regular activities, motivating her to try to improve herself, usually in the direction of greater docility. At twelve, she decides to start a triduum, three days of prayer of which the first is devoted to combatting laziness, the second to pride and “wanting to be in charge,” and the third to “conquering impatience and becoming more docile” (3 March 1926). A week later, she confides to her journal that the success of the triduum was only partial: “I finished my triduum. There’s a small improvement. But I think I’ll make a novena in a few weeks, with the same intentions” (10 March 1926). Basically, Ghislaine Perrault is a “normal” adolescent girl with a lively interest in art, extremely faithful in her friendships, and sure enough of herself to note, after a “love interest” in a young boy when she is twelve, that she is glad to be free again: “I’ve noticed that what I thought was ‘love’ (what a huge word) for the Valiant Horseman was only a ‘crush,’ as they say at the convent. And my crush is over! I’m so glad!” (30 April 1926). The four notebooks that follow trace, with remarkable discretion, the relationship between Ghislaine and André Laurendeau, from their first meeting in October 1930 until their marriage in June 1935. The entries are short and factual: “Tennis with Châteauguay, André, and Jacques […] Afterwards, André plays the piano for me […] Then, Jacques went to get Maman. André stayed for a few more minutes” (9 October 1930); “This afternoon, ‘L’Arlésienne’ at the Saint-Denis with A. A good film. Pretty. Lovely music. Then A. at our house for a few minutes. Piano. All in all, an excessively calm afternoon” (11 November 1930). Ghislaine soon meets Laurendeau’s friends, including the poet Saint-Denys Garneau (18 January 1931). She keeps poems by Alfred Lozeau in her diary, belongs to a sewing circle, and attends lectures with her father: “This evening, with Papa at Saint-Sulpice, a lecture by Robert Choquette, ‘Variations

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on Alfred Desrochers.’ Very good. His thoughts were deep, solid and well expressed” (14 April 1931). In November 1933, she goes to a ball at the Windsor Hotel with Laurendeau, and a small piece of lace, probably from her dress, is attached to the page. A few lines by Laurendeau, written two months later, give his own impressions of the evening: “I noticed four young girls as pretty as Ghislaine, but not prettier. She had a beautiful bearing […] with an appearance of reserve that made her look very young: both a little girl and a beautiful woman. – I’m not writing under the influence of my enthusiasm. It’s now January, and my memories are two months old” (14 January 1934). Religion is important in the life of the couple. On 26 April 1933, Ghislaine notes that they consecrated their engagement by attending Mass (“On Saturday January 7, our engagement. At 7.45 Mass at the Jesuit church. A. gave me my ring just before Communion, in the middle of Mass”), and adds that they celebrated André’s twenty-first birthday the same way (“Tuesday, 21 March. André is 21. We went to Communion at the Jesuit church”). With their friends from La Relève,22 they are enthusiastic about the religious renewal coming from France, attend a series of lectures given by philosopher Jacques Maritain in October, read Léon Bloy, and buy themselves a copy of “The Liturgical Year” on New Year’s Day 1935. Ghislaine is also very involved in Laurendeau’s nationalist activities, which intensify in 1932 with the founding of the group Jeune-Canada.23 Her diary portrays a life of shared passions and work, where she helps organize events and listens attentively to the ideas her fiancé is developing for his speeches: “Arrived late for the Abbé Groulx’s course, then we went to André’s place. He read me what he’s adding to his speech on ‘the sense of nation’ for the radio. We chatted, and worked a bit in the library. Had supper. Chatted (in the living room) and said some amazing things. I left at 8:30” (13 December 1933). A year later, she notes: “At the Monument National [a well-known theatre on Saint-Laurent Boulevard], ‘Who will save Quebec?’ – A full house. André [and the others] warmly applauded. Tonight we start selling ‘Our reasons for being proud.’ A good result” (3 December 1934). This nationalist commitment seems to increase the opposition of Ghislaine’s father to his daughter’s engagement, which is mentioned several times in the diary.24 Ghislaine speaks of his anger when he arrives home and finds the two alone without supervision (26 April 1933), and she mentions a visit of her father to the Abbé Groulx in 1934, to discuss the nationalist ideas of André and Ghislaine. A month before their marriage in 1935, she refers to a series of lectures with the provocative title “Is Nationalism a Sin?,” given by Henri Bourassa, political leader and publisher of Le Devoir, in which he attacks Groulx and the

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young nationalists in the name of religion: “We went tonight to Bourassa’s first lecture: ‘Is nationalism a sin?’. He demolished Abbé Groulx, the Jeune-Canada, and all nationalists with his cruel putdowns” (30 April 1935). It was a dramatic evening, which pleased Ghislaine’s father but disturbed Groulx and his young disciples, leading them to the decision that Laurendeau must reply to Bourassa after the next lecture. The diary also refers to an “amazing” lecture given by Father Georges-Henri Lévesque early in 1935, a lecture which, acccording to Yvan Lamonde, was a key date in the history of the movement for secularism in Quebec.25 The notebook ends on 16 June 1935, with the entry: “We have been married since Tuesday, 4 June, at nine o’clock,” followed by a description of the wedding day. A subsequent notebook, covering the period from 17 July 1935 to 12 June 1936, contains only nine pages of text, all devoted to the debate between the nationalist groups and the Church. Like most young girls’ diaries, that of Ghislaine Perrault ends with her marriage. •  •  • From the feeling of security offered to the young Marie-Louise Globensky by her family, milieu, and religious beliefs in the 1860s to the innocent and happy existence related in Ghislaine Perrault’s diary sixty years later, it might seem that little has changed in the situation of young girls of “good families.” And yet the diaries reveal a wide range of hopes, illusions, and anxieties, including guilt feelings aroused by the rigid religious instruction offered in the convents. After Globensky, one sees attempts at rebellion with varying degrees of success in the diaries of Alice Dessaulles, the Cartier sisters, and Michelle Le Normand, and a more and more confident expression of a female self that dares to speak out against familial, religious, and social pressures. All of the diaries express a need for love, whether that of a distant father (the Cartier daughters), a mother who fails to understand her daughter’s aspirations (Alice Dessaulles, Michelle Le Normand), or of a “Prince Charming” figure endowed with the qualities of both tender lover and husband offering an enviable social status. Significantly, many of these diaries end at the moment when a lover or husband appears, as if the role of confidant played by the diary were no longer necessary or – a more troubling possibility – as if the diarist understands that she no longer has a right to a space for private writing. This conflict between writing for oneself and acceptance of social norms is at the heart of the two diaries we will examine in the following chapter – those of Henriette Dessaulles and Josephine Marchand.

C h ap t er 6

Tw o N i n e te e n th - Ce n tu r y Re bel s: Henri et t e D e s s au lle s an d Jos é p hi ne M archand

The posthumously published diaries of Henriette Dessaulles (1874–81) (HD-I and HD-II) and Joséphine Marchand (1879–1900)1 (JM) offer a vivid portrait of two young women who dared to think for themselves in spite of the rigid conventions of bourgeois society in their era. The two diarists are almost the same age (Henriette Dessaulles was born in 1860 and Joséphine Marchand in 1861) and grew up in the same region south of Montreal (Henriette Dessaulles in Saint-Hyacinthe and Joséphine Marchand in Saint-Jean-d’Iberville). The dates of the two journals overlap, with both including the years from 1879 to 1881. Henriette Dessaulles began hers at the age of fourteen2 and ended it at twenty-one, a few months before her wedding; Joséphine Marchand kept her diary from the age of seventeen until she was thirty-eight, recording her long resistance to the prospect of marriage, her engagement, her wedding day and night, and the early years of her life as a wife, mother, and public figure. Of particular interest for our purposes is the fact that her diary originates in precisely the situation that leads Henriette Dessaulles to abandon hers: the inevitability of marriage and its implications regarding a woman’s right to her own life and thoughts. In each of the diaries, we follow the personal, intellectual, and spiritual evolution of the daughter of an important liberal family, with the resources necessary to allow her independence of mind and a strong sense of self. Henriette Dessaulles (1860–1946) is the daughter of Georges-Casimir Dessaulles, the descendant of a seigneurial family and a nephew of Louis-Joseph Papineau, who was successively mayor of Saint-Hyacinthe, a provincial member of parliament, and a member of the Canadian Senate. Joséphine Marchand (1861–1925) is the daughter of Félix-Gabriel Marchand, a lawyer and writer who was premier of Quebec from 1897 to 1900. Encouraged by her father, she began publishing

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her writings while still a teenager and, by the 1880s, was the only Quebec woman besides the novelist Laure Conan to write regularly for the public.3 During their adult life both Dessaulles and Marchand were journalists and women of letters who left their mark on Quebec culture, especially with regard to the situation of women. Under the pen name Fadette, Dessaulles wrote a weekly column in Le Devoir from 1911 to 1945, while Marchand founded the first women’s magazine in Quebec, Le Coin du feu, in 1892 and made an important contribution to women’s rights and education over the following decades. Despite these similarities, the two diaries are strikingly different in content, form, and even the quality of the writing. Dessaulles’s diary, which the French critic Philippe Lejeune described as “one of the most remarkable diaries ever written in the French language”4 and about which others have accurately noted that it “reads like a novel,”5 is an exquisite document, devoured by readers and written about by critics since its publication in 1971.6 There is now an excellent critical edition of this diary, prepared by Jean-Louis Major in 1989,7 as well as a paperback edition in two volumes which appeared in 1999 and 2001.8 Although there can be little doubt of the authenticity of the ideas and feelings expressed in the diary, Jean-Louis Major discovered imprecisions in its chronology which indicate that Dessaulles reworked the text, probably about twenty years after writing it, perhaps with the possibility of publication in mind.9 As the original manuscript of the diary has never been found, it is impossible to tell whether other corrections, revisions, cuts, and even stylistic improvements were made at the same time. Reading the diary, one is enchanted by the hypersensitive but rebellious character of the diarist and her lively evocations of the dramas of her daily life, as well as by the depth of her spiritual and intellectual questioning. Unlike Dessaulles’s diary, Marchand’s is more analytical than emotional, as was its author who describes herself on more than one occasion as “cold” and “reserved.” It is, however, a fascinating record of Marchand’s growing realization of the fact that marriage and maternity are inevitable for a woman of her milieu, and later of her discovery of the possibilities open to her as an independent-minded woman in a progressive marriage. Each of the diaries implicitly asks whether it is possible for a woman to have an autonomous existence and sense of self in a society centred on the traditional role of woman. Adolescence is presented in both as a stifling time, not only because of the repressive convent school atmosphere, but because each of the young women has an authoritarian mother or stepmother who seems dissatisfied with her own life and infuriated by her daughter’s desire for freedom: “I should have been a boy, or, if there

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was no way to make me a boy, dear despotic God, couldn’t you have made me a bird?” writes Henriette Dessaulles at sixteen (HD-I, 171). The years following the end of her convent studies are a time of emptiness and waiting, filled with frivolous activities which are closely supervised by her stepmother, at the end of which the young girl is expected to assume her role as wife and mother – a period of idleness well described by Henriette Dessaulles: “I try on dresses, I buy trinkets, I have visitors, and I’m always moving without ever getting anything worthwhile done. It’s the life of a puppet and I’ll soon be tired of it. I wish I could be studying Law with Maurice!! That would be a great success: I’d be the expert on legal matters and he could be the expert on love!” (HD-II, 191). At the heart of each of these diaries, then, are questions about love and marriage. If Henriette Dessaulles’s diary “reads like a novel,” it is at least in part because it recounts the story of a great love which triumphs over obstacles and finally fills the heart of the young diarist so completely that she willingly gives up the “companionship” of her diary. In the very first entries she speaks with interest of her neighbour Maurice Saint-Jacques, the older brother of her best friend Jos, and the diary follows the growth of her love for him, a relationship rendered all the more passionate by the fact that it is forbidden by Henriette’s stepmother. Joséphine Marchand’s diary also contains frequent mentions of the man she will eventually marry, the future Canadian senator Raoul Dandurand. But, unlike Dessaulles, she speaks constantly of her efforts to keep him at a distance, for she sees him as too devoted to her and lacking independence. Gradually, however, she evolves toward the realization that he represents “a good catch” and that marriage is the only acceptable vocation for a young woman of her class who has no desire to become a nun. Closely linked to the question of marriage is the fate of the diary (that is, of the right of a young woman to a space reserved for her own writing) as the wedding day approaches. Mellowed by the presence of love in her life, Henriette Dessaulles moves from rebellion to an apparent abdication of her autonomy, symbolized by the fact that she gives her fiancé the right to read her diary and, soon thereafter, realizes that she no longer feels the need or the desire to write in it. As for the more rational Joséphine Marchand, not only does she keep a diary after her marriage, but she never reveals its existence to her husband.10 After her marriage, the diary changes considerably, however, becoming a unique blend of the private and the public, a reflection not only on her preoccupations as a wife and mother, but also on her activities in the public sphere.

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Taken together, the two diaries provide a record of the systematic silencing of young girls as part of their preparation for the roles of wife, mother, and educator. In Dessaulles’s diary we follow the process from day-to-day, along with the diarist’s rebellion against it; in Marchand’s, written after she has completed her studies, it is presented more summarily. The contrast between Henriette Dessaulles’s diary and that of her sister, Alice, (analyzed in the preceding chapter) is striking. While Alice at eighteen seems passive and completely dominated by religious authorities,11 Henriette, at fourteen, is fiery, sure of herself, and at times scornful of her teachers and the other pupils in her class. “It’s hard to tell how much these strange little nuns are aware of,” she writes after one of the teachers asks indiscreet questions about her private life (HD-I, 59). A strong individualist, she bristles at the conformity imposed at the convent: “I’m not made to be part of a flock […] I detest the shepherd, the crook, the sheep, and the pasture!” (HD-II, 24). But her confident exterior hides an extreme sensitivity, as well as a sadness that goes back to the death of her mother when she was four years old. The rigid rules and cold attitude of her stepmother have increased her feeling of loneliness and her need for rebellion. Rejecting the hypocritical behaviour she observes daily at home and in the convent, she proclaims herself “thirsty for change, progress, and wider horizons,” ideas that, in her estimation, are at odds with the old-fashioned values of her stepmother: “She is a representative of the Old Regime: ‘Authority, whether it’s right or wrong,’ ‘You must bow your head!’. I am the New Regime, horrified by tyranny, even in its religious forms and most of all in its religious forms, because it deforms and disfigures religion, which should represent true freedom, as it is the creation of a perfect God” (HD-II, 134). The portraits of mothers in the two diaries suggest that it was not unusual for women to feel resentment about their role of queens of the hearth. Henriette’s stepmother, cold and distant with all her children, seems particularly hostile to Henriette, who suffers enormously at being so rejected: “I wish I had a mother who would take me in her arms, caress me, help me” (HD-I, 96); “I completely freeze up in this coldness, and if bad humour also comes into the mix, I feel shaken and nervous and lose all my courage!” (HD-II, 196). Henriette notices the contradiction between her stepmother’s behaviour in the family and the pious image she presents

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to others: “What a difficult temperament! I have trouble understanding this virtue which is so hard on others, this piety which takes her to church so often but doesn’t keep her from being violent and angry more than half the time!” (HD-II, 166). Joséphine Marchand’s mother is also extremely demanding, complains constantly, and is never satisfied: “Maman thinks she is the most unfortunate of women and, strangely, it is her children who are her greatest cross” (JM, 76). Like Henriette, Joséphine suffers from the atmosphere created by her mother in the family: “I’m feeling low today. The house isn’t as pleasant as it could be: Maman is nervous and irritated, and her constant recriminations and lamentations, which fill the house from morning to night, make me sad and tense as well. When I am upset and irritated like this, I am not always as kind as I could be, but it’s almost uncontrollable. This state of affairs exhausts me to the point of making me ill” (JM, 38). Later, when she herself is a mother as well as an activist for women’s rights, Marchand observes her mother’s sacrificial attitude from a greater distance. In 1897, by which time her father has become premier of Quebec, she notes that her mother still exhibits “her marvelous faculty of suffering from everything and not enjoying anything” (JM, 170), and that “the great victim in the sad life of our family wasn’t the one you might expect […] She who called herself ‘the sacrificed one’ for forty years ruined the joy of a whole generation of children” (JM, 197). Both diarists describe the education of girls as a system governed by rules and constraints, with no opportunity for questioning or selfexploration. Dessaulles criticizes the formalism of the religion taught in the convent, focussed on rules and rituals rather than values: “All this fuss about ceremonies and external gestures is empty, it rings in one’s ears like ancient bells but says nothing to the soul” (HD-II, 198). After a supervised walk of the boarders, in which the nun in charge punishes the little girls who step off the sidewalk by making them keep silent, she reflects: “It would be a lot more valuable if she kept them from lying! But that would be caring for the soul, and here it’s only outer appearances that matter! The ideal, here, is to walk in a stilted and starched way, with your eyes on the ground, your hands crossed over your stomach, and speaking very quietly as if you were in church. How ridiculous!” (HD-II, 25). At eighteen, at the beginning of Lent, she notes: “I got ashes on my forehead this morning. It’s a dirty little gesture that doesn’t inspire me! Little pagan!” (HD-II, 169). And at twenty, after hearing a sermon on devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, she recalls the “strange devotions” practised at the convent, in which the students had to insert thorns into a red velvet heart that was supposed to represent the heart of Jesus: “It would be beautiful to

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love Jesus with all one’s heart, but statues with bleeding hearts and hearts of velvet destroy this spiritual feeling!” (HD-II, 374). Marchand too comments on the inadequacies of an educational system “with vaporous content, which absorbs the intelligence of girls and renders them useless for anything until they are confronted by their duties as wives and mothers, duties they usually carry out […] mindlessly and without energy” (JM, 117). When her fiancé, Raoul Dandurand, teases her, saying that women’s only goal is to find a husband, she imagines the kind of education she would like to see for girls: a solid basis in the arts and sciences, no novels to read, as the latter awaken “the effervescence of their young imaginations,” and, most importantly, “great pride in their relationships with men” (JM, 116). While recognizing that most young women are destined for marriage and motherhood, she insists on the importance of offering them an education that will encourage their independence and even equip them for the single life: Marriage is, indeed, inevitable (and my aim would not be to distance them from it). But I would like to teach them to live in relative happiness without marriage. A busy and intelligent life would protect them from the worry and anxiety of waiting. In other words, their existence should have a noble goal, as men’s lives do: the golden butterfly of love should not come to them as it would to a useless flower that lacks perfume […] In my opinion, if you don’t happen to meet a man suitable for passing your life with, celibacy is not a bad choice, but rather a very acceptable status quo, perhaps lacking in excitement, but not in serenity and peaceful interests. (JM, 116–17) Religious retreats, times of prayer and reflection during which one examines one’s direction in life, appear in both diaries as occasions in which the self is extremely vulnerable, and young women are bombarded with sermons, readings, and meditations on sin, death, and damnation. Henriette Dessaulles resists their negative messages, criticizing the “stupidity” of the sermons and the poor quality of the French used in them, and affirming her right to think for herself: “He is decidedly ridiculous, this man who brings everything down to its lowest level! He only talks about the ugly things in us […] and with flamboyant descriptions of punishments” (HDI, 108). When the retreatants are told to write an analysis of each sermon, she wonders: “Analyze what? Ideas? There aren’t any! – The language of this gentleman is as poor as what I’m writing in this journal, in fact it has more mistakes. The poor man! If he knew how much he scandalizes me by

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speaking of God as if he were an ordinary man, and by presenting great truths like a dinner menu” (HD-I, 110). What matters to Henriette is her own relationship with God, independent of the mediations of the clergy: “Dear God, I want to make a good retreat. Give me your grace. Help me yourself, for You love me, and your priests don’t know how to speak to my heart!” (HD-I, 107). Radically different from that of Dessaulles, Joséphine Marchand’s experience of retreat illustrates the enormous pressure exerted on young women at a time when they are contemplating their future. In a “Retreat Diary,” written when she was twenty-three, she describes in detail the gradual shattering of her self-esteem over the three days of the retreat, resulting in a dramatic “conversion” that will have a lasting influence on her life. Marchand is particularly vulnerable as she begins the retreat, for she must soon decide whether or not to accept the marriage proposal of the man she still calls “Mr. Dandurand,” for whom she feels no passionate attachment. Over the course of the retreat, she gradually succumbs to the influence of the director (a nun), who tells her that her lack of passion for Dandurand is an indication that she has a religious vocation, and that she must “decide on her vocation” before the end of the retreat. The priest adds his opinion, saying that she is taking a great risk by contemplating marriage to a man “of little faith” (JM, 64). Influenced as well by readings about death and the necessity of sacrifice, Marchand arrives at a decision which puts her future in question and completely destroys her peace of mind: she will promise the Sacred Heart not to marry Dandurand unless she is “morally convinced that he will be a good and true Catholic” (JM, 67): I will always remember the 21st of March 1884 and its anguish. Never have I suffered so much morally […] After speaking with Father Caraux, I was shattered; I cried in the chapel and in my room, like a Madeleine, and said to myself: If only I could die tonight! […] Why did this decision cost me so dearly? Is it because I love him greatly? No […] It’s because my future, which seemed so certain, is now completely in doubt. Everything will have to be started over. Will I find someone else who will love me as he does, who will be as devoted as he is to my happiness? It’s probable that I’ll never get married! (JM, 67–8) Is it possible to maintain one’s autonomy under such pressures? At the beginning of a new year at the convent, Henriette Dessaulles exposes the impossibility of her situation with remarkable lucidity, seeing clearly that if she affirms her individuality she will be condemning herself to social

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rejection: “Poor little me, you will be ogled, supervised, looked after, babied! They will try to mold you, shape you, perfect you! They will take everything from you […] Alas! If they succeed you will no longer be yourself and if they fail you’ll be the most miserable of little girls, because you’ll be the most persecuted!” (HD-I, 200–1). Several critics have opined that Dessaulles abdicates her autonomy in favour of love, claiming that she “has no other choice, no other possibility than to accept the social norms [of her time].”12 While it is true that the happiness of knowing she is loved (as well as the impossibility of envisaging a future other than marriage) transform the young rebel and lead her to a submissiveness that may appear shocking to the modern reader, we will see that her apparent compliance does not exclude the presence of a lively critical intelligence. As well, by examining Marchand’s journal, we will see that, during the same years in which Dessaulles was giving herself over completely to love, the milieu offered other possibilities to women tenacious enough to grasp them. tALK ing t O “SOMeO ne W hO underS tAndS” : h enriette deSSAu LL eS ’S APPAre nt S urrender

As she turns eighteen, Henriette Dessaulles believes strongly in the possibility of living according to her own values: “I won’t be shaped by life […] I will make my own life, of everything that is in me,” she writes (HDII, 127). However, once her studies are over, she finds herself trapped in a life that lacks structure. Her stepmother is still forbidding her to see Maurice, and her days follow one another in unbearable monotony. “I don’t know what to write, I’m dying of boredom! I cried about it a while ago” (HD-II, 102), she writes in July 1877. In August, she takes part in decorating her family’s house in preparation for the visit of the apostolic delegate to Saint-Hyacinthe: “I make votive candles, I paste and cut things out; and I’ll go crazy if this keeps on much longer!” (HD-II, 103). A few months later, she takes part in a small play with her friend Jos, and is warned by the superior of her former convent school of the dangers of being an actress and losing her dignity (HD-II, 137). She reads boring French authors, approved by the Church, and English authors (Dickens, Tennyson, Longfellow, Carlyle) whose ideas make her more conscious than ever of the narrowness of her environment: “There have been female saints, heroes, and great sinners! For sure they were born far from this large village which feels to me like a box out of which square houses and stiff, varnished trees are pulled every morning […] And then, when the day is done, they fill up the box again and close it: everything sleeps and it all starts over the next morning!” (HD-II, 120). A visit from a pious friend

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planning to enter the convent inspires the following reflection: “It’s possible that in other countries [nuns] have more personality – Here, the first priority is to get rid of it – to crush anything in them that would differentiate them from others – they are all reduced to the most general and ordinary level, and then forbidden to look at anything beyond what’s right in front of them” (HD-II, 186). At times Henriette dreams of travelling, of seeing countries where there might be more room for a questioning spirit: “I’m not living – I’m floating in my dreams when I’m not stuck in the dust […] and this empty life is worthless. I was made for something better. If only I could travel, open my mind, come into contact with the truly beautiful. I wish I had huge wings to take me to beautiful countries where they grow things other than vegetables like us!” (HD-II, 194–5). But for her there will be no travel, just love and marriage: a sweet exchange of her rebellion for the happiness of being at last understood and loved. “When will I be able to speak to someone who understands the mystery of pain and human suffering which so revolts me?” (HD-I, 44), she had written when she was fifteen. The role of her diary – and its eventual replacement by another confidant, Maurice – can only be understood in the context of the solitude she has experienced as her lot since the death of her mother. Both the blank pages of the diary and, later, the attentive ear of her fiancé fulfil her need for “someone who understands.” During these long years of solitude, the diary is her confidant, friend, judge, and support, the sole repository of her most intimate secrets: “Jos is keeping a diary and she lets me read it – it’s full of amusing little stories of what she’s doing […] She reproaches me for not letting her read my diary and doesn’t understand why. I refuse, saying: ‘I write only for myself!’ I don’t explain to her that it’s my soul that holds the pen and that I can’t possibly let her read my soul” (HD-I, 50–1). Henriette fiercely protects the space of her intimacy, even against Maurice, to whom, as she reveals in the opening pages of the diary, she refused to give her portrait when she was fourteen: “I said no; he insisted […] I would really have liked to please him, but give him my portrait! No, thanks. I’ll keep such things for myself ” (HD-I, 17). When she is sixteen and Maurice asks her if she loves him “more than anything,” she resists, imagining a more egalitarian relationship with him: “Yes, I love him a lot, but he said more than anything, and I don’t love him more than anything! I try to think of him as little as possible. It distracts me to think of him and keeps me from concentrating on my studies, and I want to learn and know things, and some day be educated enough for him to enjoy my company as if I were a boy! I should have been a boy, I’m no good at being a girl!” (HD-I, 155–6).

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By allowing Maurice to read her diary, Henriette is giving up her autonomy, all the more so because the diary reveals the intensity of her love for him. In their day-to-day relationship she is reserved, continuing to address him as “vous” even though he has been using the more familiar “tu” with her for a long time, and saying little when he declares his love for her. She refuses his first request to read her diary, sensing the constraints that such a sharing will have on her freedom to express herself: “He asked about my journal, which he’d be curious to see! That’s all! […] You’ll never see this mirror of my whole self, though! Never? That’s a big word […] maybe some day, but what will I think about […] if I no longer dare to write down my dreams?” (HD-II, 131–2). When he asks again, insisting that he wants to understand her and know her depths, she begins to envisage the possibility of giving in to his request: “I’m sometimes tempted to put my diary in his hands, and yet I hesitate and I’m afraid of such a step. I know, though, that when I decide to do it, reason won’t have anything to do with it. One fine day, he’ll really want it and, as always, I’ll give in to what he wants […] There is no use pretending to myself. He is my will, my reason, my heart, my all […] and it’s only what’s left of my pride that is making me put off the moment when he will know it” (HD-II, 245). The intensity of the emotion she feels when she does finally give in to his request shows her deep attachment to this exceptional diary, and also the immensity of her love for Maurice: “[I am] still troubled by this promise I’ve made. I feel a bit as if he were going to open my heart and see what’s inside, and it’s almost a physical pain I feel. And yet I’m happy to think that after this he will never be able to doubt my love for him” (HD-II, 259). From the moment when she shows him her diary, Henriette’s love for Maurice begins to take the place of her autonomy and of her desire to write: “I’m letting myself be absorbed by my love. It is my constant preoccupation and my only goal. The more I move forward, the less I belong to myself ” (HD-II, 262). Now she sees the limitations of her relationship with her silent notebooks: “I no longer need to write for myself, it’s so much better to confide in him and chat with him” (HD-II, 375); “If at least you could give me advice, my poor confidant! You’re so useless with your big white eyes! A confidant is supposed to speak, to answer, to help a person! […] I want a new one, do you hear me?” (HD-II, 325). The diary now appears to her as “a somewhat cumbersome friend I still love, but who is no more use to me: it’s to Maurice that I write pages and pages to keep him up-to-date on my pleasures” (HD-II, 367). Far from regretting this progressive detachment from her diary, she sees it as an entry into maturity: “A new phase of the Self! I no longer have the slightest desire to write!” (HD-II, 363).

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This new “phase of the Self,” confirmed by the official engagement of the couple, is the stage of learning to be “a Madame… his wife!” (HD-II, 375). While formerly Henriette had hated domestic tasks, now she does them joyfully, thinking about how she will soon be in a house of her own (HD-II, 372). She now enjoys the social events she used to scorn: “I’m too honest to claim that I’m bored by life in society […] I’m not bored at balls, receptions, or at the parties that take place one after the other. I am surrounded, flattered, admired and, I’m afraid, loved!” (HD-II, 367). Despite the proud claim early on in her diary that she didn’t have “the heart of a slave” (HD-I, 141), she now submits with pleasure to the least desires of her fiancé: “I have discovered that I love doing what he wants” (HD-II, 363). Her new nickname for Maurice is “Mr. Wisdom” and she describes herself more and more often as “a little girl”: “Happy peoples have no history, and little girls don’t write theirs! […] Maurice receives clients and pleads their cases […] I live in a little paradise where there’s no sign of a serpent” (HDII, 362). Like other young women of her time, she accepts the fact that her future husband now exercises control over what she reads13 (HD-II, 254– 5), seeing that control as a sign of his care for her: “And that’s how little girls are treated when their friend is a Wise Person! […] I’m touched by the delicacy, protectiveness, and tenderness with which he envelops the confident and yet somewhat fearful little soul that is me” (HD-II, 355). The diary ends a few weeks before Henriette’s wedding, closing with the image of a beatific future from which any attempt at female rebellion would be banished: “An earthly paradise [but] with no forbidden apple, no lying demon, and no disobedient and curious Eve!” (HD-II, 392). Critics who have seen only capitulation in these final pages of the diary have, however, ignored several passages which indicate that the critical faculties of the young diarist remain intact. She remains sceptical about several of the practices of her religion, affirming, at the height of her happiness, that she has the feeling of inhabiting “an earthly heaven from which I fear God is too absent” (HD-II, 376). She continues to act in plays in spite of the opposition of her stepmother and the nuns, and proclaims her intention to keep waltzing even after it has been forbidden by the Church: “If it weren’t for the bother of being touched by any old person, which does upset me, I would waltz even more often than I do now, in spite of all the ecclesiastical interdictions which don’t bother my conscience at all! […] I waltz the way I eat chocolates, and even if the Pope came to tell me I’m doing wrong, he wouldn’t convince me!” (HDII, 351–2). She observes other marriages critically, noting that very few couples seem as happy as she and Maurice are, and that too many husbands ignore the good qualities of their wives: “Her husband treats her

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a little […] cavalierly. If I were in his place, I would adore that woman. I bet he doesn’t know her and doesn’t understand her […] He belongs to the race of men who expect homage and are blind to everything around them! There are tons of men like that!” (HD-II, 349). When a judge who is a neighbour and friend of the family opines that “a woman who can read, write, and count a bit knows enough to be a good homemaker and perfect wife,” she replies, “perfect for a stupid husband!” (HD-II, 200). Finally, recognizing that there are moments when Maurice does not understand her and that she finds some of his ideas uninteresting, she celebrates the fact that there is a distance between them: “Each one of us has his own little hat, and under the hat his own little ideas! I like that, because it means that I can keep for myself a little private corner where I can put my things, my precious little things!” (HD-II, 375). As for the realities awaiting her after marriage, she hopes for time to “be spoiled by Maurice before having to raise crabby little children” (HD-II, 296), but admits her total ignorance of matters concerning sex, pregnancy, and contraception: “Jos doesn’t know any more than I do, but I hope […] that people only have children if they want them” (HD-II, 380). Eight weeks before her wedding, these questions are still unasked and unanswered: “Now a new life is starting, a life partly hidden by a mysterious veil that no one is willing to lift for me […] How strange! Strange to enter an unknown territory that everyone else seems to know but no one speaks of. I don’t even ask Jos about it, she is probably as ignorant as I am!” (HD-II, 391). bACKing int O MArri Age : JOSÉPhi ne MArCh A nd

One of the principal functions of Joséphine Marchand’s diary is to provide her with a space to reflect on marriage, an institution which terrifies her, but which she sees as inevitable. In one of the first entries, she mentions that she has received a marriage proposal from an old, single anglophone man, and that her response to him was “as brief as it was negative” (JM, 16). However, influenced by the marriage preparations of her sister Eugénie, she asks herself whether “all these preparations aren’t making me want to play a principal role myself ” (JM, 18). After the first part of the diary, in which the entries are infrequent (only eight between July 1879 and January 1880), she abandons it for almost two and a half years (from 30 January 1880 until 27 July 1882), in order to concentrate on her “literary work” (JM, 21), returning to it only when, as she notes, “I seem to be getting involved with someone, a person who didn’t attract me at all at first” (JM, 22). This person, Raoul Dandurand, and Joséphine’s ambivalent feelings about him

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and about marriage in general will be the subject of almost all the diary entries up to the day of their wedding on 12 January 1886. After meeting Dandurand, who immediately declares his immense admiration for her,14 Joséphine describes herself as “less frightened than I was” by the idea of marriage (JM, 23), but until the day before her wedding she will resist the coming transformation of her life. Fiercely independent, she has trouble imagining herself in the role of wife and mother: “Will my cold, even selfish, nature, be capable of the devotion required by that state?” (JM, 45). Several times, she notes that the happiness of young lovers does not survive the monotony of married life: “My brief reconciliation with marriage is over. I feel more repugnance than ever for this holy state […] The change in one’s life has its attractions at first; but, once you get used to it, you’re less happy than you were before” (JM, 25–6); “It seems to me that it’s the husband who becomes indifferent and bored. All the things one says, the craziness, the futilities, the unimportant things, are charming when one is in love, but afterwards, you find yourselves with nothing to say to each other. Conversation becomes banal and indifferent, as it is between two people who see each other constantly” (JM, 52). After spending several days visiting the home of the future premier Honoré Mercier15 and his wife in Montreal, she notes: “The little household exchanges between our hosts proved to me once again that one must reflect seriously before committing oneself irrevocably. There is a great distance in age between them, and he is used to treating her like a child” (JM, 29). On 31 December 1882, thinking about the coming year, she writes: “Goodbye 1882! What will your sister bring to me? … Not marriage, I hope! […] Getting married is madness” (JM, 33). Afraid that the “intolerable situation” in her own family is pushing her towards marriage (JM, 38), she tells herself: “[I need] two years all to myself [before] closing my eyes and throwing myself into the abyss. I would have liked not to get married until I was twenty-five” (JM, 41). When Dandurand proposes to her in September 1884 she accepts, reminding him, however, that the “fateful event” is still a long way away and that she has no intention of getting married before she is twenty-four (JM, 83). Like Henriette Dessaulles, Joséphine sees a contradiction between keeping a diary and the openness to another person required by engagement and marriage. Unlike Dessaulles, however, she finds a way to protect the space of her private writing, although a somewhat questionable one – lying to her fiancé. As her relationship with Dandurand becomes more intense, she realizes that the prospect of him reading her diary is already leading her to censor herself: “The cause of this constraint [in my writing] is perhaps the idea that some day I will have to allow another person

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to read these indiscreet meanderings. No matter! Let us be honest above all” (JM, 55). Little by little, she begins to notice that the letters she writes to her fiancé are taking up the time she used to devote to writing in her diary: “This is a simple polite visit to my Journal,” she writes in June 1885, after six weeks in which she has recorded nothing. “I don’t want to neglect it completely and, if truth be told, I have little of interest to tell it. My outpourings have deserted it and taken a new direction” (JM, 103). When the engagement becomes official, she begins a new notebook with a binding of pink ribbon to signify happiness, in which she admits to having lied to her fiancé by telling him she has burned the previous notebook: “His curiosity and interest worried me. I was afraid he would be upset by all the prevarications and gloominess it contains” (JM, 102). Three weeks before their wedding, she promises him “not to destroy this last volume of my Journal, as he believes I have done with the others; on condition that he must never insist on seeing it, that he must wait until I show it to him on my own initiative” (JM, 128). Joséphine opens her new notebook by reflecting on the possibility that these “last thoughts of a young girl, written before her wedding” (JM, 102) may one day find a reader. The revelations that follow, about the terror and confusion she feels regarding the physical realities that await her after marriage, are a rare and perhaps unique record of what must have been a common experience. Ill-prepared by their Catholic education to understand the realities of the body and sexuality, young women must have been terrified by comments like those of two married women who tell Joséphine that “conjugal life is a long martyrdom for Christian women, who sacrifice themselves completely […] It’s good to get rid of one’s illusions before getting married, because otherwise the awakening is too brutal” (JM, 123). Idealistic and romantic, Joséphine generally succeeds in conquering her fears during the time of her engagement; for example, she responds to a tactful remark by her fiancé about the “possible suffering” associated with childbirth by telling herself that the only thing that worries her is the intrusion of children into the life of the couple: “I’m not really interested in the material aspects of maternity […] for there’s nothing poetic or great about them […] On the contrary, they are trivial and disillusioning. The sad part is the little intruders who gradually change the feelings of your best friend or even steal him from you. Little by little, the wife gives up her status as a spoiled child, her privileged place, her empire, to the little despots who have arrived in her life” (JM, 104–5). However, the “material aspects of maternity” become inescapable during the pregnancy and childbirth of her sister Eugénie, which bring to the surface Joséphine’s repressed feelings of disgust for the body and

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dismay about women’s destiny. During a conversation with her fiancé about “poetry and love,” she notices her pregnant sister and is overwhelmed by her realization of love’s “brutal, inevitable, revolting result.” “Assuredly [she writes], the human race is guilty for so disfiguring a beautiful feeling. In a better world, we would be able to love without such humiliations” (JM, 109). When her sister gives birth on 15 November 1885, Joséphine is plunged into a crisis that lasts several weeks, from which she will only emerge thanks to Dandurand’s tenderness and understanding. On 16 November, the day after the birth, she writes: “I think I aged by several days yesterday, and lost many of my illusions,” ending her observations on the birth with the following sentence: “Riel was hanged today.”16 Her sister’s moans, her mother’s suffering, and the serene confidence of her brother-in-law, who seems oblivious to his wife’s pain, upset her to the point that “[her] whole being [is] trembling with disgust and terror” and she asks herself: “What has woman done to deserve all this?” (JM, 121). Having decided that the act of giving birth is “the banal, tiresome, and disappointing result of love,” she begins to wish that there could be an expression of her love for Dandurand other than marriage: “I wish he didn’t want to marry me. I wish he was my brother […] Oh la! la! I hope I’ll have time to get over these frightful impressions before my wedding!” (JM, 122). Men now appear to her as “the smiling executioners of women” (JM, 123) and women as their blind, passive victims: “What a disappointment life is! Woman is the perennial victim!” (JM, 121). She begins to sense that her fiancé is treating her in a condescending manner: “The time of appreciating my intelligence is over now; he loves me like a wife, with the kind of gentle, distracted interest one gives to children” (JM, 124). Marchand’s crisis is clearly a product of the Victorian era, and, more particularly, of a Jansenist education which has instilled in her a disgust for the body, particularly the female body. “I must resign myself, close my eyes, live as much as possible in the realm of the mind and not of matter, it’s the only way to avoid dying of disgust” (JM, 23), she writes less than two months before her wedding. “If I hadn’t resolved to conquer all my repugnance it would be a crime for me to get married. Only God can console us for the disappointing reality of life” (JM, 127). Despite her fears and hesitations, the entry for 11 January 1886 reveals a confident and serene Joséphine, more realistic than she had been before her crisis, but full of love on the day before her wedding. She bids farewell to this final volume of her youthful diary in a tone of camaraderie similar to the one used so often by Henriette Dessaulles in addressing her diary: “Goodbye, dear Journal. It’s not easy to leave you. Your little pink ribbon was prophetic! When you see me again, I won’t be me and you won’t be

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you. The last time I’m writing in you is by the window, in the little back bedroom, next to the tomb with a padlock on it which is waiting for you and in which I’m going to imprison you. Goodbye! Say: ‘Goodbye, mademoiselle.’ It’s the last time for us” (JM, 134). •  •  • The diaries of Henriette Dessaulles and Joséphine Marchand not only offer a revealing look at the tension between autonomy and love, individuality and social conformity in the French-Canadian bourgeoisie of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, they also illustrate the crucial role played by the private diary in maintaining a young woman’s sense of self. One of the effects of reading private writings, with their close link to the author’s life, is that on reaching the end of the text the reader inevitably wonders, “What happened next?” The lives of Dessaulles and Marchand in the years following their marriages indicate that each of them remained faithful to her choice: Dessaulles by devoting herself totally to a life – tragically shortened – of wife and mother, and Marchand by adopting a way of life that allowed her to reconcile career and marriage. At the age of thirty-seven, Henriette Dessaulles found herself a widow and mother of five children, suffering from serious health problems. A little over a year earlier, in March 1896, following the birth of a seventh child who died five months later, an attack of peritonitis left her paralyzed for almost two years. Shortly after the attack, in March 1897, her husband became the Liberal candidate for Saint-Hyacinthe for the upcoming provincial election, but had to withdraw a month later, after an attack of typhoid fever. On 4 May 1897, he died of pneumonia. Devastated, Henriette returned with her three youngest children to live with her parents, and was further shaken the following year by the death from pleurisy of her sister-in-law Joséphine Saint-Jacques (the “Jos” of her diary). According to Jean-Louis Major, the rewriting of her diary began during this period of mourning and led to “a sort of rebirth”: “At the gates of death, having lost the desire to live,” as she confided to a friend in 1898, “she found in her diary the thirst, desire and passion for life which she had lost, as well as a proof of the persistence of love.”17 Dessaulles’s diary contains four premonitions of this premature end of her idyll, most notably, a dream in March 1878 from which she has difficulty freeing herself on awakening: “I saw Maurice dead and laid out in a very long living room – not theirs. I was there, alone with him. He seemed blonder and had a long mustache, it was him, but he was different, still young but more handsome and older. In my dream, I kissed him and I

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can still feel the impression his cold forehead made on my lips […] There were flowers everywhere, on the floor, on the tables, and their perfume is still there in my heart, it’s atrocious! Dear God, please don’t separate us in that way, I couldn’t bear to see him die” (HD-II, 177). A year later, she confides the following thought to her journal: “I can only see one enemy, death, which separates people so pitilessly, and, thinking about it, I tremble with terror. Dear God, leave me Maurice, leave me for him, that is all I ask of you!” (HD-II, 247–8). Maurice too foresees death, on two occasions. When Henriette tries to console him as he is leaving for college – “We have a whole life to be together” – he replies dreamily: “A whole life! […] I don’t know how many years that represents,” and the two lovers remain silent, troubled by the spectre of death (HD-II, 247–8). Another time, his face pale, he interrupts Henriette while she is playing the “Miserere” from Il Trovatore on the piano, whispering: “I beg you, Henriette, don’t play that any more in front of me […] The death knell is dreadful!” (HD-II, 247–8). A sceptical reader might wonder whether these memories were added to the text or amplified during the process of revision; whether or not this is the case, they closely correspond to the sad fate of the couple. A few excerpts from the revised text of the diary were published in Le Journal de Françoise in 1908, and during the same period Dessaulles (under the pseudonym Jean Deshaies) contributed a column on graphology to the same publication, and later to La Patrie. In 1911, her famous weekly column, “Les Lettres de Fadette,” began in Le Devoir, where it continued to run until a few months before her death in 1946. As for Joséphine Marchand, she returned to her diary two weeks after her wedding (describing, in an entry of remarkable honesty and discretion, the mutual embarrassment of two young newlyweds on their wedding night, and the fact that the physical consummation of their union did not take place until eight days later), and kept it up intermittently until shortly after the death of her father, then premier of Quebec, in 1900. The interruptions to the diary are at times lengthy (Joséphine abandons it for more than a year after the birth of her daughter Gabrielle in December 1886, and for more than five years in the 1890s, a period in which she is actively involved in a large number of political, professional, and charitable activities), but each time she returns to it she stresses its importance in her life. In 1897, perhaps thinking of the four years of hard work spent as founder and editor of Quebec’s first women’s magazine, Le Coin du feu (1892–96), she expresses her regrets at having spent so much time on journalism, at the expense of her private diary: “From a selfish point of view, I was very wrong to abandon my little private writings in order to do public journalism: an arid task which enslaved me to a

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thankless labour, distracted me from my reading and my favourite studies, and also – while I was doing my best to instruct others – kept me from educating myself ” (JM, 162). During these years in which Marchand, her husband, and her father are all active and influential in the public sphere, the form of the diary reproduces the back and forth relationship between the inner and outer worlds which characterizes the author’s life. Reflections on the behaviour and education of her daughter or on family life alternate with accounts of public events like the accession of her husband (then thirty-seven years old) to the Senate, in 1898, partly thanks to his wife’s prestige and influence.18 “We have the reputation of being ambitious, and it’s accurate,” she writes. “As for playing a role in the world, I want an important one or none at all” (JM, 192). She realizes that her diary, besides being a document that will interest her daughter some day, will be of interest to future readers in the same way as the memoirs of politicians: “I want to lay out my memories so I’ll feel free afterwards to philosophize or make pronouncements on daily events. In the last few years I’ve known many people who will be talked about in the history of our country. I’ve seen many events quorum pars parva fui [in which I played a small role]” (JM, 162–3). The consciousness of the historical value of what she is writing can be felt even in the style of the diary, which now consists of long entries summarizing the activities in which she has taken part and explaining their political significance. Marchand knows that her lectures and her involvement in the new National Council of Canadian Women, founded by Lady Aberdeen, the wife of the governor general, have made her a model for the women of her generation: “My entry into active life proved that, in our century, there are women of value in the public sphere” (JM, 163). She notes the opposition of Quebec’s clergy to the women’s movement and denounces the huge sums of money spent by the Church on building huge cathedrals, accompanied by presbyteries as grand as castles, in small country parishes, when such money should be spent on schools and on helping the poor (JM, 164). Reflections of this nature are interspersed with more personal revelations on subjects such as the thankless role of the mother, who is responsible for her children’s discipline while her husband is perceived by them as being more indulgent (JM, 184), the hard work involved in sewing summer dresses for her daughter during the years when she is actively involved in the public sphere (JM, 219), or the pleasure of being alone at home when her daughter has gone skating with her friends: “I have my books, a pen, and some paper. With that – and the privilege of being able to use them! – I would be happy even in prison” (JM, 186). In 1898, Marchand founded l’Œuvre des livres gratuits (The Free Books Project),

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an organization which offered books to teachers with no access to libraries and to those who were too poor to buy them. The following year, she was honoured by the French government with the Palmes académiques, in recognition of her defense of French culture in America. In 1900, as the representative of Canada, she chaired the International Conference of Women in Paris. Overall, this woman who accused herself in her youth of being cold and distant displayed remarkable passion in her public life, although her attitude was often condescending, whether on the subject of the French language (she is scandalized by the poor French spoken at her daughter’s convent, and by the French spoken in Parliament), culture (“We cannot forever fail to recognize the intellectual interests of our anemic race,” JM, 165), or women, of whom she writes the following: “In a country lacking in art, culture, and intellectual atmosphere, the French-Canadian woman leads the most boring life imaginable. The only thing that raises her above the material reality of her life as a homemaker or society woman is her religion […] They don’t even bring up their own children, which would force them to exercise their ability to think. The convents and colleges look after that” (JM, 165). The only charitable activities permitted to women (fundraising for religious communities, looking after sacristies and altars, and sewing for the poor) keep them in “a passive role that discourages all independent effort or personal ideas” (JM, 165). Marchand’s diary is witness to the fact that it was towards this goal – to “elevate” women, and the whole population, towards independence of thought and personal autonomy – that she devoted her life. Like Henriette Dessaulles, she offers a singular example of intellectual and personal independence in an era in which such qualities were far from the norm for women.

