Book Review
Women's Writing in Québec: Then & Now
- Lori Saint-Martin (Author)
Le nom de la mère: mères, filles et écriture dans la litterature québécoise au féminin. Nota Bene (purchase at Amazon.ca)
- Marie-Claire Brosseau (Author)
Trois écrivaines de l'entre-deux-guerres: Alice Lemieux, Eva Senécal et Simone Routier. Nota Bene (purchase at Amazon.ca
Reviewed by Valerie Raoul
Lori Saint-Martin has already published several articles related to the depiction of mothers by contemporary authors. Le nom de la meÌ€re brings a number of these together in amplified versions, as well as additional material including chapters that provide a frame for an overview of maternity in a range of works. The project is ambitious, as it includes several dimensions: a summary of the evolution of representations of motherhood in QueÌbec literature; a discussion of both French and Anglo-American feminist psychoanalytic theories of maternity; detailed analyses of a number of works of fiction, poetry or theatre produced between 1931 and 1995; and comparative commentary on the similarities and differences between these works by women and others by men.
The earlier stages of attitudes to mothers in the QueÌbec novel have been extensively studied by a number of critics, many of whom are amply cited. Absent in the roman de la terre (they are usually already dead), mothers were perceived by most male authors as allied with the clergy in pre-Quiet Revolution works, and oppressive and ultimately castrating in more recent ones. What Nicole Brossard calls the "patriarchal mother" was also denounced in works by women depicting mother-son repression. The mother-daughter relationship, the focus of Saint-Martin’s study, is frequently shown as equally dominated by rivalry or hostility, the survival of one seeming to entail the demise of the other—matricide or infanticide. Such accounts tend to adopt the point of view of the daughter, rather than that of the mother, illustrating a "matriphobia" motivated by the fear of becoming like one’s mother. Gabrielle Roy’s autobiographical narratives were the first to present the daughter as attempting to incorporate her mother’s voice into her own story. The mother is depicted as the source of the author’s desire to write, but writing is still seen as incompatible with becoming a mother. The old dichotomy between creation and procreation is maintained by the daughter’s decision not to have children, and to abandon (and avenge) her mother in order to fulfill her own artistic ambition.
Among works written by women before the 1970s, Jovette Bernier’s 1931 novel La chair deÌcevante was a notable exception because it adopts a mother’s perspective and contrasts with other representations of unmarried mothers. Although the child is a boy and the mother ends up insane, the narrator’s sensuality, desire for freedom and decision to keep her child (and to defend that choice) bring her closer to the feminist attitudes of writers closer to us, like Brossard and others. Their works convey the revalorization in the 70s of mother-daughter bonds as representative of the pre-Oedipal stage of non-verbal communication, and nostalgia for a pre-patriarchal state based on an ethic of caring, connection and reciprocity, rather than the aggressive competition and violence associated with stereotypical masculinity. This symbolic defense of mother-daughter symbiosis is related to the feminist psychoanalytic concept of women as inherently bisexual, oscillating between desire for the same (the mother) and the (different) other.
The last sections of the book deal with more recent texts that innovatively depict women as both mothers and (named) individuals. Pregnancy, childbirth and mothering are reinterpreted as potential sources of satisfaction that need not exclude writing or other creative activity. In the past, the roles of mother and writer do seem to have been largely incompatible, for social and economic reasons as well as psycho-social ones. Several of the authors discussed are in search of role models in the past, of a feminine genealogy not only for the history of QueÌbec, but for a lineage of female writers. Novels by Nicole Houde and Anne HeÌbert (Le premier jardin) illustrate attempts to bring these two together, the latter emphasizing the function of naming associated with both genealogy and autonomy.
The choice of language in which to write may also be a function of maternal loyalty (as in the case of Roy), or an individual decision to break with the past, as for the last author mentioned, Ying Chen, an immigrant from China. Her novel L’ingratitude (1995) closes Saint-Martin’s discussion of QueÌbec women writers’ representations of maternity. Somewhat surprisingly, no mention is made of the fact that the similarities discovered in Ying Chen’s depiction of a mother-daughter relationship are unlikely to be due to any factors specific to QueÌbec. This issue is left in abeyance, along with several others, including new attitudes in women’s fiction to fathers (and new attitudes in men’s fiction to mothers, resulting from changing family dynamics?). There is still no doubt a lot of thinking and writing to be done on mothers and mothering; on "femininity" as it relates to the potential to be responsible for children (as opposed to bearing them) and to one’s own parents; on innovation in language and form, the limits of "sense," and the value or danger of associating madness with femininity; above all, on the tendency in a number of the texts analysed to "invraisemblable" plots and extremely fragmented narration, elements which may be claimed as revolutionary but are more often designated as signs of failure in terms of the text’s literary value. Saint-Martin has indicated many avenues to be pursued.
