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

Refiguring the Mother: Quebec Women Writers in the 80sNotes1. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Association of Canadian Studies in theUnited States Biennial Conference in Boston, November 1991.2. See Jean Le Moyne, “La femme dans la civilisation canadienne-française,” Convergences(Montreal: HMH, 1969), p. 79.3. See the excellent study by Janine Boynard-Frot, Un matriarcat en procès: analysesystématique de romans canadiens-francais, 1860-1960, which considers the impact onfemale characters of the ideology and conventions of this sub-genre.4. The significance of this early text for the subject of this essay was first brought to myattention by Lori Saint-Martin in her essay, “Writing (Jumping) Off the Edge of the World:Metafeminism and New Women Writers of Quebec,” to be published in Beyond theHexagon: Women Writing in French, eds. Karen Gould, Mary Jean Green, Micheline Rice-Maximin, Keith Walker, Jack Yeager.5. See Patricia Smart’s in-depth feminist look at the roman du terroir (Jean Rivard, MariaChapdelaine, Menaud maître-draveur, Trente arpents) in her engaging study of the Quebecnovel, Écrire dans la maison du père: L’émergence du féminin dans la tradition littéraire duQuébec (Montréal: Québec/Amérique, 1988).6. Mary Jean Green offers an additional historical context for understanding the daughter’shostility toward the mother in Blais’s early novels and particularly in Une saison dans la vied’Emmanuel in which, Green argues, “Blais specifically attacked the repressiveness of amother-daughter relationship based on identity and repetition—a relationship much like theone shown in Maria Chapdelaine. In Blais’s vision, the role assigned to women bytraditional Quebec society reduces her to the status of a nameless, faceless animal, whoseonly function is to bear, feed, and often bury an unending series of babies.” See Green’sessay, “Redefining the Maternal: Women’s Relationships in the Fiction of Marie-ClaireBlais,” in Traditionalism, Nationalism, and Feminism: Women Writers of Quebec, ed. PaulaGilbert Lewis (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1985), p. 128.7. Barbara Godard offers an interesting reading of Élisabeth’s condition of outsider, arguingthat despite the heroine’s rebellious acts and positive steps toward self-awareness, sheremains repressed by society as evidenced in her final “refuge in Jérome [the patriarch] andhis fictional vision of her” (Godard, p. 28). See Barbara Godard, “My (m)Other, My Self:Strategies for Subversion in Atwood and Hébert,” Essays in Canadian Writing 26 (Summer1983): 13-44.8. See Mary Jean Green, Paula Gilbert Lewis and Karen Gould, “Inscriptions of the Feminine:A Century of Women Writing in Quebec,” The American Review of Canadian Studies Vol.15, No. 4 (Winter 1985), p. 373.9. See my discussion of motherhood and writing in the works of Gagnon and Bersianik inWriting in the Feminine: Feminism and Experimental Writing in Quebec (Carbondale andEdwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990).10. France Théoret, “La mère, peut-elle être moderne?,” La Nouvelle Barre du jour 116 (1982):47-50.11. See my discussion of the meaning of the phrase for Nicole Brossard and others formed at theLa Barre du jour in Writing in the Feminine, pp. 52-53.12. Nicole Brossard, L’Amèr ou le chapitre effrité (Montreal: Les Quinze, 1977), p. 12.13. Patricia Smart is doubtless correct to insist upon the centrality of the mother figure inGabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion and the importance of the mother/daughter dialogue aswell. See Chapter 5 of Smart’s Écrire dans la maison du père.14. Karen Gould, “Vers une maternité qui se crée: l’oeuvre de Louky Bersianik,” Voix et images49, Vol. 17, N o 1 (automne 1991): 35-47.15. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York:Bantam, 1976).16. Madeleine Gagnon, Antre (Montreal: Les herbes rouges, 1978), p. 40.17. Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 167.123