C h ap t e r 7

D i a r i e s of “ Qu e e ns of t he Hear t h”

In spite of the difficulty of reconciling private writing with marriage revealed by the diaries of Henriette Dessaulles and Joséphine Marchand, several married women did manage to keep diaries. In the mid-nineteenth century, some began to assume the role of unofficial historians, using chronicle-type diaries in which they noted the births, illnesses, anniversaries, birthdays, and deaths of their family members, as well as the social and religious activities of their communities. If the authors of these texts “come to life” for the reader, it is not by revealing their intimate secrets, but by evoking with precision and even eloquence the details of their daily lives. In the first part of this chapter we will look at two of these chronicle diaries, kept by Angélique Hay Des Rivières between 1843 and 1872,1 and by Marie-Louise Globensky (Lady Lacoste), from 1888 until her death in 1919.2 In the twentieth century, changes in women’s lives opened the way for a new type of married woman’s diary, much more revealing of the author’s private life. The diary kept from 1922 to 1964 by the writer Michelle Le Normand,3 wife of the novelist Léo-Paul Desrosiers, is an excellent example of this type of diary. At once a workshop for perfecting her writing, an outlet for expressing the frustrations of her marriage and career, and an irreplaceable confidant, it illustrates how diary writing could be a literal “life saver” for married women. In the third part of the chapter, we will examine this diary in detail, paying particular attention to the author’s attempts to satisfy the sometimes irreconcilable demands of her roles as wife, mother, and professional writer.

Writing for Oneself • 166 A Ch rOni CLe di A ry: A ngÉL i Que h Ay deS ri viÈ reS (1843–18 7 2 )

On 15 July 1872 (a Monday), in the final notebook of her journal, Angélique Hay Des Rivières writes: “Yesterday, a fine day. I played the organ in order to please the curé – a young organist! – sixty-seven years of age!” Thanks to this information and other facts noted in her diary or mentioned in the chronicles of the Eastern Townships,4 we know that Angélique Hay was born in 1805 and that she married Henri Des Rivières, one of the principal beneficiaries of the will of the merchant James McGill, in the 1830s. In McGill’s will, several large tracts of land in the canton of Stanbridge, near the American border, were left to Henri Des Rivières and his brother Francis. The Hay-Des Rivières couple settled there and actively participated in the development of the region, whose economy was largely based on wood. In 1837, Henri Des Rivières joined the Patriotes and took part in the Rebellion, but escaped arrest; later he pursued a brief political career, first as prefect of Missisquoi county and later, for a few months in 1841, as member of the Legislative Assembly for Verchères. Their son Willie was born in 1840, and their daughter Caroline in 1842. In 1843, at the age of thirty-eight, Mme Des Rivières began the diary in which she would write almost every day until 1872, except for an interruption of ten months in 1855 and a three-year interruption after the death of her husband in November 1865. The fact that the diary was a family enterprise and not just an individual occupation is made clear on three different occasions when Mme Des Rivières is absent or ill, and is replaced by her daughter Caro. On 3 April 1858, Caro writes: “Maman is very ill.” She will be the diarist for almost four months, except for an interruption of three days (7–9 July), during which she travels to Montreal and is replaced by her brother Willie. Similarly, on 14 June 1864, after announcing that she and her husband are leaving for Montreal the next day, Mme Des Rivières writes: “Dear Caro – will write in my absence,” and her daughter will do so from 15 to 23 June. A month later, Caro takes up the pen again for four days, announcing: “Maman ill with an attack of inflammation” (25 July 1864). When Mme Des Rivières returns to her journal three years after the death of her husband, she confesses that she has lost the taste for writing, but is doing so in order to please her son: “I again this year – continue to keep a daily Journal at the request of my dear Willie who wishes to have it, to refer to – as the daily occurrences, of what was done – will be mentioned – also who came, and went away – if I consent to take up this Journal it is entirely to

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be useful, to dear Willie – as, I have no more, the same interest or desire – to follow it up” (1 January 1869). Only three of the ten notebooks (II, III, and IV) are written in French. The fact that the diarist writes regularly in English starting in November 1853 can perhaps be explained by the increase in the anglophone population of the region (already significant, thanks to the presence of United Empire Loyalists), due to Irish immigration in the 1840s and 1850s. A certain amount of interaction between the two language groups takes place because they share a common parish; Mme Des Rivières mentions, for example, that, during a novena, the priest preaches to the Irish in the vestibule after giving his sermon in French in the church. The sentences and expressions in the English-language volumes often have a French structure and even contain French words at times: “It is not to be told, this intense cold we have had today – such a piercing wind ! – quite a poudrée!” (6 January 1857); or, discussing a new priest: “He is so graphic, his voice good, he is entraînant” (27 February 1864). The punctuation is irregular, with a great number of dashes, commas, capital letters, and underlined words. The size of the diary is also worth noting: the first eight notebooks are fairly large (eight by ten inches), with lined pages and enough space to allow the writer to say whatever she likes. If the entries in the diary become more laconic after 1869, it is not only because the diarist has lost interest in writing, but also because she is now using a smaller notebook (six by eight inches) with the dates already printed on the page, and covering three days per page. The diary provides a portrait of family and social life in the canton of Stanbridge in the years following the Act of Union of the two Canadas in 1841. What we know of the Des Rivières family suggests that they were Catholic moderates with links not only to the anglophone bourgeoisie of Montreal but also to Papineau and his Parti Patriote.5 The rare mentions of political events in the diary indicate that, to the extent that she was interested in politics at all, Mme Des Rivières shared the views of her husband. On 29 April 1849, four days after the burning of Montreal’s parliament buildings, carried out by anglophone Tories infuriated by the passage of a law granting indemnity to the Patriotes, she notes that one of the members who supported the bill, the Honorable Mr. Moore, is angry because he was burned in effigy by the Tories. And on 21 August, after a summer of fires and violence in Montreal, she complains about “the Montreal vandals and their depredations”: “It’s terrible, they’re angry at poor Mr. Lafontaine – but why let them have so much of their own way – it’s the ruin of the city of Montreal.” In the background of the diary’s notations,

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one can make out a picture of the economic and technological progress of the region of Stanbridge. In 1843, Mme Des Rivières mentions her husband’s trips to Montreal on horseback, changing horses at Saint-Jeansur-Richelieu. In 1865, she notes: “The Montreal and Vermont junction railroad opened today to the Public! A new Era for us! We shall now leave Des Rivières Station and be landed at Bonaventure Station in Montreal, without changing cars – how delightful! what a happy change for us, what an improvement! for we old people – how much Henri and I will find it convenient when we go to town!” (16 January 1865). In the 1840s, she refers to the construction of a dam, a sawmill, and a carding mill, as well as to the danger of flooding during spring thaw: “This afternoon the ice broke up in bits […] the height of the water is beyond description” (1 April 1845). In 1872, she observes that this danger no longer exists: “The ice broke up this morning, and went down the river, without causing the least damage – water not as high as usual – we have been protected in a most particular manner – at one time, we had, all season, to fear an inondation [sic.] – the Almighty has been merciful to us –” (15 April 1872). The details of the life of a wife and mother of comfortable means, living a fairly isolated life in the country, are numerous and precise. Walks (often with her daughter) are frequent during the day; the evenings are devoted to card games, visits, and writing letters. Often Mme Des Rivières writes in her diary when the children are in bed, and she always begins by noting the day’s weather: “A hoary frost, this morning – bright and pleasant, all day –” (30 April 1857); “rain, rain, more rain – when will it cease?” (2 May 1857); “I went to Mass – this morning – I was wrapped up – like in January” (21 March 1864). The close correlation between religious faith and the caprices of nature are a constant theme: “Rain – rain again – what is going to become of us? it pours rain all day – roads fearful, awful […] the gardens are saturated so wet – it is impossible to sow […] – it cannot be helped – it is the Almighty’s Will – we must bow down submissively, to his divine will –” (12 May 1864). Life follows the rhythm of the seasons. At the beginning of May 1844, she notes that they have removed the storm windows; in June 1844 that, thanks to their greenhouse, they have “delicious little potatoes” for dinner; in March 1845, that workmen have finished filling the ice shed; and, in June 1849, that “the gardener gave us little green peas for dinner today” (26 June 1849). In the spring, there is the great annual house cleaning: “I have been busy, all day, making la revue annuelle of trunks and cupboards in the garret – I have yet, two days work before having quite finished the review” (21 April 1857); “I have been busy, putting away – out of harm’s way, by the Moths, all that they could injure – so much done” (29 March 1864). In the fall there are fruits

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to be preserved for the winter: “made 12 lbs apple jelly – it’s very fine” (24 November 1869). Mme Des Rivières’s garden is the object of constant attention, nourishing her family, pleasing her by its beauty, and reminding her in a concrete way of the passage of time and the change of seasons. In the spring, the greenhouses already provide a multitude of fruits and vegetables: “I went to see the hot beds this afternoon – melons, cabbages, cucumbers, tomatoes, a few potato plants, lettuce and radishes, carrots, cauliflowers – and a glorious sunset – this morning it was delightful to hear the Robin warbling so prettily as well as the Nightingale” (28 March 1864). With August comes the plenitude of harvest season: “The garden is looking beautiful – a quantity of melons – it seems to me – the Forest is looking more and more beautiful […] I believe some intend to commence harvesting next week” (20 August 1858). In September, winter’s arrival is already on the horizon: “A cold bright morning – Henri always on the go either riding or driving – I miss my Caro – the garden is looking already triste, the dahlias withered and gone – the garden walks are covered with dead leaves – autumn has set in very early – we make fire in the stoves, even in our bed-room – how very early in the season to commence, all this kind of work” (22 September 1864). Religious practices are omnipresent in Mme Des Rivières’s life. She attends Mass frequently, as well as High Mass, vespers, and the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament on Sundays (2 March 1845), often makes novenas, and celebrates religious feast days. The parish is growing: in 1845, she notes that fifty children made their First Communion, and in 1849 that 120 persons received the sacrament of Confirmation (2 July 1849). Very active in parish life, the Des Rivières often receive visits from important priests and bishops, including Msgr Édouard-Charles Fabre, who will succeed Ignace Bourget as bishop of Montreal (30 June 1849). On 4 August 1849, speaking of the visit of two priests, she writes: “I never enjoyed myself better, in the aimable (sic) society of these gentlemen.” Among her spiritual readings are the classic work The Imitation of Christ, given to her by her daughter (1 August 1849), and The Spiritual Combat (30 January 1850). Her faith sustains her during times of illness and offers consolation in periods of suffering or mourning. After describing the terrible pain experienced by her husband during one of his frequent attacks of gout, she writes: “Sad, how sad! God! grant him, patience and resignation, to bear, with so much pain” (21 April 1857). In 1864, during a long period in which both her husband and her daughter are ill, she prays that her own health will be preserved so that she can continue to care for her sick ones: “Caro walked out for a few minutes – returned fatigued – I was not well today – cramps in my chest – God, spare me from being ill, as I have enough

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to do, to attend my sick – Henri’s gout is on his mind” (3 March 1864). In general, the Des Rivières women seem more pious than the men. While Caro devotes more and more of her time to the Church as she grows older, Mme Des Rivières seems relieved to learn that Willie, at twenty-four, has made his Easter duty, and she prays that his piety will continue (21 March 1864). During the last months of her husband’s final illness, she is ecstatic when he receives Communion: “I feel so grateful, so happy, to see my poor Henri looking so pious, so happy! My God! I thank you with all my heart!” (29 April 1865). There are few, if any, expressions of guilt or other negative religious feelings in the diary, but it is clear that for Mme Des Rivières the world is full of dangers from which only religious practice offers protection. On Caro’s sixteenth birthday, her mother writes: “Dear child: may she always be blessed, with health and happiness. I hope she will always prefer her home and quiet habits to all the vain illusions and apparent pleasures of the gay world – I flatter myself that her turn of mind is such that she will not […] follow the path of many who find pleasure, in the gaieties and frivolities of life – she has a great shield, at this present moment – her sincere piety and sweet disposition” (14 February 1858). While devoted to her children, especially her daughter, Mme Des Rivières seems not to be overwhelmed by the responsibilities of motherhood, as Julie Papineau was, nor even to be particularly conscious of a “maternal role” to which she must conform. However, she constantly worries about her children’s health, often writing gratefully in her diary: “My dear children are in good health.” The almost daily entries for June and July 1849, when an epidemic of cholera was raging in Montreal, reveal the fear and anguish felt by a mother during such a time, and the consolation offered by religious faith: On 21 June, she writes: “Today’s Le Pilote says there are two cases of asiatic cholera in Montreal that were fatal – may God preserve us from it – ah! my God, what a scourge – I tremble when I think of it – may God’s will be done – my dear little ones are in perfect health”; and, two days later: “My dear little children are in perfect health – they are always so happy – they go to bed singing and wake up the same way – these dear children – may they always be this happy” (23 June). By midJuly, her worries have increased, causing her headaches and feelings of melancholy: “I’ve had a nervous feeling for the last few days that has really upset me – I imagine a thousand things – my thoughts are sad – worse – I’m torn apart the word cholera makes me tremble – oh! My dear little children, how it would cost me to let go of them” (15 July); “I no longer dare to read the papers, I’m so afraid of what they will say about cholera – it’s amazing, how afraid of it I am this year” (18 July).

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Despite moments of anguish like these, Mme Des Rivières is a calm, well-balanced woman with a good sense of humour. The act of keeping a diary helps her to see her life from a distance and to laugh at it at times, as in the entry for 1 January 1872, where, after noting that it has rained all night, that the roads are slippery, and that her children have come to ask her blessing for the new year, she adds: “My dear children! I blessed them, with all my heart – may all the fervent wishes and prayers I made for them be heard […] I have lost three teeth, my front lower teeth! Such a vacuum! I’m an old toothless bonne femme!” Especially at the beginning of a new year, the diary provides her with an opportunity to look back at her life, noting the triumphs and losses of the past year. On 1 January 1857, having lost her mother during the previous year, she welcomes the new one with sadness: “Appearance of a continuation of mild weather – the Moon looks dim – […] I have felt very brittle and low-spirited all day – this morning, early, dear Willy and Caro came to ask their Father, to bless them – and to give us an affectionate kiss – dear children! – I was denied, that happening of being blessed by a dear Parent, this year – dearest Mother was not there – to bless me – how very much I felt the void!” Similarly, the entry for 1 January 1869 indicates that she has not recovered from the loss of her husband three years earlier: “Willie and Caro, gay and cheerful – came early this morning to ask my blessing – the dear one was not there to bless them! […] What cruel reminiscences!” Examples like these give an indication of the way in which Mme Des Rivières’s diary, as well as being a family chronicle, provides glimpses of her interior life. Writing is an activity of renewal for her, indulged in moments of solitude snatched from her busy days: “I was alone, I said my rosary – and then I enjoyed letting myself go in a daydream that pleased me greatly – I scribbled a lot today” (7 August 1849). Some evenings she waits until all the members of the family have gone up to bed before starting to write: “Henri went to bed before eight o’clock – Francis has gone up to his room – my dear Children have gone to bed – and now I’m alone, quite alone – I’m thinking – I’m scribbling – it’s eleven o’clock – I’m going to get ready for bed myself – I read a lot this evening” (30 January1850). Internalizing the attitudes of her time regarding women’s writing, Mme Des Rivières devalorizes the act of writing to some extent by constantly describing it as “scribbling” (as do many female diarists of the period). But it is clear that for her, writing is more than a means of documenting the facts of her life. It is a tool for sharpening her perceptions of the world around her and for capturing passing moments, as well as a training in the art of writing and a way to live more fully and consciously.

Writing for Oneself • 172 A MOde L “Queen Of the he Arth ” : the di A ry Of LA dy LAC OSte (1 8 8 8 –1 9 1 9 )

Marie-Louise Globensky (Lady Lacoste) abandoned her journal in 1866, a few weeks before marrying Alexandre Lacoste, and took it up again in August 1888, on her return from a trip to Europe with her husband, now a member of the Senate and chief justice of Quebec’s Court of Appeal. At the time she begins to write in it again, Marie-Louise is the mother of nine children and pregnant again (her seventh daughter, Berthe, was born on 16 March 1889); her youngest child, Arthur, who was only three, died after a short illness a few weeks after his parents’ return. A final child, René, was born in 1891, but survived for only eleven months. The Lacostes live in a large house on Rue Saint-Hubert in Montreal, a desirable neighbourhood for the French-Canadian bourgeoisie. Marie-Louise spends summers in the country with her children, joined by her husband on weekends. Confident, optimistic, and devoted to her children, she seems to have inexhaustible energy, which she directs towards cultural, charitable, and religious activities. On Thursdays when in town, she hosts a salon for writers, artists, politicians, and other members of the professions. She organizes charitable endeavours in her parish, sews for the poor, makes religious vestments and altar cloths for the church, and organizes charitable events for the Sisters of Providence and other religious communities. Later in life, she will be a member of the Board of Directors of Hôpital Sainte-Justine (founded by her daughter Justine), promoter of a vast network of écoles ménagères (home-making schools for girls), and president of a multitude of other committees and boards of directors.6 Like the journal of Mme Des Rivières and the one she herself kept as a young woman, Lady Lacoste’s journal is closer to a chronicle (or even a social calendar) than to a private diary. The entries, rarely consisting of more than a sentence or two, often begin by noting the day’s weather and record, usually without commentary, the births, baptisms, First Communions, engagements, weddings, and deaths of members of the family, as well as the numerous balls, receptions, concerts, and official ceremonies she attends with her husband, often in the company of friends who are well-known members of the Montreal elite: Wilfrid Laurier, prime minister of Canada, Louis-Alexandre Taschereau, future premier of Quebec, the railway magnate William Van Horne, and others. In 1899, she mentions a skating party she is hosting for fifty people; another time, she notes in passing that her husband “dined with the Prime Minister at the Royal Club.” Still as pious as she was in her youth, Lady Lacoste attends Mass every day and organizes her life around religious feast days, sermons, and

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retreats. She comments favourably on a sermon which denounces “lively dances” and the danger of novels, and particularly appreciates those that discuss the role of the wife and mother. A “sublime” sermon on the mission of Christian mothers inspires the following summary: “She is the one who must shape the heart of her child, this flower confided to her care. In order to do so, she must learn to be devoted, to sacrifice herself. From the cradle onward, the love of duty must be instilled in [the child]” (24 October 1892). Both her daughter and her first granddaughter are named Marie,7 a sign of the family’s devotion to the Blessed Virgin. A perfect example of the French-Canadian “queen of the hearth,” Lady Lacoste is strong and energetic, with her strength rooted in the teachings of her religion, and devoted to her (frequently absent) husband and children. The numerous references in the diary to the children’s birthdays give an idea of the warm family atmosphere: “My little Thaïs is six today” (18 October 1892), “my little Alexandre is ten” (29 January 1893), “My Yvonne is 18 today, now she is really a big girl, I regret seeing her grow up so fast” (2 March 1899), “my little Berthe is ten today” (16 March 1899). At fortytwo, Lady Lacoste is already a grandmother, but she continues to give birth every two or three years. On 23 July 1891, she gave birth to her last child, René, whose death eleven months later is movingly recorded in her journal. On 21 June 1892, she describes his sudden death in the middle of the night, when he had seemed only mildly ill the evening before: “At the very moment the doctor arrived, the dear little angel had already taken flight for heaven where his brothers were waiting for him.” The description of her anguish – one of the rare times in her diary when she reveals her emotions – shows the important role religious faith can play in giving meaning to unbearable suffering. Even after this immense loss, she finds strength in the certainty that she must accept God’s will: “No, I couldn’t believe it, what a heartbreaking experience for a mother. I had to give up this angel I so loved to caress. He was not mine, and yet I bathed in that illusion! […] You are the Master of things, my God, you lent him to me, you want him back, may your holy will be done […] May I be reunited with you again some day, my darling, that is my hope. You are happy now, I am suffering” (21 June 1892). The sentences she writes the following day, after the return of her husband, are a sober account of the shared suffering and faith of the couple, with no dramatization of her own emotions: “I could only show him the cold little body of our dear René and tell him about my night of anguish, but, as a Christian full of resignation, he exhorted me to suffer in silence” (22 June 1892). On 23 June, the day of the funeral, she simply notes: “A day of indescribable sacrifice may it be of spiritual benefit to me.” In August,

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vacationing with her family at Lotbinière, she is still torn between the affliction she feels and her belief in the merit and necessity of suffering: “Alas, in a single day everything was broken, my dear René left me, for heaven it’s true, should I complain about it? Earthly selfishness. We cry only for ourselves. O my angel, think of your mother, obtain for her the ability to immolate herself since you possess the glory I dreamed of for you” (6 August 1872). Unable to shake off her sorrow, she remains at home while the other members of the family leave “joyfully” for a boat trip: “My poor broken heart refuses to go, the departure of my dear René still absorbs me” (10 August 1892). Other than mentioning her social relationships with various people of influence, Lady Lacoste rarely refers to public events in her diary. Notable exceptions are Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 and the coronation of King Edward VII, a day when “flags were flying from all the roofs [of Montreal]” (9 August 1902). One senses the shadow of war in the notebooks written between 1914 and 1918, for example, when she mentions sewing for the Red Cross, or in her wish on New Year’s Day 1916 that “this year will bring us peace.” When Armistice Day finally arrives, she writes: “A superb day, and what happiness on waking up this morning to the delicious news that the amnesty accord has been signed, at last we’re seeing the end of this frightful war. We can finally breathe easily and thank with all our hearts the God who has delivered us” (11 November 1918). On the occasion of her fiftieth birthday on 2 February 1899, Lady Lacoste notes in her diary that her life is “well advanced,” and offers a prayer to God that she will be able to continue doing her duty “as you desire, and [that I will be able] to give you back all the souls you entrusted me with.” In the twenty years that follow, she continued living as she always had: in harmony with the traditional order, submitting to church dogma and to the rules and practices of her society, working to improve the situation of the poor and the marginalized without ever questioning the social hierarchy that maintains the divisions of class and privilege. It was her daughters – Marie, Justine, and Thaïs – who would go further. Marie Lacoste Gérin-Lajoie, one of the great pioneers of women’s rights in Quebec, led the struggles for women’s access to university, the legal rights of married women, and the right to vote; Justine Lacoste-Beaubien founded l’Hôpital Sainte-Justine, the first children’s hospital in Quebec; and Thaïs Lacoste-Frémont worked for several decades on improving women’s legal situation. As a “Christian mother,” Lady Lacoste took seriously her responsibility of “shaping the heart of her child […] from the cradle onward, [by instilling in her] the love of duty” (24 October 1892),

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and the commitment of her daughters testifies to the fact that she succeeded in her mission. t h e diAry Of M i Che LL e L e nO rMA nd (1 9 1 8 –1 9 6 4 ) I want woman in her place, in her role. The arts are not forbidden to her. She has the right to spend time on them on the condition that her husband lack for nothing. The husband must be the most important thing. Claude-Henri Grignon, Letter to Michelle Le Normand, 22 June 19388

Although she is more or less forgotten today, Michelle Le Normand was one of the most widely read female writers in Quebec before the publication of two important novels by women in 1945: Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion and Germaine Guèvremont’s Le Survenant. As well, she is one of the only women writers of the period (if not the only one) who succeeded in combining marriage and motherhood with a literary career. In addition to her collection of short stories, Autour de la maison, which appeared in 1916, she published eight other books: four novels (Couleur du temps, 1919; Le nom dans le bronze, 1933; La plus belle chose du monde, 1937; La montagne d’hiver, 1961), two collections of short stories (La maison du phlox, 1941; Enthousiasme, 1947), a book of nonfictional stories (Dans la toile d’araignée, 1949), and a biography (Marie-Célina Plourde, Veuve de Joseph-Onias Thériault: Sœur Sainte-Jeanne-de-Chantal, des Servantes de Jésus-Marie, 1879–1938, 1942). In June 1922, Le Normand married Léo-Paul Desrosiers, the future author of historical and patrotic novels like Nord-Sud (1931) and Les engagés du grand portage (1938), which are among the classics of Quebec literature. According to Julia Richer, a close friend of the Desrosiers, the complementarity of the couple was remarkable: “Never have two such dissimilar beings complemented each other so well. While Léo-Paul Desrosiers was serious, meditative and silent, his wife Michelle was lively, impulsive and enthusiastic. But they shared a love of literature and an irrepressible need to write. From the day when Michelle Le Normand’s smile came to brighten Desrosiers’s solitude, their fate was sealed. With the support of a companion who valued intellectual work above all else, he could, in all security, begin the work of a creative career that would alternate between history and the novel.”9 Behind this image projected by the Desrosiers couple, one can imagine the possible tensions between two people so different from each other: one of them “serious, meditative and silent” and the other full of joie de vivre; one of them considered to be a great writer and the other

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as the companion who supports her husband and provides him with the security necessary for his creative endeavours. Michelle Le Normand was, in fact, devoted to her husband and convinced of the importance of his work; she was an indispensable collaborator who corrected and recopied Desrosiers’s manuscripts, as well as handling his relations with his publishers and even the sales of his books.10 But her diary reveals the price she paid, and the reality behind the façade of the perfect complementarity of the couple: the damage to her own self-esteem caused by the constant moodiness of her husband and her determined struggle to keep writing herself, in spite of the obstacles created by her responsibilities as a wife and mother. Reading this diary, which covers a period of more than forty years (from Le Normand’s marriage until her death in 1964), is an often sad experience, in which one has the feeling at times of intruding into a space that should perhaps remain private – for example, in the frequent mentions of Le Normand’s despair at the untenable marital situation in which she was imprisoned by the rigid attitudes of her time and her own conservative views. Such an intrusion into the private life of the writer is only justified by the courage, vulnerability, and joie de vivre that we discover in these pages, often written in the difficult moments of her life. In all, Le Normand’s diary consists of twenty journals: the first one covering the years 1909–11 (see chapter 5), and nineteen others, written during the period from 1918 to 1964. Four of these journals precede her marriage to Desrosiers: a notebook containing summaries of her readings and drafts of articles from 1918 and three others which deal, among other things, with the end of Le Normand’s relationship with the poet, Albert Lozeau, in 1919; a new romance, with lawyer Georges Monarque, which lasted from 1918 to 1921; a year’s stay in Paris (October 1920 to October 1921), during which Le Normand studied at the Institut catholique and at the Sorbonne; and a correspondence with her future husband, Léo-Paul Desrosiers, in 1920 and 1921. bef O re MA rriAge (JOurnALS ii i–vi, MAy 1918–MAy 1 9 2 2 )

The unacceptable prospect of a literary career which would exclude marriage and motherhood leads Le Normand to break up with her mentor, Albert Lozeau, in 1919, given that, in spite of his love for her, he is judged unsuitable for marriage because of his infirmity: “I no longer want to see my life solely as a long literary career devoted to looking after a sick man [Lozeau], I want to see it include a probable marriage, and motherhood, and feelings and actions that are [French] Canadian,” she confides to

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her journal in April 1919. At twenty-seven, she doubtless sees the love of Desrosiers, a man who shares her literary, patriotic, and religious views, as a last chance for the marriage and motherhood of which she dreams. Already in the first letters she receives from him, she notices that he is “a sad and not very happy young man” (14 December 1920), but in December 1921 she decides to accept his marriage proposal. Declaring herself madly in love, she gives up writing for several months, noting in her diary that “I’ve been working hardly at all on my writing and a great deal on my trousseau” (22 March 1922). Some weeks later, she comes across her diary by chance as she is preparing to move to Ottawa: “I’ve unearthed my diary from one of the boxes I still haven’t packed! And I’m writing a few lines in it […] My life as a fiancée is ending” (12 May 1922). t he firS t ye ArS O f MA rriAge ( JOurnAL vi i, June 1922–OC t Ob e r 1 9 2 8 )

Le Normand starts a new volume of her diary during the couple’s honeymoon in the Gaspésie, with each of the partners writing about their happiness at being together. The fact that this notebook covers more than six years is an indication of the little time she finds to write among her activities as a young wife and soon a mother. As Desrosiers is the parliamentary correspondent for Le Devoir, the couple settles in Ottawa; in 1928, he leaves Le Devoir to become the official recorder for Hansard and editor of all House of Commons publications, a position he will occupy until 1941. A first son, Louis, is born in 1923, and a second, Claude, in 1925. These are generally happy years for Le Normand. In fact, she confides to her diary in the first year: “We are so very, very happy together that I sometimes take the time to feel a little afraid, as if my apprehension will protect me from other things” (12 March 1923). She often declares her love for Léo-Paul: “I always want him to feel good. The smallest thing worries me. I love him so much” (14 May 1923); and, on their first anniversary: “Life together has not disappointed either of us. I thank God very much for this” (12 June 1923). In August 1925, she notes that they have moved into the “house of [their] dreams.” Yet there are problems, almost from the beginning: Desrosiers is frustrated at work, even more so after he becomes a civil servant, and Le Normand is having difficulty writing. From the time her first son is born, in 1923, she spends less and less time writing in her diary, except for noting the progress of “baby.” In September 1923, she admits: “Sometimes I am very depressed about my writing. It seems to me that nothing I write has any value, and that it would be wonderful not to have to do it

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any longer. This morning, I’m in that kind of mood. And I can find nothing, absolutely nothing, to write about in my next article. Paul consoles me and cheers me up – and I know that soon I’ll go from discouragement to enthusiasm […] Sometimes it’s hard. But nothing is achieved without effort, and I shouldn’t let such things get me down” (25 September 1923). A frequent complaint in these years is the difficulty of finding a maid (either they quit or are let go shortly after being hired). The lack of time for writing, as well as a dearth of inspiration probably linked to the constraints of her life as a mother, gradually eat into Le Normand’s confidence: “My only worry is my lack of literary confidence, my constant sterility! Once a week, regularly, the article I have to write [for Le Devoir] reduces me to sadness. Then, when it’s done, I come back to life and find my joy again. Paul scolds me. Is my brain tired out? Or is it that there are so few subjects to write about in my daily life?” (March 1924). In August 1925, three months after the birth of her second son, she resigns from Le Devoir. Le Normand’s diary is a moving record of the conflict felt by women artists over the generations between the claims of self and other, life and artistic creation. Being a writer demands a certain amount of egotism, discipline, positive models to encourage one, and, as Virginia Woolf famously put it, a room of one’s own into which one can withdraw and find solitude – all of which were lacking in Michelle Le Normand’s life. Perhaps too sociable or too attracted to the pleasures of life, she often expresses doubts about her vocation as a writer, accusing herself of laziness and feeling guilty when she produces nothing. Already in 1919 she had identified the dilemma faced by many women artists: “I am so much a woman (!) with my poor heart which constantly needs to belong to someone and be busy; so much a woman with my imagination that is excited by feelings more than by my writing. It doesn’t matter, though I suffer a bit to see that I can’t devote myself entirely to my writing. It seems to me that I’m not moving forward. I absolutely must write an article today” (27 April 1919). After the birth of her first two children, she discovers a new passion, tennis, and throws herself into it with her usual enthusiasm: “It is literally a kind of madness. I would play in the house if I could. I tremble with impatience when I look at the courts in front of our house and realize I have to be here – without playing” (July 1927). But, always, the need to write and to be worthy of the reputation she enjoys brings her back to her desk: “It’s now almost twelve years that I’ve had my little reputation as a writer – and so few works in all those years. It would be so wonderful to write well and write a lot,” she notes, and then adds: “The event – these days – is tennis” (May 1927). Some months later, she returns to the theme of feeling unworthy of her status as a writer, reproaching herself for

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having “contributed nothing to the world” although she has given birth to two children: “I am filled with confusion when I think of the fact that I’ve been writing for 12 years, that my reputation is shrinking rather than growing – and that I’ve still given nothing to the world” (29 August 1927). Maternity seems to have been difficult to accept for Le Normand, who complains about having to look after the children when she has no maid and bristles at the primary duty of a “queen of the hearth,” sacrificing herself for others. “I am egotistical. I was spoiled when I was a child and have felt the effects of it all my life. I don’t like being sacrificed, I don’t like devoting myself [to others] – with the result that the smallest sacrifices are harder on me than on most other people,” she writes on 21 February 1928. After a quarrel about the children, following which her husband is cool with her for ten days, accusing her of not being a “good mother,” she explodes: “Is it my fault I was spoiled? If until my marriage I had no concerns other than myself and was always surrounded by people who adored me?” (17–18 July 1928). Tensions between Le Normand and her husband increase during these early years. In March 1927, she confides to her diary: “Paul has a pronounced tendency towards pessimism […] which upsets me and terrifies me.” A year later, she expresses the wife’s eternal complaint: “I find Paul too quiet, too much inside himself – too used to my company. Often he doesn’t remember things I’ve said – and is amazed when I’m upset by that. I wish I could write all the time. It would put an end to my pipe dreams, my heartache, my other demands.” And, a bit later: “Instead of talking, projecting, or explaining what he thinks, Paul is mute and taciturn in all our crises. And he runs away” (Spring 1928). t O Write , in SPite O f everything ( JO urnALS vii i A nd iX, nOve Mber 1 9 2 8 –June 1 9 3 8 )

Over the next decade, Le Normand keeps a separate notebook (Journal VIII) in which she writes drafts of future articles and plans for the novels, Le nom dans le bronze (1933) and La plus belle chose du monde (1937). In Journal IX, she occasionally notes events (such as the birth of her daughter Michelle in 1929), as well as the thoughts and emotions of her day-to-day life. It is a large notebook of 350 pages, written between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five by a courageous woman who demands a great deal of herself. During this period, Le Normand matures, and her writing improves: the diary contains a number of beautiful evocations of landscapes in Ottawa and in the Gaspésie, where the couple spend several weeks each

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summer, as well as precise, eloquent descriptions of the texture of her daily life. Struggling constantly with two heavy burdens – her husband’s depression and the retarded development of her daughter Michelle – she becomes more realistic over these years. The journal opens on a familiar theme – the difficulty of writing – in a passage which evokes the uneventful nature of her daily life and the many distractions that keep her from her work: “It’s raining, it’s dark, I have nothing in my head and no energy. I could work, though, since my two boys are playing quietly downstairs. But I need light! … light outside and light within me. My autumn is often gloomy. I make ferocious resolutions about writing, then they are annihilated by time, circumstances, or laziness” (3 November 1928). In addition to her responsibilities at home, Le Normand is fully involved in the life of Ottawa’s francophone community. She is active in several clubs, gives lectures, writes occasional book reviews, and keeps up her friendships, sometimes inviting twenty or thirty people for tea. Unable to renounce her literary ambitions, she tries to find time to write: “Tried for two hours yesterday to finish the opening section of my novel […] Failed […] discouraged […] Maybe I don’t have the strength or temperament for a long piece of work. Why, in spite of everything, does this worry about the work to be created never leave me?” (19 April 1929). And yet she has three novels in preparation: Le nom dans le bronze, a nationalist novel inspired by the ideas of Abbé Lionel Groulx, which will appear in 1933; a book with the tentative title of Quatuor or Les quatre, which will become La plus belle chose du monde, an autobiographical novel about four young women living in Montreal at the beginning of the First World War (1937); and, finally, another novel, closer to her experience as a wife and mother, which she thinks about often but never writes. Reflecting on her lack of inspiration for a novel she is attempting to write (probably Le nom dans le bronze), she admits that it does not correspond closely enough to her own experience, and tells herself that her next novel, which will be called Maternity, will be better and easier to write (26 November 1928). Le nom dans le bronze, with its plot similar to that of Lionel Groulx’s controversial novel, L’appel de la race (1922), is the story of a young woman who is in love with an anglophone, but who, on a trip to Quebec City, discovers her cultural heritage and decides to give up her relationship with him. In her diary, Le Normand seems somewhat uncomfortable with the ideological content of her book, worrying that patriotism is no longer in style and that her book will be badly received by the critics (3 March 1933). Before publication, she sends the manuscript to three priests for their approval. This is a common procedure, and she submits to it despite

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the fact that she considers it “a ridiculous idea.” When one of the three expresses reservations about the novel, she exclaims: “What does a priest know about novels? And this one is a poet to boot!” (24 November 1932). The novel is, in fact, well received by the critics when it appears, but the handwritten dedication in a copy of it which now belongs to Montreal’s Grande Bibliothèque shows that the author is still unsure of its value. “To Berthelot Brunet,11 this book that you will probably hate,” she writes. Le Normand and Desrosiers have some justification for their dreams of an international reputation. Desrosiers’s Nord-Sud and Le Normand’s Autour de la maison were honoured by the Académie française in 1932, and, the same year, Desrosiers was invited by the prestigious Parisian publisher Gaston Gallimard to submit his next manuscript to Gallimard (2 June 1932). In April 1934, Le Normand starts her novel La plus belle chose du monde, praying, as she often does, for her work to bear fruit: “O God, help me to write a masterpiece, or at least help me to have a successful career as a writer. To have success would be patriotic: if it could make a big splash, Paulo and I would be known outside Quebec. Oh, what a beautiful dream! Will I have to sacrifice it as well?” (Summer 1935). In August, after noting with satisfaction that “my pen is moving across the paper almost by itself,” she adds: “It’s not for me personally that I want fame, it’s for my country, for my children” (1 August 1935). And yet, for four months in 1936 she neglects her own novel in order to correct the proofs and look after the publicity, sales, and distribution of a work by her husband, Le livre des mystères. In May 1937, on learning that the Paris publisher Grasset has rejected her novel, she resigns herself to the fact that it will not be published in France. Instead, she publishes it at her own expense, and on its appearance, La plus belle chose du monde is unanimously praised by the critics (10 September 1937). On the surface, then, these are productive and successful years for the Desrosier-Le Normand couple. But behind their successes the diary reveals a tense and even tragic atmosphere, aggravated by the deteriorating mental and physical condition of their daughter Michelle. The conflict of temperaments between husband and wife grows worse, and in the privacy of her journal Le Normand gives free rein to her feelings of anger and desperation, accusing her husband of having destroyed her joie de vivre by his constant negativity. On their seventh anniversary she writes: “It seems to me that […] Paul will always be ill, and I’m afraid of how life with him will change me over the years. Tonight, he said to me: ‘You shouldn’t have married me, poor Miche!’” (12 June 1929). The stress of Desrosiers’s work in the House of Commons increases in this decade, plunging him into a state of constant depression. As for Le Normand, only

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her work and the recognition of her own and her husband’s books help her survive. On her husband’s thirty-fifth birthday, she writes: “[Faced with] his incurable sadness […] I work. It’s the only consolation. And then I get enthusiastic again when the orders for books arrive. Nord sud has been published” (4 November 1931). While totally sympathetic to her husband’s stresses at work, she sees that his problems are psychological as well as professional: “He’s not sociable. He doesn’t like anyone, he’s not cut out for having friends […] He’s always alone, meditating or stewing over things” (21 December 1932). When the prestigious Prix David is won by an author other than her husband, she is bitter, furious at the injustice of the choice, all the more so because the other writer has now bought himself a car: “Louvigny de Montigny now has a car: his jury paid for it!” (12 November 1932). Her own moods, she observes, depend entirely on those of her husband: “He doesn’t know how to live, that is, to find meaning in life. All his black moods and daydreams come from that […] When he’s happy, he smiles easily and I’m totally happy myself ” (10 May 1934); “Each crisis relieves him and […] gives him back his equilibrium. But my own equilibrium gets weaker each time” (28 October 1937). Le Normand’s gradual discovery of the extent of her daughter’s handicap is heartbreaking to read. During her first year, the little girl is calm and smiling, but slow to develop, and her mother sometimes thinks she is “lazy.” At nineteen months, she is still not walking, and her mother is extremely anxious, all the more so because she feels alone with her burden: “When one imagines, on getting married, that one is gaining a support in life, one is often mistaken. At bottom, everywhere I go it is the woman who supports, keeps calm, and is courageous” (22 June 1931). At three and a half, there has been no change: “My little girl doesn’t walk. I never think of anything else, yet everyone thinks I’m so carefree and happy” (25 May 1933). And, a few months later: “Will she be normal some day? Talking and walking like other children? Sometimes I doubt it. The only consolation is that she is not unhappy, that she is gay, and spoiled, and we surround her with tenderness and care” (2 October 1933). A year later, after consulting several doctors, she mentions a mysterious “illness of an invisible gland which explains why, at almost five, she is still not walking by herself and can only say Mommy and Daddy” (3 October 1934). A few days later, Brother André,12 sent by Le Normand’s sister-in-law, who is a nun, comes to see the little girl. His visit moves Le Normand to tears, for she must now resign herself to the fact that “God does not want a miracle” (14 October 1934). In 1935, the doctor’s verdict is merciless: “No point in treating her […] she will only improve a litttle and will die before puberty” (22 September 1935). Le Normand prays constantly for the little girl and, terrified

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by the idea that the child will one day have to be placed in an institution, admits: “Since I haven’t obtained a miracle, I wish that God would come and take her” (15 June 1936). In 1937, she laments that “this incomplete, vegetative, babbling, and joyless little life […] is of no use to anyone, except to my sanctification, my suffering” (28 April 1937). Unable to change the situation, Le Normand turns more and more to religion, finding a certain consolation – as had Julie Papineau and so many other women of the time – in the glorification of suffering and sacrifice. Frustrated with her husband’s sullenness, she concludes: “Nothing can be done, except to endure it. My attempts to help are too often pushed away” (9 May 1935). Resignation is also mentioned in relation to her husband’s struggles: “[Léo-Paul] has had so much to put up with – but, my God, he is so badly equipped for life. I pray. I have no other resource. And instead of being gentle and patient, I get angry – oh! without shouting! – and I tell him what I think. His suspicious and complicated mind drives me to despair” (8 July 1936). t O uC hing bO tt OM (JO urnAL X, 2 AuguS t 1 9 3 8 – 1 MAy 1 9 4 4 )

