Arts and Literature in Canada:Views from Abroad, Les arts et la ...

Refiguring the Mother: Quebec Women Writers in the 80sbe suffocating for both of them. Denying the weighty responsibilities ofmotherhood is a way of opposing the seemingly unavoidable loss of self.Here, as elsewhere in contemporary women’s fiction, repression of thematernal lingers on even outside the patriarchal family plot. Stanton’snarrative focuses on the surfacing of the maternal voice, which comes intobeing quite naturally while in dialogue with others. Narrated in the omniscientthird person, Stanton makes extensive use of indirect discourse to reveal themother’s personal reflections and hidden emotions. This technique opens uptextual spaces where Janou’s maternal thoughts and feelings can be expressedto the reader even when they contradict what is being asserted in conversationswith her daughter, lover and friends. For Stanton, reconstructing the mothermeans mediating contradictions in the external and internal discourse onmotherhood in her text.In Ma fille comme une amante, Stanton replaces the overdeterminedpatriarchal mother (cf. Brossard’s L’Amèr) of traditional fiction with aconfused and gropping maternal subject who realizes that independencebreeds ambivalence about mothering. Challenging the determinism ofbiology, Stanton contextualizes maternal ambivalence about “le renouementdu premier corps à corps” (p. 78) by tracking Janou’s resistance to thesocialization of motherhood. Like Adrienne Rich, however, Janou eventuallyrecognizes that it is “in the enormity and inevitability of this [maternal] lovethat [her] sufferings lie.” 21 In the end, the novel’s constant mix of conflictingmaternal emotions and states of being undermines the traditionaldichotomization of “good” and “bad” mothers. Resentment and tenderness,anger and protectiveness, self-centredness and self-sacrifice are all part ofStanton’s rewritten maternal portrait. In this respect, her novel foreshadowsthe harsher, more pessimistic vision of Nicole Houde in whose novels theconditions of poverty and motherhood are darkly drawn (La Malentendue[1983] and L’Enfant de la batture [1988] in particular 22 ).Monique LaRue has given the topic of motherhood serious attention in herwriting as well. But LaRue’s work also goes beyond the privileging ofmaternal characterization, point of view and domestic circumstance. Indeed,what is striking about La Cohorte fictive (1986) and Copies conformes (1989),her first and third novels respectively, is the extent to which the maternalviewpoint not only organizes and filters narrative events, but also provides theethical stance from which we read and evaluate the competing systems ofvalue outlined in each work.LaRue’s first novel is a short birth book in which the birth of a child and thebirth of a text are consciously interwoven in theme as well as form. La Cohortefictive contains a double, alternating narrative structure, which shifts back andforth from a mother’s reflections on her writing and her life with a newborn tobrief episodes from the book she has been trying for two years to complete.Organized around maternal time, the time during which Clothilde’s infant119