Negative judgments by influential male literary figures have often, in the past, assigned women’s texts to oblivion. Marie- Claude Brosseau’s Trois eÌcrivainesde l’entre-deux-guerres deals with three QueÌbeÌcoises born around 1905 and writing in the 1920s and 30s, who all received encouragement from another young poet, Alfred Desrochers. Brosseau’s comments on the lives and works of Alice Lemieux, Eva SeneÌcal and Simone Routier are based on correspondence between them and Desrochers: the only reason that Jovette Bernier (author of the 1931 novel discussed by Saint-Martin) is not included is that no correspondence with him is available. Brosseau’s modest monograph is full of fascinating details about the ways in which social background and financial considerations made all the difference to a woman’s career possibilities. While all three began by writing poems, entering literary competitions and producing columns for the "feminine" pages of regional reviews, their paths ended up diverging considerably. Although all three became members of the "SocieÌteÌ des poeÌ€tes canadiens-français du QueÌbec," none of them succeeded, as Desrochers did, in being subsequently recognized as worth including in anthologies.
Alice Lemieux engaged in a flirtatious correspondence with Desrochers, to whom she defended a "feminine" concept of poetry as inspired rather than based on formal expertise. She moved to QueÌbec City, became President of the Poets’ Society in 1929, and won a prize that enabled her to visit France. But having had ТВ herself in 1925, in 1932 at the age of twenty-six she abandoned writing to become a sanatorium nurse, and eventually agreed to a marriage of convenience. Her diary for the years 1920-6 has been preserved, but will not be available to the public until 2004. Eva SeneÌcal trained to be a teacher at the Ecole Normale in Saint-Hyacinthe (1918-24), but also contracted ТВ and spent time in a sanatorium in 1923. Her poems echoed an old-fashioned "meÌlancolie reÌ‚veuse" remi- niscent of another sufferer from ТВ, EugeÌnie de GueÌrin. Author of two novels (Dans les ombres, 1930, and Mon Jacques, 1933), she could not manage to make a living as a journalist and experienced problems that today might be interpreted as sexual harassment. Jilted by one fianceÌ, she also ended up accepting a "mariage de raison."
The third in this trio, Simone Routier, though the daughter of a rich Quebec City jeweller, was nevertheless also determined to become financially independent. Having attended both the Ursulines’ EÌcole Normale and the EÌcole des Beaux-Arts, she became engaged in 1922 to the poet Alain Grandbois (his penchant for married women led her to break it off). In 1929 she completed a novel, l’immortel adolescent, which won the prestigious Prix David, enabling her, like Lemieux, to go to Paris. Routier stayed there from 1928 until she had to leave because of the war, as recounted in Adieu Paris! Journal d’une eÌvacueÌe canadienne. 10 mai au 31 aouÌ‚t 1940. After her French fianceÌ was killed she began a successful career as a diplomat, and like Lemieux married a Franco-American.
What is most striking is that although all three of these women poets were hailed as potentially great writers at the time of their first publications, they received insufficient encouragement to continue writing, and what they did write fell very quickly into oblivion. Family expectations and financial considerations led them all to conform to a conventional model in spite of their early efforts to avoid it. They are part of the hidden female lineage discussed by Saint-Martin: literary mothers, "women of letters," whose works need to be reassessed in terms of their context. As Brosseau points out, part of that context was the ambivalent relationship of rivalry and mutual admiration that existed between them—another inviting avenue of research.
Similar reviews
- Memory, Family, Politics by Deborah Torkko
Books reviewed: Sisters of Grass by Theresa Kishkan, Speak Mandarin Not Dialect by Elizabeth Haynes, Girls around the House by M.A.C. Farrant, and Gravity Lets You Down by Maggie Helwig - Signs of Life by Julie Rak
Books reviewed: Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: Writing Lives by Helen M. Buss, D. L. MacDonald, and Anne McWhir and Love Strong as Death: Lucy Peel's Canadian Journal, 1833-1836 by J. I. Little - Fiction et réalité sociale by Sophie Bastien
Books reviewed: Trois visions du terroir: récits et nouvelles by Josée Bonneville, C. H. Grignon, G. Guèvremont, A. Laberge, A. Rivard, and Andre Vanasse and La terre promise, Remember! by Noël Audet - Ce monstre, Ducharme by Kenneth Meadwell
Books reviewed: L'abécédaire des monstres : Fragments de Réjean Ducharme by Marie-Hélène Larochelle - Quête spirituelle ou guide touristique? by Lucie Lequin
Books reviewed: India, India by Yolande Villemaire
MLA: Raoul, Valerie. Women's Writing in Québec: Then & Now. canlit.ca. Canadian Literature, 8 Dec. 2011. Web. 20 June 2013.
This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #173 (Summer 2002), (Crawford, Munro, Watson, Atwood, Duncan). (pg. 161 - 163)
***Please note that the articles and reviews from the Canadian Literature website (www.canlit.ca) may not be the final versions as they are printed in the journal, as additional editing sometimes takes place between the two versions. If you are quoting from the website, please indicate the date accessed when citing the web version of reviews and articles.
.jpg)