A major change in the fortunes of the Desrosiers took place in 1941, when Léo-Paul Desrosiers was named chief librarian of Montreal’s municipal library and, the following year, elected to the Royal Society of Canada. The tenth volume of Le Normand’s diary records these events, as well as the greater calm that characterizes their life after the move to Montreal. However, most of the notebook’s 180 pages are devoted to their final years in Ottawa, the most difficult time of their life together. During this period, Le Normand is working on a novel that will never be completed but whose title, La lampe est éteinte (The light has gone out), suggests her state of despair in those years. It will, she says, be a novel centred on the lack of communication in a couple, as well as being a satire of the federal civil service milieu. “The novel I’m thinking of would be the story of a young family […] I’d like to try to capture the melancholy of this moment we’re going through: when I never have the impression that I’m important to Paulo, but rather fear constantly that I’ll displease him and be criticized” (23 October 1938). Vacationing in the Gaspésie in 1939, she mentions that her novel is advancing, but that it will not be possible to publish it while her husband is still in the civil service (7 August 1939), adding, a few months later: “Personally, I would take the risk, And a succès de scandale wouldn’t be such a bad thing” (29 November 1939). She is still working on it in 1943, making a written portrait of her husband’s detested former boss,

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Senator Rodolphe Lemieux,13 “now dead and buried, although his portrait still smiles in the halls of the House of Commons” (10 August 1943). As far as literary success is concerned, these are good years for Le Normand. In February 1939, her novel La plus belle chose du monde is published in France, and she quotes from a report in a French newspaper of an academic lecture which claimed: “In 1939, it is Madame de Sévigné whose work is being taught at the Sorbonne; in 2039, it will perhaps be Madame Michelle Le Normand” (11 September 1939). In February 1941, she publishes a collection of short stories, La maison aux phlox; she is also working on her biography of Sister Sainte-Jeanne-de-Chantal as well as doing book reviews for various publications. At the same time, she continues to look after the correction of proofs and the sales of her husband’s books. On 22 October 1938, she makes the following observation: “Paulo is always criticizing me because I don’t spend enough time on my writing. But he forgets all the days when I don’t write for myself because I’m answering the letters he should be replying to, or looking after his books and his publicity.” Because of the tension in her marriage, the years 1938–40 are the darkest of Le Normand’s life. She questions herself often about happiness and love in marriage, always finding the same answers: pray, endure, keep silent, resign oneself to unhappiness, and hope for eternal salvation. “I said to myself: none of that matters to me any more, I will be happy when I’m dead, because I will have endured all of it as a good Christian. And that’s all that matters. To endure with as much patience and gentleness as possible. Endure. Put up with the fact that everything one does displeases the other or, for no reason, saddens him” (18 November 1938). The expressions Fiat, fiat, fiat, “Let it be done,” and “It’s up to God” are her usual way of ending the discussion of a difficult subject, and yet resignation does not come easily to her: “Is there any tenderness one can count on? For that matter, is there anything we can count on in this world? Loving one’s suffering and accepting it with mystical joy isn’t easy” (17 May 1939). A sentence from a novel she loves, Charles Morgan’s Sparkenbroke, inspires a reflection on the difficulty of communication: “[I wondered] how it was that human beings, with all their powers of language, are so poor at communicating among themselves […] And then I thought about all the things Paulo never says to me any more, and about what I never say to him, even though I’m constantly thinking about him. I’m not capable of giving him happiness. No one can give happiness to another person. And yet, despite my basic selfishness, it is for his success that I constantly pray. It’s true that it all comes back to myself. When he’s content, I can be happy in my own way” (23 October 1938). At times she seems close to a

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feminist rebellion, but her conservative beliefs stop her from following her thoughts to their logical conclusion: “But does marital happiness exist anywhere? Is there such a thing as a just man? Why do we women have to put up with the bad humour of men as if we were responsible for all their problems? […] Doubtless because of Eve. Everything goes back to her!” (6–7 November 1938). And later: “I deluded myself for a long time, I was determined to believe in happiness – but at bottom, for several years now I’ve only known small moments of happiness. Paulo will never be a happy person. He’s more alone than I am, because he’s so unsociable. He doesn’t want to see anyone. He doesn’t even answer the telephone […] Paul will never be cured. It’s like a gangrene” (9 December 1938). In September 1939, desperately in need of tenderness, she has a strange dream about Albert Lozeau, who has been dead for sixteen years. “And yet I don’t want the return of love,” she writes on awakening. “I have hardened […] I no longer believe in human happiness” (30 September 1939). In July 1940, on holiday in the Gaspé with her children, she receives a letter from Desrosiers proposing a solution to their problems: that she would live in Montreal while he remains in Ottawa. Distraught, she spends the day praying for God’s help, before concluding: “I can no longer sense any feeling for me in P. […] except blame, hostility, irritation. He has placed me in the category of his enemies” (25 July 1940). Such intimate revelations about the relationship between two people make the reader wish to know the point of view of the other person in question: a possibility that exists for the reader of a correspondence, but not of a private diary. In any case, the tensions between the two diminish after their move to Montreal in 1941, and after their difficult decision to place their daughter, now eleven, in a private institution: “Will we get used to it? Will we ever get over the feeling of being burned, in the deepest part of ourselves, by this unbearable pity! My little girl! My little girl!” she writes (20 August 1941). the LAS t nO tebOOKS ( JO urnALS X i–XX, 20 MAy 1944–19 OC t O b e r 1 9 6 4 )

The final notebooks of the diary are a perfect illustration of the idea that, traditionally, women’s lives have followed a repetitive and even circular narrative arc, marked by few dramatic changes. Over and over again, the struggles and the periods of relief, the attempts at resignation followed by moments of revolt or despair, the solitude and the passion for writing (as well as its difficulty) return like melancholy leitmotifs in the notebooks of Le Normand’s last twenty years. In 1953, the Desrosiers move to

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Saint-Sauveur-des-Monts in the Laurentians, where Le Normand finds a certain amount of peace in the beauty of the landscape and her frequent outings on skis. She keeps publishing, but at a slower pace: a collection of short stories, Enthousiasme, appears in 1947, another collection, Dans la toile de l’araignée, in 1949, and a final novel, La montagne d’hiver, in 1961. She is aware, however, especially after the arrival of the Quiet Revolution in 1960, that contemporary Quebec is no longer interested in her kind of writing. Still extremely conservative, she and her husband have been passed over by history and feel estranged from the tastes of their time. Upset by the films she hears discussed on the radio and by the mention of scandals associated with a religious community, Le Normand prays “that the Holy Spirit will enlighten everyone […] What a dreadful era!” (February 1964). The hundreds of books read by Le Normand over the years, carefully listed in her journal, reveal the rigidity and self-censorship imposed on her literary tastes by Catholic orthodoxy. “I read. I read too much. I forget half of what I’ve read,” she writes on 16 November 1934. Along with the names of a great number of mediocre authors, English and American bestsellers, and books on spirituality, there are mentions of the authors she likes: Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Edith Wharton, Thomas Mann – and of Louis Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine, which she would like to have written herself (14 October 1932). In general, French literature enrages her by its frank descriptions of the body and sexuality, inspiring several colourful explosions over the years. After reading a French novel she likes, she writes: “Hardly a word on love. What a record for a Frenchman!” (November 1928). Modern French novels seem to her “so empty, so untrue, so lacking in anything that is moving” (14 October 1932). The well-known novel Les Thibault, by Roger Martin du Gard, for example, inspires the following reflection: “As in all French novels, forbidden love takes up a lot of space, and my God, how boring it is. Last night I finished Night and Day by Virginia Woolf – where, on the contrary, with feelings that are purely human but clean, and with decent characters who aren’t thinking about sex all the time, the reader is charmed for 600 pages!” (5 January 1932). On reading André Gide’s L’immoraliste, she wonders: “Why do people like this author so much, what explains his worldwide reputation?” (Summer 1933). Unlike Gide, the novelist Joseph Malègue, whom she calls “a Catholic Proust,” fills her with enthusiasm: “It’s the most beautiful French novel I’ve ever read. [He shows that] one can be human without grovelling in the mud, without making a display of sexual life, of evil” (25 November 1934). She finds Henry de Montherlant’s Les jeunes filles “decadent” (Winter

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1937); she detests Le journal d’un curé de campagne by Georges Bernanos (Summer 1938) and La Pharisienne by François Mauriac (Winter 1942); she likes Colette, but says of her: “How well this dishonourable woman writes!” (Autumn 1939). Her tastes do not change; in the late 1950s she is still indignant about the authors who are respected in France (Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and André Malraux): “What can our good people learn from these authors who are condemned by the Church!” (5 March 1959). In 1964, she is thrilled to hear Father Émile Legault, one of the founders of Quebec theatre,14 say on the radio that Sartre is out of date. It was this same conservative spirit that had been responsible for Le Normand’s reputation and the sales of her books, as religious communities and schools made up a large proportion of her readers. But if conformity to such ideas worked in her favour, the self-censorship it created prevented her from completing the two novels (Maternité and La lampe est éteinte) which grew out of her own experience and which were perhaps too revealing of her private struggles for her to envisage offering to the public. Her published works have the taste of another era; they are too often sentimental, tales bathed in nostalgia or constructed around unrealistic episodes that betray the lack of inspiration she so often complains about in her diary. It may be that Michelle Le Normand’s greatest contribution to literature is the diary itself, to which she confided the essential aspects of her life for over fifty years, along with her keenly felt emotions and her profound interrogations about the meaning of life. The passion for writing which is present throughout the diary was, in fact, her greatest reason for living. In the last year of her life, Le Normand was still, at seventy-one, inhabited by the imperious need to write to which she had never succeeded in giving full expression. Inspired by a visit from Gabrielle Roy the previous year, she had begun to imagine the possibility of a new novel, but, as usual, the writing of it was constantly interrupted by her other activities and responsibilities: “In 1964 – as in 1963 – it will be almost impossible to write. What a fastidious task it would be to list all that I’ve had to do since the beginning of the year: receive guests, shop and make meals, correct Paulo’s proofs […] And yet this book that I’ve been thinking about since Gabrielle R.’s visit has started to inspire me, it seems to me that it would be something new in my work and in our literature” (20 January 1964). The next day, she notes: “Worked on the manuscript that I’m calling for in silence […] Will get back to it in a minute” (21 January 1964) and, a few days later, after a list of her daily activities: “No literature in any of that” (24 January 1964). The final entry in the diary is dated 19 October; on 1

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November, Le Normand died suddenly, towards the middle of a day that was probably not very different from all the others. •  •  • The diaries of Angélique Hay-Des Rivières, Lady Lacoste, and Michelle Le Normand, each of which covers almost the entire married life of its author, cannot be seen as representing the “typical” life of a “queen of the hearth,” but together they tell of the experience of such women for a period of over a century, the one in which the role of wife and mother was most rigidly defined in French Canada. Each of the three diarists takes her role very seriously, and each draws strength and consolation from her religious faith, with its ideal of self-sacrifice and its belief in the redemptive value of suffering (especially for women). Devoted to their children, they are fiercely protective of them in face of the dangers of sickness, death, and moral depredation that threaten them. The negative aspects of their religious beliefs – fear of sin and disgust for the body – are glimpsed at times in these diaries and were undoubtedly part of the legacy passed on from mother to daughter during these years. However, it is only in the most modern of the three – that of Michelle Le Normand – that such preoccupations become explicit, contributing at least in part to the anguish expressed by the diarist in the thousands of pages she left for posterity. Of the three diaries, only that of Le Normand presents the wife and mother as an autonomous individual, irreducible to her role and functions within the home, and it is therefore not surprising that this diary is the only one of the three in which the diarist frequently expresses feelings of anxiety, confusion, frustration, and guilt. To achieve a solid sense of self is far from easy in a culture and milieu in which women who dare to challenge traditional roles are disapproved of and condemned by those in power. In spite of the brief period of fame and recognition Le Normand enjoyed, thanks in part to her conformity to the dominant ideologies, she paid for her fame by a lack of inspiration and a dispersion of self among her numerous feminine and national obligations. Above and beyond the particular details it reveals to us about the author Léo-Paul Desrosiers and the literary and cultural milieu of their time, Le Normand’s diary offers us a valuable portrait of the difficulty of reconciling marriage and maternity with a writing career in the first half of the twentieth century. The accusation of “selfishness” that she often directs against herself, and that her husband directs against her, speaks volumes about the difficult road that women still have to navigate in the pre–Quiet Revolution years before achieving autonomy.

PArt f O ur

• Wr i ti n g On e s e l f i nt o Hi st or y: T h e A ge o f Au to bi o g rap h y, 1965–2012

Astonishingly, it is not until 1965, three centuries after the spiritual autobiography of Marie de l’Incarnation, that another autobiography by a woman will appear in Quebec. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, thanks to the example of Laure Conan, the novel became a literary genre to which women could aspire, but, as the diary of Michelle Le Normand illustrates, the possibility of a literary career for a woman, especially if she was married and a mother, was extremely problematic until the mid-twentieth century and even beyond. It is no coincidence that Claire Martin, the first woman to write an autobiography in contemporary Quebec, had no children – like the novelists Laure Conan, Gabrielle Roy, and Anne Hébert, and indeed like Marie de l’Incarnation, who had to leave her son in order to embark on the spiritual adventure that would lead her to write about her life. In chapter 8, devoted to Dans un gant de fer (In an Iron Glove) by Claire Martin, we will see that autobiography can be far more threatening to the established order than the novel as we revisit the controversy over her book, which appeared in the same year as Marie-Claire Blais’s novel Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel, set in a very similar universe of violence and repression. In that chapter we will also look at some definitions of autobiography, try to clarify the traditional distinction between autobiography and memoir, and, finally, look at some of the traits theoreticians have seen as characteristic of autobiographies by women. Dans un gant de fer is both an autobiography, recounting the survival and eventual liberation of the author from childhood to her early twenties, and a memoir, describing, analyzing, and denouncing the milieu which not only permitted but encouraged the kind of violence against women and children experienced by the author. Equally important as a work of art and as a social document, Dans un gant de fer deserves a detailed analysis.

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Despite the example of Claire Martin, Quebec women were relatively slow to accede to autobiographical writing, perhaps because traditionally they had been so well trained in obedience and silence. But by the end of the 1970s, thanks to the liberating influence of the Quiet Revolution and later of feminism, their autobiographical texts began to appear. With these contemporary autobiographies, in part because of the social changes brought about by the Quiet Revolution, the field of personal writing by women expands to include autobiographical works by women of poor and working-class backgrounds. In chapter 9, we will look at some of these writings, paying particular attention to the complex interweaving of social class, language, culture, religious background, and gender identity in the often painful journeys of their protagonists towards self-expression. These autobiographies correspond to a coming into existence – an act of giving birth to the self through language – and often they gravitate around an original wound, almost always identified with the mother and the conservative culture she embodies and transmits to her daughters. Chapter 10 will examine the intense struggle with the mother, the starting point and also the stumbling block of so many women’s autobiographies, no matter what their cultural origin. In the Quebec context, this all-powerful mother, who either stifles her daughter with too much love or paralyzes her by rejection, carries the imprint of a negative Catholicism and finds an unforgettable fictional counterpart in Anne Hébert’s “La grande Claudine” – the mother figure of her short story “Le torrent,” who looms over her son like a monstrous entity blocking his route to freedom and happiness. In several of the autobiographies, the resemblance between the mother and this mythical character created by Anne Hébert is at least implicit; in Denise Desautels’s Ce fauve, le bonheur (This beast happiness), the debt to Anne Hébert is made explicit by a series of intertextual allusions which echo Hébert’s writings and endow the author’s painful quest for autonomy with a collective resonance. All the autobiographies examined in this section go beyond the simple reconstitution of reality and involve a construction of self linked to the author’s ability to distance herself from the facts and memories that make up her life and impose order and coherence on them. Such a recreation of one’s past self is achieved by projection into a character the author can observe, judge, and dialogue with from her present perspective. In Gabrielle Roy’s magnificent autobiography La détresse et l’enchantement (Enchantment and Sorrow), the meeting between the author and her younger self is evoked with a compassion familiar to readers of the author’s other works, but exercised here, in her final work, with regard to herself: “I can talk about her without embarrassment. The child that I was

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is as much a stranger to me as I would have been to her if she, at the dawn of life as they say, had been able to see me as I am today. But from birth to death and from death to birth, through remembrance on my part and hopes and dreams on hers, the two of us keep moving closer to a common meeting ground, as the distance between us grows.”1 The impression of strangeness that Roy feels in face of the heroine who embodies her younger self is an indication of the “fictional” dimension of all autobiography. As Louise Dupré points out, the simple fact of projecting oneself into a narrative “I,” without whose existence the book would be a simple testimony, necessarily implies an entry into fiction: “And what is fiction, other than a form one invents for one’s life? For writing is not opposed to reality, it prolongs reality, arranges it, magnifies it.”2 Several of the texts we will examine in these chapters go beyond the limits of traditional autobiography, with its clearly recognizable identification between author, narrator, and protagonist and its implicit pact with the reader guaranteeing the truth of what is recounted, and admit to some extent their fictional character. Some are called “autobiographies,” some simply “stories” or “autobiographical stories,” and still others are called “novels.” But all contain infratextual signs (dates, precise places, proper names, or mentions of historical events) which anchor them clearly in the lived experience of the author as it can be verified outside the text. Even Claire Martin’s autobiography, in spite of the author’s insistence on the accuracy of her memory and the “truth” of what she is recounting, is necessarily a reconstruction of lived events, whose impact depends on formal aspects of the work like the quality of the author’s writing, the emotion communicated to the reader, and the suspense the author imparts to the telling of her tale. Other autobiographies are more explicit about containing a fictional dimension. In the prefatory note to her autobiography, Ce fauve, le bonheur, Denise Desautels explains the liberating effect of this “fictional” dimension she felt the need of conferring on her text: I began this story as if I were writing an autobiography. The heroine was me. At least, that was what I believed, and it terrified me. The useless concern with truth, the doubts that assailed me with every word, all of these things militated against the continuation of this project. I quickly understood that only the pleasure of the text, with its advances, retreats, and reversals, could put into movement the obsession that runs through the story. To face up to Happiness with all its cunning, I had to have recourse to vital forces, deliberately fictional, thanks to which another truth, lighter than the first one, would have a chance of emerging.3

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Echoing Gabrielle Roy, she evokes the “familiar strangeness” she experiences in relation to her heroine, a strangeness “linked to the very pleasure of reading.”4 The final chapter will be devoted to “autofiction,” a hybrid genre which plays on the ambiguity created by the inevitable mixture of “true” and “fictional” elements in autobiography, and to the works of one of its most brilliant practitioners, Nelly Arcan. Tragically, these works, which give voice to the identity questions of contemporary young women, do not succeed in advancing the quest for self we have seen in earlier autobiographies. On the contrary, their narrators, despite their lucidity, exhibit a need for self-destruction which seems like the triumph of all the negative elements against which their predecessors were struggling. In a sad irony, Arcan’s work recalls that of Marie de l’Incarnation, by a need for transcendence which, deprived of an object, turns against itself in an expression of pure nihilism. While the seventeenth-century mystic was, paradoxically, grounded in her body throughout her life, we shall see that Arcan, imprisoned in her female body, became more and more obsessed with a sense of being “disincarnated,” or cut off from her body, in the years before her self-imposed death at the age of thirty-six.

C h ap t e r 8

Cla i re M ar ti n : T he C oura ge of t he Au to bi o g r a p hi cal “I”

The publication of Claire Martin’s autobiography Dans un gant de fer (In an Iron Glove),1 in 1965, more than three centuries after Marie de l’Incarnation’s spiritual autobiography, marks the move of women’s personal writings into the public sphere, at the precise moment when Quebec culture as a whole was freeing itself from its restrictive past through the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. A worthy inheritor of Élisabeth Bégon by her acerbic comments on her society, of Henriette Dessaulles by her revelations about the convent school world, and of Joséphine Marchand by her feminist critique of education and women’s position in society, Claire Martin produced with In an Iron Glove the first explicitly feminist work in Quebec literature. As mentioned in the introduction, autobiography as a literary genre begins at the moment when the concept of the individual appears in Western culture, and in traditional French Canada the possibilities for individual self-expression were extremely limited, especially for women. It is precisely this erasure of individuality, achieved through a pedagogy which punished all manifestations of the child’s singularity, that Claire Martin denounces in her autobiography. A scene in the book describing the author’s earliest traumatic memory suggests that, at least unconsciously, the idea of individuality dominates her psychic landscape. The scene takes place on a Sunday morning when Claire, only three and a half years old, and her older brother André are at home with their father while their mother and sisters are at Mass. Always subject to irrepressible giggles, Claire gets carried away with laughter when her brother uses a word she has never heard before, and which she finds comical. “My father never took laughter for anything but a symptom of lewdness. And we had all been suspected of dirty-mindedness from the cradle up. Though we laughed very seldom, it was still too much, if you consider the dangers

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it exposed us to,” recalls the narrator (24). What follows is a disproportionate punishment which will remain forever engraved in the author’s memory, her first experience of her father’s violence: “It began with openhanded blows which immediately became very heavy, then, getting into the swing of it, blows with the closed fist, and if he got really swinging he would finish off with kicks that sent us skidding from one room to the next all through the downstairs” (25). What is interesting for our purposes is the word which provoked Claire’s peals of laughter: it was the word “individual.” A stinging commentary on a milieu and an epoch, In an Iron Glove is also a work of art in which, through the power of the author’s writing, an individual drama attains universal proportions. In it, Claire Martin tells the story of her childhood in a family dominated by a sadistic and violent father, living in an isolated and badly heated house a few kilometres from Quebec City. The work also contains an exposé of the education she received in convent school, at the hands of nuns whose mediocrity and lack of intelligence were matched only by their cruelty. One of the important works of the Quiet Revolution years, the book exorcised a past that was still fresh in the collective memory and denounced a system of which many of its readers had themselves been victims. The dates in brackets at the end of the volume (April 1957–August 1965) indicate that the book was gestating during the eight years in which Claire Martin was establishing a reputation as a novelist and short story writer – a consummate stylist and an irreverent critic of her society, especially regarding its treatment of women.2 In a 1979 interview, she claims that she put off working on the book because she sensed in the 1950s that the time was not yet ripe for the revelations she was preparing to make: “It was the time for me to write [my memoirs] and I was ready to do it. I’d been preparing them for years. But I didn’t want to publish them before people were ready to accept what I was saying, and in 1959–60 it would have been too early. They would have upset so many people that the book would have gone nowhere.”3 The numerous personal letters received by the author and stored in Fonds Claire Martin at Library and Archives Canada4 testify to the liberating effect of the book for hundreds of readers, especially women, many of whom corroborate what the author says about the education of girls. “I started primary school about twenty years after the period you described, but I can assure you that things hadn’t changed; I think they had even gotten worse,” writes one correspondent. Another, ten years younger than the author, writes: “In an Iron Glove revived in me the cinders of a past that I thought had completely gone cold, for, like all the women of my generation (40 years old), I spent a great deal of time with

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the ‘sisters’ you describe so well. I observed them being accusatory, spiteful, and sly.” A young woman writes that she was overwhelmed by reading In an Iron Glove because in it she found the explanation of her own mother’s unhappy life. Among the most moving of the letters are those from women who remember being treated as “bad girls” by the nuns, as Claire Martin was. One of them, born five years before the author, reflects on “our convent schools, obsessed by mortal sin, crimes, and little girls who are not good,” adding: “I was one of those girls, and I turned out to be a good woman.” Aut ObiO grAP hy, MeMO irS, WOM en’S Aut O biO grAPhieS

When In an Iron Glove was published, most critics referred to the book as “memoirs”; today, we would be more likely to call it an autobiography. Is “autobiography” the proper term for this account of the author’s childhood and adolescence, ending when she is in her early twenties? Or would this story, which situates the author’s experience very precisely in the context of women’s lives in early twentieth-century Quebec, be more accurately described as the author’s “memoirs”? According to Philippe Lejeune, autobiography is “a retrospective prose account by a real person of their existence, stressing their individual life, and in particular the story of their personality.”5 In memoirs, on the other hand, “the author is behaving like a witness: his point of view is individual, but the object of his discourse […] goes far beyond the individual; it is the story of the social and historical groups he belongs to.”6 In an Iron Glove belongs to both of these categories, illustrating how interdependent they are and anticipating by a decade the feminist idea that “the personal is political.” However, neither the concept of autobiography nor that of memoirs adequately describes this work in which the gradual accession of the protagonist to freedom is unimaginable without the narrator’s critical observations on the obstacles to that freedom represented by family, convent school, and society in general. Claire’s passage through the violence and sadism of her environment, from her first reaction of terror and astonishment to a succession of emotional states and strategies of survival (cynicism, ruses, lies, emotional paralysis, and, always, rebellion) gives the story its narrative power. And yet, far from insisting on the uniqueness of her situation, Martin draws attention to the representative nature of her experiences, inscribing her own story in that of her moment in history: “It mustn’t be thought that I was the only one persecuted. Almost all of us were, each in turn, and each for her own particular reasons” (68); “Many

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of us who went through the system complain that our minds were left uncultivated. And what about the heart, then, what about the heart?” (69). According to feminist theorists, this sort of fusion between autobiography and memoir is characteristic of the autobiographical writing of women, whose sense of identity is often more relational and less strongly individualized than that of men. Jacques Lecarme and Éliane Lecarme-Tabone note, for example, that “in the nineteenth century, women more often wrote memoirs than autobiographies” and that in their memoirs “the personality of the author often manifests itself solely in the subjectivity of the point of view adopted.” When “real” autobiographies do exist, “women grant more space to the other, not only in the definition of their own identity but on the emotional level.”7 One can almost speak of “intersubjectivity” in describing some of these works, a phenomenon observed by Françoise Kaye in her analysis of In an Iron Glove: “The ‘I’ isn’t abolished in these memoirs. It has in some sense merged with or melted into a collectivity. Claire’s story is also the story of her sisters who appear much less often in the text, who are heard less often, but who have as much presence as the narrator has.”8 t ruth O r fi C tiO n? the C OurAge Of the Aut Obi Ogr APhi C AL “ i”

The nature of the controversy that followed the publication of In an Iron Glove suggests that the troubling aspect of the book was indissociable from the fact that it presented itself as an autobiography rather than a novel. For the first time in three centuries in Quebec, someone – a woman – had dared to say: “This is what I lived and I’m not the only one to have lived it,” and the effect was dramatic, as documented not only by the many personal letters received by the author, but also by the angry discussion which took place about the “truth” of the book’s contents. In the same year, Marie-Claire Blais’s novel, A Season in the Life of Emmanuel,9 which evokes a universe strikingly similar to that of Martin’s book, was unanimously praised by the critics. Each of the books offers a disconcerting portrait of French Canada before the Quiet Revolution, seen from the point of view of a child: a universe of interdiction and religious dogma dominated by a sadism born of the very values of suffering and self-sacrifice propagated in church teachings and in the educational system, whose greatest victims are children. Matriarchal in Blais and patriarchal in Martin, authority is personified in each of the works by an immense and intimidating figure: in Blais’s novel, by the unforgettable Grand-Mère Antoinette, seen from the point of view of her newborn grandson Jean Le

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Maigre; in Martin’s work by the cruel, hypocritical, and ridiculous father who reigns over the universe of the small protagonist like a fairytale ogre. Even this brief description gives an idea of the “literary” aspect of Martin’s autobiography: as many critics and readers noted, In an Iron Glove “reads like a novel.” However, unlike Marie-Claire Blais, who was praised for her dreamlike presentation of a social reality that was vaguely recognizable, Claire Martin was constantly asked to justify her choice of the autobiographical genre and to respond to critics who questioned the accuracy of her portrayal of society. The stormy reception of In an Iron Glove is, in part, an indication of the fact that autobiography was still an unfamiliar genre in the Quebec of the sixties. In the numerous interviews she gave after the book appeared, Martin was often asked why she had not transposed her memories into novel form rather than writing such a disturbing book. In answer, she explained the fundamental difference between the concepts of truth and verisimilitude: “There are things you can say in a novel and others that you can’t say […] What is true is not necessarily the same as what will pass for true. This truth, often hard to believe, belongs in a book like the one I’ve written. In a novel, it wouldn’t have been believable, and I’d have covered it with a veil of modesty.”10 Later, reflecting on the fact that representatives of the publishing house Gallimard were interested in publishing her book in France but wanted to present it as a novel, she comments: “This idea of making it into a novel was ridiculous. It would have made the worst novel ever published in Canada.”11 As a teenager, she had been obliged to lie in order to hide the violence in her family from those around her, and it was unthinkable to her that she would now blur the boundaries between truth and fiction. And yet she would say of her book: “It’s an autobiography, perhaps, but my childhood had an almost fictional character that pleased me as a novelist.”12 Critic Philippe Lejeune offers some guidelines for distinguishing between an autobiography and a novel. In formulating his famous concept of the “autobiographical pact,” he puts into words something that the reader of any autobiography takes for granted: the fact that it involves a “pact” between author and reader guaranteeing the “truth” of the story that is told. Often this pact is made explicit by paratextual signs (a preface, subtitle, dedication, or author’s note) declaring the autobiographical intention of the author.13 Although there are none of these paratextual signs in In an Iron Glove, the book presents itself without ambiguity as a true, referential document: the detailed genealogy of Martin’s ancestors, the precise dates and place names, and the allusions to a wide range of recognizable people and real events anchor the book solidly in historical

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reality. As well, throughout the book the author insists on the accuracy of her memory and the truth of her story: “Blessed with a pitiless memory, I have forgotten nothing” (4); “I am inventing nothing” (198). This does not mean, however, that she is giving a “photographic” representation of her childhood or that she is revealing everything about it; on the contrary, she claims that her childhood was worse than the representation she gave of it in the book: “Everything couldn’t be told, because there were things that were too huge, too raw, because there are moments in life when truth goes beyond what can be imagined.”14 The manuscript of In an Iron Glove contains more than one example of scenes that were eliminated from the final version because they were too painful or too violent to be believable. At one point in the published version, the narrator intervenes ironically in the text to warn the reader that what she is about to reveal about her ignorant and cruel stepmother is true, even though it may seem torn from a fairy tale: Here I pause for a word with the reader. It is extremely unliterary, I know, but I can hear what you’re thinking from here, Dear Reader, and I can’t resist making room for a bit of dialogue. – “You’re not going to throw in a stepmother on top of all the rest?” – “You will have to excuse me, Dear Reader, I don’t wonder that at times you must think I’m laying it on a bit thick, but I can’t help it. Truth is sometimes… et cetera. Yes, as a matter of fact, I am going to throw in a stepmother.” (326–7) Elsewhere, before recounting the painful experiences of her sister, Dine, who was obliged to abandon her studies at the age of fourteen in order to care for her dying mother and her younger siblings, Martin writes: “To tell what the next six months were to be for Dine is no easy task. It seems to come straight out of a third-rate novel. As little as I say, I always seem to be overdoing it. Yet it may well be that I don’t know the whole of it” (91). The “autobiographical pact” of Claire Martin with her readers, so shocking for some and so liberating for others at the time of the book’s publication, may seem of little consequence today. But at a time when autobiography, with its potential for revealing disturbing truths, could have implications for the whole population – and thus required considerable courage – In an Iron Glove carved out a unique place for itself in Quebec literature and culture. By entering into an autobiographical pact with her readers, Claire Martin was making a statement about the right of her fellow citizens to justice: “A child doesn’t just hunger after tenderness, caresses and presents, but justice. And how hungry I’ve been!” (282).

Claire Mar tin • 199 A M iL ieu W ith Out LOve

The opening sentence of In an Iron Glove – “I have forgiven everything” (3) – immediately establishes the narrator’s emotional perspective. After this opening, which is followed by a statement about the pity she now feels for her father in old age (a “wrinkled little creature, shrivelled to half his size, trembling […] deprived now of the cruel strength that had once been both his pride and his master” [4]), the narrator announces that she must now “put aside that pity [in order to] tell things as they were” (4). From this moment on, the book becomes the story of an epic but unequal struggle between the father – gigantic, menacing, and yet ridiculous in his tyranny – and the innocent little girl with the irrepressible laugh, whose only weapons are her intelligence, her cunning, and the awareness of love she has acquired during long stays with her maternal grandparents. The two volumes of the autobiography – The Left Cheek and The Right Cheek – deal, respectively, with the author’s childhood and adolescence. The first covers the period between Claire’s birth and the death of her mother, a month before Claire’s thirteenth birthday. The second follows the stages of Claire’s development at home and at the convent until she is twenty, and ends with the moment of liberation represented by the wedding of her sister Françoise. In the first volume, in spite of Claire’s consciousness of the injustice in her family, her father’s tyranny remains unchallenged. In the second, Claire evolves little by little towards a moral and intellectual independence from her persecutors. Having lost all those who were dear to her – not only her mother, but also her maternal grandparents, and the only one of her teachers to have shown her any compassion – she traverses a long period of dryness and anger, from which she will gradually emerge thanks to the growing and increasingly effective solidarity that links her and her brothers and sisters. As for their father, who lacks the intelligence to outwit his now adolescent children, he appears more and more as an impotent figure and object of scorn. The last lines of the book confirm the victory of the children over their former tyrant: “He went on talking, but nobody was listening” (357). The theme of love and its absence, central to all of Claire Martin’s works, is one of the elements that structure the autobiography, colouring not only the stages of Claire’s evolution but the analysis of her milieu. “In those days, it was pretty difficult to love in this country. It either made people laugh, or set their teeth on edge” (127), recalls the narrator. The tension between love and its opposite (shame, scorn, humiliation) is summed up for her in the contrast between her maternal and paternal grandparents. When Claire stays at her maternal grandparents’ house, she

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is aware of a “climate of love,” in which “there was no shame in speaking from the heart, in weeping freely if what one was saying was sad, or bubbling over if it was gay” (38), while in her paternal grandparents’ home all expressions of love, especially those involving the body, give rise to “embarrassed grimacing.” It is the paternal grandparents, she suggests, who were typical of the French-Canadian milieu of her childhood, whose mentality she sums up as follows: “No body, no heart, and none of the words that name them” (39). It is this sort of Jansenist attitude that Claire encounters everywhere until the end of her adolescence: at home, in the confessional, and at boarding school. Her father and the priests in the parish resemble each other in suspecting children of serious sexual perversions, acts that the children in their innocence are incapable of even imagining. At the convent, the nuns exercise their authority by humiliating their pupils, administering “meticulous and patient tortures” like scrubbing the faces of the girls who had bad marks with a stiff brush dipped in a powerful detergent that left their faces “peeling and oozing blood” (49). Observing the petty and fickle attachments of some of the nuns to their “teachers’ pets,” Claire experiences for the first time the vanities of love, of which she will later, in her novels and short stories, show herself to be a shrewd analyst: “The world of feelings seemed to me to be set up like a vast game organized by insincerity and cunning, a game whose rules you had to learn” (244). On the rare occasions when she encounters exceptions to these rules, Claire is filled with astonishment and gratitude: “It was the first time in that institution that I had encountered a truly human feeling, the presence of a real heart. I was enraptured. A fervent gratitude drove me on in my work, since it was all I had to offer” (84); “Was what had just happened really possible? Were there really sisters who could understand a little girl’s heart, her preferences, her need of reciprocity? I wouldn’t have believed it” (126). Worn out by her misfortunes and by the cruelty that surrounds her, Claire goes through a period of emotional paralysis: “I was almost incapable of feeling any more pain. I was nothing more than a bunch of scars” (161). By showing the effects of this spiritual and intellectual climate through the experiences and reactions of her heroine, Martin goes far beyond simply providing a satirical portrait of her society. As critic Jean-Louis Major wrote to her in a personal letter, her autobiography is, above all, a call for love and a witness to its healing possibilities: Every moment [in your book], no matter how painful or sordid, is illuminated by the beautiful transparency of clear-minded love. For this story, made up primarily of unhappiness and pain, is, more than

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anything, an act of love: a love that shines through every one of your sentences and gives each line its quality of contained emotion, each event its exemplary character and the whole of the book its powerful immediacy. In an Iron Glove is full of the love of life: a love that allows for both the splendid flames of anger and the joys of irony.15 the nA rr At O r And the PrO tAgOniSt

As important in autobiography as the story that is told is the perspective of the author on what she is recounting. The point of view of the author – or, rather, of her spokesperson in the book, the narrator – colours the entire narrative. The “I have forgiven everything” which opens In an Iron Glove determines the perspective and the style of the whole book, transforming material which could have been presented as melodrama or made into an inferior novel into a work which vibrates with wisdom and serenity. In almost every sentence or paragraph, thanks to the ironic smile of the narrator, the traumatic past lived by the child is redeemed by a present in which the values of good sense, reason, and justice are unassailable. Thanks to her talent as a novelist, Martin is able to bring to life the child that she was, capturing her experiences, perceptions, and feelings as they were lived at the time. Rarely has the terror of a child petrified by the power of an adult seeking to humiliate her been depicted as unforgettably as in the scene where six-year-old Claire has to answer a nun who is demanding to know why she did not go to Communion: “My hands were moist and the blood hammered in my ears […] I couldn’t utter a word […] I didn’t have the courage either to tell the truth or to lie. Just enough to keep on standing there, a little outside myself, feeling the way you do just before you faint. Only one thought: It can’t last forever, there’s nothing to do but wait” (77). Often the humour of the text comes from the naiveté of little Claire, who can never figure out what it is she has done wrong when her father or the nuns fly into a rage. But her innocence also has a tragic resonance, as in the scene in the confessional, where she hears with horror, from the mouth of the priest, an enumeration of sexual perversions that are beyond her imagining. The narrator respects the point of view of her small heroine, smiling at her naiveté and her blunders, and, on occasion, offering a retrospective judgment of her actions: “I can’t think of those holidays without remorse. I was truly impossible” (107). Never, however, does she express pity for her, with the result that the reader too feels not pity for the little girl as much as admiration for her rebellion. As well as mediating the story, the narrator is present in the text as a spokesperson for the author at the time of writing. Her serenity and joie

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de vivre are apparent not only in the humour of her presentation of the past, but in her comments on her present situation: “Fate […] has richly compensated me for everything!” (17); “Anger can be corrected. I know that, for at birth I received a good share of the paternal heritage” (35). At times, through the use of expressions like “I understood later” or “If I had known,” she emphasizes her adult perspective on the events of the past. In this respect, the description of her last visit to her dying mother, many of the details of which she admits to having forgotten, is particularly moving: “If I had known, when I was living it, that it was to be the last, it seems to me that I would be able to describe it second by second” (180). At times, she questions the motivations or perceptions of her younger self, asking herself, for example, how it could have been possible that she did not understand that her mother was close to death: “Is it normal that a girl almost thirteen should be so little aware of what’s going on, especially when it’s a question of her own mother’s sickness and approaching death? […] I think that I didn’t want to know” (179–80). In summary, the act of writing her autobiography gives Claire Martin the possibility of examining her life from her present point of view, and even of correcting perceptions she has had of certain events or persons. For example, when reflecting on the period in which she and her brothers and sisters formed a “clan,” united in their opposition to their father, she sees the situation of her father in a new way: “And I sometimes find myself pitying the solitude of this man” (221). Similarly, remembering a nun who persecuted her, she declares: “The poor girl with her South American lake, her dirty Gospels, her singular spellings, and her ignorance of the Templars, she has given me a chapter that I rather like, and in return I forgive her all the slaps she gave me” (159). Even as it constitutes the principal link between the heroine and the narrator, the process of writing completes the transformation of one to the other – a transformation which is also a healing process. It is through writing that the narrator discovers, for example, that, contrary to the memories she has always had of her years in boarding school, all of the nuns were not cruel: “Years had to go by and I had to write this book before I could perceive that from time to time one of them had crossed my path who wasn’t a shrew, who, I would even have to admit, was a really fine person. I’m glad to say that. It warms my heart to discover that I wasn’t always as unhappy as I remember myself being” (242). During her childhood and adolescence, Claire goes through long periods during which, broken by her pain and anger, she is unable to cry; now, reliving these experiences through writing, healing tears come to her eyes. Recalling the letter she wrote to her grandmother after her grandfather’s death, she states: “Today, thirty-five years afterwards, I have tears in

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my eyes as I write this page. That night I wrote three or four, and my eyes were as dry as an ancient desert” (225). As she writes about the humiliations that her stepmother inflicted on her and her siblings, she weeps: “When I try to imagine this scene, I am blinded by tears” (348). A St Ory An Ch Ored i n hiS t O ry

As important as its literary qualities is the historical value of In an Iron Glove, an indispensable document on the first decades of twentiethcentury French Canada (especially in Quebec City). As a background to the narrator’s memories, we see the evolution of Quebec society from the First World War to the end of the Depression years, including decisive moments like the end of the war (marked in Claire’s family by an evening as lugubrious as all the others), but also objects, technologies, and fashions. Among Claire’s earliest memories is that of her grandparents’ telephone, easy to use even for a three year old: “First there was the telephone lady you gave your number to, and then the number was never more than three digits long” (17). She also recalls the “paper twenty-five cents” that her grandfather gave her, and that the nuns tried to force her to put in the bank of contributions destined for the charity The Holy Childhood (67); the Quebec City streetcar which, “coming down from l’Avenue des Érables, ran along la Grande Allée, la rue Saint-Louis, la Côte de la Fabrique, then down to la rue Saint-Jean where Grandmother and Grandfather lived” (70); her Aunt Berthe’s living room in Quebec, “very, very 1925, in what was called flapper style: dark as the devil’s den, hung with navy blue wallpaper brightened a little by a sparse orange design, stuffed with cushions” (181). In about 1930, her father buys one of the first radios of the period, equipped with a key allowing him to prevent other members of the family from using it (176). The narrator also evokes the Eaton’s catalogues from which she and her sisters ordered their clothes (222), the popularity in the 1930s of French songs and cinema, two areas in which, before that time, “Quebeckers […] were Americanized to the marrow – much more than they are now, you have no idea” (289), and, finally, the misery of large segments of the population during the Depression and the stock market crash of 1929, which allowed her father to get rich by acquiring properties at a low price. Several of the author’s memories are related to her life at boarding school and the Catholic atmosphere of her childhood: the “I give my heart to God” prayer recited by the boarders on awakening (105); the many hours devoted to the study of English at the Ursuline convent (82); the red-covered books, from the publisher Mame et fils in Paris, given as

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prizes at the end of the school year. Once a year, on 31 May, during the celebrations marking the end of the month of Mary, the boarders have permission to enter the Ursulines’ garden, of which Marie de l’Incarnation herself had spoken in her letters:16 “a garden full of fruit trees and flowers and raked gravel paths which has left a wonderful memory” (102). She also evokes the church decree of 1923 forbidding dancing in the diocese of Quebec, to which the faithful responded by announcing they would go and dance in Montreal (89); the popular retreats for men preached by Father Lelièvre in Saint-Sauveur parish (216); the New Year’s blessing (210); the family rosary recited every evening (186); the annual pilgrimage of the family to the shrine at Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré (233); and the young French-Canadian candidate for canonization Gérard Raymond, who was very popular in the 1930s (313). More than simple historical facts, many of these concrete details provide the basis for an analysis and critique of the narrow-mindedness encouraged by the institutions of the period. In the family, no questioning of the rules, the madcap ideas, or the violence of the father is permitted: “That’s the main reason I hated him so, because of that terrified silence he reduced us to, that cowardice he plunged us into, just as deeply and for as long as he wanted” (262). At the convent (especially at the “second convent” – that of the sisters of the Congrégation de NotreDame in Beauport, where Claire was a boarder after her years with the Ursulines), one of the teachers accuses her of “wasting [her] time reading” (151). Language itself is seen as a terrain full of dangers: instead of “Q” (a sound which in French is identical to a vulgar word), the students are made to say “que”; Pope Pius VII is called “Pius, the seventh in name” for similar reasons; and the name of Lake Titicaca is replaced by “Titicana” (144). “What are you looking for in the dictionary? Dirty words?” one of the nuns asks Claire (143). Not only does such an education fail to transmit essential knowledge to the students, but, notes the narrator, it actively teaches them not to think: “Thought! Poor me! […] Shortly after I left the convent, I perceived that I knew nothing, that I wasn’t aware of anything, that I couldn’t have named a great writer later than Victor Hugo, that I didn’t know how to go about discovering what I needed to know” (297). At twenty-five, she admits, she was “fascist and anti-semitic” (296), the almost inevitable result of an education which failed to teach her how to think for herself: “There were quite a few of us who hadn’t the least idea where we were going. To the right, to the left, any old way […] Like sheep, we always believed the last person to speak” (296). Such a state of ignorance is part of the logic of a system of thought centred on the divine and ignoring the human: “Headed straight for eternity, face to face with God,

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no one else around, a little object in transit, I really didn’t need to know anything, all I needed was to be a bigot” (298). the SAd L iv e S Of WOMe n

Reflecting on the passivity and need for self-sacrifice which led her mother, on the advice of a priest, not only to marry her father (already a widower and father of a six-year-old boy), but to stay in a marriage where she was physically abused, the author lists several factors which contributed to the suffocating atmosphere of the period: the final years of the Victorian era, puritan attitudes from the United States, the arrival in early twentieth-century Quebec of extremely conservative priests and nuns from France after the adoption of the law which secularized the French educational system in 1905. And, she might have added, the increasingly conservative nature of Ultramontane French-Canadian Catholicism after the reign of the powerful bishop Ignace Bourget in Montreal. Surrounded by all of these repressive tendencies, women – the cornerstone of the patriarchal edifice – were their greatest victims: I know the women of that generation all too well. In them, timidity, apprehension, the inability to face life, a fear of the world and of the hereafter reached a pinnacle. In earlier days, women, city women at least, still breathed a little of that fresh air that circulated before the Victorian era. Grandmother, her sisters and sisters-in-law, though quite estranged from the spirit of Voltaire, were much more daring than Mother ever was. Their own grandmothers, to judge by the anecdotes I heard about them, were even more so. At the other end of the scale, my generation began to throw off the yoke. My poor mother and her contemporaries lived through what was really the most suffocating stage of the feminine adventure. (6) The rage and insistence on justice for women which animate almost every page of In an Iron Glove are rooted in the indignation felt by Claire Martin from a young age regarding the fate of her mother, “a sacrificed woman […] chronically terrified by all the bugaboos of the age [and] persuaded that no woman has the right to escape the task that heaven requires of her devotion” (7). As an adolescent, Claire is scandalized to learn that she owes her life to “a brief moment of pleasure taken from a poor, sick, frightened woman, reduced to the state of an object, used and kicked aside afterwards” (274). The home, the parish, and the convent reinforce the contemptuous and guilt-inducing attitudes to

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women which underlie male domination. A woman who leaves her husband is responsible for all the sins that his solitude may lead him into, Claire’s mother is told when she dares to return to her parents’ house with the children for two years (20). According to Claire’s father, “women shouldn’t read. That was an occupation that should remain strictly masculine. If you let women read they risk, first, imagining that they understand, and second, concluding that they have brains in their heads. Whereas women have nothing in their heads” (149). The cleaning woman, a mother of six children, tells Claire tearfully that the priest has refused her permission to have a hysterectomy, even though her doctor has said she will risk her life if she has another baby. This was the period – and not only in Quebec – when Catholic doctrine decreed that in a difficult birth the life of the child must take precedence over that of the mother: “God didn’t invent operations, and someone else could have brought up the children,” the priest says blithely. For Claire, stories like these are a nightmarish initiation into the woman’s life that awaits her: “I could only tremble with fear at the thought of my female condition, and wish the curé was dead” (260). Among the rare reading materials permitted in Claire’s family are the Annals of the Good Saint Anne, a monthly publication put out by the Sanctuary of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré. The letters column of the magazine offers Claire and her sisters other examples of the sad lives of women: “Sounds like a gay future for us!” (295). These letters are also examples of the power of the Church over women, most of whom seem to accept the advice given by the priest with docility: “The thought of the millions of women who had bowed to this frightful fate for centuries, and would for centuries to come, made me boil with rage. I couldn’t see why those idiotic women would take the trouble to write to the Annals just for the confirmation of a death sentence they had been labouring under so long already. Were there really that many people who believed in the truth of such a crippling system?” (295). At the convent, the boarders are taught by the nuns that menstrual periods and other signs of puberty are punishments from God: “We were so used to being ashamed of our bodies, to thinking that every last thing that happened to them was a punishment for some unknown crime, that even the growth of a single hair disturbed us greatly. When I first noticed them growing in my armpits and pubes, I was overcome with despair. What could I have been doing?” (141). The sole aim of the education of girls, according to the narrator, was “to make us servile, pious, resigned and prudish” (297). The idea of university education for women led to interminable discussions about “the feminine vocation,” in which there

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was “one point on which everyone agreed: marriage just wasn’t possible for such a girl. Never, never, never would any man on Quebec soil wish to marry this bluestocking” (299). Having revisited the situation of women through the lens of her own experience, the narrator provides the following description of how “the feminine vocation” was envisaged in her youth: “We had no right to knowledge, either general or specialized. But yearly maternities, sleepless nights and dreary days, nursing children, washing, cooking, finished off with eclampsia or puerperal fever – no objection to that. Feminine vocation” (299). the t WO “MA dAMe MArtinS”

As we have noted, there were no true autobiographies – no works exhibiting the self-possession, clear-mindedness, and writing ability required to impose a narrative coherence on one’s life – between those of Marie de l’Incarnation and Claire Martin. By a strange coincidence, these two women had the same family name: Marie Guyart de l’Incarnation because, before entering the Ursulines in 1631, she was the wife and later the widow of the silk merchant Claude Martin, and Claire Martin (born Claire Montreuil and, after marriage, known as Mme Roland Faucher), because, when she began publishing in 1957, she adopted the family name of her mother, Martin. Even more important, the role of the convent of the Ursulines in Quebec City is central in both autobiographies. As we have seen, this convent, founded by Marie de l’Incarnation in 1639, appears in Claire Martin’s autobiography as a symbol of the stupidities and injustice of an entire culture built on the denial of individual freedom (and therefore of the possibility of autobiographical expression). One cannot help wondering what personal and cultural factors contributed to the emergence of these two works, while so many women’s voices remained silent. What pushed these women to write, and what inner reserves of strength allowed them to resist the pressures of censorship and self-censorship exercised by the institutions of their time? In each of the two, the words on the page seem to come from an inner need of expression awakened by the exceptional character of what they experienced – in the case of Marie de l’Incarnation, mystical experiences of great intensity and import; in Claire Martin’s, the horrors of a brutalized childhood. Although autobiographies are eminently subjective constructions and cannot be seen as primary historical sources, these works reveal with remarkable clarity the essential truth of the historical moments marking the beginning and the end of the long period in which Catholicism was the predominant force in French-Canadian culture.

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While the life and writings of Marie de l’Incarntion were exemplary, she nevertheless shared the values – a mixture of common sense, optimism, and mystical aspirations – of the other nuns who came to New France. Three centuries later, Claire Martin’s autobiography lifts the veil on a petrified culture, in which the source of divine love that energized these nuns has dried up, replaced by a stifling atmosphere of rigidity, conformity, and hypocrisy. And it is in the very heart of the Ursuline convent that the young Claire Martin experiences the sadism and narrowmindedness that are symptoms of this spiritual asphyxiation. “When I look back on all those wretched years, I realize that the thing that was lacking in our convents was kindness,” she writes (99). Twice in her autobiography, with her usual humour, Claire Martin alludes to Marie de l’Incarnation or to the convent of the Ursulines as it existed at the time of the foundress. Describing the daily schedule of the young boarders, she implies that it had not changed since the seventeenth century: “We were put to bed when we weren’t sleepy and had to get up before we had slept enough […] The girls of 1660 had followed the schedule, and nowhere in the convent archives was there any record of their having suffered from it. Naturally enough, when you’ve always got the Iroquois on your heels, dawn doesn’t come any too early. Nothing better than to be in a vertical position. But we, who were not threatened by anything […] would gladly have foregone being wrenched out of our sleep by a great jangling bell” (75). As for the attitudes of the Ursulines of the 1920s to their foundress, a tragicomic story illustrates the impoverished mentality of the time. Needing a miracle to bolster the cause of Marie de l’Incarnation’s beatification, the nuns choose a disabled pupil and announce that all the prayers and devotions of the year will be dedicated to obtaining a cure for her from the foundress: “She was radiant. One morning she would wake up with both legs the same size, there wasn’t the slightest doubt about it. Prayers began immediately” (105). Unfortunately, at the end of the year no miracle has taken place: “We multiplied our prayers and promises, in vain. Nothing happened. The venerable foundress remained insensitive, and little by little Jeanne lost her smile. The month of June found her just as she had come to us in September. All she had got out of it was not having had a single day without hearing her infirmity talked about […] Every step she took was a deep disappointment, incessantly renewed, both for herself and for the whole convent” (106). Between these two great autobiographies, each of which sums up the mental and moral atmosphere of its era, something has clearly happened – a hardening, or perhaps a fatigue or fear which led to narrow-mindedness and the tyranny of the strong over the weak, especially women and

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children. However, as little Claire discovered early on regarding her father’s power over her, “all tyrants suffer from a common weakness in their systems: they cannot prevent those they tyrannize over from thinking” (22). Nor, fortunately for readers, can they prevent them from writing.

C h ap t er 9

Gro wi n g U p Poor i n M ont real , 1 9 3 0 – 1960: Li s e Pa y e t t e , France T héoret , D e n i s e B om b ardi e r, M arcel l e B ri sson, a n d A dè le L auz on It isn’t easy to carry one’s projects to conclusion. How many times have I been told I was ambitious? I never believed I was born for a small piece of bread. I was naïve enough to believe that I wasn’t underprivileged, even if I was born in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve part of Montreal. France Théoret, Journal pour mémoire

In Gabrielle Roy’s novel Bonheur d’occasion (The Tin Flute), published in 1945, critics and readers have rightly seen an unflinching but compassionate portrait of the inhabitants of the impoverished Montreal neighbourhood of Saint-Henri during the Second World War. For the first time in Quebec literature, there was a work that seemed to give voice to the poor, particularly to girls and women, and to present their perspectives on reality. However, a reading of autobiographical accounts by women who grew up in poor areas of Montreal during those years – several of them in Saint-Henri itself – provides a more complex portrait of the experience of poverty as lived by girls and women. Li Se PAyette : A n ALternAtive viSi On O f SA int-he nri

For the future television personality and cabinet minister Lise Payette, then a fourteen-year-old girl growing up in Saint-Henri, reading Bonheur d’occasion in 1945 was the first major blow to her self-confidence, a “cultural shock” that “almost killed” her and from which it took her a long time to recover. In the first volume of her memoirs, Des femmes d’honneur: Une vie privée, 1931–1968, Payette states that she never forgave

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Gabrielle Roy for writing that novel. She reveals that, during the many years in which she hosted the popular television show Appelez-moi Lise, she never attempted to interview the novelist, and that later, when she was a minister in the cabinet of René Lévesque and lived in Quebec, she was often tempted to go and knock on Roy’s door and explain to the author all the harm the novel had done to her as an adolescent. This harm, she writes, consisted in making her see her own life from the outside and in confronting her with the idea that poverty was an interminable and repetitive cycle from which escape was almost unimaginable: I saw my life and my world and I saw us as if in a mirror through her characters […] I looked around me through her eyes. I saw us poor, insignificant, lacking in ambition and culture, born for a small piece of bread and incapable of escaping our fate, repeating the same gestures and the same errors from generation to generation. I was wounded in the depths of my self. I saw us as lazy, satisfied with little and not wishing for anything else […] I was ashamed. Ashamed to be who I was, ashamed of being from Saint-Henri, ashamed as well of having worn stockings with runs in them, like her heroine with whom I identified. I felt like an animal caught in the headlights of a car. (67–8) What made Roy’s novel offensive for Payette was its lack of correspondence with the details of her own life in Saint-Henri, in which the experience of material poverty did not exclude a strong sense of pride in her maternal, working-class heritage and a rich cultural life that included movies, theatrical events like Gratien Gélinas’s Fridolinades, and enthusiastic participation in the lively culture of 1940s radioromans, whose star system included actors like Muriel Guilbault, Pierre Dagenais, Huguette Oligny, and Guy Mauffette, all of whom would leave their mark on Quebec theatre and radio. Saint-Henri was a “tough” neighbourhood in the 1940s and ’50s, to the extent that Payette’s father, in order to safeguard his daughters’ “virtue” (as well as his own philandering lifestyle) rented a cottage at Lac-des-Deux-Montagnes every summer, where he deposited his wife and daughters at the end of June and returned to pick them up in September. But it was also a neighbourhood where there was a strong sense of community, especially among young people. Among Payette’s memories are Saturday night parties, with slow dancing and games of spin-the-bottle, that went on until six in the morning when the young people (like those in The Tin Flute) would go off to Sunday Mass together, and ritual battles in Selby Park between the boys of Saint-Henri and the

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anglophone boys from Westmount, which Lise always attended to cheer on her friends. To help pay for her studies with the Sisters of Saint Anne, she works on weekends behind the soda counter at the Five and Ten (like Roy’s Florentine Lacasse). By the end of her high-school years, she and her friends have begun to organize for a Saint-Henri young people’s centre, “a cultural space all for us, where we would be able to listen to classical music and opera, discuss the latest books, and even have a ciné-club” (92– 3). As well, she has become her school’s representative in the progressive Jeunesses étudiantes catholiques, where she will meet Gérard Pelletier, Jeanne Sauvé, and other future leaders of Quebec and Canadian society. In sum, in spite of her poverty, what Payette remembers about SaintHenri is a sense of community and possibility: the joy and fun of being young, the discovery of classical music, theatre, and literature, a healthy and comfortable relationship between adolescent boys and girls, and a strong sense of pride, confidence, and family instilled in her by her mother and grandmother. Small wonder, then, that, like many others in Saint-Henri in 1945, she cannot forgive Gabrielle Roy for putting her vision of Saint-Henri’s poverty on display for the outside world. •  •  • The five works we will examine in this chapter evoke the physical and psychological realities of poverty as lived by young women who grew up in Montreal in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Three of them – Payette’s Des femmes d’honneur, Marcelle Brisson’s Le roman vrai, and Adèle Lauzon’s Pas si tranquille: Souvenirs – are memoirs; the two others – Denise Bombardier’s Une enfance à l’eau bénite and France Théoret’s Une belle éducation (Such a Good Education1) –  are autobiographical novels. Although poverty is linked to social class in all these works, it is perceived and lived differently in each of them. Unlike Lise Payette, who experiences poverty with pride, Denise Bombardier experiences it with shame and dreams constantly of escaping it. For Adèle Lauzon, poverty gives rise to a rebellious spirit and a struggle for social justice, while for France Théoret it is a paralyzing force: the day-to-day experience of belonging to a group which cruelly stigmatizes anyone – particularly any girl – who dares to aspire to a life beyond its narrow confines. For Marcelle Brisson, poverty is the shared experience of many who lived through the Depression years: an unemployed father, annual moves because the family can no longer afford to pay the rent, and the recurring spectacle of men lining up to get their social assistance cheques. In each of the works, poverty and social class are linked to other factors

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which define the identity of the authors: being a girl in a culture where gender roles are strictly defined and maintained, but also that of being francophone and Catholic in a city where power and money belong to anglophone Canadians. A final factor, common to all the authors and perhaps the key one in their journeys toward individuation, is the fact that each is the eldest child in her family. The autobiographies analyzed here challenge several stereotypes of poverty and life in French Canada in the three decades before the Quiet Revolution, and the distinctiveness of the voices within them shows that growing up in poverty is an individual experience, strongly influenced by culture, politics, gender, and family background. In the history of women’s personal writings in Quebec, they are the first examples of life writing by nonbourgeois women, speaking of the experiences of groups like the poor and unemployed of the Depression years or the francophone workers who tried to make a living at a time when English was the language of work in Montreal. The authors are among the many children from these milieux who became contributors to and benefactors of the Quiet Revolution. Three of the authors – Lise Payette, Denise Bombardier, and Adèle Lauzon – became journalists in print or on television after 1960. Marcelle Brisson, after twelve years as a cloistered nun, became a professor of philosophy, while France Théoret is a poet and novelist. All five grew up in what were then working-class areas of Montreal: HochelagaMaisonneuve, Saint-Henri, Parc-Extension, and the northern parts of the city. The works by Payette, Lauzon, and Théoret are wholly or partly situated in Saint-Henri, and the striking contrasts in their representations of the area owe as much to differences in family background as to changes which took place in Saint-Henri over the decades. Lise Payette and Adèle Lauzon were both born in Saint-Henri in 1931, but Lauzon’s memoir begins when she is eight or nine and her parents, in a change of social status that dramatically illustrates the class mobility of the period, moved to the neighbouring district of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce and enrolled their daughter in the upper-class convent school of Villa Maria. Théoret, born in 1942 in the district of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, moved with her family to Saint-Henri in 1956, at the age of fourteen. Her novel, which is clearly autobiographical, begins with the arrival of her protagonist Évelyne’s family in Saint-Henri in 1956, when Évelyne is also fourteen. As for Denise Bombardier, born in 1941, she grew up in the multiethnic neighbourhood of Parc-Extension, north of the Plateau Mont-Royal. Marcelle Brisson, born in 1929, lived in several different lodgings with her family in the area farther north, near Parc Jarry and Avenue Christophe-Colomb.

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•  •  • At the beginning of her essay, Remnants of Nation, an important work on women’s poverty narratives, Roxanne Rimstead cites Paulo Friere’s reflection that the poor must find a way to value their own thoughts about the world over and against the dominant cultural discourses they have often internalized.2 In pre–Quiet Revolution Quebec, the idea that poverty was the divinely decreed lot of the French-Canadian people was frequently repeated from the pulpit and passed on from generation to generation in a sort of folk wisdom of patience and resignation: On est nés pour un petit pain, “We were born for a small piece of bread.” In Denise Bombardier’s Une enfance à l’eau bénite, this idea is articulated by the father, with a profound self-hatred with which his daughter must come to terms before she can acquire a sense of confidence in her own perceptions of herself and of the world. A frustrated and cynical hydroelectric technician who works for an English employer, he constantly reminds his family that “the English are our masters” and shows his contempt for his compatriots by referring to them as “Culbécquois.” Bombardier’s hilarious account of the alcohol-fuelled trips her dysfunctional family would occasionally make around Montreal in her aunt’s car provides an economic map of Montreal and of the cultural associations attached to different levels of wealth. As they ogle at the houses of the anglophone nouveaux riches of Ville MontRoyal with their picture windows and impeccably manicured lawns, the aunt observes: “They’re rich but they look stupid” (118). In Outremont, little Denise discovers that there are people of her “race” who are as rich as the English, but is shocked by her aunt’s second-hand gossip about their immorality. In Westmount, her father contemptuously explains that the owners of the mansions they are driving by also own all the forests, mines, and lakes of the province: “Duplessis, the premier, gives them the whole province and you, the ‘Culbéquois,’ continue to elect him.” And he goes on: “Keep speaking ‘culbéquois.’ Keep learning the catechism. The English are happy. You’re playing into their hands” (120). Finally they go down the mountain and across the railway tracks into Saint-Henri, where the father tells them: “This is where you belong. This is what French Canadians are like! Look how happy they are on their balconies with a cross on their neck and a dozen children in the house!” (120). Autobiographies can confirm the stereotypes we have of a culture (although they always add complexity to them), and two of the works examined here –  those of Lise Payette and Denise Bombardier – do indeed reinforce the familiar image of the French-Canadian family centered around a strong mother, with a weak, irresponsible, negative, or

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absent father. In Théoret’s novel, the father is, on the contrary, too present: a grocer and later owner of a sleazy hotel-restaurant north of Montreal, he obliges his children to work as “slaves” in his establishments and watches them closely in the hours they spend at home. Only Marcelle Brisson and Adèle Lauzon have positive memories of their father and recognize the importance of his influence on their life choices. Nonetheless, in all the autobiographies, it is the father who controls the purse strings. Claire Martin’s In an Iron Glove, which contains a heart-breaking scene describing the terror of Claire’s mother when she must ask her husband for money,3 offers the prototype of this recurring model, which is even present in Marcelle Brisson’s work, despite the fact that it is the author’s mother who supports the family by gambling, while her husband is unemployed. In Des femmes d’honneur, Lise Payette reveals that her father gambled away his entire weekly salary during the night her mother was giving birth to Lise, her first child. A delivery man and later a bus driver, he gives his wife a small amount of money each week, out of which she must pay the rent, food, electricity, heat, and clothing bills. Payette’s memories of poverty are not memories of deprivation, however, thanks to the optimism and strength of her mother and her maternal grandmother. “When the cupboards were empty, we went to eat at my grandmother Marie-Louise’s place, where the door was always open” (23). When the electricity is cut off because she cannot pay the bill, Lise’s mother puts a candle on the table and serves her daughters pancakes with molasses or French toast, “and for us those meals were transformed into celebrations” (23). Although she had worked as a secretary before marriage, her mother chooses, as her own mother had done, to work as a cleaning woman in the houses of Westmount so she can be at home when her daughters return from school. However, like grandmother Marie-Louise, she works only for francophone families, claiming that she can accept taking orders if necessary, but only if they are given in French! fr AnC e th ÉO ret: the trAP Of POverty

The striking contrast between Payette’s representation of poverty and that of France Théoret, who lived in Saint-Henri a decade after Payette and attended the same high school as she had, suggests that poverty is a relative condition, not entirely reducible to economic circumstances, and that it can be most oppressive when those who are condemned to it actively perpetuate its rules and injustices. Une belle éducation (Such a Good Education) is a stark and uncompromising evocation of the absolute desolation of poverty, paradoxically beautiful in its precision and

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unsentimentality. The main section of the novel covers the period from the arrival of the family in Saint-Henri in 1954 to the end of the protagonist Évelyne’s high school studies in June 1958, when she moves with her family to Saint-Colomban, a village in the Laurentians, where her father has bought a seedy hotel and bar. Two subsequent sections bring the book to its conclusion: in the first, set in June 1968, we see Évelyne at the end of her university studies and in the second, situated in October 1985, we learn that she has become a writer. For those who are familiar with the recurrent images of Théoret’s previous work – the young girl listening with terror to the rats behind the walls of her bedroom, the tyrannical father enraged by the fact that his daughter is studying Latin, the almost mad mother who emerges from the bathroom after a miscarriage and, without a word of explanation, brutally asks her daughter, “Do you want to see the fetus?” – the autobiographical nature of Such a Good Education leaves no room for doubt. The omnipresent reality of poverty in the work creates a claustrophobic, silent, and paralyzed universe, shot through with repressed rage and hostility: a moral and psychological prison which mirrors the oppressive ugliness of the material conditions in which the characters live. The tiny, dark, rat-infested house they inhabit is bare of ornament and cut off from the community by the mother’s decree that the front door be permanently locked and that there be no contact with the neighbours. When her daughters begin to develop friendships at school, their mother tells them they do not need friends, that all the teenagers of the neighbourhood are “juvenile delinquents” who will end up in reform school, and that their proper role is to stay at home and obey their parents. In an earlier, explicitly autobiographical work, Journal pour mémoire,4 Théoret speaks of the intense need for beauty she felt as an adolescent and the painful, almost unbearable sense of deprivation caused by the lack of beauty in her surroundings: “I was captivated, I had the cult of beauty […] I couldn’t live without it. My desire for it was so great that reality seemed sad and painful to me […] Beauty was a lifting of my shadow, my portion of unlivable eternity, the image that I disappeared into.” From its first sentence on, Such a Good Education immerses the reader in a similar atmosphere: “The moment we arrive I notice how bare the street is and that there are no trees” (3). Ugliness shows itself brutally in the two-storey lodging Évelyne’s father has rented without even consulting his wife: in the basement, a kitchen lit by a bare light bulb where no daylight penetrates, a living room area in which they install a television and a rickety sofa bed, and an oil furnace with pipes extending to the ceiling; on the main floor, bedrooms without doors, and a toilet. From the perspective

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of the hypersensitive Évelyne the reader experiences the humiliation of such a lack of privacy: the need to wash in front of everyone in the kitchen sink, with cold water; the impossibility of getting away from her parents’ constant arguments about money; the unpleasant odours; the regular appearance of huge rats which her younger brothers, in a rage and need for violence they will carry with them for life, catch and hurl against the brick wall in the asphalt courtyard behind the house. Despite the precarious financial situation of his family, Évelyne’s father does not see himself as poor. On the contrary, he considers himself a member of the middle class. Obsessed by money, he fanatically espouses capitalist ideology: “Money is the true indicator of intelligence […] He is not one of the losers, he is a winner […] He is after a success story, he has an American soul, he believes in business […] My father compares commerce to conquest” (68). He has chosen to move his family to SaintHenri because he believes there is more money to be made in a “poor neighbourhood,” where people have less choice as to where they shop for the necessities. Obese and constantly complaining, he spends his time in front of the television and barely speaks to his children. His anger is particularly directed at his eldest daughter Évelyne, whose intelligence and timidity he resents, and whom he constantly reproaches for her refusal to work in his store. Évelyne’s mother is equally authoritarian, silent, and full of repressed anger. Proclaiming her hatred of the “dark, smelly and cold” apartment in which she is forced to live, she refuses to cook, clean, do the washing, or put curtains on the windows. In spite of her parents’ middle-class aspirations, Évelyne’s life as she enters her high-school years is one of poverty and unremitting duty: returning home at lunchtime every day to heat up canned food for her younger brothers, who have already learned to laugh at her and taunt her with the word “servant”; putting up with the unpleasant smells and the filth of the house, grabbing a quick half hour at the kitchen table to do her Latin homework, and admiring the fashionable clothes she sees in the boutiques on Rue Notre-Dame without any hope of acquiring them. All of this becomes “a habit, a way of being. I cannot imagine it being any different […] I am learning to want only what I have” (36–7). Like Florentine Lacasse in The Tin Flute, although more consciously, she sees herself repeating the destiny of her mother: “My mother’s voice traverses my ear, deposits in me the idea that life is unhappy, that women are inevitably subject to their husbands’ authority, that they give themselves up to be of service to others” (21).5 Like many of the other mothers in Quebec women’s autobiographies, Évelyne’s is a controlling and intimidating figure. Forbidding all

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conversation at the dinner table, she insists on good table manners and total obedience, reminding her children on the rare occasions the family goes to visit relatives that she has given them “a good education” and that they must not disgrace her. It is against this education in submissiveness, strongly reinforced by the nuns at school, that Évelyne’s arduous struggle to acquire an autonomous identity is set. Faithful to an “inner voice” that whispers to her that the only way out for her is through “learning,” she embarks on a tenacious, step-by-step construction of self that will eventually take her to university, in spite of the opposition of her parents and the need to live in conditions of extreme poverty, which she hides from her fellow students. Although her university degrees will open the doors to the middle class for her, she will never forget the poverty which has defined her existence. Once she has embarked on her career as a writer, she vows to be true, in everything she writes, to its reality and its devastating consequences. deni S e bOM bA rdier : Se e ing One Se Lf AS e XCePt i OnAL

While Lise Payette almost breezes through poverty, strengthened by the pride instilled in her by her mother and grandmother, and France Théoret’s protagonist gradually escapes from it thanks to her tenacity, Denise Bombardier’s autobiographical novel Une enfance à l’eau bénite (A childhood bathed in holy water) offers a very different perspective on the experience of growing up poor. Full of humour and irony, her first-person narrative recounts the childhood and adolescence of an unnamed heroine obviously modelled on the author, who learns from an early age to hide her family’s poverty and “play the game” of bourgeois society. This story, which could have been subtitled “Learning to Be a Snob,” is remarkable for its humour and honesty. Bombardier’s narrator/heroine is an intelligent and talented girl who is motivated to win at any cost in order to raise herself above a milieu which everything in her social environment has taught her to disavow. From its very first sentence – “I made my First Communion in a state of mortal sin” (9) – Bombardier’s narrative is propelled forward by her sense of being “unique, exceptional” (9). Like France Théoret’s Évelyne, Bombardier’s protagonist lives her Catholic childhood and adolescence with a constant sense of guilt. Unlike Évelyne, however, she experiences that guilt not as paralyzing but as “stimulating”: “If I am the greatest of sinners in God’s eyes, I have to be the best in face of the adults who matter to me: my parents and my teachers. I will reach my goal by my scholarly

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accomplishments” (9). With two Irish families living on her street, the unnamed narrator (whom I will call “Denise”) quickly learns English and chooses to speak it with her mother in the elevators of the department stores downtown: “It is absolutely crucial that no one should guess my origins” (10). Embarrassed that her father does not go to church, she hides the fact from her teachers and classmates through a series of ever-more elaborate lies. Through an alliance with her mother, who projects onto her daughter her own unfulfilled dreams, Denise embarks on a journey that will be a denial of her class and cultural origins. Enrolled at the age of three in diction classes, an important part of growing up for many young Québécois in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, she soon comes to see the connection between “speaking well, being educated, and being rich” (18). At school, her piety and her perfect French make her the favourite of all the teachers and she is often hated by her classmates, to the point that, in grade five, they complain about her to the principal: “We’re sick of having our French corrected. Of being told we have to talk like the teacher’s pet” (96–7). After school she prefers to play with her anglophone neighbours rather than with the francophones, who make fun of the way she speaks. By the age of eight or nine she has come to see the French language, even when spoken well, as “a language of inferiors” (18). Like Théoret’s character, Denise is constantly made aware of her family’s economic status by the violent quarrels of her parents about money: “Insults and cries accompanied the moment when he would furiously throw a few dollar bills on the table, never enough, and my mother would gather them up with a discouraged air. As if we were despoiling him of something we had no right to. I hated the terrifying power he had over us […] and I was humiliated by the obsessive role money was coming more and more to play in my life” (195). However, her mother, by stealing money from her husband’s pockets, manages to sew dresses that make her daughter look like “a little princess,” attracting admiring glances from people on the streetcar each Sunday when the children and their mother visit their maternal grandparents. As already observed, poverty is relative and exists, to some extent at least, in the eye of the beholder. Denise never sees herself as poor: the poor, for her, are the unfortunate children in her school who are referred to as les queues, who sit in the back of the class smelling of urine and are constantly humiliated by the nuns: “When they had an accident, Sister of the Holy Martyrs would make them clean up their mess and leave them with underclothes stuck to their behinds until the end of the class” (37). When Denise herself has a similar accident, the teacher makes one of the

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poor girls clean up after her while she consoles the tearful Denise and takes her off to find her a clean pair of bloomers. As she returns to her seat, Denise feels both humiliated about what has happened and happy at the treatment she has received, but lacks the courage to look the poor queue,who has been forced to clean up after her, in the eyes. In the schoolyard, she refuses to participate in games if any of the queues are present: “And as we, the smartest in the class, are popular, all our friends agree to kick them out of the group. It happened in front of the teachers, who weren’t the slightest bit upset. When Mlle Tremblay is preparing our souls for the bimonthly confession, she asks us: ‘Did you love your neighbour as yourself?’ It would never have occurred to me to feel guilty for my odious treatment of these poor queues. My neighbour means those who are equal to me. They are my inferiors” (46). Before she reaches high school, Denise has perfected the art of “passing for rich.” She never invites friends to her house, and, after the diction classes, she asks the wealthy parents of her fellow students to drop her off a few blocks from home, in a ”better” part of the neighbourhood. But the older she gets, the more she feels trapped by the falseness of her situation, isolated in a world in which she cannot reveal herself to anyone: “I am ashamed of those I love, and, by projecting me into a milieu that is above my own, my mother has involuntarily trapped me in an unbearable solitude” (62). Seeking to escape her crisis of identity, she throws herself into a mystical and guilt-ridden religiosity which only increases her anguish. Fortunately, around the same time, she also discovers books. In all the autobiographical works we have examined in this chapter, reading is a powerful means of transformation and liberation, enabling the protagonists to envisage other models and ways of living than the ones presented to them at home and at school. Bombardier’s observations regarding the mistrust of books and ideas in the culture around her echo those of Théoret, and also those of Claire Martin, who had been dismayed by her total ignorance at the end of her school years three decades earlier. Like the other two writers, Bombardier describes the immense and solitary effort required in order to face up to this hostility to education and culture: “The network of public libraries was little developed. And I hardly knew anyone who owned any books. In order to read, I needed to have a will that was greater than the apathy around me […] People didn’t trust those who were too well educated. They were afraid of them” (64–5, 68). At the age of ten or eleven, when Denise is starting to search for a direction of her own, her father’s ideas, of which she had been so ashamed when she was younger, take on a new meaning for her. Influenced in spite of herself by his never-ending criticisms of what she is being taught

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in school, she wonders for the first time whether “dying scalped by the Indians for the glory of God” is really her ambition in life. At eleven, exhausted by the effort of constantly measuring herself against the rich and confident students in her diction classes, she asks her mother to withdraw her from them (112). Gradually, over the course of her adolescence, she frees herself from the prejudices of her milieu and develops a new respect for her heretical father who, she realizes at the time of writing, was a neonationalist before his time. MA rCeLLe bri SSOn : eSC APi ng vertiC ALLy

Whether experienced with pride (Payette), pain (Théoret), or snobbery (Bombardier), poverty is always something one seeks to escape, and the autobiography of Marcelle Brisson, Le roman vrai, illustrates how few ways of escape there were for young women of poor backgrounds in the 1930s and 1940s. The book revolves around an obsessive question: Brisson asks herself how she could have been capable of making the monumental error of entering the cloister at the age of twenty and staying there for twelve years before returning to society. The echoes of The Tin Flute are numerous in all these autobiographies, and when reading Brisson it is hard not to think of Yvonne Lacasse, Florentine’s younger sister, who escapes into religion in order to avoid her destiny of poverty. Remembering her relationship with her mother, Brisson discovers an unsatisfied need of tenderness and physical warmth which must have been at the origin of her oceanic desire for love: “Much later, I understood this dissatisfaction as the sadness of not having had a tender mother […] It was as if neither she nor I knew how to express our love by gestures: she treated me like a sensible big girl” (25). At the same time, she precisely identifies the social conditions and sexist attitudes which limited the possibilities for young women of her class: “What kind of a future was reserved for the girls of my neighbourhood? Becoming exemplary mothers? Moving into the bourgeoisie by acquiring a husband they would support as best they could? […] Being a single mother like Simone or like my cousin Estelle who regularly took her child to the daycare on Côte-de-Liesse?” (66–7). In spite of scholarly successes which gain her access to an education rare for girls of her class, she notes the few professional possibilities and the absence of female models for the young women of her generation: “Not one of us was planning on a career, for there was no professional future for girls, even of the bourgeoisie” (75). And yet Brisson shows little interest in the Church or religious sentiment during her childhood and adolescence. Born in 1929, “the year of

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the stock market crash,” she is the first child of a “couple of modest workers, employees of a laundry: Augusta Hétu, a sorter, and Augustin Brisson, a delivery man” (15–16). They are a harmonious couple, and when Augustin loses his job as a result of the crash they soon enter into an economic relationship unusual for the period. Encouraged by his wife, who adores taking risks, Augustin opens a small restaurant which soon goes bankrupt. Later, he survives as best he can by doing small jobs for relatives and neighbours, while his wife, of Amerindian descent, indulges her passion for gambling, often spending entire nights in clandestine gambling establishments with little Marcelle beside her in a cradle. Two other children – boys – are born during these years, and Marcelle feels more and more excluded from the chaotic and colourful group of people who make up her mother’s world. When she starts school, however, she will begin to discover a world of culture and knowledge in which she will feel more at ease than in the noise and confined space of the family home. The reassuring world of school also offers a refuge from the tensions and worry created by poverty. When Augusta wins at gambling, the bills are paid and an atmosphere of celebration reigns in the house, but, between 1928 and 1940, unable to pay the rent, the Brissons move eight times. Another echo of The Tin Flute in Brisson’s work is the description of the annual moving day, on which her father borrows a cart and horse, and the children and all their cousins participate in loading and unloading the furniture. Brisson remembers it as a joyful event, for her mother prepares sandwiches, the children drink KIK soda pop, and all are buoyed up by their hopes for a better apartment than the one they are leaving. But the new place always turns out to be worse than its predecessor: the Brissons will even be evicted from two of them by the municipal Department of Health. Several of these lodgings are infested with rats: “A terrible memory, the rats… [they] lived in our sheds. They roamed around on the porches looking for the garbage bag. We even saw them on the clothes line and on the electric wires” (43). And, outside the house, she observes the daily spectacle of misery: “On our street, near Rue Saint-Vallier, there was a soup kitchen. I saw men – never women – lining up long before it opened. My mother explained to me that these unfortunate people were poorer than we were. No matter what, even if we had nothing to eat, we would not join the line. She wouldn’t accept boxes from the Saint Vincent de Paul either. She didn’t want to depend on public charity” (42). Like Payette, Bombardier, and Théoret, Brisson gains entry through her studies into a larger and freer space than the cramped household, a world in which, thanks to her good grades, she will finally merit her mother’s admiration. She quickly acquires a passion for reading, perhaps

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inherited from her parents: her mother scandalizes the neighbours by reading popular novels instead of doing the housework, and her father, despite only three years of schooling, is a great lover of newspapers: “I devoured my first book in two days, reading without stopping, even while I was walking on Rue Saint-Vallier” (45). Thanks to the school library, she reads Geneviève de Brabant,6 the Comtesse de Ségur,7 biographies, adventure stories, lives of saints. At the end of primary school, she benefits from a situation which is entirely new for girls of poor neighbourhoods: the Sisters of Sainte-Croix have just opened a day school, with tuition of five dollars a month, which will allow their graduates access to the cours classique.8 For the Brisson family, five dollars is also the amount of their weekly unemployment cheque, but Marcelle’s mother does not hesitate: “I would go to the Sainte-Croix High School” (49). At eleven, she uses her mother’s library card to borrow books by Corneille, Racine, Molière, Dante, Shakespeare, and Gœthe. On the streetcar, she and her school friends entertain the other passengers by reciting passages from Romeo and Juliet, Phèdre, or Le malade imaginaire aloud (61). In 1945, the Sisters of Sainte-Croix perform another “democratic act,” opening the last four years of the cours classique to day students, and allowing their best students to skip a year and enter directly into the final year, fine arts. At last, “girls of modest origin could dream of going to university” (72). During adolescence, Brisson drifts into a sort of idealistic mysticism made up of love of nature, poetry, and travel, a young Catholic girl’s romanticism similar to that of Denise Bombardier at the same age: “I was penetrating to the deepest levels of my self, to the point at which I fused with nature and felt reborn in harmony with the origins of the world” (62). A course on Paul Valéry’s poem “Le cimetière marin” (“The Graveyard by the Sea”), offered to girls on Saturday mornings at the University of Montreal, awakens in her a desire to see the ocean, and soon she is off with friends to hitchhike around the Gaspésie and, the following summer, the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean area. By the end of the war, literary and philosophical works are again crossing the Atlantic, and Brisson, now enrolled at the University of Montreal, is reading and discussing works by Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, André Gide, Antoine Saint-Exupéry, Jacques Maritain, and Emmanuel Mounier. The passion for ideas, travel, freedom, and the absolute, all of which made Brisson identify with Jack Kerouac and hear the call of the road, attract her to the idea of a career of writing or journalism, but she is discouraged by the few female models in these professions. Despite grave religious doubts, she allows herself to be convinced by her professors and her spiritual director that she must “interpret this call of the road

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in a symbolic way” and consider the possibility of a contemplative religious vocation. “Lacking models in my family, my environment, in the Quebec of the time, I adhered to what the Church was presenting me through its saints and its mystics. It was a world of excess, another form of my desire for the absolute” (108). In September 1949, she enters the Benedictine community of Sainte-Marie des Deux-Montagnes, and the obligatory dowry is paid by an anonymous donor. She remains there until 1962. Reflecting later on the motivations which led her to this choice, she evokes the poverty and the claustrophobia of the family environment: “I can think of a very down-to-earth answer: I had no place of my own at home. Barely a pullout chair-bed to sleep on for five or six hours a night. I got up early in the morning, washed, got dressed quietly, and left for the university […] My parents would never have allowed me to live outside the home” (109–10). It is clear that Brisson’s decision to take the veil, a dramatic shrinking of her immense desire for life, is intimately linked to the fact of being a girl and to the poverty of her place of origin. Ad ÈL e LAuZO n : A Qu eS t f Or J uSti Ce

Unlike the previously discussed books, Adèle Lauzon’s Pas si tranquille describes an experience of poverty that is relatively short, thanks to her father’s financial success, but marks the author for a lifetime because of the stigmatization to which she will later be subject in the bourgeois milieu where the family moves. Another contrast with the other works is the fact that Lauzon is the daughter of a strong, loving, and open-minded father, who encourages her independence. A respected businessman, he becomes the president of the Club Richelieu (a club for members of the francophone elite) and during the 1940s, a friend of Maurice Duplessis, premier of Quebec during an ultraconservative time known as the “great darkness” (1936–39; 1944–59). Throughout these same years, Adèle, a student at the University of Montreal, is becoming known for her radical articles in the student newspaper, Le Quartier latin, in particular for an article supporting the workers in the famous Asbestos strike of 1949, which polarized Quebec and is seen by many historians as a prelude to the Quiet Revolution. When Duplessis tells Adèle’s father that his daughter should “learn to be quiet,” her father replies: “My daughter thinks what she likes and writes what she likes” (27). The contrast between this broadmindedness and the fury of Théoret’s father when he learns that his daughter is studying Latin could not be more pronounced. The story of the social ascension of Lauzon’s father – and how class snobbery condemns his daughter to being looked down on as “the

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daughter of a garage owner” for years afterwards – provides a rare look into the class mobility that was possible in pre-Quiet Revolution Quebec, as well as the condescension shown to the poor by nouveaux riches who had themselves succeeded in escaping poverty in previous generations. Born in Saint-Henri, Lauzon’s father was the son of a baker and the seventh of nine children. Thanks to a scholarship which destined him for the priesthood, he was educated by the Franciscans at Collège Séraphique in Trois-Rivières, where he studied Latin and Greek and developed a lifelong love of literature, particularly of Victor Hugo (his daughter Adèle was named after Hugo’s daughter). During his college years, Lauzon decided that he wanted to be a lawyer, but was obliged to abandon his studies at the age of seventeen, when his father, who had lost his job, fell into a serious depression. His entrepreneurial genius manifests itself for the first time when he rents a commercial space in Saint-Henri and hires his father as a baker; within a few years, “Lauzon Bread” will be delivered to homes in many districts of Montreal. His next breakthrough (still in the 1930s) grew out of an idea that came to him after he lent a car to a friend for a few days in exchange for a small fee. Soon after, he decides to buy another car and rent it out, and, within a few years, he has become the owner of the first car-rental operation in Quebec. In 1947, he establishes the Lauzon Driving School and becomes the host of a new radio program, Les Lauzon de Conduite (Driving lessons/Lauzons), in which he explained the rules of the road to the thousands of new car owners in 1950s Quebec. Certainly more privileged than the other autobiographers, Adèle Lauzon grew up in a house where there was a profusion of books, where girls were seen as the equals of boys, and where there was great respect for French-Canadian culture. As a young girl, she accompanied her father to a lecture given by Henri Bourassa, Quebec journalist and politician, and she recalls that her first political act was that of writing “vote no” in chalk on the walls of her neighbourhood during the 1942 campaign against conscription. Her memories of shopping with her mother in the department stores of downtown Montreal recall Gabrielle Roy’s recollections of similar shopping trips with her mother in Winnipeg,9 and offer a striking contrast with Denise Bombardier’s account of how she and her mother tried to pass for anglophones in the same stores. Like Gabrielle Roy, Lauzon is embarrassed by her mother’s insistence on speaking French – “I thought she was brave but I was ashamed because it always led to scenes that put me into a panic, as I was extremely shy” (12) – but the example of her mother’s resistance and insistence on her right to speak French will mark her for life. Her nationalism is strengthened by the tense relationship she senses between her family and their anglophone

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neighbours in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce: “I was […] humiliated by the feeling that the English were masters everywhere, and that we were only servants, sometimes too complacent” (12). At the same time, like the other Villa Maria students, she is attracted by American fashion magazines and movies, and sometimes speaks English with her classmates to prove her sophistication: “English got us out of the suffocating world of the nuns, the Church, sin, and mediocrity. Using the English language transformed our grey landscape into a glittering background” (18). Like the other authors, Lauzon sees reading, and in particular, certain books she read in her youth, as having been extremely influential in the choices she made in life. Her passion for social justice originated, she claims, in her reading of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment at the age of fourteen, through a series of comical errors. Having heard that one of her heroes, the actor Pierre Dagenais (also admired by Lise Payette) will be the star of a radio version of the novel, she decides to listen to it, expecting a popular murder mystery. Overwhelmed by the story, she searches for the novel, impossible to find in Quebec in the 1940s, but finally obtains it thanks to her father’s friendship with Henri Tranquille, a bookseller who played an important role in progressive thought during the Duplessis years. For Adèle Lauzon, Raskolnikov represents a combination of strength and compassion which anticipates her own predilection, later in life, for radical and even violent political action: “It was like a phantasm of omnipotence which would compensate for my feeling of being weak, small, dependent, French Canadian and, worst of all, a girl” (13). Her penchant for social justice increases at Villa Maria, where the parents of her schoolmates, almost all of them wealthy francophones from Westmount, refuse to let their daughters associate with “the daughter of a garage owner.” (“You invited that into the house?” says one of the mothers on seeing Adèle in her living room.) Reflecting on this rejection, so painful for her as an adolescent, Lauzon claims that, rather than making her hate the rich or feel ashamed of her parents, it gave her “an acute consciousness of my dignity and that of my parents, a sensitivity to humiliation that would later influence my convictions. What mattered most from then on was respect. The respect owed to me and my loved ones, and that I would have for others. Respect for the intrinsic value of each person and not for the fact of their belonging to a social class, race, religion, or ethnicity” (16–17). This respect for the dignity of all human beings, regardless of their class, nationality, religion, or ethnicity, will lead Lauzon, over the course of her years of study in France, to the Communist Party and to a young member of that party, Michel Van Schendel, whom she will marry and bring back to Montreal in the late 1950s.

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•  •  • Like many other women’s autobiographies, these five works are accounts of the road travelled and the obstacles overcome in a process leading to self-acceptance and the confidence of self-expression. In each case, it is a road which obliges the author/narrator/protagonist to navigate the often contradictory realities of class, language, religion, culture, and gender, at a time when economic and social success was reserved for men and demanded a mastery of the English language. In these circumstances, learning to be true to one’s self and finding values other than submission to live by were a considerable challenge for young women, whose entire education and experience were directed towards preparing them for the roles of wife and mother. Taken together, these autobiographical accounts contain images and themes that evoke a common reality: that of school uniforms, Catholic guilt, diction classes, and idealistic dreams, to name only a few. Despite the limits of the convent school educations described, one cannot help being impressed by the vast culture to which these schools opened the doors for their young pupils. For all of the writers, although the right to a university education was far from being a reality, books and access to knowledge were of key importance. In a 2012 column in Le Devoir, Denise Bombardier recalled the extreme financial hardship of her years as a student at the University of Montreal, and the opposition of her father to her studies: “My mother stole dollar bills from my father’s pants pockets and gave them to me parsimoniously, for my father believed that advanced studies for girls were a waste of money. May God rest his soul!”10 France Théoret lived in a similar if not worse state of poverty during her years at the same university, a victim of the same paternal opposition and tormented by the need to hide her poverty from her fellow students. Bombardier describes the situation of being poor at university in the 1960s as that of feeling like an impostor: “One fact was very clear to us, the poor who had arrived at university surrounded by our petit bourgeois contemporaries. We felt like impostors and, at the same time, like the representatives of the “people” to whom our classmates from Outremont and Notre-Dame-de-Grâce were so devoted. I think that our destitute financial state contributed to our determination to succeed.”11 However, one is equally struck by the differences between the perceptions, choices, and roads taken by these five women, differences that can be explained as much by their individual temperaments and family situations as by their socio-economic condition. The contrast between the experiences of Lise Payette and France Théoret at the same school, run

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by the Sisters of Sainte-Anne in Saint-Henri, ten years apart, is a striking example of such individual differences. While Payette emphasizes the encouragement she received from the nuns after her traumatic reading of The Tin Flute, Théoret describes an education entirely devoted to the values of piety and submission, well summed up in the scene where, after excelling in a provincial test, she is called to the principal’s office and given a lecture on the sin of pride and the dangers of aspiring to a fate outside the norms of her class. Among the first examples we possess of personal writings by women who are not members of the upper classes, these works offer a new and complex perspective on the experience of young girls who grew up in poor neighbourhoods during the three decades before the Quiet Revolution. In addition to revealing the tenacity of these young women and their passion for knowledge and dignity, they throw light on the milieux in which these women grew up and on the educational system which, in spite of its faults, was an instrumental part of their journey towards autonomy. In spite of their differences, all these authors demonstrate the ability to look at their lives as a totality and make sense of it that is the sine qua non of autobiographical writing.

C h apt e r 1 0

G i v i n g B i r th to On e sel f i n Wri t i ng: T he S tr u g gle wi t h t he M ot her

So what is a mother? Someone who makes the stereotypical gestures she’s been told to make, and who has no personal language or identity. How can we, the daughters, have a personal connection and shape an identity for ourselves in relation to someone who is nothing more than a function? Luce Irigaray, The Bodily Encounter with the Mother

Two autobiographical films made by Quebec women in the last twenty years capture the dramatic stakes of the relationship which, for many women, is the most intimate and intense of their lifetime: the link between mother and daughter. In Tu as crié LET ME GO (You cried LET ME GO), Anne-Claire Poirier’s final film, she mourns her daughter Yanne, a young drug addict who was murdered in October 1992, at the age of twenty-six. Transcending her own personal grief, she explores the mystery of the last years of her daughter’s life through interviews with the latter’s friends, many of whom became drug addicts or prostitutes in an apparent rebellion against the values of their parents’ generation. The film is a critical examination of the state of Quebec society as well as of Poirier’s fractious relationship with her daughter. By means of family films and photos, she revisits the past and attempts to weigh her own portion of responsibility for the troubled relationship which her daughter perceived as an unacceptable constraint on her freedom. The other film, Trente tableaux (Thirty images), by Paule Baillargeon, explores the tangled web of the mother-daughter relationship from the point of view of the daughter (Baillargeon), and, in so doing, traces a portrait of the evolution of Quebec society over the last fifty years. Using photos, animations, videos, and film clips, Baillargeon presents the scattered fragments of her life: the little

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girl whose dream of being an artist is demolished by her mother’s decree that she has no talent; the young actress whose improvisations betray the presence of an immense repressed rage; the filmmaker whose feminist film La cuisine rouge (The red kitchen) is judged to be so scandalous that Baillargeon’s career grinds to a halt; and, finally, Baillargeon as a mother, filled with joy at the birth of her daughter Blanche, the first step in a reconciliation with her own mother and with life. In an interview at the time of the film’s release, Baillargeon admitted that she “carried [her mother] on her shoulders” all through the process of making the film, but that it was only on its completion that she recognized its true theme: “That of the mother that I loved and hated, who died seven years ago and whose own anger inhabited me.”1 Anger and guilt, the desire for fusion and the feeling of being abandoned, love and hate: the mother-daughter relationship is full of ambivalence, and it seems as if female autobiographers of all nationalities feel the need to explore it in order to untangle the threads of their own journey towards autonomy. Unlike men’s autobiographies, those of women are often a project of giving birth to the self. These difficult births seem to circle around an original wound, almost always associated with the mother and the conservative culture she imposes on her daughters. This negative mother, whose maternal instincts seem restricted to the aim of preventing her child from achieving autonomy, is a familiar presence in Quebec literature.2 One of her most unforgettable embodiments is in Anne Hébert’s character from The Torrent, “la grande Claudine,” whose message of refusal of life resonates incessantly in the mind of her son, who has been made deaf by his mother’s violence: “One must master oneself utterly. We have no idea of the evil forces within us. […] I will master you thoroughly myself.”3 Seen through the eyes of her son François, Claudine is an immense and paralyzing presence: “As a child, I was dispossessed of the world. By the decree of a will higher than my own, I had to renounce all possessions in this life. I related to the world by fragments […] I could see the large hand of my mother when it was raised against me, but I could not perceive my mother as a whole, from head to foot. I could only feel her terrible size, which chilled me.”4 In this image of ice, immensity and paralysis, this ability to reduce the other to a state of nothingness that can only be escaped by violence, Anne Hébert has captured the intimidating power of the archetypal mother. In patriarchal culture, mothers were traditionally consigned to a role which frustrated and diminished them, but which they were expected nonetheless to pass on to their daughters. As a result, maternal love often contains a great deal of resentment or bitterness, while filial devotion hides an

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immense, repressed anger. It is not surprising, then, that the autobiographies of Quebec women who grew up in the period when the mother was seen as “queen of the hearth” are so often stories of lives nipped in the bud, written by women who never entirely freed themselves from the trauma of their childhoods. Such a destruction is suggested by the titles of the two earliest works examined in this chapter: Thérèse Renaud’s Une mémoire déchirée (A torn memory) and Paule Saint-Onge’s La vie défigurée (A disfigured life). The coldness, rules, and punishments inflicted by mothers are, however, only one aspect of the passionate and problematic link they have with their daughters. As feminist psychologists have reminded us, the mother and her body represent the place of unattainable fusion, the source of love and the beginning of language for her child.5 For sons, the break from her, while difficult, is a natural part of growing into male identity; for daughters, whose relation to her is one of sameness rather than difference, it is more difficult, especially in patriarchal society, where the mother, frozen into her appointed role, never reveals herself to her daughter as a subject. The title of Margret Andersen’s feminist collection, Mother Was Not a Person, sums up the problem succinctly. Psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray, in her lyrical text Et l’une ne bouge pas sans l’autre (“And the One Doesn’t Move without the Other”), gives voice to the anguish of the daughter caught in this paralyzing relationship: “With your milk, mother, I drank ice. And now here I am frozen inside. And I walk even less surely than you do, and I move even less. You have flowed into me and this hot liquid has become a poison that paralyzes me […] I must make another effort, get angry at you once more for wanting me to remain small […] and at last I will emerge from your dream. From my sickness. From you in me, from me in you. I will get away from us […] I will live my life, my story.”6 According to Bella Brodzki, the struggle with the mother is often the very basis of women’s entry into autobiographical writing: “She is the pre-text for the daughter’s autobiographical project […] As the child’s first significant Other, the mother engenders subjectivity through language; she is the primary source of speech and love […] In response, the daughter’s text, variously, seeks to reject, reconstruct and reclaim […] the mother’s message.”7 In some cases, autobiography can be an act of revenge, allowing the writer a power over the mother that she never had in childhood and possibly still lacks. Shirley Neuman argues that women’s autobiographies often contain “an incipient matrophobia,” born of the daughter’s fear that, if she is not vigilant, she risks being swallowed up once again in the mother’s tastes and values.8 All the autobiographies examined in this chapter – Une mémoire déchirée (MD) by Thérèse Renaud, La vie défigurée (VD) by Paule Saint-Onge, La

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détresse et l’enchantement (Enchantment and Sorrow) (ES) by Gabrielle Roy,9 Ce fauve, le bonheur (CFB) by Denise Desautels, Ma mère et Gainsbourg (MMG) by Diane-Monique Daviau, Hôtel des quatre chemins (HQC) by France Théoret, and La femme de ma vie (FV) by Francine Noël – illustrate the struggle against the mother necessary in order for women to achieve autonomy. Gabrielle Roy’s book is closer than the others to classical autobiography in that it was begun shortly before the author’s death and is, in many ways, her last testament to her readers. But, like all of the other books, it is an autobiography by a daughter, in which the author explores the minefield of her relationship with her mother in order to understand herself. The interest of these works lies not only in the perspective they offer on the mother-daughter relationship, but also in what they tell us about the situation of the “queens of the hearth” of earlier generations. What was the price paid by these women for accepting the traditional maternal role, and what were the compensations? How much power did they exercise in their families, and what values did they transmit to their daughters? Each of the works (even that of Gabrielle Roy, to some extent) demystifies the idealized portrait of the French-Canadian mother propagated by the dominant ideology of the time, several of them going so far as to make us wonder if these women even loved their children at all. Whether cries of anger or suffocation, attempts to understand or gestures of reparation, all bear witness to the fact that the daughter’s liberation cannot take place without her recognition of the mother as subject rather than object. eChO eS Of AurO re , the L i ttLe MA rtyr: thÉr ÈS e renAud A nd PAuLe SAi nt- O nge

Lamentations over lost childhoods and the distance between daughters and mothers, both Thérèse Renaud’s Une mémoire déchirée and Paule Saint-Onge’s La vie défigurée seem to lose their coherence and narrative direction after strong opening sections on the childhood of the two authors. Each author expresses a feeling of failure as she contemplates what she has made of her life. For Thérèse Renaud, one of the signatories of the famous manifesto Refus global in 1948 and the author of the first volume of surrealist poetry published in Quebec, Les sables du rêve (1946), the “imperious need to recount [her] interior journey” (MD, 143) emerged after seventeen years of literary silence. The book is dominated by Renaud’s regret at not having found a creative artistic expression since her marriage to painter Fernand Leduc in 1948 and the birth of their daughter Isabelle in the 1950s. For Paule Saint-Onge, the writing project originates

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in a similar feeling of failure, despite the fact that the author is the mother of eight children (barely mentioned in the book) and had achieved a certain amount of fame as a novelist in the 1960s and 1970s. Writing in a difficult moment of her life, following a divorce, a subsequent failed relationship, and the suicide of one of her sons, she examines her past as part of a process of learning to live independently. “I have often dreamed of writing the story of a happy love, but I have only known punished love […] I have also wanted to write a story about feminine liberation, and I would have called my book The Autonomous Woman. But I am not the one to write about an autonomous woman […] As for this disfigured life, perhaps I still have a few years in which to make it better” (VD, 7–9). Like Claire Martin’s In an Iron Glove (although less successfully), these works are attempts to exorcise the effects of childhood abuse, an all too common phenomenon in the era when the story of “Aurore, the child martyr” was the subject of a bestselling book and a popular movie.10 Born in the 1920s, both authors have memories of humiliating punishments, religious hypocrisy, and a cold, cruel mother or stepmother figure. SaintOnge refers explicitly to Aurore, recalling that she read “this best seller of the period” at the suggestion of her mother, who used the book to frighten her children, threatening them with the prospect of the cruel stepmother who would replace her if she died: “The odious stepmother who would have only one goal: to torture us, the poor little orphans” (VD, 44). Beaten by her mother, young Paule has no difficulty identifying with the little victim Aurore: “Even as I would think with horror about the mouthfuls of soap she had to ingest, I was being beaten regularly. One evening a neighbour, troubled by my cries, came and rang our doorbell” (VD, 45). In the case of Thérèse Renaud, whose mother died when she was six, the role of cruel stepmother is filled by Mlle Rose, an ugly, crippled “old maid” recommended by the parish priest as a caregiver for the children after their mother’s death. For more than a year, until a neighbour intervenes to inform their father about what is taking place in his home, the three Renaud sisters, all of whom will later be part of the group associated with the Refus global manifesto, are “forbidden to play and consecrated to prayer” (MD, 24). They attend Mass at five o’clock every morning, and, on the way home, follow their guardian in single file reciting the rosary, with Thérèse dying of embarrassment at the prospect of being seen by her friends from school. At home, they are deprived of food in order to “make sacrifices.” Quickly chosen to be the scapegoat, Thérèse is often required to kneel under the table and be kicked by Mlle Rose while the others eat: “Strange as it seems, that was the way my consciousness was formed. I learned to steel myself in adversity and transcend the suffering

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I was feeling in my body and my heart: I remained motionless under the table” (MD, 26). In the evenings, the girls are obliged to recite the rosary with arms outstretched in the form of a cross, meditating on their sins, while their guardian hovers over them, ready to strike them with a ruler if their arms tremble (MD, 24). Each of the authors displays a psychic fragility which originates in feelings of rejection by the mother. “To protect my sensibility and my intelligence, I had to cut myself off early from the maternal universe, but a child cannot resign itself to such a fate without a terrible struggle,” writes SaintOnge (VD, 40). The eldest daughter of an unhappy couple living in the Plateau Mont-Royal district, she adores her father, a streetcar driver who has left an earlier job as a Canadian Pacific Railways technician because his jealous wife refuses to allow him to spend two days a week away from home, as required by the job. Her obese mother neglects the housework and the children, and spends her time in a rocking chair on the balcony, sending her daughters to the corner store to buy her Coca Cola and candies: “For her, the pleasures of the table had replaced all others” (VD, 33). Her sole passion is for card games: “When she could find partners for a game of 500, she was transfigured. She laughed, joked, and always wanted to get the jackpot […] Time – oh how marvelous this was! – was abolished” (VD, 20). More often, she spends her evenings embroidering in the company of her eldest daughter, telling the latter how unhappy she is, or leaves the little girl at home with her younger sister, waiting until “the big hand of the clock goes all the way around” (VD, 19), while she visits a neighbour. The children seem to be regarded as disagreeable little intruders in the melancholy routine of her days. Haunted by the memory of being violently pushed away by her mother when she was looking for consolation (VD, 25), Saint-Onge also recalls constantly being threatened with reform school, with her mother going so far as to pick up the phone and pretend to be dialing the authorities in order to intimidate her daughter (VD, 44). The atmosphere of negativity surrounding the mother – “a climate of anger at life, at men, at us, the children, who were there because of a man” –  destroys the daughter’s sense of self: “[It is] a climate that sucks you under little by little and makes you want to return to the nothingness she is constantly reproaching you for having emerged from. And so, if you’re pious – and education in those days often offered you such an escape – you pray fervently to die” (VD, 38). At the time of writing, the author remembers having heard that her mother, from whom she was estranged, uttered her name just before dying: “The great pity that her death inspired in me was mixed with astonishment that I could have been her last preoccupation: I had given up hope so long ago of being loved by her” (VD, 89).

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And yet the signs of an earlier and different mother exist. Among the young Paule’s first readings are some of the red-bound volumes, published by Mame et fils, which were given out as prizes at the end of the school year and which her mother had won in convent school: “She must have been a good student, for there was an impressive number of them” (VD, 55). In the living room there is a piano which no one ever touches, and, stuffed in a cupboard in the basement, old partitions which lead the little girl to the discovery that her mother studied piano for four years with the famous composer Rodolphe Mathieu, although, “according to all appearances, she hadn’t retained any of it, not even the love of music” (VD, 59). As the process of writing leads her to a better understanding of her mother, the narrator sees her as “trapped from birth onward in a stifling circle of rules and regulations, which she tried pathetically to escape, using whatever means were at her disposal” (VD, 19–20). Thérèse Renaud’s memories of her mother are less precise, but the fact of having lost her at so young an age leaves the narrator with a vague sense of guilt and emptiness: “I had a difficult relationship with my mother […] Mostly I remember a reciprocal lack of understanding” (MD, 12). She recalls a woman who was cold and distant when her husband was absent: “[When he wasn’t there], the whole house became sad. Our mother, who was usually cheerful, became dreamy, distant, and indifferent to us” (MD, 8). The independent-minded Thérèse cannot help provoking her mother, and is punished by being locked in a closet or put in a cold shower: “Giving full rein to my anger, I shouted insults at her which terrified me by their extravagance” (MD, 12). From little rebels who would have preferred to be boys, Saint-Onge and Renaud soon turn into “bad girls” and later, after years of conditioning, into Catholic teenagers inflamed by a religiosity made up of guilt, self-sacrifice, and a desire for fusion with something greater than the self. Meanwhile, under the surface, simmer a rage and self-hatred whose eradication will be the work of a lifetime. “I was born guilty,” writes SaintOnge. “One finally rebels against such a heritage, but I think that rebellion came too late for my generation, as the structures of our lives were already in place” (VD, 62–3). At eight, she began writing a novel with the title “Rage in the Heart,” and at ten she read Romeo and Juliet in secret, hiding it behind a larger book entitled On the Necessity of Prayer, but by adolescence she has become obsessed with martyrdom and dreams of wearing a hair shirt: “But where could one find a hair shirt in our day and age?” (VD, 58–9). Later, she wonders whether the “edifying” books she was made to read were not, in fact, a dangerous influence, cultivating a tendency towards masochism. “Add to that ideas on the supposedly feminine virtue

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of altruism […] and you find yourself admirably prepared to make your eventual marriage a triumph of abnegation, deprivation, and constant pregnancies” (VD, 57). The young Thérèse Renaud also dreams of sacrificing herself for Christ, but her mystical aspirations are mixed with “evil thoughts” inspired by sermons on such horrors as “kissing on the mouth” (MD, 62). Like Saint-Onge, she denounces an educational system which prepared girls for no career other than that of wife and mother: “We were raised in the purest Bovarysm imaginable” (MD, 143). Her observations on the internalization of hate-filled ideologies learned at convent school recall those of Claire Martin. With her school friends, she indulges in lurid fantasies about Communists, Jews, Freemasons, and even the students from a neighbouring English school, dangerous because it is coeducational: “We were surrounded by bad elements who desired not only our moral defeat, but our physical mutilation. I saw myself submitting to martyrdom rather than giving in to their desire to make me deny Christ, who had given his life on the cross to save humanity” (MD, 60). A more material salvation will come to her at the age of sixteen, when, through her sister Louise, then a student at the School of Fine Arts, she will meet the young artists surrounding Paul-Émile Borduas, the future signatories of the manifesto Refus global. However, like Paule Saint-Onge, it is only many years later, after years of marriage and motherhood, that she will take stock of her life, her relationship with her mother, and the culture of her childhood through the process of writing her autobiography. g Abrie LL e rOy: Avenge the MO ther, Or eSCAP e he r gAZ e?

As those familiar with Gabrielle Roy’s work are aware, the mother is the central figure around which the writing circulates incessantly, as if around an unfathomable mystery. From the dedication of her first novel, The Tin Flute, to her mother, Mélina Roy, to her final text, published posthumously under the title Le temps qui m’a manqué (TM) (Not enough time), Roy sings the praises of the mother even as she laments the separation from her, perceived as an “abandonment” which leads to much guilt on the part of the daughter. This final work – the unfinished sequel to the autobiography Enchantment and Sorrow, written just before the author’s death in 1983 – is entirely devoted to the twin themes of the mother and writing, the closely linked poles of the author’s identity. It opens with an evocation of the train trip taken by the author, then a young journalist working on her first novel, from Montreal to Manitoba on the occasion of

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her mother’s death in 1943, and ends, after several months of mourning, with the moment she returns to writing The Tin Flute. The idealization of the mother which characterizes all of Roy’s work is well captured in the reflections of the narrator as she stands before her mother’s coffin: “I had just understood that from my dead mother, through what she had loved and taught me to love, I was receiving far more than what she had given me in the course of her life” (TM, 60). But the title of the book, Le temps qui m’a manqué, suggests the other side of this debt to the mother: the constant guilt felt by the daughter who, by the simple fact of living her own life, has the feeling of having abandoned her mother. It was a guilt acutely felt by Roy at the time of her mother’s death, as she had decided, on her return from Europe in 1939, to settle down in Montreal rather than returning to her teaching position in Manitoba as her mother had expected her to do. By a cruel irony of fate, Roy receives the telegram announcing her mother’s death at the precise moment when she has just finished writing a joyful letter to her, revealing that she has received a small raise and now has enough money to look after the needs of her family. An example of the distance between aspiration and reality which is at the heart of Roy’s vision, this scene is also of interest because of the ambivalence betrayed by the author regarding the debt which links her to her mother: “Why did Maman have to die before I had time to give her the reason to be proud of me that I had crossed the ocean to find for her with so much effort? She was always so patient: why couldn’t she have given me just a little more of the time I needed?” (TM, 14). It is possible, however, that the mother’s death was the only way to resolve the terrible ambivalence of the daughter and to liberate her creative energies.11 For two years, she tells us, she has been carrying the manuscript of The Tin Flute, “a thick pile of typed sheets which must have made up 800 or 900 pages” (TM, 88), with her wherever she goes, without being able to work on it. She is so discouraged with the novel’s imperfections that once she almost throws it in the fire: “It only would have taken a few seconds; lifting the cover on the stove, slipping the large package into the flames. And now, not having had the courage to do that, I had no choice but to carry on with my work on it” (TM, 88). The text ends at the moment when, after several months of mourning, the author’s writing finally begins to flow: “I was surprised […] to see that I had filled twenty pages. And not only that […] on rereading them, I realized I had greatly improved my text” (TM, 89). This sense of a liberation of her creative energy clarifies the passage quoted earlier, in which the narrator reflects that her dead mother has given her more than she had when she was alive. From this moment on, the author/narrator will live more and more within

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and for her writing, filling the void created by her mother’s absence with the presence of a virtual reader to whom she will offer the gift which she had not had time to give her mother: “Real life for me was located more and more in the stories I told myself or told others who might recognize themselves in them, and then, perhaps, we would truly meet in silence, me walking alone and that stranger in the future, who would stop for a moment, awaiting something unknown” (TM, 90). This “writing of reparation,” as Lori Saint-Martin describes Roy’s work,12 will also be a gradual return to the mother and to an explicitly autobiographical writing. In Enchantment and Sorrow, Roy reveals that her earliest writings were autobiographical, but that they lacked the authenticity and strength she would later acquire through her work as a journalist: “I began with anecdotal accounts of my adventures in England and France. Alas, in my downcast state of mind, no longer stimulated by elation, I could bring forth only platitudes. It took close to a year before I began to write articles with some substance, given the opportunity by a farmer’s publication, the Bulletin des Agriculteurs, to write on subjects involving fact, reality, close observation” (ES, 410). After The Tin Flute (1945) and a later realist novel, Alexandre Chenevert (The Cashier) (1954), Roy’s work becomes more and more autobiographical, notably in the short story collections Rue Deschambault (1955), La route d’Altamont (1966), and Ces enfants de ma vie (1977).13 But it is only with Enchantment and Sorrow that she fully assumes the autobiographical pact with her readers, guaranteeing the referential truth of her story and the identification between author, narrator, and protagonist. Close to classical autobiography in that it is clearly seen by the author as a literary testament left for her many faithful readers, Enchantment and Sorrow is nevertheless different, in that it covers only the years leading up to the author’s discovery of her literary vocation, born of an urgent desire to “avenge” her mother which goes back to early adolescence.14 Brodzki’s idea that the mother is the “pre-text” for the writing of the daughter is perfectly illustrated by this autobiographical masterpiece in which Roy anchors all the great themes of her work – time, love, the need for justice, the infinite aspirations of human beings, and the inevitable distance that separates them – in her own experience and in the symbiotic, painful, but loving relationship she had with her mother. In the opening scene, which describes the shopping trips she and her mother would make to Eaton’s, in anglophone Winnipeg, the link between mother and daughter emerges as the cornerstone of Roy’s identity and writing. Beginning with the surprising opening sentence – “When did it first dawn on me that I was one of those people destined to be treated as inferiors in

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their own country?” (ES, 3) – we discover a Gabrielle Roy much more conscious of the political dimensions of her Franco-Manitoban heritage than her earlier work suggested, and pushed to excel as a young girl in order to compensate for the injustices her compatriots have suffered, as illustrated by her mother’s stories of their ancestors. It is the mother who formulates this goal for her daughter after the humiliations they have endured in trying to communicate in French: “I was the one, with my quick mind and my brain not broken down already from constant figuring, who ought to start learning English so I could make up for all the rest of us” (ES, 6). The need to excel becomes more precise at the age of twelve, after Gabrielle, hospitalized for a grave illness, realizes that her medical expenses represent a terrifying burden for her mother: “In order to make good for Maman, I realized that once I was back at school I’d have to work twice as hard, always come first in French and English and all the other subjects, win medals and other kinds of prizes, and keep bringing her trophies” (ES, 21). With this realization begins an ascension each of whose steps will paradoxically lead her further away from the mother for whom she believes she is pursuing these achievements. Among the qualities which make Enchantment and Sorrow such a powerful work is Roy’s ability to bring her “characters” to life: not only her mother and father, but also the brothers and sisters with whom, she admits in the text, she did not always get along. The reflections of a great writer close to death are thus nourished and accompanied by the anxieties, failures, and aspirations of her loved ones, and the story of her own evolution is inextricably linked to theirs. It is a striking example of women’s tendency to make the autobiographical “I” a porous space, open to the other and not restricted to the life of the individual author.15 That said, it is the mother who functions in the text as the primary “other”: the mirror image of the author’s identity as well as the origin and goal of her quest. In a scene which clearly shows the interdependence of the “enchantment” and “sorrow” of the title, young Gabrielle’s joy during her high school graduation ceremony is inseparable from her consciousness of the maternal sacrifices which made this joy possible, just as the joy she perceives in the face of her mother generates a feeling of distress: From up there on the stage, I searched and searched through the faces in the crowd. Finally I caught sight of her, and she remains forever in my memory as I saw her then. Her poor face was grey with fatigue – she may have finished my dress only late the night before – but was lifted, straining towards me, smiling at me across the distance. For all its sunken eyelids and drawn cheeks, it shone

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with pride, and that hurt more than anything I’d seen before because I knew how much all this had cost. The wave of cruel realization swept over me, gripped me in vice-like anguish, robbed me of all my joy in the day, then faded, leaving me to my insouciant youth up there in my place of honour. (ES, 60) Such a dissolution of the barriers between self and other can only be lived with an extreme ambivalence, which is captured in the final image the narrator has of her mother at the time of her own departure for Europe. Alone, pathetic, and abandoned on the railway platform, the small figure of the mother constitutes such a powerful reproach that the daughter, in spite of herself, is relieved to be leaving her behind: Why hadn’t I noticed before how tiny she was? Her body was like a child’s […] Her sorrowful eyes were fixed on me as though they’d never lose me wherever I went. It became unbearable. I saw too well that she knew I wouldn’t be coming back […] It was clear now that I wasn’t leaving to make good for her […] it was really to be free of her. Free of her and the family woes clustered about her […] They all seemed to be reproaching me for their failed or unfulfilled lives. Why is it only happening to you? Why not us? Mightn’t we have found happiness too? (ES, 192–3) During her two years in France and England, an alternatively exalted and anguished period in which she affronts numerous obstacles on the way to discovering her vocation as a writer, Roy continues to feel an enormous amount of guilt each time she receives a letter from her mother: “I began to tremble as soon as I recognized the writing. I always trembled when her letters came, not because I was afraid of reading reproaches or complaints – there never were any – but because seeing her writing was enough to open the door to memories of all the suffering culminating in me. Surely I shouldn’t be the only one to escape […] At this, the shame of having been able to be happy while she was sad overcame me” (ES, 329–30). Such tensions can only be resolved through writing, a triumph over the time which has always been “lacking” for the author, and a reconciliation, beyond time, with her mother and her loved ones. Enchantment and Sorrow ends with a vision of the author as she embarks on her writing career, not yet knowing that in her first novel, The Tin Flute – a story of poverty, courage, and pain centred on maternal love and on the unending struggle between daughters and mothers – she will find “the feeling of coming

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home, of oneness with my people, whom my mother had taught me to know and love in my childhood” (ES, 410). d iSPOSS e SS ed O f the WOrLd: deniSe de SAuteLS, di Ane -MO ni Que dAvi Au, And frAnC e thÉ Oret

Unlike Gabrielle Roy’s work, in which, no matter how great the anguish of the daughter, the mother is always portrayed lovingly, the autobiographical works of Denise Desautels (Ce fauve, le bonheur), Diane-Monique Daviau (Ma mère et Gainsbourg), and France Théoret (Hôtel des quatre chemins) present a more sombre portrait, representing her in all her paralyzing power. Avatars of Hébert’s “grande Claudine,” these mothers stifle their daughters’ creativity and rebellion, overpower them with a suffocating love (Desautels), reduce them to nothingness by their indifference (Daviau), or render them mute by their rigidity (Théoret). “Our mother ‘kept us in line,’ as she was always proclaiming,” writes Théoret (HQC, 11). “She never kissed or embraced us and she argued with us every day. Signs of tenderness were deemed to be dangerous. We weren’t yet worth anything much” (HQC, 29). Daviau’s mother exhibits the same scorn for her child and the same hypocritical justification of it by her authoritarian principles: “My mother said – it was her principle of education and the basis of any relationship with a child: ‘You must never let a child get away with anything. A child is meant to be dominated. Its character is meant to be broken.’ […] Words were not necessary between us: I understood very early on that she, my mother, was going to devote her whole life to breaking me” (MMG, 82). In Desautels’s work, where Anne Hébert’s influence is explicit and constant, the mother is part of a cohort of sweet and menacing women whose voices transmit the Jansenist beliefs of traditional French Canada: “The voices carry within them, camouflaged under many caresses, absence, the weight of Heaven, and the ugliness of the world, terror, death. Hardness as well, like a hair shirt, a means of resisting the temptation of evil. They alarm us in order to better swallow us up, hold us in their grasp, absorb us into themselves. Yes, these softly murmuring voices which we’re not allowed to contradict are sure of themselves and of their truth” (CFB, 71). Each of the three texts has a static or circular character, the mark of a story unable to take shape, stuck in the quicksands of the original fusion or blocked by the immensity of the rules forbidding it to move forward. For the poet Denise Desautels, born in 1945, the sudden death of her father when she was five years old is the initial disaster, the subject of a

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never completed mourning process around which her entire body of work circulates, and the passage from poetry to prose in Ce fauve, le bonheur corresponds to the liberation of an entry into time.16 By its circular form and its constant returns to the suffocating atmosphere of childhood, her story captures the extreme difficulty of this entry into history – not only individual history, but also that of a Quebec hesitating on the threshold of modernity. The story begins with a precise date – “On 6 May 1950, my father died” (CFB, 15) – and ends in 1960, “a year still talked about in history books, which marks a break, the end of a long sleep, of an absence” (CFB, 219). It is also the year of a personal liberation, marked by the young protagonist’s crossing of Montreal from east to west in order to attend a Van Gogh exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, an experience which signals her accession to an autonomous voice, associated with artistic expression: “And, this time, it is my real voice I hear” (CFB, 233). As Louise Dupré explains, the word Happiness, always spelled with a capital letter in the text, is “a metaphor for the simultaneously blissful and deadening state of fusion with the mother which must be broken with in order to arrive at subjectivity.”17 The title suggests the troubling nature of the secure and excessively loving universe created by the young heroine’s mother and aunts after the death of her father and of a little cousin two years later – a universe in which all signs of pain are repressed and one finds consolation in the idea that the dead, transformed into angelic presences, are keeping watch over the living: “Pink angels accompany us everywhere” (CFB, 22). Beneath the surface, death hovers like a menacing presence and the child learns, under pain of sin, to repress her natural curiosity: “Happiness. It is like a wild animal ready to awaken; a threatened peace. Always well behaved, it doesn’t anticipate the dreams that come at night, with their noise and disorder, that will finally attack it […] My future guilts” (CFB, 28). The heroine sleeps with her mother until puberty, succumbs to melancholy when she is absent, and feels an ambiguous pleasure in her caresses: “My mother’s caress moves along my leg fabricating Happiness, over my ankle, until it reaches her despair at being a woman alone, infinitely alone, a despair she doesn’t succeed in hiding, it goes as far as her false smiles, as far as her loving words, too smooth, too polite, which bind me, breathe me in, swallow me up […] I cry my eyes out, weeping over myself, my mother, and the interminable life we lead, over this emptiness I carry within me, this bottomless pit”(CFB, 55–7). A “round form” (CFB, 50), a “cocoon [filled] with caresses” (CFB, 129) from which joy and pain are equally banished, this too cosy universe is opposed to individuation and prevents one’s entry into time: “I remain for all time a little girl, tucked in by her mother, tucked in until the end

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of time” (CFB, 94). The “I” does not exist, as the borders of the ego are dissolved into a sort of magma where one’s private self is a forbidden territory: “I am possessed. Where does my being begin? Where does hers end? How is it possible for a person to sleep alone, to live alone? I do not know. I do not think. Thoughts of my own don’t exist. In this universe where everything is order and cleanliness, thoughts are the only thing that are susceptible to being dirtied” (CFB, 131). Divided into short chapters corresponding to the people or the experiences which marked the narrator/protagonist, the text thus reveals by its very shape the important role played by openness to the other in the evolution towards subjectivity. The narrator’s adolescence, closed in by the limited horizons of 1950s Quebec, is dominated by fear, anguish, and a constant sense of guilt. But there are meetings which awaken her to the existence of a wider world, anchored in history. Her Uncle Bernard, who has not been the same since he returned from the war, carries within him experiences that are unforgettable, uncommunicable: “Elsewhere, the war, something other” (CFB, 154). And a woman who works with her mother, a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust, shows by her example that there are ways to experience tragedy other than closing oneself off from the world enveloped in an imaginary Happiness: “The smile of the Polish woman who is walking on my right, her head high, her dark hair blown by the wind, and my mother close by, vulnerable, having noticed the familiar vertigo of her little orphaned daughter” (CFB, 108). The letters from the narrator’s French pen pal Élisabeth tell of an unknown and somewhat intimidating cultural world: for example, she describes a trip to Paris to see the film Hiroshima mon amour, almost unimaginable for a young Québécoise in 1958: “I had never heard of Carl Dreyer, or Marguerite Duras, or Alain Resnais, or Emmanuelle Riva […] Reading her letters, I had the impression of entering a fictional universe. In fact, at that time, I was discovering the world, the vast world in books […] in the Larousse dictionary and the Grolier encyclopedia my mother had bought” (CFB, 198). And above all there is Lou, her best friend since childhood, in whose company she discovers literature and art, reading Les fleurs du mal in secret and dreaming of living with intensity: “It’s easier with two of us” (CFB, 229). Numerous intertextual allusions – to Émile Nelligan, Anne Hébert, Charles Baudelaire, André Gide, Albert Camus, Clarice Lispector, Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, and the Quebec feminist writers France Théoret, Madeleine Gagnon, Louise Cotnoir, and Louise Dupré – emphasize the vital importance of literature, another route to openness and sharing, in a gesture of recognition on the part of the author to the writers who have helped her survive and taught her how to live.

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At the opposite pole of the maternal spectrum, Diane-Monique Daviau writes with the devastated consciousness of knowing she was completely rejected by her mother: “[I imagine] the warmth of my mother’s arms […] but I have no memory of it” (MMG, 15). And yet her story too is an exercise in mourning: for her mother, who died without asking to see her daughter, but also for “the affection and support that [she] would have wanted to have” (MMG, 101). Faced with the reality of her mother’s death, the narrator is overcome by a feeling of irreparable loss: “I can’t get rid of the idea that keeps coming back to me like a crazy obsession: that I’d like to slide in beside her in the coffin, lie down beside her with my face turned towards hers” (MMG, 13, 17). The moment when the coffin is closed marks for her the end of the possibility of being loved, the disappearance of “the land of ochres and almost violet blues towards which I had always held out my arms” (MMG, 18). A “monster of egotism” (MMG, 130) and a master of the arts of manipulation and blackmail, this mother (like that of Paule Saint-Onge) often brandished the threat of her future death as a weapon against her loved ones: “When I die, people are going to be surprised […] But it will be too late!” (MMG, 22). Daviau writes to explore the possibilities contained in these enigmatic words, imagining that after death her mother has become the companion of Serge Gainsbourg, a singer and actor loved by the daughter but hated by the mother when she was alive: “It is a little bit as if […] my mother shared something with me” (MMG, 78). The words of Gainsbourg’s famous song “Je t’aime. Moi non plus” (I love you, me neither) are repeated several times in the text, a heartbreaking reminder of the uncrossable distance between mother and daughter. “Shell,” “wall,” “prison,” “hard kernel” (MMG, 131): the recurrent images of the mother all emphasize her hardness and inaccessibility. Angry at her mother even beyond death, the narrator imagines aggressive strategies that will allow her to penetrate this impregnable fortress: “I would force her to laugh […] I wouldn’t give up, I would be obstinate, pitiless, I would break her as she broke us by walling herself up in her coldness, I would shatter her hard gaze, her hard voice, her unending ability to be miserable” (MMG, 29). Writing provides a means of escaping her paralyzing anger: “[I write] in order to move forward […] as if I were a donkey […] so that I can finally discover something that will help me to take another step in my life” (MMG, 28). But the narrative refuses to take off, turns in circles, constantly falls back into repetition: “It circles around the death of my mother, it speaks of the abyss which opened under my feet when my mother died, it tells of the difficulty of losing one’s mother when one never really possessed her, perhaps it speaks of mothers who never allow

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themselves to be tamed, of all the mothers who don’t give, who would rather die than offer themselves” (MMG, 52). Gradually the writing project takes shape. The author will try to penetrate the mystery of this lack of love, to “go back even further, to find the moment when my mother, my very own mother, was forever lost to me” (MMG, 21). Unable to remember such a moment, she begins to obsessively imagine the loving relationship she would have wanted to have with her mother: “At the end of each sentence, I put what didn’t exist […]: the gentle words of my mother, the caresses of my mother, the attention of my mother, the indulgence of my mother, the generosity of my mother, the gaiety of my mother. At the end of each sentence, as alive as a dream, as vibrant as a wish: the gaze of my mother” (MMG, 28). Or she clings to the pathetic fragments of memory of what, for her, was a “paradise lost” – silent evenings spent at her mother’s side while the latter is watching television, interrupting the program from time to time to give orders to her daughter: “Go and get me a handkerchief / Give me the crossword section / Bring me the cushion […] Turn up the TV […] Go and empty the ashtray and bring me some matches / Go and see what time it is […] Go and get me another Coke […] Alright, it’s getting late. Go to bed!” (MMG, 144–5). During these evenings, the little girl dares not say anything, do anything, or hope for anything, for fear of being relegated to nothingness: “At each moment, I could be expelled from paradise, rejected with no possibility of an appeal. I was a little Cinderella whose carriage could be transformed into a pumpkin at any time” (MMG, 145). Like many of the other mothers in these autobiographies, Daviau’s mother exerts total control over her family and constantly complains to her children that, growing up in a family of fifteen children, she lacked mothering herself. Disappointed by life, she blames her unhappiness on the fact of being a mother: “I have given up everything for you all!” (MMG, 107). She spends her time waiting, never satisfied, projecting her frustrated dreams onto her daughter: “For a long time […] I believed that I wasn’t good enough […] My mother couldn’t see my good qualities or my actions […] my path, my life […] She could only see what was lacking in me, my faults, my weaknesses […] She seemed obsessed by her dreams which had remained in suspense, unrealized” (MMG, 104). Imprisoned in a thankless role and deprived of other options, these mothers cling to their role furiously, treating their daughters like children until they reach adulthood. Not being subjects themselves, they cannot bear the idea that their daughters could separate themselves from them and achieve autonomy. Like so many other autobiographical texts by women, Ma mère et Gainsbourg illustrates the paralyzing fusion with

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the mother spoken of by Luce Irigaray: “My mother was lost to me when I started to speak and to walk, my mother turned away from me when I started to disappoint her, to escape her, to be myself – when I started to escape her by being myself ” (MMG, 93). The narrator succeeds in separating herself from her mother, but at the price of an ongoing feeling of emptiness which her story attempts to fill. Given that the person she is mourning never became a subject herself, it is an impossible task: “My mother […] cannot die easily because she is not yet born […] Doesn’t a story, no matter what kind, have to contain an ending, a conclusion? Nothing here can lead to the resolution of anything” (MMG, 51). Having reached the end of her story, the narrator does, however, arrive at a certain acceptance of herself and of the imperfections of her relationship with her mother, imperfections reflected in the formlessness of her text: “The hardest thing […] is obviously to accept the fact that there is no meaning, no direction, in all of this” (MMG, 116). Noticing her increasing resemblance to her mother as she gets older, she is at first horrified, but, as she gradually learns to accept this resemblance, she is reconciled to some extent with herself and with the necessity of living with her negative heritage: “I feel almost privileged to have nothing in my suitcase but a dress with holes in it” (MMG, 126). Like Such a Good Education (examined in chapter 9), France Théoret’s Hôtel des quatre chemins (Hotel at the crossroads) is described as a novel on the title page, but, like the earlier book, it is clearly autobiographical, with place names, dates, characters, and events which correspond to facts in the author’s life. Once again the protagonist is named Évelyne, and here her evolution is traced up until her decision in her thirties to break with her mother, Éva, and devote herself to writing. Rather than following a linear or chronological order, the eleven short chapters of the book are “portraits in movement,”18 corresponding to themes (“Service, Helpfulness, Servility,” “I Offer the Other Cheek”), events (“Leaving the City,” “Starting College”), or persons (“My Mother’s Principles”) which have influenced or marked the narrator. Here again Théoret is exploring her relationship with the elegant and sensual mother she adored as a small child, but who reduced her to a state of muteness by her coldness, anger, and rigidity. In short, factual, powerfully resonant sentences, she assesses the damage done to her in childhood and reflects on the collective dimension of her individual experience. Hôtel des quatre chemins resembles Such a Good Education in its focus on the education of a young girl at home, at school, and in society – an education aimed at the erasure of all traces of individuality, spontaneity, and imagination. One recognizes the hierarchical system written about

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by Claire Martin and others, based on the power of the strong over the weak; Théoret’s heroine is taught, for example, that “if you don’t learn to obey, you won’t know how to give orders” (HQC, 29). For the timid Évelyne, who seeks above all to please her mother, this means she must be obedient and “servile” in all circumstances: “The adult was large, the child was an unfinished being whose energies had to be crushed. They had to be drained, destroyed, gotten rid of entirely if possible” (HQC, 30). Beginning with her earliest volumes of poetry in the 1970s, Théoret’s work has circulated around two themes: the relationship with the mother and the daughter’s struggle to find a voice. As Lori Saint-Martin explains, the short phrase “Je, langue, mère” (I, language, mother) in her second book, Une voix pour Odile19 (A voice for Odile) (1978), sums up Théoret’s entire project: “to tell what has never been told about mothers, women and bodies that are mistreated […] To give birth to all these mothers through writing.”20 In spite of her hysterical outbursts and her rigidity, the mother is evoked with tenderness in these works, portrayed as a silent and suffering victim linked to her daughter in a fragile complicity. It is not until Théoret’s two autobiographical novels Such a Good Education (2006) and Hôtel des quatre chemins (2011) that her full destructive force is unveiled. Each of these works seems to bring the author closer to total self-revelation, almost as if she were unpeeling the layers of an onion skin and getting closer to an almost unspeakable truth. It is hard not to think in this regard of Denise Desautels’s words about her own process of self-discovery: “There are so many resistances before you get to the true story, the thin, bony shell that protects the soul.”21 In Hôtel des quatre chemins, Théoret’s ongoing preoccupation with finding liberation through the pursuit of knowledge is shown to be linked to an extreme ambivalence in the mother-daughter relationship, for it is the mother who not only inspires her daughter with the desire to excel in her studies, but, years later, represents the voice of interdiction, harshly telling her that she has no right to abandon her mother and her social class by continuing her education. Like a praying mantis which devours not her husband (since he is “head of the family”) but her children, Évelyne’s mother refuses to let go of her daughter, pursuing her into adulthood and reducing her to a childlike state on each encounter. Married to an authoritarian, mediocre husband and deprived of the possession of a house, which she considers the symbol of feminine success, she puts on airs of superiority, dressing her children in such a way as to show they come from a well-to-do family (HQC, 27) and teaching them to condescend to their working-class neighbours. Possessed by an immense anger, she screams or falls into

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silence, treating her children coldly and insisting on total obedience from them: “She totally assumed her role as a mother. She made us toe the line, knocked us into shape […] She taught us that we shouldn’t be afraid of our lowliness. If we were very lowly, we would be accepted” (HQC, 13, 17). Such an education in servility, reinforced by the hymns sung at church, the lessons taught in school, and the threats and insults of the adults at home, leads the little girl to the realization that revolt is impossible. Here, Théoret explores in depth the disappropriation of self which she captured in the image of the “old, tired little girl” of her early poetry: “Mocking was the prerogative of the big people and you had to accept it with a smile. It was a perilous thing to learn, this disappropriation of the self […] I gave in before my parents. I had the feeling of having been born tired, lacking will, on the side of dirtiness and guilt. I had so little personal value, I was too young for that. My shame was continual” (HQC, 30). Until adolescence, Évelyne continues to adore her mother in spite of being constantly rejected by her: “Her rigid body would freeze” (HQC, 31). Blaming herself for her mother’s coldness, she lives in the future, motivated by the principle so often repeated by her mother: “The best heritage we can leave our children is schooling” (HQC, 26). This principle will guide her throughout her life, leading her to engage in the search for knowledge that was the principal subject of Such a Good Education. Hôtel des quatre chemins reveals the extent of the struggle with her mother that will be necessary in order for her to claim this right to education and knowledge. Focused primarily on the years after the family’s move from Saint-Henri to Saint-Colomban in the Laurentians, where the father has bought a hotelbar situated at the crossroads of the village, Hôtel des quatre chemins reveals an important transformation in the mother who, despite her anger, had in the past shown an interest in the arts, dressed as elegantly as she could, sewn good clothes for her children, and hired a diction teacher who read them the fables of La Fontaine: “That mother no longer existed” (HQC, 37). Now, having given up her dreams and her ambitions for her children, she does all she can to resemble the other women in the village and please the lumberjacks, loggers, and construction workers who are the principal clients of her husband’s bar. Education, formerly seen as an advantage for her children, now seems to her a defect, an unacceptable sign of their difference: “Here, we’re in the country, surrounded by unpretentious people, and my daughter walks around with a book in her hands. I don’t want our clients to see my daughter with a book” (HQC, 37). Often she intones, with pursed lips: “The little miss is putting on airs.” As well, she repeats constantly to her daughter, who is now working in the bar, that “all men are

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superior to all women” (HQC, 38). Totally devastated, the young girl enters a long period of confusion and stuttering, in which only the forbidden activity of reading offers her any relief. Torn between conflicting views of the world, she loses all sense of her own worth and dares not utter any words of revolt: “In her presence I was learning what was called masochism” (HQC, 38); “I was a rebel without the right to rebellion” (HQC, 57). Treated as a snob and accused of being pretentious or mentally ill, she sinks deeper and deeper into silence: “I became mute, turning more and more into what I had been since birth, a night person, without a voice. I had learned too many things, I didn’t know where to start” (HQC, 59); “I was under surveillance, that is why I never spoke” (HQC, 67). In her mother’s gaze she sees no recognition of her own existence: “I was an intelligent object in her service. As in the past, when I was a child, I served as a place for her waste disposal, an outlet for the disgust she felt for my father” (HQC, 95). The book deals only briefly with the years of college and university described in Such a Good Education. It does, however, record the awakening of the “inner voice,” defined, as in the earlier work, as a key moment of transition: “I learn to value my existence” (HQC, 93). The book ends with a final attempt at communication with the mother, an event that begins in hope but ends in disaster. Now thirty-four years old and a college professor separated from her husband, Évelyne rents a cottage with the idea of using it as a place to write. Full of optimism, she invites her mother, now a widow, to visit her there, planning to ask her if they may now at last begin to address each other using the familiar “tu.” “My decision to ask her this anticipates a renewal, we will have a better relationship. We will be closer to one another. I think about my mother, whom I’ve never stopped loving […] I am part of the women’s movement and I want to give her what I’m receiving from the other women […] My heart is pounding. I’m feeling the same way about her as I did when I was little” (HQC, 114). The mother acquiesces to her daughter’s request, but immediately attacks her, accusing her of stealing boxes of spaghetti twelve years earlier, when she was a student living in poverty and returning to the hotel-bar to work on weekends. All at once the joy of addressing her mother as “tu” disappears, and Évelyne falls back into her childhood feelings of guilt and shame: “I am inhibited, destroyed by her accusations. I was on the edge of euphoria and now I am falling into an abyss […] I admit that I stole some boxes of Catelli. I lower my head, ashamed, uncertain, guilty […] It doesn’t occur to me to justify myself […] The day is ruined […] I had hoped to get closer to her. I was so close to her in childhood, I loved her so much […] I am a woman of language and I can’t formulate a single convincing sentence in her presence” (HQC, 115–18).

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Éva leaves, telling her daughter how disappointed she is in her: “She expected more of me, she tells me. My mother is dissatisfied with me, with my way of living, with what I am, with what I have” (HQC, 118). The next day, Évelyne sits down in front of a blank page and begins to put her dispossession into words. re COn C iLi AtiO n At LA S t: frAn Cine nOËL

A combined biography and autobiography, Francine Noël’s La femme de ma vie (The woman of my life) treats the same themes as the works previously discussed, but goes beyond them to a reconciliation with the mother who, thanks to the process of remembering and writing which constitutes the book, has finally become a subject for her daughter. As in the works of Saint-Onge, Desautels, Daviau, and Théoret, the mother presented here is controlling, egotistical, and uninterested in sacrificing herself for her daughter. But even as she lays bare these negative aspects of her mother, Noël pays homage to her verve, energy, and courage and, above all, to the passion for storytelling she has passed on to her daughter. Like Gabrielle Roy, but in a more sustained fashion, she brings her mother to life for her readers, allowing them to espouse her point of view as fully as they do that of her daughter. Written ten years after the death of Noël’s mother, the book is an attempt to untangle the complex threads of a relationship that moved from the daughter’s total admiration for her mother as a small child to an embarrassment and desire for distance which began when she was eleven years old. Unlike the other authors, Noël follows the mother-daughter relationship through the length of a full life (or, rather, two full lives), from the original fusion and the dramatic break to an ongoing series of reconciliations and retreats, until the moment when the daughter accompanies her dying mother in her final moments, holding her hand “like that of a child who needs reassurance” (FV, 154). La femme de ma vie conforms perfectly with the traditional criteria of autobiography, fully respecting the pact between author and reader as to its referential truth. The identification between author, narrator, and protagonist is total and the story is full of dates, place names, and events which anchor it solidly in the historical and cultural reality of Quebec (Gratien Gélinas’s Fridolin monologues from the 1940s, the songs of Félix Leclerc, the election of René Lévesque, etc.). Faithful to the quotation from Samuel Beckett which is the book’s epigraph – “I tell it as I see it” – Noël writes in a direct, down-to-earth prose studded with amusing anecdotes, evoking her negative feelings about her mother even as she presents the life of the latter and traces the progression of their

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relationship as objectively as possible. Like Gabrielle Roy, she recognizes the immense influence of her mother’s talent for storytelling on her own vocation as a novelist, with the notable difference that the family saga recounted by Noël’s mother turns out to be a tissue of lies. The mother’s voice (its musical intonations, its impeccable articulation, its accent) and her stories are at the heart of the magic she exerts, but are also an aspect of her overpowering and irritating presence in her daughter’s life. Thus, the first sentence of the book – “My mother talked a lot” (FV, 11) – is double-edged. Noël reveals her ambivalence in an amusing scene where she recalls the frequent telephone calls she would receive from her mother when she was in her forties, the mother of a small boy, a well-known novelist, and a college professor. While her mother goes on at length about herself on the phone, showing no interest in the life of her daughter or grandson, Francine looks after various tasks, watering her plants or giving herself a manicure while murmuring an occasional word or two to show that she is still on the line. And yet, she adds, in spite of her irritation she would sometimes take the time to call her mother herself, for the simple pleasure of hearing her voice: “I would dial her number and then lie down on my bed and listen to her. I had the best of her then, her voice abstracted from her body” (FV, 115). As in Denise Desautels’s Ce fauve, le bonheur, the intensity of the original fusion with the mother owes much to the fact that the latter is present only intermittently in the life of her daughter. In both autobiographies, the formative years of the protagonists (from ages three to five) are a period in which they only see their mothers on weekends. Francine’s parents having temporarily separated, she is living with a guardian in the suburbs while her mother works during the week in downtown Montreal. For the little girl, her beautiful and elegant mother seems like a “hard-working fairy” (FV, 15), an affectionate physical presence who shares her bed and whose crepe de Chine dresses, jewellery, trinkets, and silvery belts she adores. In turn, she knows she is adored by her mother, who caresses her from head to toe while singing loving words (FV, 12). The short period during which her parents reconcile leaves few traces in her memory: “In my memories, I’m alone with my mother” (FV, 13). Mother and daughter live together for only a year and a half, when Francine is eight or nine years old, and the author recalls this time on Rue Laval, near Square Saint-Louis, as the happiest of her life. Enrolled in the neighbourhood school, the little girl returns home alone at lunchtime and after school, waiting until her mother returns from work with her arms filled with groceries. Energetic, joyful, and a good cook, her mother shares with her daughter not only her housekeeping secrets but her love

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of culture: the Metropolitan Opera, which she listens to every Saturday as she does her ironing, the songs of the Quebec chansonniers, and the folksongs of her Gaspé childhood, sung heartily while playing a piano left in the apartment by the previous tenants, and an oral and personalized version of literary works, from the Bible and Greek mythology to Lafontaine, Hugo, Musset, and Lamartine, as well as stories about “Louis XIV, Marie-Antoinette, Cleopatra, Liszt in Paris, Chopin in Paris, Josephine Baker in Paris, Sarah Bernhardt in Montreal, King Dagobert, the twins Jacob and Esau and their plate of lentils, and Vercingetorix conquered by the Romans” (FV, 28). During their walks in the neighbourhood, she tells the story of “each building, each house, each passerby” (FV, 22). All her stories have a personal touch, with poet Émile Nelligan’s house on Rue Laval inspiring a tale in which she is the principal character: “She told me he had been thrown out of the house by his father and said that she identified with him. Their youths had almost touched each other – there were a few decades between them, but that was a minor detail. According to her, Émile had been familiar with her home territory, Cacouna! He had spent his summers there and admired the same landscapes as she had” (FV, 22). The stories of her childhood in the Lower Saint Lawrence, worthy of a picaresque novel, constitute a myth of origins for Francine, peopled by priests, fishermen, and a whole panoply of colourful characters who gave her the sense of having a history and belonging to a culture: Whether she was evoking the exploits of Hercules or those of our family, she was carried away by her storyteller’s emotion and revealed feelings to me which she couldn’t – or wouldn’t – reveal any other way […] She had such joy and conviction in telling the story that I totally espoused her point of view. My life was life according to Jeanne Pelletier. Like all storytellers, she chose what she wanted from reality and transformed it. She gave me a sunnier vision of the world. She designated my place in this world and our family saga constituted the framework of my personal story, which was a continuation of hers. (FV, 37–8) And then, at the age of about ten, the heroine is expelled from paradise through her own fault: “I took a false step and I was shut out of this happiness […] My marvellous childhood with her was over. It had lasted a year and a half ” (FV, 38–9). Caught skipping school, Francine is sent, sick at heart, to a boarding school run by the Sisters of Saint Anne in Lachine. From that moment on, daughter and mother will be separated by a distance that is not only geographical, but dictated by

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questions of social class, as Francine begins to compare her mother to the bourgeois mothers of her schoolmates. Seeing her through the eyes of the other girls, she feels disgusted by her too made up face, her heavy perfumes, and her cheap jewellery: “Suddenly, I was ashamed of this solitary, hardworking, flashy mother. And I was ashamed of being ashamed. A gulf started to open up between us” (FV, 53). Overcome with guilt about these feelings, she reveals them to a priest in confession, only to discover that he is obsessed with “sins of impurity” and not the least interested in her relationship with her mother. Seething with frustration, she leaves the Church and does not return for the next twenty-five years: “No one could deliver me from my repugnance for my mother, no one wanted to absolve me of it, and I was condemned to live alone with it and my guilt” (FV, 64). With this growing detachment comes “the desire to live my life rather than hers” (FV, 67). Frustrated by the control her mother still exerts over her, Francine leaves home at seventeen, in a gesture to which her mother, wounded to the quick, responds by disinheriting her. And yet she continues to interfere in her daughter’s life, telephoning the theatre in the middle of a play in which Francine is acting to inform them that she is on the verge of committing suicide and will do so unless her daughter returns home immediately. Used to her mother’s self-dramatizations, Francine is not overly worried: “I returned to the stage with even more adrenalin” (FV, 78). Over the years, the two women come to a reconciliation of sorts, made easier when Francine becomes a mother and Jeanne a grandmother, but always extremely tense, especially when the two find themselves in the same physical space for more than a day or two. In spite of herself, Francine is unable to conquer the disgust she feels for her mother’s body: “Her laboured, sonorous breathing disgusted me instead of inspiring my compassion. Her patchouli-based perfumes made me feel sick and I hated the way she dressed like a thirty-year-old coquette […] Part of me judged every one of her gestures, I was irritated by the lack of control I had over the physical effect she had on me” (FV, 111–12). At times, she admits, she was troubled by the contrast between the mothers she portrayed in her novels and the reality of her own situation: “At night, I was haunted by the vanity of my prose: in my books I invented characters who were loving mothers and who were loved, but I couldn’t stand my own mother” (FV, 112–13). As Jeanne reaches old age, a certain calm, even a reversal of roles between mother and daughter, arrives in their relationship: “She talked less, using her energy to fight against her pain. I became talkative. In my turn I told her all my ‘office’ stories, I confided in her a bit and she listened to me without judging” (FV, 123).

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The family saga is also transformed during these years. Behind its ellipses and false notes, Francine discovers a hidden story, marked by violence, alcohol, and a rejection her mother has never been able to speak of, one which explains her rapid mood changes, hypersensitivity, and tendency to reject her own daughter. If, for the daughter, the fact that her grandfather was a smuggler during the prohibition years adds spice to the family story, she realizes that this is not the case for her mother: “Shame doesn’t need to be founded in reality in order to take a person over and reduce them to silence, camouflage and denial” (FV, 107). This parental silence is not unique, Noël suggests, but rather a phenomenon common to families of the generation which gained access to the middle class thanks to the Quiet Revolution: “There will always be things that aren’t spoken of – suffering, deprivation, failures – and in the family history of most people in my generation there are a lot of suspension points” (FV, 107). Her mother’s stories –  as much by what they leave out as by the magic they exert – are one version among a thousand of the collective story of the Québécois people: “The murmur of her words had passed over my childhood like a snow squall which attracts the eye on a beautiful winter day. Under the shimmering snow, I now suspected the frost, the famous Quebec silence by which she too was affected. A part of her remained enclosed in permafrost” (FV, 107). A voyage towards love and understanding, the book ends with the author’s statement that she misses her mother. It is not (as in the case of Gabrielle Roy, for example) an idealized and suffering mother she misses, but rather the complex and imperfect one she has discovered through writing: “Not the fairy of my childhood, but the person who replaced her, the capricious and difficult woman with whom I shared moments of complicity, the pleasure of words and laughter. I miss her courage, her passion, and even her implacable pride” (FV, 164). It is also a voyage towards the self, for, in revisiting the stormy territory of her relationship with her mother, the author has discovered many aspects of herself which are an inheritance from her mother: “The pride of being part of a family […] my confidence at work, my feeling of belonging to a class – the one I came from – and pride in being a Québécoise. But the best thing she left me is words. Her love of stories rubbed off on me” (FV, 161–2). Returning in conclusion to the autobiographical pact, she identifies with precision the only type of truth which autobiography can aspire to: the authenticity and accuracy of one’s own point of view on reality. “There is no such thing as a complete and objective account. So I didn’t aim at the truth, but rather to tell the story of my mother as she spoke of herself and as I heard her speak” (FV, 164). More than anything, her book is “a small and simple

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battle against being swallowed up by death. A memorial. The refusal of loss” (FV, 165). •  •  • More than any of the other works, and with a “panache” (FV, 164) which recalls that of the author’s storytelling mother, La femme de ma vie presents a mother-daughter relationship that takes place over time, moving from the paradise of original fusion to the necessary rupture, and finally to reconciliation with a mother who has finally become a subject for her daughter. As Lori Saint-Martin points out, Gabrielle Roy too “lays the groundwork for a recognition of maternal subjectivity […] inscribing the voice of the older woman in the text of the younger one in such a way that two subjectivities, two voices are at times intertwined.”22 But in Noël’s work, the difficult dialogue between daughter and mother is examined from all points of view, embraced in all its imperfections, and followed in its changes over time. For the first time, there is a possibility of reconciliation with the overpowering French-Canadian mother presented as a paralyzing force in so many other autobiographical works by women. Several of these works mention the unfulfilled dreams of these mothers in passing, but the mother is presented as so distant and forbidding, and the autonomy of the daughter is so dearly bought, that reconciliation seems out of the question. As Luce Irigaray’s work demonstrates, a mother who has not lived herself, who is not herself a subject, cannot give her daughter the tools necessary for achieving autonomy. All these texts tell of women imprisoned in the maternal role and of the consequences of that imprisonment for the lives of their daughters. As for the father, he is notable for his absence. In almost all of them, to borrow Francine Noël’s description of her own family situation, we are in the presence of a “dynasty of single mothers” (FV, 83). Is it possible to generalize on the basis of these few examples about the situation of Quebec women – that of the so-called “queens of the hearth” who reigned over the pre-Quiet Revolution families, or that of their daughters, many of whom became adults in the 1960s, when changes in women’s role had begun to take place? Most of the authors make the link themselves between their experiences and those of the larger collectivity, showing their own acquisition of voice as a consequence of the Quiet Revolution and, a decade later, of the feminist movement. Reading their stories, one begins to understand the often bitter struggles and the hardwon solidarity among women that were necessary before the latter could say, along with France Théoret, “I value my existence” (HQC, 93).

C h ap t e r 1 1

Tr ap p e d i n th e Im a ge: N e ll y A rc an’s Aut of i ct i ons

A death wish […] develops and grows when you’re eaten up by your own reflection. Committing suicide is just a refusal to go on cannibalizing yourself. Nelly Arcan, Burqa of Skin I’ll finally be able to show my ugliness […] I’ll kill myself in front of you at the end of a rope, I’ll make my death into a poster that will reproduce itself on the walls, I’ll die like they die in the theatre, in the din of the hue and cry […] And if I die before my suicide […] if someone strangles me in a fit of rage because my very special way of keeping silent outlasts the most cocksure of speeches […] I’d have to be found dead in bed, the crumpled sheets on the floor a sign of someone fleeing without bothering to cover me […] I’d like to be unveiled cold and naked to my community, so that no-one can deny me any longer, permanently fixed, a corpse to be identified. Nelly Arcan, Whore

Aut O fi CtiO n Or the SP eC tAC Le Of the Se L f

On 24 September 2009, at the age of thirty-six, scant weeks before the publication of her novel Paradis clef en main (Exit), Nelly Arcan took her own life in her Plateau Mont-Royal apartment. Her tragic death brought an end to a brilliant and scandalous body of work of which the first two books, Putain (Whore) (2001) (W) and Folle (Hysteric) (2004) (H), as well as a collection of short texts published posthumously under the title Burqa de chair (Burqa of Skin) (2011) (BS),1 are examples of a hybrid genre called autofiction, a product of the postmodern era which all of Arcan’s works portray and denounce. Trapped in the image of femininity

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transmitted by advertising and the media, Arcan can only expose, with a rage-stoked lucidity, the devastating effect of these images on women’s lives and her own inability to get free of them. And what better means to communicate the nature of this image-centred universe than autofiction, a genre founded on the impossibility of distinguishing between image and reality, lies and truth, in all autobiographical works? The product and symptom of an age in which the old hierarchies have collapsed, autofiction makes a spectacle of a self in free fall, liberated by (or condemned to) the singularity of its narrative path. As Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska points out, it is the self we meet on phone-in shows, reality television, and even the immensely popular Quebec television program Tout le monde en parle: media spaces where the postmodern Narcissus exhibits his or her struggles and excesses before audiences of millions.2 The term autofiction, invented in 1977 by Serge Doubrovsky, refers to a category of works close to the autobiographical novel, but which proudly display their refusal to submit to generic boundaries. Neither novels nor autobiographies, they are a combination of the two, thumbing their nose at readers who look for signs of the pact guaranteeing the referential truth of the text. Philippe Lejeune, the theoretician who formulated the concept of the “autobiographical pact,” reflected in the 1970s on the possibility that a novel might exhibit the onomastic identity of author, narrator, and protagonist which characterizes autobiography: “Can the hero of a novel have the same name as the author? Nothing says that such a thing is impossible, and it might in fact be an internal contradiction that could produce interesting results. But in practice, I cannot think of an example of such a work.”3 This was the challenge to which Doubrovsky seemed to be responding by inventing the neologism autofiction to describe one of his own works: “Autobiography? No, that is the privilege reserved to the important people of this world, at the end of their lives and in a beautiful style. A fiction, rather, of events and facts that are strictly real; or an autofiction, if one prefers, which replaces the language of an adventure by an adventure in language.”4 The boundaries between autobiography, the autobiographical novel, and autofiction are porous and depend to some extent on the point of view of the observer. For some critics,5 the category of autofiction includes any fictional work which contains a clearly identifiable autobiographical element. According to this very broad definition, the list of such works goes back to Dante’s Divine Comedy and would include such titles as James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Hubert Aquin’s Prochain épisode (Next Episode). Jacques Lecarme’s definition is much more restrictive: for him, only works in which the text actually

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contains the name of the author can be considered autofictions: “The term autofiction designates a novelistic fiction which is also an autobiography. It is a fiction in that it is labelled a novel, and some parts of it may therefore be fictional. It is an autobiography in that author, narrator, and protagonist all bear the same proper name: that of the author or of his or her usual pseudonym […] This nominal designation can be complete, partial, or coded, but it is not limited to an initial or reduced to anonymity.”6 Gilles Perron also stresses the importance of the author’s name, even if shrouded in ambiguity, in the distinction he makes between autofiction and the autobiographical novel: “While autofiction aims at confusion between the character and the author, the autobiographical novel avoids this confusion by disguising the author under another name in the story.”7 Following Lecarme’s strict definition, the only work by Nelly Arcan that truly qualifies as an autofiction is Hysteric, a text described on the title page of the original French version Folle simply as a recit, a “story,” although the English translation is presented as a novel. Not only are the narrator and the protagonist identical to the author, but the text reveals that the name Nelly Arcan is a pseudonym (the author’s real name is Isabelle Fortier): “I kept my real name for close friends and used Nelly for everyone else” (H, 18). Later, addressing her lover, the narrator remembers: “You thought I was beautiful too, you were happy, you had Nelly Arcan at your feet” (H, 160). Several other publicly known details of the author’s career, especially regarding the success of her first book, Whore, are also revealed in the book, so that, as Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska observes, “the contract of identity as defined by Lejeune is […] fulfilled. The name of the author, whether or not it is a pseudonym, includes the identity of the narrator and that of the principal character.”8 Most critics are, however, less demanding than Lecarme regarding the need for the author’s name to be included in the text if it is to be considered a work of autofiction. In general, they allow for extratextual signs like a prologue or an author’s note attesting to the autobiographical nature of a work to be sufficient indicators of its autofictional status. This is the case of Whore, which, while it is described as a novel on its title page, was accompanied by numerous interviews and television appearances in which Nelly Arcan spoke openly of the fact that, like the narrator of her book, she had worked as a call girl for several years while a student of literature and psychoanalysis at the University of Quebec in Montreal. Attracted by the scandal, members of the media focussed their attention on the autobiographical aspects of the book, ignoring its literary qualities in spite of the author’s attempts to draw their attention to them. In front of the cameras, Arcan often found herself trapped in the image of the whore

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she had created of herself, while desperately wanting to be treated as the writer she had become by publishing the book.9 In an interview with Pascale Navarro, she discusses this dilemma, insisting on the fact that Whore is not an autobiography, but rather a fiction inspired by the facts of her life: “I can’t stop [this insistence on the autobiographical aspect]. But I don’t want people to focus on the image of the prostitute as an object of curiosity […] I want them to listen to me, to see me, as a writer.”10 In general, the “fictional” element in Arcan’s writing consists of a tendency to push the elements of a situation, emotion, or person to their limits, while at the same time reducing them to their essential traits. “All the characteristics I borrow from people are made absolute,”11 she tells Tristan Malavoy-Racine regarding her book Hysteric. Speaking of Whore, she explains to Pascale Navarro that she chose an esthetic, or a form, in which to capture lived reality: “I wrote this novel in a state of hatred. Then I detached myself from the story. It is true that it’s autobiographical, but at the same time, I wrote it as if I were ‘beside’ reality: the form that I chose is one of entrapment, of excess, there was a literary and esthetic decision to communicate hatred.”12 Nancy Huston describes the way this process of transformation of reality works for Arcan in her presentation of “Shame,” a short story based on the author’s humiliating experience when she was a guest on the program Tout le monde en parle in 2007: “She amplifies the pain she is feeling, pushes it to a paroxysm, which is her way of capturing its meaning” (BS, 67). In the interviews Arcan gave, one is also struck by her tendency to generalize from her own experience, making it emblematic of the experience of all women, especially regarding the tyranny exerted on them by images of women in the media: “It’s my story that I’m telling, that of a girl who needs to please no matter what the cost. And the alienation related to beauty is a woman’s story. When I go into a corner store and see all those magazines with photos of sexy teenagers, I can’t bear it: I’m both fascinated by this femininity and panicked by it. I absolutely have to be the most beautiful. If it’s not me it’s them, and then who am I?”13 “Then who am I?” This question, which is the central one asked by all the writings analyzed in this book, is dissected and analyzed with a despairing lucidity in the work of Nelly Arcan. Who am I, the Québécoise raised in a Catholic milieu which fashioned every aspect of my deepest self, and in whose dogmas I no longer believe? Who am I, the daughter of a woman who never existed as a subject, but only as the object of desire for a man? Who am I, who detest my body and need male approval to the point that I submit to an unending series of cosmetic surgeries? The obsession with the body, appearance, and sex exhibited by Arcan’s

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narrators is the surface covering of a fragile or nonexistent sense of self, linked to a culture centred on the image of the sacrificial woman. As the title of her posthumous volume Burqa of Skin suggests, the cult of beauty in Western society, like the veil worn by Muslim women, can mask an absence of identity or autonomy. The dissonance between public image and inner reality, which girls become used to at an early age, may explain women’s taste for autofiction, a genre which allows them to reveal their intimate selves in the public sphere at last. In Autofiction et dévoilement de soi, Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska remarks that the lack of modesty and desire to shock the reader which characterize the writing of Arcan and other writers of autofictional works (Annie Ernaux, Catherine Millet, Christine Angot, Marie-Sissi Labrèche) are attempts to disguise a confusion that is close to panic: “No longer knowing who she is, woman capitulates readily to the desire of the other, his fantasms, his needs.”14 Reflecting on the situation of today’s women, who longer have the ideals of femininity and the roles that formerly defined them, she concludes that the separation of sexuality and reproduction, while offering women new possibilities of erotic fulfilment, condemned them to the perpetuation of their status as sexual objects: “Makeup, diets, visits to the gym, hormone therapy and cosmetic surgery transform her flesh into a cultural object.”15 In Nelly Arcan’s work, the sexual object speaks, from the most abject space assigned to her in culture, that of the prostitute (Whore), and that of the woman lost to herself through love (Hysteric). And through the power of her words, the object becomes a subject. In many ways, Arcan is the female double and the tragic “little sister” of another Quebec writer, Hubert Aquin, whom she resembles not only by the assonance of their names, but by a desire for suicide that goes back to adolescence. “Since the age of fifteen I have dreamed of a beautiful suicide,”16 says the narrator of Aquin’s Prochain épisode, in a sentence echoed by the narrator of Hysteric: “The day I turned fifteen, I decided to kill myself when I turned thirty” (H, 10). Both authors write with exceptional lucidity about the forces at play in the culture of their time, and yet they themselves were tragically incapable of escaping from the dark elements they had unearthed: the problematic heritage of the religious past, the far-reaching but undeclared war between men and women, and the suffocating presence of Quebec within Canada, which Arcan describes as “this empty container, this country like a sky where so many things stretch out and unfold, spread out like the agonies of a beached whale, but where nothing moves, nothing happens, just stretching, only distance happens, time that turns in circles” (BS, 40).

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In an earlier work,17 I used the metaphor of a “corpse under the foundations of the house” to illustrate the situation of woman in Quebec literature and, more broadly, in patriarchal culture as a whole. As the second quotation from Nelly Arcan used as an epigraph for this chapter suggests, Arcan is this corpse – the woman imprisoned in her body, destroyed by her reflection in the mirror, uncertain of her identity, obsessed by her resemblance to a mother whose fate she does not want to repeat, and dependent on the love of a paternal/masculine other whose destructive values she recognizes but is unable to resist. In the theatre that her life had become by the time of her suicide, she voluntarily assumed this role, denouncing the scandal of women’s situation in a culture that has reached an impasse: “I’d like to be unveiled cold and naked to my community, so that no-one can deny me any longer, permanently fixed, a corpse to be identified” (W, 80). Reading her, one is reminded of another literary corpse, that of the “black woman” at the end of Anne Hébert’s novel Kamouraska: Off in a parched field, under the rocks, they’ve dug up a woman, all black but still alive, buried there long ago, some far-off, savage time. Strangely preserved […] And everyone thinks that she must have an absolutely awesome lust for life, buried alive so long. A hunger growing and growing inside the earth for centuries on end! […] And whenever she runs through the town, begging and weeping, they sound the alarm. Nothing before her but doors shut tight […] Nothing to do now but let herself die. Alone and hungry.18 WHORE : M ySti Ci SM turned uPSide dOWn

In Whore, Arcan universalizes her own experience by fusing it with the archetype of the prostitute, the ultimate woman-object: “This whore can be me or not, she could be somebody else” (W, 38). Defined by her body, rejected and rendered mute by the patriarchal society of which she is both an accomplice and a victim, the prostitute is the woman exchanged as merchandise who epitomizes the oppression of all women.19 As Yannick Resch observes, the question posed by Arcan’s provocative and dispossessed narrator is that of “the identity of woman and the use of her body in today’s society […] The interrogation about identity is at the heart of the narrative. The narrator seeks to know who she is based on her clients’ multiple but always identical ways of looking at her.”20 This story of a fragmented and postmodern protagonist, reduced to her body and frozen in the gaze

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of the other, is a continuation of the quest for identity present in all the earlier autobiographies by women and, sadly, a suggestion that this quest has reached an impasse. In a striking passage which echoes not only the “decree of a will higher than [one’s] own” of Anne Hébert’s The Torrent, but also the paralysis of the narrator of Aquin’s Next Episode as he confronts the failure of his nation’s history,21 Arcan’s narrator links her own drama to the absence of stories (or the absence from history) of her Québécois and female ancestry: “What’s killing me came well before me, its seed was somewhere in the gestures my mother didn’t make, the void has a weight that I swear you can inherit, you can carry inside yourself the story of three centuries without history, ten generations forgotten because there is nothing to say about them or because the only thing to say would be what wasn’t done, and I’ve had it with this story that won’t tell itself ” (W, 72). The voice which speaks in the text is that of the prostitute, seated on the bed waiting for her clients or lying on the couch in her psychoanalyst’s office, but in it can be heard the voices of all women caught in the oppressive structures of patriarchal society: “It’s the body that makes the woman, the whore is proof of it” (W, 41). It is a powerful and despairing voice, carrying the reader along in its lyrical flow, and it seems to come from “elsewhere, on the other side of things.”22 According to Danielle Laurin, it is the devastating authenticity of this voice that distinguishes the text from a simple autobiography: “This voice […] transcends the question of whether or not it is true. We are, above all, in literature.”23 The text, a long monologue punctuated almost exclusively by commas, repeats itself and circles endlessly around a series of fragments linked by free association of images or ideas. While reminiscent of psychoanalytical discourse, it is also a lament, a prayer, an exorcism: “I talk about everything and nothing without interruption so that there are no gaps between the words, so that it sounds like a prayer […] knowing that it accomplishes nothing […] but you have to keep going not to die from the blow of a silence too much borne, have to say everything several times in a row and especially not be afraid to repeat yourself ” (W, 57–8). At times, from the depths of her solitary space, the narrator addresses an unidentified “you” who could be her psychoanalyst, but who, as Michel Biron observes, is above all “an absent addressee with whom the reader is invited to identify.”24 the SAC rifi CiAL WOMA n

A sort of preface or prologue with no title, printed in italics, anchors the text solidly in Quebec culture. There is reason to suspect that in this prologue the author has chosen to remove her literary mask, entering into

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the autobiographical pact with her readers which guarantees the truth of the story to follow. Several aspects of it create this impression: the calmer tone of the writing, the suggestion that the author is addressing the reader directly – “I’m not used to addressing others when I speak, which is why there’s nothing to hold me back” (W, 1), the details she reveals about her childhood, her family situation, and the route that led her to prostitution and later to writing. However, as there is no way to verify whether the text is “true” or “fictional,” its generic ambiguity remains total. In her preface to Burqa of Skin, Nancy Huston proposes the provocative idea that prostitutes, cut off from time and the possibility of change during their hours of work, “have a tendency to become either mystics or nihilists. Or both.”25 And indeed, in Arcan’s prologue, prostitution and mysticism appear as the two opposing poles of a long tradition of female sacrifice. The author/narrator describes her childhood in a small village near the Maine border – a traditional Catholic childhood which seems something of an anachronism given that Arcan was born in 1973, more than ten years after the start of the Quiet Revolution – and offers a surprising contrast with the urban, postmodern universe of the story that follows: “In this fervently Catholic country where I grew up […] life could be quite beautiful if you didn’t want much, if you had faith” (W, 1). In the “archaic” (W, 10) atmosphere of this childhood universe lie the roots of the narrator’s alienation: the aspiration to sacrifice, the feeling of never being good enough or talented enough, the desire to please at all costs, the self-hatred, the obsession with a body that is always to be perfected. The narrator’s description of her teachers – “dried-up nuns, fanatic about the sacrifice they were making of their lives, women I had to call mothers and who’d had to choose fake names” (W, 1) – recalls the ideal of self-sacrifice espoused by the nuns of New France and rigidly imposed in the convent school curricula described by Henriette Dessaulles and Claire Martin. Ironically, the decision to become a prostitute, initially seen as a break from this Catholic past, turns out to be a repetition of the attitudes of these nuns: “[I became] a whore to escape every shred of my past identity, so I could prove to others that you really could pursue your studies, dream about being a writer, hope for a future and […] sacrifice yourself just like the sisters in my elementary school” (W, 1–2). Like them, she chooses a new name on entering her vocation as a call girl, that of her sister Cynthia, who died a few months before her own birth. As well, she imagines that the nuns, like her, have perhaps doubted God’s existence and attempted to escape their families: “Maybe they didn’t really believe in their God who was so thirsty for names, at least not to the end, maybe they were just looking for a pretext to separate from their family, free themselves

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from the act that had brought them into the world” (W, 3). Another trope which will be familiar to readers of previous autobiographies by women is the narrator’s negative and distant relationship with her mother: “I had too many mothers, too many sanctimonious models reduced to a reinvented name […] too many of that kind of mothers and not enough of my mother, a mother who didn’t say my name because she needed to sleep too much, and in her sleep she left my father in charge of me” (W, 3). With remarkable economy, the prologue exposes the elements that led to the narrator’s eventual choice of prostitution and to the book she is presenting to her readers: the mother, constantly in bed, who neglects her daughter; the father, a fanatical believer, who demarcates the borderline between good and evil for her, suggesting that she is already on the side of “those who had to be denounced” (W, 5); the deceased older sister who, not having lived long enough to acquire a personality, will always be the rival she cannot surpass, the one who has “taken over everything I didn’t become” (W, 5). The prologue evokes a fairly typical female adolescence, tormented by “fears of this being too fat, that too small, having a friend who’s prettier” (W, 6) and the choice of a university in downtown Montreal where the classroom windows look out on sex workers walking by on the street: “The nearness had an effect on me, it sent me toppling over to the other side of the street, how could a theory hold water in the face of so much pleasure?” (W, 8). The father, a spokesperson for the rural, Catholic ideology of traditional Quebec, denounces the city as a place of sin and installs a crucifix in his daughter’s apartment, “to keep [her] under surveillance” (W, 7). In a world so rigidly divided in two, it is easy to “topple over to the other side,” all the more so because the authoritarianism of the prostitution system mimics that of the narrator’s childhood milieu: “Prostituting myself was easy, since I’d always known I belonged to others, to a community that would take the responsibility of finding me a name, regulate my comings and goings, give me a master who’d tell me what to do and how, what to say and not say, I’d always known how to be the smallest” (W, 8). In such a milieu, as France Théoret and Pierre Vadeboncœur have pointed out, there is no place for the autonomy of the individual. Only writing, taken up when the author/narrator is in psychoanalysis, offers hope of deliverance and of an eventual entry into the cohort of women writers who have succeeded in liberating themselves through words. Always ambivalent about other women, whom she sees as rivals who “never show up without threatening to put me in my place, back in the ranks where I don’t want to be” (W, 11), she admits that she envies these writers and dreams of joining their ranks one day: “What I do envy is that they can call themselves writers, I’d like to think of them […] the way I think about myself, as

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Smurfettes, whores. But don’t worry about me, I’ll write until I finally grow up, catch up with those whom I don’t dare read” (W, 11). A Pri SO ner O f the bO dy And the i MAge

While the mystic punishes her body in order to disappear into the divine, the prostitute is reduced to hers, a scorned and anonymous object invaded by the sperm of thousands of men: “I didn’t dream these thousands of men in my bed, my mouth, didn’t invent their sperm all over me, in my face, my eyes” (W, 13). As in the case of the mystic, the prostitute’s self is annihilated, but against its will and without any divine or human recompense. Knowing that her body is only a receptacle of male desire, a female body interchangeable with a thousand others, the narrator searches desperately for her self: “It isn’t me they’re getting hard for, never has been, it’s my whoredom, the fact that I’m there for that […] it could just as well be somebody else, not even another whore but some doll made of air” (W, 13). In her private life as well as in her work as a prostitute, the narrator is possessed by a feeling of nonexistence, a lack of the borders she needs to protect her fragile sense of self: “I think about what makes me a woman, about that femininity I have a reputation for, [that] infinite fluidity I have, and it swallows me up whenever it’s not supported by slaps or fondling” (W, 15). Illustrating John Berger’s insight that “men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at,”26 she details the many instances in which women learn to deny their identity in favour of the image they project. The insatiable need to be seen and desired transforms life into a spectacle and makes every mirror an enemy and a judge: “How do you walk without foundering under those piercing looks, looks that send me back to what I can’t seem to see in the mirror, those mirrors that hound you in stores and cafés everywhere, offering you more presence, and me no longer existing among them” (W, 17); “mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all, well it can’t be me […] I’m inadequate, indefinable” (W, 18–19). Her feeling of inferiority is amplified by the images in the magazines the agency places on the table beside her bed: “If I think I’m so ugly, maybe it’s because of all those girls […] in the magazines piled there […] fourteen year old bimbos advertising a new wrinkle cream, their little noses and luscious lips, their tanned asses and hard nipples sticking out under an open blouse” (W, 29). Despite her rage against a society in which “they’re putting makeup on little girls and you’re supposed to be eighteen your whole life” (W, 92), the narrator recognizes the devastating effects it has had on her own psyche.

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Her obsession with being “the most beautiful” and even her choice of prostitution go back to a hypersexualized childhood (“I didn’t become a whore with the first client, no, it was long before that, during the figure skating and tap dancing of my childhood, in the fairy tales where you had to be the most beautiful and sleep yourself to distraction” (W, 44–5), followed by an adolescence dominated by American movies, comic books, and television, all reinforcing the stereotypes of the man who acts and the woman who seeks only to be the object of his desire. In a sterile parody of mystical life, the modern woman spends her life cut off from time and the world, in an unending quest for beauty and youth: A whole life [in which] you’ve got to hydrate your skin and make yourself up, get larger breasts and lips, and then do the breasts again because they aren’t big enough, keep an eye on your measurements and dye your white hair blonde, have the wrinkles on your face burned off as well as the varicose veins on your legs, in fact have your whole body burned to get rid of any signs of life, so that you can live out of time and the world […] like Michael Jackson alone in his white skin, finally dying from never being completely white, completely blond. (W, 92–3) Here, as in all of her work, Arcan is exposing the duality at the heart of patriarchal culture: the opposition between the male subject, abstract and immaterial, and the woman object identified with her body. The narrator comments acerbicly on the lack of symmetry between the sexes in matters of the body: “Anyway, they notice only when women are fat, they can be whatever they want, mediocre or flabby, half hard, whereas with women, flab and wrinkles are unforgivable, totally indecent, remember, it’s the body that makes the woman” (W, 41). the vi CiO u S CirCL e thAt LeA dS bAC K T O THE MO THE R

In the prologue, as we have seen, the author/narrator situates the origin of her drama in the family situation of her childhood: “Out of this knot emerged the fundamental, tireless, and alienated subject of my writing, my struggle to survive a sleeping mother and a father waiting for the end of the world” (W, 11). Just as the prostitute she evokes is not only her but all prostitutes, all women, her relationship with her parents, while entirely convincing on the level of autobiography, is explored in its psychic depths and becomes emblematic of the incestuous structures of desire which,

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the narrator comes to believe in the course of her psychoanalysis, underlie society as a whole. Like the autobiographers of the previous generation, Arcan’s narrator is possessed by the fear of turning into her mother, “a larva hovering between sleeping and waiting to take form” (W, 48), “somebody who sleeps and doesn’t speak, somebody who really isn’t anybody because she isn’t there” (W, 72). It is this fear that motivates her to become a prostitute, in a rupture which only forces her into the other stereotype reserved for women. Mother or whore, larva or Barbie doll are the only options for a woman in a male-dominated universe where young girls quickly learn “that you mustn’t grow old, no, not that […] you have to stay saucy and childless to excite the guys between two business meetings” (W, 29). At first glance, the narrator’s mother seems to have nothing in common with the domineering mothers of so many other Quebec women’s autobiographies. Arcan almost always presents her as a “larva” or a “corpse,” the mute and nonexistent woman created by patriarchal society: “My mother doesn’t speak and doubtless never did, maybe that’s what she lacks the most, wings to fly and a voice to speak” (W, 97). Rejected by her husband in favour of younger women, she has retired to bed and spends her days feeling sorry for herself, even as she follows her husband’s every gesture “with the eyes of a dog waiting to be walked” (W, 30). Yet her influence on her daughter is immense, and becomes a more and more obsessive theme as the latter moves forward in her exploration of self. While initially kept at a distance by images that seem designed to shock the reader, she gradually emerges as the key figure in her daughter’s drama, its origin, and its inescapable destination: “I have my mother on my back and in my arms, hung around my neck and rolled into a ball at my feet, I have her in every way and everywhere at the same time” (W, 126). Arcan’s description of the mother – a good example of the esthetic of excess and hatred she later described as her approach in the writing of Whore27 – is limited to repulsive but eloquent physical traits (her “toothin lips,” “downward smile,” “funereal look,” fingers with bitten-off nails “crooked from uselessness,” W, 27), all of which the narrator fears that she can already detect in her own body: “And I’ve got to stand up straight to keep back the moment when she catches up with me and I’m folded in two by her scoliosis, bent more and more towards the ironing board by her hump […] stand up straight and wear false nails […] and my lips need silicone, since how could I resolve to live without lips as she does […] yes, that’s what the money’s for, to cut myself away from my mother, give myself a face that belongs to me, break away from that curse of ugliness” (W, 29). Despite her “disgust for being a larva engendered by a larva, disgust for a mother whom I constantly detest” (W, 30), and her fear of becoming “a

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prolongation of my mother, a corpse who leaves her bed to pee, to show off her agony” (W, 31), the narrator gradually faces the fact that her life is an even sadder version of that of her mother. Like her, she is confined to a bed and a room, and like her, she submits to the desire of the other: “Don’t you have to be a larva to whore like this […] I forget at what point I no longer know how to say no to anything […] the sanctimonious little larva who whimpers on demand and lowers her head when they hand her the money” (W, 55). Like many other women in search of themselves, she discovers at the end of her quest that she has been moving in a circle back to her point of departure: “I think like my mother […] I am my mother […] I see that I actually do sleep, eat, think like my mother, suffer like her, too, mustn’t forget that, being like your mother means being completely like her […] right up to being ugly and to what you can’t manage to say, right up to no longer being able to stand yourself ” (W, 89). In a despairing passage reminiscent of Anne Hébert’s image of the “black woman,” she exposes the centuries-old roots of the heritage of nonexistence transmitted from mother to daughter across the generations of patriarchal culture: “This mother who haunts me […] everyone has already forgotten her except perhaps me, I have to think about her for all those who no longer do, that’s why I hate her […] and for all these reasons my spirit is dying too, it’s dying from the weight of my mother […] the weight of a corpse that’s very hard to budge […] I should bury her once and for all, cover her with the strongest metals so she can’t come to the surface and hunt me down with her octopus’s grip, with the menace of her bird of ill omen” (W, 73). P etrified by the fAthe r’S gAZe : the Stru Cture S Of deS i re

Both in the bed where she receives her clients and on the psychoanalyst’s couch, the narrator is trapped by the male gaze and intimidated by an authoritarian discourse that denies her the right to speak. Obliged to listen as her clients talk about their affairs, conquests, and disappointing wives, she is forbidden to speak of herself or to ask intimate questions. Yet she never stops imagining the women in the lives of these clients and is filled with rage at the hypocrisy of their claims that they would never allow their own daughters to become prostitutes: “But who do you think I am, I’m the daughter of a father like any other, and what are you doing here in this room, squirting sperm in my face if you wouldn’t want your daughter to take her turn at it” (W, 98). In Arcan’s work, as in Claire Martin’s, it is the father, not the mother, who embodies the Jansenist ideology of traditional French Canada:

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“He likes to think that we live under the reign of evil and […] that life down here will never be a life but an ordeal” (W, 62); “[he] takes pleasure in tracking down happy people and crushing flowers for the sole reason that they grow in a greenhouse and not according to divine will” (W, 151). Already at the age of ten, guilt-ridden by the discovery of her body and her father’s claim that females carry within them an “indelible stain, the serpent’s bite” (W, 64), the narrator prays desperately to remain good and to continue being loved by her father. As she enters adolescence, her obsession with the evil lodged in her body manifests itself in a refusal to eat: “I became anorexic the day when my sex took over from my braids and patent leather shoes” (W, 154). She blames her father for her inability to grow up, trapped as she is in the desire to remain a little girl in his arms: “He passed on to me his dread of happiness and lulled me for hours into believing that I mustn’t grow up or get older, that I ought to stay small forever so that he could carry me in his pocket everywhere […] this body which isn’t a child’s anymore, though not really a woman’s, is still not mine, it never will be, since someone kept it with him, it’s rolled into a ball on my father’s knee, it’s still a tiny thing wriggling at the bottom of his pocket” (W, 151, 154). All the male figures in the narrator’s life – her clients, her psychoanalyst, her cosmetic surgeons, and the professors who take her on their laps (W, 124) – are images of the father who made her into a little starlet, sure of her powers of seduction and of the fact that she was preferred to the wife for whom he no longer cares. A large part of the guilt that weighs on her is related to this betrayal of her mother, and hence of all women: “I killed my mother, I took away her youth and the attention of men” (W, 71); “I should have not been a child from the start and tied myself to this drained woman” (W, 163). All of society appears to her to be ruled by this structure of desire, with men demanding “fluid flesh that is still maturing” (W, 42) and women seeking to remain eternally young in order to please them. Faced with the consciousness that her life as a prostitute has been a repetition of this repressed desire for the father, she begins, with a pleasure mingled with horror, to imagine that her real father will show up some day at her door: “Why doesn’t he get it over with and take me, put an end to this eternal tension between fathers and daughters […] this society where girls are whores and fathers are clients” (W, 43); “so that he’ll finally know what he’s made of me, what I’ve made of him” (W, 147–8).

Writing Oneself into histor y • 270 SWALLOW ed uP by the Mi rrOr: HYS TERI C

The story of a mad love affair experienced by a protagonist named Nelly Arcan, Hysteric represents a decisive step in the author’s deterioration: the confirmation of a fundamental lack of substance which is literally enough to drive her mad. The original French title Folle evokes a mad love affair that reduces the narrator to abjection, but it could also apply to the universe, cut off from reality and entirely dominated by the image, within which the protagonists live. In this cool and narcissistic little world, situated in the clubs and bars of Montreal’s Plateau Mont-Royal and in the virtual reality of cyberspace, “each person is a mirror image of the other, reflecting his or her popularity, insignificance, confusion or humiliation.”28 Since the huge success of Whore, Nelly has become a celebrity in that world, while at the same time being recognized, with condescension but also with a shiver of sexual desire, as a former prostitute – an image from which she will never succeed in freeing herself. The tragic ending of Hysteric is foreseen in its first sentence: “When we saw each other the first time at Nova [a commercial party which takes place in a loft on the night of the summer solstice] on Saint-Dominique Street, it was already too late: our story would be a calamity” (H, 5). The fateful meeting takes place on the day before the narrator’s twenty-ninth birthday, which is exactly a year before the date of her planned suicide. Several months later, after breaking up with her lover and having an abortion, she begins writing him the letter which constitutes the text. Darker and cruder in some ways than Whore, Hysteric exposes the underside of a universe of appearances and fakery, as threatening as the block of ice hidden by an iceberg’s shimmering tip: “It was just the tip of the iceberg, as people say when they want to warn adventurers so they will understand that some things flourish in the depths where they thrive in secrecy and take on monstrous proportions” (H, 124). Small, intelligent, and insecure, Nelly falls in love with a man who is her polar opposite: a French journalist freelancing for a Montreal tabloid who dreams of becoming famous by publishing a novel based on his “research” on pornographic websites. Tall, arrogant, and extremely handsome, he seduces her initially by his accent: “Today, I realize I loved you because of your French accent, I heard the race of poets and thinkers come from the other side of the world to fill our schools, that accent […] that made you a bearer of the Word like my grandfather said of his prophets” (H, 5–6). Nelly’s feelings of inferiority in relation to France are one of the recurrent themes of the book.29 “You loved me like a colonizer” (H, 142), she writes to her lover, recalling the sordid details of their sadomasochistic

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relationship; and elsewhere she writes: “You should know that killing myself will be a way to cast off the weight of France that you made me carry” (H, 112). In him she has found the God-man, the male authority figure all of whose characteristics contribute to her diminishment: “You were three years younger than I was but you towered over me, when you moved through a room, you automatically put me in a corner. With a single hand you could mask my face entirely […] Our disproportion excited you, it thrust you forward, it made you look grander” (H, 37). Trapped by the world of the image and especially by the image she has projected of herself, Nelly moves from one humiliation to the next until she reaches a state of total disconnection from reality. While her deepest desire is for love and for being part of the normal life of a couple – “I’d had an easy life but missed out on what’s essential: being part of a couple in love, with that butterfly feeling in your stomach, projects for the future in a loft on the Plateau and sharing the housework” (H, 37) – she finds herself in a relationship with a man who treats her like a prostitute, spitting on her and sending her home when she displeases him, a man whose narcissism leads him to boast of the photos he takes of his own penis. In order to demean Nelly completely, he forces her to participate in erotic sessions on porn sites, a triumph of the virtual over the real which she correctly sees as a total disembodiment: “I wondered whether you were looking at Jasmine’s ass or mine, I doubted the usefulness of my contribution to your romance, I was only a conduit to the screen, I doubted the reality of my own flesh against yours” (H, 86). Everything in the daily life of the lovers is dominated by the gaze: the gaze of others on them and their own narcissistic gaze at their reflection in the mirror. Because they like “being seen in the midst of artistic fervour” (H, 134), they write in cafés, and the one Nelly prefers is Le Pèlerin, where she writes before a mirror: “After years of writing in cafés I can attest that you’ve finally found your spot when you can cry, keeping an eye on your face in the mirror, without anyone seeing you” (H, 137). But the mirror is also the ultimate judge, which reflects not only her imperfections but her very nonexistence. This “lack of being” (H, 33) is evident to her on the night the lovers first meet at Nova, when she feels herself swallowed up by the immense mirror that covers one of the walls of the loft: “Then I caught sight of myself, Nelly. Despite your attention, I collapsed into myself, I slipped from your hands, the mirror swallowed me up and the thread between us was broken. That night at Nova without wanting to I displayed the flaw that has been in me since birth and has turned me into a monster unable to appear in my aunt’s tarot cards […] That flaw, you came to know it well, it exhausted you because it clung to you so you

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might counterbalance it with your love, so you might give it a little of your beauty” (H, 124). Even more than Whore, Hysteric is marked by nostalgia for a world in which transcendence would be possible. Without it, the cosmos becomes a chaotic and menacing entity amplifying Nelly’s feelings of nonexistence. At the height of their love and happiness, she and her lover kiss in front of a crowd of spectators, and the reaction of the onlookers confers on the scene something of the atmosphere of the elevation of the Host: “When your lips touched mine, people around us went silent and lowered their eyes as if they were in the presence of a priest raising the body of Christ above their heads. That the world around us bowed to acknowledge our love made me so happy that I paid the bill” (H, 104). Following her abortion, Nelly sinks into the depths of despair and renounces whatever faith she may have had in a dimension beyond matter: “That night I understood many things: the soul does not exist and people will convince themselves of just about anything to ward off death when it approaches […] If there had been life after death, the wind would have howled the day I had the abortion, and the light bulbs in my three room apartment would have exploded to cast darkness upon the sacrilege I had committed” (H, 66–7). With the passage of the generations, the search for transcendence has become degraded, going from the solidity of the Catholic values of Nelly’s grandfather (nonetheless ruled by fear and by the sense of an impending catastrophe) to the superstitions of her aunt who is a devotee of tarot cards, and then, in Nelly’s generation, to the belief in probability that inspires her friend Josée in her search for a partner on internet dating sites: “Believing in probabilities is a great way to find your way when you don’t believe in God” (H, 146). For the father of Nelly’s lover, a fanatic of astronomy, the spiritual quest takes on a scientific form that only imperfectly hides his terror of a fragmented universe no longer under divine guidance: “A comet might not pass at its appointed time, it might be carried off by currents moving through the bottomless chaos of space […] The cosmos held his cherished novas and supernovas born of what he called the “Iron Catastrophe,” the moment when the atomic cohesion of stars was undone. His greatest hope was […] to see stars explode, he wanted to see their gases projected into space, where perhaps the soul resided” (H, 139–40). Deprived of this transcendent dimension, Nelly experiences her imprisonment in a body with anguish: “I understood that evening that my body had moved through my life without my soul, which had never left the void from which I was expelled at birth” (H, 163). The self, demolished by the disaster of her love, is now nothing but a gaping wound, its pain

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made all the more unbearable by the experience of writing: “I think this letter has reached some sort of end […]; it circled our story and finally collided with its core. I tried to understand our love and reach within it, and only hurt myself more. Writing serves no purpose but to shipwreck on the reefs; writing means losing parts of yourself, you understand far too intimately that you’re going to die” (H, 166). Nelly ends her letter to her lover on the day before her thirtieth birthday, the day set for rejoining the soul she left behind in stellar space: “This letter is my corpse. It’s already starting to rot, it’s exhaling its gases” (H, 166). Like a nova or a supernova, she has exploded into the cosmos. Living in S hAM e: BUR QA OF S KI N

Published in October 2011, two years after the death of Nelly Arcan, the collection of short, previously unpublished writings titled Burqa of Skin confirms the author’s exceptional talent and throws a harsh light on the existential impasse of her final years. Its various texts reveal an immense solitude and an irreparable sadness, and return to the major themes of Arcan’s work: the relationship with the mother, the tyranny of the image and of technology, the hatred of the body, the search for transcendence and meaning. Perhaps because they were not reworked into final form during the author’s lifetime, these texts, almost all of which are narrated in the first person, seem to reveal the “real” Nelly Arcan, the wounded and vulnerable being who in the earlier works was hidden behind the masks of autofiction. For example, for the first time in Arcan’s work, we see her cry: “I cry. I cry in a theatre. My cries are heard by the crowd and every spectator’s rapt gaze is on me […] admiring and unmerciful” (BS, 32). Burqa of Skin recounts the painful details of the life of a young writer, no longer the latest star in the literary firmament, who feels abandoned by her friends and family because of the negative portraits of them which fill her books: “The shame which increases with age […] the shame which grows larger as my friends keep me at a distance, as my parents erase themselves from my life” (BS, 29). In a text entitled “The Dressing Gown,” a fragment of a longer autofictional work which Arcan sent to her publisher in April 2008, a narrator who “no longer works, or hardly at all” and spends all day in her dressing gown laments the fact that she will never have a child and bitterly regrets the harsh judgments she formerly made of her mother: “I was ashamed of my mother. I judged her and I regret that now. You lose sight of yourself when you judge your mother” (BS, 32). Another event clearly anchored in the autobiographical and easily recognizable for those who followed Arcan’s appearances in the media is the humiliating

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treatment she received on the popular television program Tout le monde en parle in 2007, the subject of the story “Shame” in which the protagonist Nelly is presented as “an unbearable and thoroughly unhappy woman, full of doubts” (BS, 75). Shame is in fact the predominant theme of the whole collection: a shame undoubtedly related not only to the fact that she is a woman and a gazed-at object, but to the guilt instilled in her during her Catholic childhood. But shame in Arcan’s work is also a more all-embracing condition, a fundamental unworthiness felt in the depth of her being: “My very being is indistinguishable from my shame […] The shame of my presence, of existing among others” (BS, 29). It is a “condemnation to existence” which goes back to the “primordial rape of birth, which each time rips from nothingness a form which asked for nothing except to remain in […] the eternal mineral cold of the cosmos” (BS, 30). And for Nelly, her disastrous appearance on Quebec’s most popular television show, before an audience of two million spectators, represents the culmination of this primordial experience of shame. Invited onto the program on the occasion of the publication of her third novel, À ciel ouvert (Breakneck), she is assaulted by a series of questions and jocular comments which totally ignore her book and instead draw attention to her body and her seductive appearance. Crushed, she is unable to respond, “because she knew only how to write. Outside of her books, she wasn’t worth anything. She wasn’t certain of anything. Her true significance only came across on paper” (BS, 76). Not only is an image worth a thousand words, as in the oftrepeated phrase, but “an image could annihilate a thousand words” (BS, 77), and that evening Nelly receives the indisputable proof of the power of the image: “The whole world’s judgment was reflected on her fallen face, that night, and then it slid down into her cleavage. In the hollow of her corseted breasts lodged the oldest story to afflict women, that of the examined body, the history of their shame” (BS, 69). Imprisoned in her body, Nelly is paradoxically disembodied, like the prostitute “excommunicated from all that is not her body: love, friendship, marriage, childbearing” (BS, 43). Images of cold, distance, and disembodiment are numerous in “The Dress”: “To be disembodied is to see yourself from afar, in the distance, from someone else’s point of view. Disembodiment is a gust in your eyes, a polar wind that lashes and makes your teeth chatter” (BS, 45). A call girl, the narrator tells us, is quite the opposite of a companion, for in her life “everything is distance and frigidity; a body […] trussed up in the frou-frou of its disembodiment” (BS, 43). The virtual world of the internet is equally cold and disembodied, “a portal of disembodiment, a desert of ice” (BS, 44–5). In this desert, one

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doesn’t live, one survives, simulating the presence of love: “To be cold is to feel your body move further from the hearth, further from the central heat of the heart […] But we act like it’s nothing. We act as if something other than this emptiness, something like love, exists” (BS, 45, 44). Diagnostician of a problem from which she is not alone in suffering, Nelly Arcan is a tragic voice, thirsty for love in the desert of a postmodern world which values only appearances and consumption. In her apparently disillusioned way, she repeats the heart-rending question posed by Claire Martin regarding French-Canadian society before the Quiet Revolution: “And the heart, then? What about the heart?”30

Co n c lu si on

From the spiritual autobiography of Quebec’s mystical foundress to the work of the young author forever identified with her job as a prostitute, all of the writings examined in these pages speak of a difficulty of being, and in particular of the difficulty of being a woman in a world that does not recognize women as subjects. Is it pure coincidence that the writings of Marie de l’Incarnation and Nelly Arcan exhibit similar feelings of inadequacy and a similar need to punish the body and sacrifice the self on the altar of the Other? The reverse side of this sense of unworthiness is an immense need for love and justice, which, for those who were able to find ways to channel it, led to possibilities of action in the world and in history. Feminine in their content and form, these writings throw new light on Quebec’s history, from the dreams and accomplishments of the foundresses to the long period of retreat and isolation that followed the Conquest, the effects of which, if one judges by the testimonies of many of these women, are still being felt in spite of huge steps towards liberation. All of the women whose stories are recounted in these pages left their mark on history –  at the very least, on that of their families and loved ones – and yet most of them would be unknown to us had they not put pen to paper to record the events of their lives. Together, their writings tell of experiences and personal qualities which challenge stereotypes and make these women and young girls – including the nuns whose lives and works are recorded in the annals of their religious communities – singular and fascinating human beings, made all the more interesting by the less than perfect character traits one detects at times in their self-revelations. Far more than the writings of their male counterparts, their works offer us a glimpse of inner realities and private lives in the various periods of Quebec history.1 At the same time, from Marie de l’Incarnation to Nelly

Conc lusion • 277

Arcan, these women and young girls are often lucid and critical observers of their society. Although usually expressed indirectly and with a great deal of restraint, the realities of the body and maternity are central preoccupations of these texts, and perhaps the reason for their eminently practical, down-to-earth perspective on the world. The body is a constant presence in them, whether in the leaps for joy that express Marie de l’Incarnation’s happiness or the constant preoccupations with illness on the part of many of these women, who were responsible for the health of their loved ones. Élisabeth Bégon worries about the signs of aging in her father and in her own body; Julie Papineau, Angélique Hay Des Rivières, and Michelle Le Normand are tormented by their helplessness when faced with the illnesses of their husbands and children. The reality of the body is experienced as pain more often than pleasure: Marie de l’Incarnation’s severe mortifications of her body, Joséphine Marchand’s horror as she observes her sister giving birth, and young Claire Martin’s terror when she discovers the first signs of puberty are symptoms of an all-toocommon alienation. Whether or not she so desires, woman is condemned to inhabit the body that patriarchal, Catholic society has identified as a primary source of evil. At the same time, she is invited to transcend it by becoming the angel of the hearth, destined to transmit the same malaise and the same interdictions to future generations. It is no surprise that Nelly Arcan, although imprisoned in her body and her image, paradoxically describes her situation as one of “disembodiment,” an ironic contrast with Marie de l’Incarnation, the mystic who fully inhabited her body as well as her spirit (a contrast made all the more evident in the original French, where the word for “disembodiment,” so often used by Arcan to describe her condition, is désincarnation). Several of these texts, in particular the private diaries, throw troubling light on the educational system which transmitted these self-destroying values to young girls. The nuns depicted by Henriette Dessaulles, Claire Martin, France Théoret, Denise Bombardier, and others are all too often guilty of snobbery, narrow-mindedness, and hypocrisy during this period (1850–1950), which was the most conservative and repressive in the history of the Church in French Canada. The devastating discovery by Claire Martin and Thérèse Renaud at the end of their studies that they had learned nothing but bigotry is, however, counterbalanced by the positive experiences of other young girls like Ghislaine Perrault and Lise Payette. The autobiographies of women who grew up in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s reveal the important role played by the convents in opening up possibilities of higher education and social advancement for their working-class

Writing her self into being • 278

students, as well as the huge range of cultural knowledge many of the nuns transmitted to their students. Maternity is a recurrent theme in these texts, and yet the maternal role frequently appears as a trap for women, blocking their access to subjectivity as well as to writing. In fact, the maternal point of view is rarely heard in these texts. It is by liberating herself from her maternal responsibilities that Marie de l’Incarnation opens a path for herself not only towards spiritual fulfilment, but towards writing and action in the world, and it will be a long time before other women are able to reconcile their maternal role with writing or other activities outside the domestic sphere. Élisabeth Bégon and Julie Papineau, both talented writers and perceptive observers of their society, identify so strongly with their maternal role that in their later years they risk overpowering their loved ones with their solicitude and complaints. The “queens of the hearth” of the nineteenth century also disappear into their role, even in their private diaries, where they chronicle the history of their families and rarely speak of their own thoughts or feelings. In the first half of the twentieth century, the diary of Michelle Le Normand breaks with this pattern and offers an eloquent testimony to the difficulties of reconciling professional writing with marriage and motherhood. And yet by their regular “scribbling” in their diaries, all these wives and mothers achieve the status of subjects and leave traces of their existence on paper for following generations. Almost all the autobiographies by women published since the Quiet Revolution record the difficult paths followed by their authors before finding expression of their own voice. The obstacles they confront and finally surmount can be social, cultural, or economic (or a combination of all three), and they vary depending on the temperament and family situation of each writer, but, in every case, the fact of being a woman, and the daughter of a woman, is of fundamental importance. Too often, the most difficult of all the obstacles to self-expression and autonomy for these authors or their narrators is their link to the mother, who seems to block their path by a superabundance of love, by rejection, or simply by a refusal to envision the possibility that their daughters can achieve the freedom that has been denied to them. “Judging your mother is like throwing a boomerang,”2 as Nelly Arcan sadly observes. In one of the most recent autobiographies, Francine Noël’s La femme de ma vie, the author, through the very process of writing, comes to an understanding of her own mother as a subject and thus reaches a reconciliation with her, opening up the possibility of a filiation between mothers and daughters in future generations. In all of these works, as Barbara Havercroft observes, “it is […] the coming to writing, the performative gesture of chronicling [the author’s]

Conc lusion • 279

quest for liberation, that constitutes the last, most decisive stage of the acqusition of subjectivity and agency.”3 The struggle for subjectivity in these texts is not the linear route to progress one might have imagined or wished for, but rather a path filled with obstacles, which many of these autobiographies take as their primary subject. The courage of the autobiographical “I,” so unexpected and yet so necessary at the time when Claire Martin’s In an Iron Glove was published, is still not acquired without a struggle. In November 2012, France Théoret received Quebec’s highest literary honour, the Prix AthanaseDavid, bestowed annually on an author for the entirety of his or her work. On receiving the prize, she spoke of the courage required to tell stories like these, and the resistance they still encounter: “I cannot make the point more strongly: one is not allowed to write about negativity or negation, absence to oneself, or the various faces of the difficulty of existing in the world. All these things that destroy so many parts of ourselves.”4 Reflecting on the links between today’s women and those of Marie de l’Incarnation’s time, the historian Brigitte Caulier evokes a still unfinished struggle, prominent in all the personal writings by women examined in this book: The emergence of women as subjects and writers takes many painful detours. [In the time of Marie de l’Incarnation], this route involved the multiple renunciations imposed by the cloister: that of femininity [to the point of anorexia in the case of certain mystics] and that of maternity. Such renunciations were the price of liberty! […] Marie de l’Incarnation found her God of love, but not without pain and a certain negation of her woman’s body […] Today’s women must still struggle with their bodies in order to be recognized fully as persons made up of both body and soul.5 As for the “truth” of these stories, the theoreticians of autobiography and autofiction have taught us not to take the version of reality proposed by authors as objective or impartial statements of fact. These texts offer at times contradictory and always subjective perspectives on history and on the lives of women. However, at the deepest level – well exemplified by the resemblance between Anne Hébert’s portrait of “la grande Claudine” and the many mothers evoked in these personal writings – the imaginary, myth, literature, and history are fed by a common source. And it is perhaps in personal or autobiographical writings that we come closest to the always receding point where the personal, the collective, and the universal come together.

N o t es

i ntrO duCti On 1 See, most notably, the pioneering volume on Quebec women’s history by Micheline Dumont, et al., L’histoire des femmes au Québec. 2 See, for example, Mason, “The Other Voice,” 207–35; Jelinek, “Women’s Autobiography,” 1–20; Friedman, “Women’s Autobiographical Selves,” 34–62. 3 Marie de l’Incarnation, Écrits spirituels et historiques, vol. 2: 101. 4 Papineau, Letter of May 19, 1823, in Femme patriote, 26. 5 Gusdorf, “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” 28–48. 6 See also Lamonde and Turcot, La littérature personnelle. 7 Van Roey-Roux, La littérature intime, 16. 8 Hébert, “Pour une évolution de la littérature personnelle,” 16. 9 Lecarme and Lecarme-Tabone, L’autobiographie, 42. 10 Vadeboncœur, La ligne du risque, 171–3. 11 In addition to receiving the Prix de la Province de Québec, the Prix FranceQuébec, and the Governor General’s Literary Award, In an Iron Glove had record sales, with six printings for the first volume and three for the second. See chapter 8 for a discussion of the book’s impact and the controversy that surrounded its publication. 12 Théoret, La femme du stalinien, 138. 13 Théoret Une belle éducation, 48. 14 Dessaulles, Journal: Premier cahier, 280–1. 15 Arcan, Putain, 7. 16 Blodgett, “Reports from la Nouvelle France,” 46. 17 The 1634 dream, which prefigures Marie’s mission in a “great and vast country, full of mountains, valleys and thick fog […] as pitiful as it was terrifying,” is dominated by the figure of the Virgin Mary, holding her son in her arms, “as at the age when she was nursing our adorable infant Jesus” (Marie de l’Incarnation, Écrits spirituels et historiques, vol. 2: 193).

n otes to pages 13–34 • 282 PART ONE 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Krumenacker, L’École française de spiritualité, 123. Marie de l’Incarnation, Écrits spirituels et historiques, vol. 2: 317. Collin, “Le livre et le code,” 13. Quoted in ibid. Bossuet, “Instruction sur les états d’oraison,” Œuvres complètes, vol. 9: 126. Marie de l’Incarnation, “Letter to Père Poncet, 1670,” in Correspondance, 888. Nepveu, Intérieurs du Nouveau Monde, 34. Ch AP ter One

1 Marie de l’Incarnation, “La Relation de 1654,” in Écrits spirituels et historiques, vol. 2: 45–366. 2 Ibid., Correspondance. 3 Bourgeoys, Écrits. See also Marguerite Bourgeoys: Textes choisis. 4 Juchereau and Duplessis, Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec. 5 Morin, Histoire simple et véritable. 6 Rapley, Social History of the Cloister, 113. 7 Jamet, “Introduction,” in Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, ii. 8 Ibid., iii. 9 Le Jeune, Relation of 1635, quoted in Oury, Marie de l’Incarnation, vol. 1: 269. 10 See Gourdeau, Les délices de nos cœurs, 41–3. 11 See Choquette, “‘Ces Amazones du Grand Dieu,’” 627–55, for an excellent overview of the history of all of these orders in France and in Canada. 12 Michaud, “Une chétive historienne,” 45, describes Morin’s Annales as “a female history of the city of Montreal,” noting in particular the freshness and sensuality of much of its imagery. 13 On the contrast between Marie and the Jesuits, see Davis, Women on the Margins, 116–21. 14 Dumais, “À partir d’une éthique de la relation,” 123–8. ChAP ter t WO 1 Marie de l’Incarnation, “Relation de 1633,” in Écrits spirituels et historiques, vol. 1: 139–351; and “Relation de 1654,” in ibid., vol. 2: 15–388. 2 Marie de l’Incarnation, Correspondance. 3 See Théry, “Marie de l’Incarnation, intimée et intime,” 107–17, for an analysis of the “incarnated” or embodied dimension of Marie de l’Incarnation. 4 Ferraro, “Une voix qui perce le voile,” 66.

notes to pages 34–60 • 283 5 On this period of transition, see Gusdorf, “De l’autobiographie initiatique,” 957–94. 6 Ferraro, “Une voix qui perce le voile,” 66. 7 “I confess that I can only hesitate in trying to speak of what happens between God and the soul […] However, as I have been ordered to write, I am putting on paper what the spirit of grace which directs me obliges me and allows me to write about it.” As quoted in ibid., 68. 8 Ibid. 9 Schulte Van Kessel, “Vierges et mères,” 143. 10 Martin, Vie. 11 Quoted by Jamet in Marie de l’Incarnation, Écrits spirituels et historiques, vol. 1: 124. 12 See Davis, Women on the Margins, 128–32, on Claude Martin as editor of his mother’s autobiography. 13 Ibid., 133. 14 Ibid., 55. 15 See Beaude, “De l’autobiographie comme provocation,” 48. 16 Martin, Vie, 622, quoted in Jamet, Marie de l’Incarnation, Écrits spirituels et historiques, vol. 2: 180. 17 Ibid., 620, quoted in Jamet, Marie de l’Incarnation, Écrits spirituels et historiques, vol. 2: 179. 18 Ibid. 19 Trépanier, “Être rien,” 190. 20 Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity, 51. For a psychoanalytical interpretation of these practices, see Millot, La vie parfaite. 21 Trépanier, “Être rien.” 22 Rougemont, Love in the Western World, 147. See Book 3, Passion and Mysticism, on the similarities between courtly literature and mysticism. 23 Collin, “Le livre et le code,” 13. 24 Millot, La vie parfaite, 31. 25 According to Oury, certain parts of what we now know as the Relation of 1633 were probably added as late as 1636 (Oury, Marie de l’Incarnation, 217). 26 Nepveu, Intérieurs du Nouveau Monde, 31. 27 Dom Albert Jamet, the author of the critical edition of Marie’s writings, suggests that these “mists” could refer to the “spiritual darkness” that hung over the colony in 1634 (the year of Marie’s dream), during the three years of British and Protestant domination (1632–35). In 1634, he writes, the only remaining vestige of the Catholic mission which had been established by the Recollet fathers was the tiny church in Quebec City (Notre-Dame de Recouvrance), which could correspond to the church on which the Blessed Virgin was seated

notes to pages 60–8 • 284

28 29 30 31 32

in Marie’s dream. The “mists” began to lift in 1637 with the arrival of the Jesuits and the construction of new seminaries and other establishments (Écrits spirituels et historiques, vol. 2: 278). “As the deer pants for flowing water, so my soul thirsts for you, O God” (Psalm 42). Martin, Vie, 513, quoted in Oury, Marie de l’Incarnation, 382. Crichton, “De-mystifying the Mystic,” 10, 172. Oury, Marie de l’Incarnation, 416. For example, an influential nineteenth-century biography of Marie de l’Incarnation by Monseignor H.R. Casgrain presents her as a submissive and accomplished wife, a model “queen of the hearth”: “Always ready when she should be, she directed everything with gentleness and created an admirable harmony within the home. Since the day when she had pledged her troth to her husband at the foot of the altar, she had devoted all her affection to him […] obeying the slightest indication of his will and seeking to anticipate all his desires, which were orders for her” (Histoire de la Mère Marie de l’Incarnation, 81–2). PART T WO

1 Quietism, a mystical doctrine affirming the possibility of a union with God which transcends institutional rules and practices, was condemned by Pope Innocent XI in 1687. In France, Bossuet led the attack on Quietism, most notably by condemning Madame Guyon and her defender Fénelon. However, as noted in the avant-propos to part 1 (see note 5), he was full of admiration for Marie de l’Incarnation. 2 Letter of Mère de Sainte-Hélène (Marie-Andrée Duplessis), 21 October 1720, quoted in Juchereau, “Introduction,” Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu, xl. 3 For an excellent study of this body of material, see Roy, “Stratégies épistolaires.” 4 See Goodman, Becoming a Woman. 5 Grassi, “Naissance de l’intimité épistolaire,” 74. 6 Gusdorf, Les écritures du moi, vol. 1: 152. 7 Diaz, “Avant-propos,” in L’épistolarité au féminin, 9. 8 Goodman, Becoming a Woman, 2. 9 Didier, “Écrire pour se trouver,” 247.

notes to pages 70–92 • 285 Ch APte r three 1 See Roy, Rapport de l’archiviste, 1934–1935. 2 Citations in this chapter refer to the second edition of this book: Deschamps, ed., Lettres au cher fils. 3 Robitaille, “Du rapport à l’image,” 41. 4 Deschamps, ed., “Avant-propos,” in Lettres au cher fils, 13, 18. 5 Ibid., 20. 6 See Melançon, “Letters, Diary, and Autobiography,” 151–70. 7 Le Moyne, “La femme dans la civilisation canadienne-française,” in Convergences, 87. 8 Gusdorf, Les écritures du moi, vol. 1: 152. 9 Paul-Joseph Lemoyne de Longueuil, a retired military man whose grandfather, Charles Le Moyne de Longueuil et de Châteauguay, received a number of land grants as a wedding present from Maisonneuve in 1654, including a property on Rue Saint-Paul, where he and his wife lived for the rest of their lives. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography, http://www.biographi.ca/en/index.php. 10 Deschamps, ed., “Avant-propos,” in Lettres au cher fils, 23. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 35. 13 Ibid., 33. 14 Ibid., 26. 15 Ibid., 34–5. 16 Rubinger, “Love, or Family Love, in New France,” 187–99. 17 Frégault, Le Grand Marquis. 18 For more on this topic see Micheline Dumont-Johnson, Girls’ Schooling in Quebec. ChAPter f O ur 1 See Greer, “La république des hommes,” 507–28. 2 See Julie Papineau, Une femme patriote: Correspondance 1823–1862, and Louis-Joseph Papineau, Lettres à Julie. 3 See Lamonde’s review, “Julie B. Papineau,” 591–4. 4 For information on the libel suit, see Rudin, “Julie Papineau,” 372–5. 5 See also Ouellet, “Le destin de Julie Bruneau-Papineau,” 37–63. 6 Ouellet, Julie Papineau, 15. 7 Ibid., 22. 8 Ibid., 40. 9 Lachance, Le roman de Julie Papineau, vol. 1, La Tourmente: 298–9. 10 Ibid., 16.

notes to pages 93–123 • 286 11 12 13 14 15

Ibid., 301. Gusdorf, Écritures du moi, 152. Broughton, “In the Cowshed,” 5. Greer, “La république des hommes,” 510. Because of the political changes which followed the Rebellion, this law did not take effect until 1849. 16 See Aquin, “La fatigue culturelle du Canada français” and “L’art de la défaite.” 17 See Arcand’s NFB film Le confort et l’indifférence. 18 The article appeared on 11 December 1837 and is quoted in Roy, “Stratégies épistolaires,” 452. 19 His research contributed to François-Xavier Garneau’s important Histoire du Canada. 20 Ouellet, Julie Papineau, 27, 29. 21 Ibid., 29. 22 See for example Hudon, “Des dames chrétiennes,” 169–94. 23 See Bourassa, Femmes-hommes. 24 See chapter 2, note 33. PART TH REE 1 Gusdorf, Écritures du moi, vol. 1: 324. 2 Raoul, “Women and Diaries,” 57–65. 3 For the poetics of the private diary, see Gusdorf, Écritures du moi, vol. 1, chap. 12; Rousset, “Pour une poétique du journal intime,” 155–70; Braud, Forme des jours; Girard, Journal intime; and Didier, Journal intime.

Ch APter fi ve 1 Lejeune, Le moi des demoiselles, 23. 2 The daughter of Pierre-Joseph-Olivier Chauveau, Éliza Chauveau (1849–75) also kept a journal during her stay at Montebello. See Mathieu, “Journaux personnels,” 1–23, for a study of her diary and those of her sisters Flore, Henriette, and Honorine. 3 Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Montreal, Fonds Alexandre Lacoste, Box 6, Globensky, Journal, 1864–1866, 1912–1919. 4 Centre de Référence de l’Amérique française, Québec, Fonds Thaïs LacosteFrémont, P41.1.1/003–006, Globensky, Journal, February 1866, 1889–1919. 5 At almost eighty years old, Papineau adores Marie-Louise and treats her like one of his own daughters or granddaughters. Shortly after her stay at Montebello, he writes to her: “I would love to advise you about what books to read to

n otes to pages 124–38 • 287

6

7

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9 10 11 12 13

14

15

16

continue your excellent education. It is obvious from your letters that you have already read a lot, and fruitfully: one can see it in your use of well-chosen and elegant expressions, ones that are rarely used in conversation. They must come from your readings, ones you have loved. You have acquired, by your love of reading, an endless source of useful and agreeable pleasures. You are called to a brilliant future. Don’t let yourself be one of those frivolous women who run out of topics of conversation after they’ve talked about the latest fashions and the latest scandal.” Archives du Séminaire de Quebec, Fonds Thaïs-Frémont, Papineau to Globensky, 7 September 1864. The Portrait of Marie-Louise Globensky, the future Mme Alexandre Lacoste (1849–1919), painted by Napoléon Bourassa in 1864, is now in the collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. One of the first social novels published in Quebec (1853), Charles Guérin was authored by Éliza’s father, Pierre-Joseph-Olivier Chauveau, who later became premier of Quebec (1867–1873). The Children of Mary was an association formed in France in the 1830s to foster the spiritual development of adolescent girls, under the patronage of the Blessed Virgin. A copy of Alice Dessaulles’s diary is located at the Centre d’histoire de Saint-Hyacinthe, CH384/000/000/001.054. The daughter of Napoléon Bourassa and Azélie Papineau, Adine Bourassa was a cousin of the Dessaulles sisters. See chapter 6. The two diaries are preserved in the Archives of the Archdiocese of Montreal. The British North America Act, 1840, commonly known as the Act of Union 1840, was enacted in July 1840 and proclaimed 10 February 1841. It abolished the legislatures of Lower Canada and Upper Canada and established a new political entity, the Province of Canada, to replace them. The hostility between Cartier and the Fabres is political. Unlike Cartier, who pursued a federalist career, the Fabres remained loyal to the tradition of Papineau and the Patriotes. They were also closely connected to the conservative bishop Ignace Bourget through the uncle of the Cartier girls, Msgr ÉdouardCharles Fabre.The hostility became open in 1854, when Cartier supported Wolfred Nelson against his father-in-law Édouard-Raymond Fabre in the election for mayor of Montreal. Born on 13 June 1893 in L’Assomption, a small village north-east of Montreal, Marie-Antoinette Tardif studied at the convent of L’Assomption, run by the Sisters of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame. In 1903, the family moved to Montreal. Since 1884, Laval University in Montreal had been offering lecture series open to women, even if women were not allowed to enrol as students at the

notes to pages 138–46 • 288 university. See Sicotte, Marie Gérin-Lajoie, 54, on the role played by the young Marie Lacoste (the daughter of Marie-Louise Globensky and future wife of Henri Gérin-Lajoie) in the decision of the rector of Laval University to admit women to these lectures. 17 Lemaire, “Introduction,” in Lozeau, Lettres à Marie-Antoinette, 6. 18 Lozeau, Lettres à Marie-Antoinette. See also Gouin, “Un épisode dans la vie de Michelle Le Normand,” 17–36. 19 This was Georges Monarque (1893–1946), a lawyer and amateur historian born in Sorel, who encouraged Le Normand to continue writing but (if one judges by her diary) never showed any interest in marrying her. 20 Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Montreal, Fonds Familles Laurendeau et Perrault, Perrault, Journal (1922–1936). 21 Lionel Groulx (1878–1967) was a priest, a historian, and the most influential proponent of traditional French-Canadian nationalism from the 1920s until the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. 22 A periodical founded in 1934 by Laurendeau’s friends Robert Charbonneau and Paul Beaulieu, to which both Laurendeau and Saint-Denys Garneau contributed. 23 Jeune-Canada was a movement created to denounce the situation of francophones in Canada. In December 1932, the group organized a public meeting to launch their “Manifesto of the young generation,” whose ideas are similar to those of Laurendeau’s Report of the Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism in the 1960s. According to Monière, André Laurendeau, 51, two thousand people attended the launch of the manifesto, which was later published in Le Devoir and attracted 70,000 signatures. 24 See Monière, André Laurendeau, 40, for more information on Antonio Perrault’s opposition to his daughter’s engagement to Laurendeau. 25 According to Lamonde, “the highpoint of the decade, from the point of view of the history of ideas, was the debate (1935), polite but with decisive consequences, between the young Dominican priest Georges-Henri Lévesque and the prestigious abbé Lionel Groulx. It was a debate which symbolized the clash of generations within the Church and […] challenged the traditional relationship between Catholic action and national action” (L’heure de vérité, 14). Ch AP ter S iX 1 Marchand, Journal intime. 2 A remark near the end of the first notebook of Dessaulles’s diary indicates that earlier volumes were destroyed: “You will join your brothers in my box of secrets – you will be burned; when I’m older, I will reread you first, maybe with a bit of scorn, both for you and for me” (August or September 1876). And at

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10 11

12 13

the end of her final notebook, before giving up her diary for good, she implies that her practice of diary writing goes back to childhood: “Writing was a real pleasure when I was a child. I wrote this famous diary whose first volumes I destroyed” (20 May 1881). Marchand, who already at nineteen writes columns in her father’s newspaper Le Franco-Canadien, as well as plays, the first of which was performed in February 1880 (JM, 21), is aware of the astonishment of her milieu at the idea of a woman who publishes: “It is really amusing to hear the people around me talk about my literary talent. There are so few women who write in this country that my signature arouses people’s curiosity” (JM, 21–2). Lejeune, Le moi des demoiselles, 296. Raoul, “Moi (Henriette Dessaulles),” 842. Dessaulles, Fadette (1971). Dessaulles, Journal (1989). Dessaulles, Journal, Premier cahier (1999); and Journal. Deuxième, troisième et quatrième cahiers (2001). Passages from the diary quoted in this chapter are taken from these editions. The reference to the Salvation Army identified and commented on by Major is a flagrant anachronism, indicating that the text was rewritten – and not just recopied – by Dessaulles. In an entry dated 4 October 1875, Dessaulles criticizes the rhetoric of a sermon on death given during a retreat: “Poor little priest! You weren’t speaking in the way Jesus would have spoken – you’re preaching more like the ministers of the Salvation Army who’ve been shouting like fanatics in the streets of Montreal for the last while.” Major notes that the Salvation Army made its first appearance in Montreal in December 1884, that the movement did not exist in Canada before 1880, and that in England where it was founded, the name “Salvation Army” was only adopted in 1878. See Major’s “Introduction,” in Dessaulles, Journal, 28. See Dandurand, Mémoires, 48. Henriette herself comments on her sister’s peaceful nature – “her detached airs, her lazy philosophy, her caressing voice, her pretty brown eyes which laugh at my liveliness and my tendency to melodrama!” (HD-II, 356–7). See also ibid., 327. Imbert, “Fadette,” 71. See also Cantin, “Le Journal d’Henriette Dessaulles,” 312–23. This was a common practice for young girls of the period, even for the independent Joséphine Marchand. “Every book that came into her hands was first read by a censor: either her fiancé, who wanted to be sure she didn’t unknowingly take up an unsuitable book, or her mother, who closely monitored all the books suggested to her by her fiancé and even by her confessor.” Montreuil, “Joséphine Marchand-Dandurand,” 489–90.

n otes to pages 158–65 • 290 14 In his memoirs, Dandurand, describes his first impressions of Joséphine: “I had read articles and columns signed with the pseudonym ‘Josette’ when I first met their author. I immediately became aware that she was very knowledgeable about France; she told me that she read the French newspapers that her father, M. Marchand, subscribed to. We were the same age. She was more interested in the serious aspects of life than in the social distractions she could have taken advantage of. Her way of thinking was very personal, she knew how to defend her ideas gently but firmly. At first I found her a bit cold and indifferent, but I understood that her apparent coldness was only a wise reserve, and that she could only be approached with deference […] Except for Laure Conan, who had just published her first book Angéline de Montbrun, she was the only woman at that time who was writing regularly for the public” (Mémoires, 47–8). 15 A lawyer, journalist, and politician who rose to power by mobilizing French-Canadian opposition to the execution of Louis Riel, Honoré Mercier was premier of Quebec from 1887 to 1891. 16 In spite of the shock induced by her sister’s childbirth, Marchand is capable of a lucid analysis of the political implications of Riel’s hanging: “The FrenchCanadian people, fanatically stubborn in their devotion to the Tory, English and Orangist government, have just received proof that they are scorned and less valued than a dog would be. Riel was sacrificed without hesitation by Sir John A. MacDonald [sic]. The representatives of the province of Quebec at the Ministry, without any dignity, dared not protest, thus showing their servility and incompetence. The old Orangist is laughing up his sleeve, saying that French-Canadians fly off the handle easily and will soon calm down” (JM, 122). 17 Major, “Introduction,” in Dessaulles, Journal, critical edition, 38. 18 According to Raoul Dandurand, “It was thanks to her, to her prestige, to the sympathy she aroused in all who knew her, that I obtained such a position at so young an age” (Mémoires, 53). ChAP ter S eve n 1 McGill University, Rare Books Department, Journal of Mme Henri Des Rivières (Angélique Hay), 1843–1872. In English and French. 2 Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Montreal, Lacoste Family Fonds (P76/6), Globensky, Journals 1864–1866 and 1912–1919. For a typed copy of all Lady Lacoste’s journals (1864–1866; 1889–1919), see Centre de Référence de l’Amérique française, Fonds Thaïs Lacoste-Frémont (P41). 3 Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Montreal, Fonds Le Normand-Desrosiers (026/002/054–026/004/005), Le Normand, Journaux (1909–1964).

notes to pages 166–92 • 291 4 See for example Day, History of the Eastern Townships. 5 François-Amable Trottier, dit Desrivières (the father of Henri Des Rivières), a fervent Catholic, opposed to the idea of an anglophone university in Montreal, brought a suit against the inheritors of James McGill claiming that he was meant to be the sole beneficiary of the will, and hired Papineau as his lawyer in 1820–21. It is thanks to the fact that he lost the case that McGill University was founded. 6 See Sicotte, Marie Gérin-Lajoie, for many of these details. 7 In 1923, Sister Marie Gérin-Lajoie (1890–1971), the granddaughter of Lady Lacoste, founded l’Institut des Sœurs de Notre-Dame-du-Bon-Conseil (les Sœurs du Bon Conseil), a religious community devoted to social work. 8 Quoted in Lacroix, “‘Mon petit commerce,’”185. 9 Richer, Léo-Paul Desrosiers, 19–20. 10 According to Lacroix, Le Normand was an efficient business woman, for whom “books and prizes were products like any other […] Selling books (or a vote in a literary jury) allowed one to buy a car or a trip to France” (“‘Mon petit commerce,’” 175). 11 A critic and novelist, Berthelot Brunet was the author of several books, including a history of French-Canadian literature which appeared in 1946. 12 Brother André Bessette (1845–1937), commonly known as Frère André, was strongly devoted to Saint Joseph and was credited with thousands of healings under the saint’s patronage in the early decades of the twentieth century. The present-day basilica Saint Joseph’s Oratory, in Montreal, was built on the site of a chapel he campaigned to build in honour of the saint. He was canonized by the Catholic Church in 2010. 13 Rodolphe Lemieux (1866–1937) was a Liberal member of parliament and an influential minister in the cabinets of Wilfrid Laurier and Mackenzie King. During the years in which Desrosiers began his career as a civil servant, he was president of the Privy Council. He was named to the Senate in 1930. 14 In 1937, Father Legault founded the Compagnons de Saint-Laurent, an influential theatre troupe that lasted until 1952 and was a training ground for several important Quebec actors. PA rt fOur 1 Roy, Enchantment and Sorrow, 60–1. 2 Louise Dupré, “Postface,” in Alonzo and Desautels, eds., Lettres à Cassandre, 113. 3 Desautels, Ce fauve, le bonheur, 11. 4 Ibid.

n otes to pages 193–217 • 292 Ch APter eight 1 The original French-language version, published by Le Cercle du Livre de France, appeared separately in two volumes, La joue gauche (1965) and La joue droite (1966). Translated into English by Philip Stratford, In an Iron Glove was published by the Ryerson Press in 1968, Harvest House in 1975, and (with an introduction by Patricia Smart) by University of Ottawa Press in 2006. Quotations from the translation are taken from the 2006 edition. 2 Before Dans un gant de fer, Claire Martin published a collection of short stories, Avec ou sans amour (1957), and two novels, Doux-Amer (1960) and Quand j’aurai payé ton visage (1962), all with Le Cercle du Livre de France. 3 Iqbal and Dorion, “Claire Martin,” 76. 4 Library and Archives Canada, Fonds Claire Martin, 1956–86. 5 Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique, 14. 6 Lejeune, L’autobiographie en France, 15. 7 Lecarme and Lecarme-Tabone, L’autobiographie, 119. 8 Kaye, “Claire Martin,” 49. 9 Blais, Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel (1965), translated as A Season in the Life of Emmanuel (New York: Grosset, 1966). 10 Blois (sic), “Quelques propos de Claire Martin.” 11 Library and Archives Canada, Fonds Claire Martin, Note written by Claire Martin. 12 Jean Basile, “Autour de Un gant de fer, tome premier de la biographie précoce de Claire Martin. Pardon et souvenirs,” Le Devoir, 11 December 1965. 13 Lejeune, L’autobiographie en France, 16–21. 14 Alain Pontaut, “Claire Martin et l’exorcisme d’une adolescence,” La Presse, 10 September 1966. 15 Library and Archives Canada, Fonds Claire Martin, Letter from Jean-Louis Major, 10 December 1965. 16 See end of chapter 1. Ch APter nine 1 Quotations from this work are from the English version, Théoret, Such a Good Education. 2 Rimstead, Remnants of Nation, 3. 3 Martin, In an Iron Glove, 57–9. 4 Théoret, Journal pour mémoire, 203. 5 Unlike Lise Payette (and like Michel Tremblay), Théoret has expressed admiration for Gabrielle Roy’s work, and particularly for Bonheur d’occasion (conversation with the author).

notes to pages 223–38 • 293 6 Geneviève de Brabant is a chaste and wronged heroine of medieval legend whose tale has been the subject of numerous stories, plays, and operas since the seventeenth century and is, notably, mentioned in the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. 7 Sophie Rostopchine, the Countess of Ségur, was a nineteenth-century French writer of Russian origin whose most famous work is the children’s novel Les malheurs de Sophie (The Misfortunes of Sophie). 8 An eight-year program of education, centred on the humanities, which led to a baccalaureate and to the possibility of future university studies and the liberal professions of medicine and law. 9 Roy, Enchantment and Sorrow, 3–7. 10 Denise Bombardier, “Étudiante d’antan,” Le Devoir, 3–4 March 2012, B5. 11 Ibid. Ch APter t e n 1 Odile Tremblay, “Fragments de femme: Trente tableaux, le film autobiographique en mode collage de Paule Baillargeon,” Le Devoir, 18 March 2012, e9. 2 See Saint-Martin, Le nom de la mère. 3 Hébert, The Torrent, trans. Gwendolyn Moore, 8. 4 Ibid., 7. 5 See, for example, Rich, Of Woman Born. 6 Irigaray, “And the One Doesn’t Stir without the Other,” trans. Helene Wenzel, 56–9. 7 Brodzki, “Mothers, Displacement, and Language,” 245–6. 8 Neuman, “Autobiography and Women’s Bodies,” 59. 9 Gabrielle Roy’s La détresse et l’enchantement is the only one of these works to have been translated into English. Quotations and page references for this work will therefore be from Enchantment and Sorrow, translated by Patricia Claxton. 10 Aurore Gagnon (1909–20), a victim of child abuse who died of exhaustion after numerous beatings, tortures, and wounds inflicted by her stepmother and father, became a popular cultural icon in Quebec after her death, with a play, books, and movies based on her story. On little Aurore’s place in the Quebec imaginary, see Weinmann, Cinéma de l’imaginaire québécois. 11 See Michaud, “L’autobiographie,” 95–114, for a nuanced study of this ambivalence in Le temps qui m’a manqué. 12 Saint-Martin, Le nom de la mère, 119–60. 13 See Ricard, “L’œuvre de Gabrielle Roy,” 23–30. 14 See Michaud, “L’autobiographie,” on the characteristics which distinguish Enchantment and Sorrow from a classic autobiography.

notes to pages 239–61 • 294 15 For Michaud, “Gabrielle Roy’s autobiographical writing necessarily involves her relationship with the other: the self-knowledge of the subject is inseparable in it from recognition of the other” (ibid., 100). 16 See Dupré, “Déplier le temps,” 301–16, for a superb analysis of this aspect of the work. 17 Ibid., 312. 18 The dedication by France Théoret in the author’s personal copy of this book reads as follows: “Portraits in movement: that was my original idea. Here are eleven of them.” 19 Théoret, Une voix pour Odile, 13. 20 Saint-Martin, “La maternité dans l’œuvre de France Théoret,” 135–6. 21 Desautels, L’angle noir de la joie, 10. 22 Saint-Martin, Le nom de la mère, 120. Ch AP ter eLeve n 1 All of these works have been translated into English, and the extracts quoted in this chapter are from the translations. 2 Ouellette-Michalska, Autofiction, 13–14. 3 Lejeune, Pacte autobiographique, 14. 4 Doubrovsky, Fils, back cover. 5 See in particular Colonna, Autofiction, and Gasparini, Roman autobiographique et autofiction. 6 Lecarme, “Autofiction,” Encyclopédie Universalis (http://www.universalis-edu. com/autofiction). 7 Perron, “Le récit de soi,” 27. 8 Ouellette-Michalska, Autofiction, 58. 9 This was a dilemma Arcan encountered throughout her career, most notably on the occasion of her appearance on the television program Tout le monde en parle in September 2007. 10 Navarro, “Journal intime,” 14. 11 Malavoy-Racine, “La peine capitale,” 15. 12 Navarro, “Journal intime,” 14. 13 Ibid. 14 Ouellette-Michalska, Autofiction, 82. 15 Ibid., 90. 16 Aquin, Prochain épisode, 25. 17 Smart, Writing in the Father’s House, 3. 18 Hébert, Kamouraska, trans. Norman Shapiro, 264. 19 See, for example, Théoret’s volume of poetry Nécessairement putain and the following articles: Saint-Martin, “Politique et sexualité”; Havercroft,

notes to pages 261–79 • 295 “(Un)tying the Knot of Patriarchy”; and Boisclair, “Accession à la subjectivité et autoréification.” 20 Resch, “Putain de Nelly Arcan,” 179–80. 21 “There comes a moment, after two centuries of conquests and 34 years of confusional sadness, when you no longer have the strength to go beyond the abominable vision,” Aquin, Prochain épisode, 25 (my translation). 22 Biron, “Écrire du côté de la mort,” 337. 23 Danielle Laurin, “Nelly Arcan 1973–2009: Ni putain ni folle, juste brisée,” Le Devoir, 26 September 2009 (http://www.ledevoir.com/culture/livres/268828/ nelly-arcan-197). 24 Biron, “Écrire du côté de la mort,” 337. 25 Huston, “Arcan the Philosopher,” preface to Arcan, Burqa of Skin, 16. 26 Berger, Ways of Seeing, 47. 27 See Navarro, “Journal intime,” 14. 28 Ouellette-Michalska, Autofiction, 60. 29 This feeling of inferiority was humiliatingly reinforced when Arcan appeared on the French television program Tout le monde en parle (not the Quebec version) in 2001, when the host Thierry Ardisson laughed at her “horrid Canadian accent.” 30 Martin, In an Iron Glove, 69. COn CLuS iOn 1 See my Writing in the Father’s House for a more general comparison of women’s and men’s writing in Quebec literature. 2 Arcan, Burqa of Skin, 32. 3 Havercroft, “(Un)tying the Knot of Patriarchy,” 207. 4 France Théoret, “Notes for an Interview on Receiving the Prix AthanaseDavid,” November 2012. 5 Caulier, “Entrer dans la modernité,” 386–7.

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In de x

abnegation, 5, 33; in girls’ education, 112, 196, 236; and nuns of New France, 20, 23, 31; in Michelle Le Normand, 136; in Marie de l’Incarnation, 25, 34, 66; in Julie Papineau, 112. See also annihilation of self; sacrifice; self-sacrifice agency, 5, 7, 11, 87, 112, 116, 265, 279. See also autonomy; identity; sense of self Algonquins, 23–4, 30, 60 alterity: in correspondences, 6, 69; in diaries, 117; in women’s autobiography, 8, 31; in Élisabeth Bégon, 73–4, 86; in Denise Desautels, 243; in Marie de l’Incarnation, 33, 46, 47, 48, 56; in Claire Martin, 196; in Gabrielle Roy, 239. See also women’s autobiographies: and relationality annals: of religious communities, 4, 14, 17–18, 276; Annales de la bonne Sainte-Anne, 206; Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal, 24–5; Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 24, 26, 67 annihilation of self, 5, 15–16; in seventeenth-century spirituality, 33, 45; in

Marie de l’Incarnation, 33–4, 45–6, 50, 58, 63–5 Andersen, Margret, 231 Aquin, Hubert, 99, 262; Prochain épisode (Next Episode), 257, 260 Arcan, Nelly, 7, 10, 192, 256–75, 276–8; and Hubert Aquin, 260, fictional element in, 257; and image of women, 256–7, 265–6; and love, 275; and need for transcendence, 272–3; postmodernism of, 256–7, 275; pseudonym of, 258; and sense of self and identity, 259–60, 265, 270; suicide of, 256–7; and women’s experience, 257 Arcan, Nelly, works of – Burqa of Skin: disembodiment, 274–5; shame, 273–4 – Hysteric: as autofiction, 258; and image of France, 270–1; and mirror, 270–2; and sado-masochism, 271 – Whore: and the body, 265–6; and Catholicism, 263; and the father, 268–9; and the mother, 264, 266–8; and woman object, 261, 266; and women’s identity, 261

inde x • 312 Arcand, Denys, 99 asceticism, 44–8 Augustine, Saint, 8, 41 Augustinians. See Hospitalières de Saint-Augustin Aurore, child martyr, 232–3 autobiographical films, 7, 229–30 autobiographical pact, 191, 197; in autofiction, 257; in Nelly Arcan, 263; in Claire Martin, 198; in Francine Noël, 250, 254; in Gabrielle Roy, 238 autobiography, 189–275; and autofiction, 257–8; definition, 195; and the diary, 116; and fiction, 191–2, 195–6, 257; and the individual, 8–9; as a literary genre, 8; and memoir, 195; and the novel, 196–7 autofiction, 192, 256–8, 260 autonomy, 7, 11, 14, 87, 116, 122, 190; and relationship with the mother, 230, 232, 245–6, 255, 278; in Henriette Dessaulles, 148–55; in Marie de l’Incarnation, 45, 51, 60. See also identity; sense of self Baillargeon, Paule, 7, 229–30 beauty: for the nuns of New France, 32; in Nelly Arcan, 259–60, 266, 272; for Angélique Hay-Des Rivières, 169; for Michelle Le Normand, 186; in Marie de l’Incarnation’s writing, 33, 65; in France Théoret, 216 Beauvoir, Simone de, 88, 187 Beckett, Samuel, 250 Bégon, Claude-Michel, 71 Bégon, Élisabeth: Lettres au cher fils, 5, 11, 68–9, 70–87; attitude to France, 75, 77, 80–3; attitude to winter, 76–7, 80; and collapse of New France, 85; and epistolarity, 72–4, 78–80; and

ideas on girls’ education, 76, 87; and letter-diary, 73–4, 77, 86–7; and the maternal role, 72–3, 78–9, 84–5, 87; as an observer of society, 74–7; and old age, 85–6; and relationship with native peoples, 75; and relationship with son-in-law, 78–81; and sense of self and need for an Other, 73–4, 86; as a writer, 86 Benedictines, 37–8, 224 Bigot, François, 75 Biron, Michel, 262 Blodgett, E.D., 10 body, the: and being a woman, 259, 261–3, 265–6, 273–5, 276–7; and female mystics, 36; and Jansenist attitudes, 5, 159–60, 186, 188, 192, 200, 269; mortification of, 43–8; and the mother, 231, 248, 251, 253. See also guilt; Jansenism; shame Bombardier, Denise, 212–14, 218–21; and attitude to the French language, 219; and Catholic guilt and mysticism, 218; and denial of class and cultural origins, 219–21; and education and reading, 219–20, 277; and father, 214; and humour, 218; and mother, 219; and poverty, 220, 227; and sense of being exceptional, 218–19; and speaking English, 219 Borduas, Paul-Émile, 236 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 15 Bourassa, Henri, 111 Bourassa, Napoléon, 123–4 Bourgeoys, Marguerite: Autobiographie et testament spiritual, 4, 17; as founder of uncloistered institution, 25, 28; and inspiration of the Blessed Virgin, 22, 28; and transgression of gender roles, 21–2

inde x • 313 Bourget, Ignace (Msgr), 130, 169, 205 Brébeuf, Jean de, 30, 31, 62 Brisson, Marcelle: Le roman vrai, 7, 221–4; adolescent love of travel, 223; and entry into Benedictines, 221, 224; and lack of female models, 221, 223–4; and parents, 222; and poverty, 212, 222–4; and role of education and reading, 222–3 Brodzki, Bella, 231, 238

Conan, Laure (Félicité Angers), 136, 147, 189 Congrégation de Notre-Dame, 17, 137, 204. See also religious communities Conquest (1760), 3–5, 8, 68–70, 73, 87 correspondences, 67–113; and gender, 93; self and other in, 68; temporality and space in, 68, 89; and Élisabeth Bégon, 72–4, 78–80; and Julie Papineau, 88–90, 93, 112

Cartier, George-Étienne, 130, 132 Cartier, Hortense, 130–5; and anger at her father, 135; and finding a husband, 134–5; and social activities, 130–4 Cartier, Joséphine, 130–5; and finding a husband, 133–4; and melancholy, 133; and social activities, 130–4 Cartier, Lady. See Fabre, Hortense Casgrain, H.-R., 111, 284 Catholicism, 5–6, 9, 205; of Marie-Louise Globensky, 123–5; in Anne Hébert, 190; in Julie Papineau, 106, 110. See also Church: domination; Jansenism; religious communities Caulier, Brigitte, 279 censorship, 4, 90, 98, 122, 126, 153, 181, 187, 207. See also self-censorship Chauveau, Éliza, 123 Church: and censorship, 153, 187; domination, 3, 76, 108, 116, 277; and French-Canadian nationalism, 145; in Marcelle Brisson, 224; in Henriette Dessaulles, 156; in Joséphine Marchand, 163; in Claire Martin, 196, 204, 206. See also Catholicism; Jansenism Coin du feu, Le, 147, 162 Collin, Françoise, 14, 48

Dandurand, Raoul, 117, 148, 151, 157 Daviau, Diane-Monique: Ma mère et Gainsbourg, 7, 232, 244–6; and mother, 241, 244–6; and self-acceptance, 246; and writing, 245–6 Desautels, Denise: Ce fauve, le bonheur, 241–4; and autobiography, 191; and Catholicism, 242; and death of the father, 242; and Anne Hébert, 190, 241; and mother, 242–3; and self-acceptance, 242; and self and other, 243; and writing, 242 Deschamps, Nicole, 70–1, 78–80 Des Rivières, Angélique. See Hay-Des Rivières, Angélique Des Rivières, Henri, 166, 169–70 Desrosiers, Léo-Paul, 140, 165, 175–7, 181, 183, 185, 188 Dessaulles, Alice, 118, 122, 126–30; and death of mother, 127; and Jansenist ideas, 129; and lack of confidence, 127; and religious vocation, 128; and writing under surveillance, 126–30 Dessaulles, Henriette, 6; and critique of Quebec culture, 153–4; and diaries forbidden, 122; and diary as confidant, 118, 154; and diary and marriage, 148, 153, 155–6; and education, 148, 150; and female role,

inde x • 314 147–8, 153–4; and ideas on religion, 150–2; and individuality, 10, 149, 153; and love, 148, 153; and mother, 154; and rewriting of diary, 161; and stepmother, 149–50 Dessaulles, Rosalie, 88, 100, 101, 110 Devoir, Le, 111, 139, 144, 147, 162, 177–8, 227 diaries, 3, 4, 6, 8, 23, 72–3, 115–88; as activity for women, 119; chronicle diaries, 70, 118, 122, 141, 165–75; and confidentiality, 115; girls’ diaries, 121–45; letter-diaries, 118–19; as a literary genre, 116–17; married women’s diaries, 165–88; and mirror-space, 115; retreat diary, 152; role as confidant, 117–18; spiritual, 121–2; travel diary, 130 Diaz, Brigitte, 68 diction classes, 219–21, 227, 248 Didier, Béatrice, 68 Diefendorf, Barbara, 45 Doubrovsky, Serge, 257 dualistic mentality, 5, 34, 37, 44. See also Jansenism Duplessis, Marie-Andrée (Mère), 18, 67 Duplessis, Maurice, 214, 224 Durham Report, 102 education, 6, 9, 10, 14; and convent schools, 112, 116, 150–1, 227–8, 234, 236, 277–8; of native girls, 30; as responsibility of the mother, 11; in Élisabeth Bégon, 73–4, 87; in Denise Bombardier, 219–20; in Marcelle Brisson, 221–3; in Joséphine Marchand, 147, 159–60, 163; in Claire Martin, 193–4, 196, 204, 206; in Julie Papineau, 93, 103; in France Théoret, 218, 246–7

epistolarity, 67–9, 93; and popularity for eighteenth-century women, 67–8. See also correspondences Fabre, Édouard-Charles (Msgr), 130–1, 169 Fabre, Hortense (Lady Cartier), 130, 132 feminism, 3, 23, 90, 117, 185, 193, 190, 195–6, 230–1, 243, 255 Ferraro, Alessandra, 34–5 Feuillants (order of priests), 44, 47 Forestier, Marie (Mère de Saint-Bonaventure), 18, 23–5, 30 Globensky, Marie-Louise (Lady Lacoste), 122–6, 172–5; as a Catholic bourgeoisie, 123; and chronicle-diary, 122–3, 172; daily activities of, 123, 172; and death of son René, 173–4; and family, 123; and marriage to Alexandre Lacoste, 123, 126, 172; and Montebello, 123–4; as a mother, 172–4; political and cultural sympathies of, 123, 172–4; and religion, 123–5, 172–3 Grassi, Marie-Claire, 67 Greer, Allan, 96–7 Groulx, Lionel, 140, 144–5, 180 Guérin, Eugénie de, 121 Guèvremont, Germaine, 175 guilt, 116, 145, 188, 205–6, 227, 230; in Nelly Arcan, 269, 274; in Denise Bombardier, 218, 220; in Denise Desautels, 243; in Michelle Le Normand, 178; in Joséphine Marchand, 160; in Marie de l’Incarnation, 36, 42, 54–5, 62, 65; in Francine Noël, 253; in Julie Papineau, 108–110; in Thérèse Renaud, 235; in Gabrielle

inde x • 315 Roy, 236–7, 240, 242; in France Théoret, 248–9. See also body; Jansenism; shame Gusdorf, George, 8, 9, 68, 73, 93 Guyon, Mme Jeanne, 67 hatred: in the mother-daughter relationship, 230, 268; in Nelly Arcan, 259, 267; in Denise Bombardier, 219; in Diane-Monique Daviau, 244; in Adèle Lauzon, 226; in Marie de l’Incarnation, 54–5, 62; in Claire Martin, 204; in Julie Papineau, 101; in Thérèse Renaud, 236. See also self-hatred Havercroft, Barbara, 278 Hay-Des Rivières, Angélique: Journal as family enterprise, 166–7; format of Journal, 167; and humour, 171; and language of writing, 167; and motherhood, 170; and nature, seasons, garden, 168–9; and political views, 168; and religious practices, 169–70; and social and family life, 167–8; and spiritual readings, 169 Hébert, Anne, 189, 241, 243, 261; and “la grande Claudine,” 190, 230, 241, 279 Hospitalières (Hospital Sisters): in New France, 17; Hospitalières de Saint-Augustin (Augustinians), 18, 23, 24, 67; Hospitalières de Saint-Joseph, 20, 25, 26, 31 Hurons, 31, 57, 63 Huston, Nancy, 263 hypocrisy, 7, 77, 128–9, 208, 233, 268, 277 identity, 5; defined in relationship, 6, 8, 196; in diaries, 115–17; in letters,

68, 93; and the mother, 229–32; and role of writing, 72; in women’s autobiographies, 190, 192, 213, 218, 220. See also agency; autonomy; sense of self indigenous peoples, 3, 19–20, 23, 26; in girls’ education, 208, 221; relationship with the nuns in New France, 29–30; in Élisabeth Bégon, 75; in Marie de l’Incarnation, 31, 50, 60–1. See also Algonquins; Hurons; Iroquois individuality, 13, 18, 67; and autobiography, 5, 8–9, 195, 207, 213, 227–8, 242; and diaries, 115, 118–20, 121, 124; erasure of in Quebec culture, 3, 8–10, 193, 246, 264; in Henriette Dessaulles, 152–3; in Michelle Le Normand, 188; in Marie de l’Incarnation, 48–9; in Claire Martin, 193–4, 207; in Julie Papineau, 111 Irigaray, Luce, 229, 231, 246, 255 Iroquois, 4, 25, 27, 30, 37, 60; and Élisabeth Bégon, 70, 75, 81 Jansenism: definition, origin, and influence in French Canada, 5, 188; in Nelly Arcan, 268; in Denise Desautels, 241; in Joséphine Marchand, 160; in Claire Martin, 200; in Julie Papineau, 90, 91, 101. See also body; Catholicism; guilt Jesuits, 10, 23, 55, 57–8, 60, 86; Jesuit martyrs, 30, 37, 62–3; Jesuit Relations, 4, 13, 18–20, 28–9 Joyce, James, 257 Juchereau de Saint-Ignace (Sister Jeanne-Françoise), 17–18, 20

inde x • 316

Kaye, Françoise, 196 Kerouac, Jack, 223 Krumenacker, Yves, 13 Lachance, Micheline, 90–3 Lacoste, Lady. See Globensky, Marie-Louise Lamonde, Yvan, 8, 145 La Peltrie, Marie-Madeleine, 23, 58–9, 61 Laurendeau, André, 115, 117, 140–5 Lauzon, Adèle: Pas si tranquille: Souvenirs, 7, 224–6; and father, 215, 224; and French language, 225–6; and poverty, 210, 212–13, 215; and quest for social justice, 212, 224–6; and reading, 225–6; and social ascension of family, 224–5 Laval, Msgr François de, 26, 34, 42 Lecarme, Jacques, 9, 196, 257–8 Lecarme-Tabone, Éliane, 9, 196 Leduc, Fernand, 232 Lejeune, Philippe, 121, 147, 195, 197, 257–8 Lemieux, Rodolphe, 184 Le Moyne, Jean, 73 Le Normand, Michelle (Marie-Antoinette Tardif): Journal, 6, 117; adolescent diary of, 135–40; adult diary of, 175–88; and age of transition, 136–8; and Angéline de Montbrun, 136; and attitude to sacrifice, 136, 179, 183; and censorship and self-censorship, 175, 181; and conservatism, 186–7; and contribution to husband’s writing career, 182; and daughter’s disability, 182–3; and diary as confidant, 118; and diary and search for self, 135–8; and diary and marriage, 175; and

failed feminist rebellion, 184; and journalism, 138–9; and marginal comments, 137; and her mother, 137; and need for love and marriage, 137–40, 176; and readings, 138, 186–7; and relationship with her husband, 175–7, 179, 181, 183–5; and religion as consolation, 183–4; as wife, mother, and writer, 165, 175, 177–81, 183, 187–8. See also Desrosiers, Léo-Paul; Lozeau, Albert Lévesque, Georges-Henri, 145 Lozeau, Albert, 139, 176, 185 Maisonneuve, Paul de Chomedey de, 21–2 Major, Jean-Louis, 147, 161, 200 Malavoy-Racine, Tristan, 259 Mame et fils (publishers), 203, 235 Mance, Jeanne, 61 Marchand, Félix-Gabriel, 146 Marchand, Joséphine: Journal intime (1879–1900), 146–64; and critique of French-Canadian culture, 164; and diary and confidentiality, 158–9; and education, 151; and fear of the body and sexuality, 159–60; and marriage, 156–9; mother, 150; and religion, 152, 163; and women’s role, 151, 159, 163, 165 Maria Chapdelaine, 186 Marie de l’Incarnation: Correspondance, Écrits spirituels et historiques, 3, 5, 15, 30–1, 33–66; and abandoning her son, 33, 38–9, 53–4; and action in the world, 47, 50; and annihilation of self, 33–66; apostolic vocation of, 56–7; beatification of, 208; and Canadian nature, 25; canonization of, 33; and the Charlevoix earthquake, 28; correspondence of,

inde x • 317 4, 27; and depression, 54, 61–2, 64; and devaluation of self as a woman, 14, 21, 57–8; and entry into the Ursulines, 19, 52–3; and eroticism and mysticism, 49–52; and fusion with God and self-hatred, 44, 46–7; and identification with the body, 15, 33–4, 37, 43–8, 56, 65; and indigenous languages, 30, 63; and marriage and motherhood, 42–3; as model, 10, 11, 33, 284; and mortifications, 44–8; mystical experiences of, 43–52; and native pupils, 29, 31, 61; and New France, 17–18, 20, 31, 57–9; and relationship with the Church, 42; and relationship with her son, 36–9; and son as editor, 15, 39–40; spiritual autobiography of (Relation), 3, 5, 33–66; and spiritual directors, 54–5; strong personality of, 41, 45, 48, 51; and temptation of suicide, 54; and tension between human and divine, 33–4; and Virgin Mary, 56–7, 64; and vow of chastity, 44; and vows of poverty and obedience, 45; and Relation as women’s writing, 65–6 Maritain, Jacques, 144, 223 Martin, Claire: Dans un gant de fer (In an Iron Glove), 3, 7, 9–10, 189, 193– 209; and autobiographical pact and truth, 196–9; and autobiography and memoir, 195; and controversy on publication, 197; and critique of education, 192, 201–4, 208; as first feminist work, 193; and humour, 201–2, 208; and the individual, 193–4; and Jansenist milieu, 200; and mother, 202, 205; and narrator and protagonist, 201–3; and portrait of French Canada, 196, 199; and

Quiet Revolution, 194; and reader reaction, 194–5; and sadistic father, 193–4, 200, 206; and women’s role, 205–7; and Élisabeth Bégon, 193; and Henriette Dessaulles, 193; and Joséphine Marchand, 193; and Marie de l’Incarnation, 207–9 Martin, Dom Claude, 15, 36, 39, 44, 62, 67 martyrdom, 4, 20, 21; in Élisabeth Bégon, 71; in Joséphine Marchand, 159; in Marie de l’Incarnation, 30, 62; in Thérèse Renaud, 236; in Paule Saint-Onge, 235 matriarchy, 9, 111, 196 matrophobia, 231 McGill, James, 115, 166 memoirs: and autobiography, 195–6; definition of, 18; and Marguerite Bourgeoys, 4, 17, 21; and Joséphine Marchand, 163; in Claire Martin, 189, 194 Middle Ages, 13–14, 39, 47 Montaigne, Michel de, 8 Morin, Marie (Sœur), 17, 20–1, 24–5, 27–8 mother and daughter, 196, 229–55; in Nelly Arcan, 264, 266–9, 278; in Denise Bombardier, 219; in Marcelle Brisson, 222; in Diane-Monique Daviau, 241, 244– 6; in Denise Desautels, 241, 242–3; in Claire Martin, 202; in Francine Noël, 250–5; in Lise Payette, 215; in Gabrielle Roy, 236–41, 255; in Paule Saint-Onge, 234; in France Théoret, 216–18, 241, 246–50 motherhood: in Quebec culture, 190; as women’s role, 11, 66, 111–12; and women’s writing, 175, 189; in Élisabeth Bégon, 81, 83, 87; in Angélique

inde x • 318 Hay-Des Rivières, 168, 170; in Lady Lacoste, 172–4; in Michelle Le Normand, 175–9, 182–3; in Joséphine Marchand, 160; in Marie de l’Incarnation, 34, 36–9, 52–4; in Julie Papineau, 88–90, 95, 109–12, 116. See also mother and daughter; queen(s) of the hearth Mounier, Emmanuel, 223 mysticism: Church mistrust of, 15, 40, 67; and mystical religiosity in adolescent girls, 220, 223–4, 236; and women, 14, 34–5, 36; in Nelly Arcan, 192, 262, 263, 265–6; in Michelle Le Normand, 184; in Marie de l’Incarnation, 25, 33–66 nationalism: in Adèle Lauzon, 225–6; in Michelle Le Normand, 180; in Ghislaine Perrault, 144–5 Nelligan, Émile, 142–3, 243, 252 Nelson, Robert, 92, 99 Nepveu, Pierre, 15, 59 Neuman, Shirley, 231 New France, 4–5, 13–14; and Church moralism in eighteenth century, 76; and cloistered communities, 19; and correspondence, 68; and corruption, 75–6; and dances and festivities, 76; and relationship with France, 75; religious fervour in seventeenth century, 27; women’s perspective on, 4, 23, 28–31 nihilism, 192, 262 Noël, Francine, 7, 232, La Femme de ma vie, 250–5; and absence of father, 251; and autobiographical pact, 250; and autobiography and truth, 254–5; and autonomy, 253; and collective dimension of family story, 254; and education and class, 252–3;

and fusion with mother, 251; and mother and body, 253; and mother as storyteller, 251–2; and mother’s voice, 251; and reconciliation through writing, 250, 254 Ouellet, Fernand, 90–1, 101, 104, 106 Ouellette-Michalska, Madeleine, 257–8, 260 Papineau, Julie: Une femme patriote, correspondance 1823–1862, 6, 11, 87, 88–113; and conditions of epistolarity, 68–9, 88–90, 93, 112; and effect of English presence, 108; effect of the Rebellions, 100–3, 106; evolution of, 112–13; and evolution of the couple, 104–5; and interpretations of her character, 90–3; Jansenist attitudes and Catholicism of, 90–1, 101, 106–7, 110; and melancholy, 89, 91, 93; as a mother, 89–90, 94–6, 106, 108–11; and political ideas, 96–100, 102–3; as strong woman, 6, 92, 97, 102; and women’s role, 88, 93–7, 106, 112 Papineau, Louis-Joseph, 88, 92–110; and courtesy and love of family, 94–6; and English presence, 108; exile and indecisiveness of, 103–4; and Marie-Louise Globensky, 123–4; and Montebello, 101, 105–7, 123; and paternalism, 93, 97; and Rebellions, 98–101 Pascal, Blaise, 41 patriarchy, 196, 205, 230–1, 261–2, 266–8, 277 Patriotes, 92, 96–7, 99–101, 103, 166–7 Payette, Lise: Des femmes d’honneur, une vie privée 1931–1968, 7, 210–12; and education, 212, 227–8; and

inde x • 319 father, 215; and mother and grandmother, 215; and poverty and sense of community, 211–12; and self-confidence, 210–11, 215 Pelletier, Gérald, 212 Pepys, Samuel, 118 Perrault, Ghislaine: Journal, 140–5; and diary and identity, 117; and diary and marriage, 145; and diary read by mother, 121, 141; and Lionel Groulx, 140, 145; and happiness, 140–3; and André Laurendeau, 117, 143–5; and love of the French language, 142; and love of music and nature, 143; and marginal comments, 118; and nationalism, 144–5; and religious faith, 143–4; and shared diary, 140–1 Poirier, Anne-Claire, 7, 229 postmodernism, 7, 256–7, 261, 263, 275 poverty, 9, 24–5, 29, 31, 45–6, 64, 105; and identity, 212–14; in Denise Bombardier, 214, 218–21; in Marcelle Brisson, 221–4; in Adèle Lauzon, 224–6; in Lise Payette, 210–12; in France Théoret, 215–18 Protestantism: and autobiography, 9; and spiritual journals, 119 queen(s) of the hearth, 6, 11, 69, 116; diaries of, 165–88; and domineering mothers, 231–2, 255; fulfilment in role as, 172–5; and lack of subjectivity, 278; and nineteenth-century ideology, 111; resentment of role as, 106, 149–50; training of, 150–1 Quietism, 67 Quiet Revolution, 3, 186; and access to the middle class, 213, 225, 254; and individual and collective freedom, 3, 194, 255, 263; and women’s autobiography, 7, 190, 193; years preceding, 9, 111, 188, 196, 213, 224, 275

Rapley, Elizabeth, 18, 19 reading(s), 47, 51, 109, 124, 186, 195, 206; diaries, 119, 158, 161, 176; and importance in evolution of young girls, 87, 136, 138, 163, 206, 210, 220, 222–3, 226, 228, 249; pleasure of, 192; spiritual, 125, 128, 151–2, 169 rebellion, 6, 229; against the mother, 241; in girls’ diaries, 129, 145, 148, 149–51; in Michelle Le Normand, 185; in Claire Martin, 195, 201; in Paule Saint-Onge, 235; in France Théoret, 249 Rebellions (1837–38), 5, 9, 89, 91, 98–100; and effect on Julie Papineau, 101–2, 106, 110. See also Papineau, Julie; Papineau, Louis-Joseph; Patriotes Refus global, 9, 232–3, 236 religious communities, 4, 14, 61, 164, 172; in education, 137, 194; negative qualities of, 3, 67, 149, 194–5, 200–6, 208, 218–19, 263; in New France, 17–32; positive contributions of, 223, 276; as vocation, 221, 224, 154. See also annals Renaud, Thérèse, 7; Une mémoire déchirée, 232–6; and Les Sables du rêve, 232; and abused childhood, 233–4; and death of mother, 235; and education, 236, 277; and rebellion, 235; and Refus global, 232, 236 Resch, Yannick, 261 retreats, 123–4, 128, 143, 151, 152, 173, 204, 250 Rimstead, Roxanne, 214 role of women: in Claire Martin, 205–7. See also queen(s) of the hearth Romanticism: and the individual, 115; and the private diary, 119; in

inde x • 320 Quebec, 121 romanticism: in adolescent girls, 137, 143, 159, 223 Rougemont, Denis de, 47 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 9, 97 Roy, Gabrielle: and ambivalence regarding the mother, 236–41; and the autobiographical pact, 238; and autobiographical writing, 238; and the French language, 238–9; and guilt and maternal sacrifice, 239–40; and novelistic quality of her autobiography, 239 Roy, Gabrielle, works of: Alexandre Chênevert, 238; Bonheur d’occasion (The Tin Flute), 210–11, 217, 221, 222, 228, 237, 239; La détresse et l’enchantement (Enchantment and Sorrow), 238–41; Le temps qui m’a manqué, 236–8 Rubinger, Catherine, 80 sacrifice, 4, 9, 10, 20, 23, 59, 76; in Nelly Arcan, 263; in Michelle Le Normand, 136, 181; in Joséphine Marchand, 150, 152; in Julie Papineau, 92, 96, 101, 112–13; in Thérèse Renaud, 233; in Paule Saint-Onge, 233–4. See also abnegation; body: mortification; self-sacrifice Saint-Bernard, Dom François de, 44 Saint-Bernard, Dom Raymond de, 42, 44, 46, 48, 50, 54, 57 Saint-Jacques, Joséphine, 148, 154, 161 Saint-Jacques, Maurice, 148, 153–7, 161–2 Saint-Martin, Lori, 238, 247, 255 Saint-Onge, Paule: Une vie défigurée, 232–6; and autobiography as search for autonomy, 212–13; and

childhood abuse, 213; and education in masochism, 235–6; and rejection by mother, 234 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 187, 223 Sauvé, Jeanne, 212 Schulte Van Kessel, Elisja, 36 self-censorship, 4, 207; in Alice Dessaulles, 122; in Henriette Dessaulles, 155; in Michelle Le Normand, 175, 186–7; in Joséphine Marchand, 158–9. See also censorship self-hatred: in Nelly Arcan, 263; in Denise Bombardier, 214; in Marie de l’Incarnation, 33, 44, 46–7; in Paule Saint-Onge, 235. See also hatred self-sacrifice, 112, 159, 188, 205, 235, 276; and Michelle Le Normand, 179; and mothering, 173. See also abnegation; sacrifice sense of self, 4, 5, 9, 188; in Nelly Arcan, 260; in Denise Bombardier, 218; in Henriette Dessaulles and Joséphine Marchand, 146; in Marie de l’Incarnation, 41, 49; in Lise Payette, 211. See also autonomy; identity; individuality separate spheres, 88, 93, 96 sexuality, 116, 159, 186, 260 shame: in Nelly Arcan, 259, 273–4; in Denise Bombardier, 212, 220; in Claire Martin, 199–200, 206; in Francine Noël, 253–4; in Lise Payette, 211; in France Théoret, 248–9. See also body; guilt; Jansenism spiritual autobiography, 3, 8, 41; and women, 14–15, 34–5 subjectivity: and aim of women’s autobiography, 279; emergence in the sixteenth century of, 8; and gender,

inde x • 321 68, 69, 88; and the mother, 111, 231, 242, 255; and openness to the other, 196, 243. See also agency; autonomy; sense of self submission, 97, 227, 228 suffering: in family backgrounds of the Québécois, 254; for the nuns of New France, 23–5; and religious consolation, 169, 173–4, 183–4, 188; in Élisabeth Bégon, 71; in Henriette Dessaulles, 154; in Joséphine Marchand, 150, 160; in Marie de l’Incarnation, 35, 37–8, 43, 45, 48, 50, 52, 55; in Julie Papineau, 89–90, 107, 110 suicide: in Nelly Arcan, 256, 260–1, 270; in Marie de l’Incarnation, 54; in Francine Noël, 252; in Paule Saint-Onge, 233 temporality: in autobiography, 8, 116, 195, 201–3; in correspondences, 68; in diaries, 116 Teresa of Avila, 8, 14–15, 41, 47, 49 Théoret, France, 7; and construction of self, 218; and the denial of the individual in Quebec culture, 9–10; and education in submission, 228, 246–9; and father, 217; and inner voice, 218, 249; and mother, 217–18, 232, 241, 247–50; and need for beauty, 216; and precision and unsentimentality of writing, 215–16, 246; and Prix David 2012, 279; recurrent images in, 216; and trap of

poverty, 210, 215–18 Théoret, France, works of: Une belle éducation (Such a Good Education), 215–18; Hôtel des quatre chemins, 246–50; Journal pour mémoire, 216 Tout le monde en parle, 257, 259, 274 transcendence: in Nelly Arcan, 272–3 Trépanier, Hélène, 45, 46 Ursulines, 3, 10, 18, 20; constitution of, 26, 42; and destruction of monastery by fire, 63–4; in New France, 29, 30, 34, 60–1, 63; in Claire Martin, 204, 207–8; and Julie Papineau, 88, 91 Vadeboncœur, Pierre, 9, 264 Van Roey-Roux, Françoise, 8 Vaudreuil, Pierre de Rigaud de, 83–5 Villebois de la Rouvilliere, Michel de, 23, 24, 70–2, 78–83, 83–5 wars of religion, 45 winter: in New France, 4, 23–5, 31, 60, 64, 76–7, 80; spiritual dimension of, 25 woman-object, 229, 232; in Nelly Arcan, 7, 261, 265–6, 274; in France Théoret, 249 women’s autobiographies, 3–4, 7–8, 189–275; and the mother, 7, 190, 229–55; and relationality, 5–8, 19, 47–9, 196 Woolf, Virginia, 178, 186