Le Québec à l’aube du nouveau millénaire: Entre tradition et modernité

Maria Chapdelaine in Literature and Film

Maria Chapdelaine in Literature and Film Between Tradition and Modernity J. Debbie Mann Southern Illinois University Edwardsville Abstract In keeping with the theme of “the gaze” essential to the novel, this consideration of Maria Chapdelaine explores how Hémon’s story of early-twentieth-century Québec reflects the socio-cultural contexts in which it was written or adapted for the screen and the vision of the directors responsible for its cinematic recreation. The discussion also extends to the Gabrielle Gourdeau and Philippe Porée-Kurrer sequels to Maria Chapdelaine published in 1992, which reproduce the interplay of spatial and temporal frames of reference and the tradition/modernity and identity/ alterity dichotomies evident in the novel and in the 1934 and 1983 film versions. Based on the narratological theory of Gérard Genette, a consideration of the relationship between histoire and récit guides the comparison of the novel and its cinematic adaptations by Duvivier and Carle while the discussion of narrative voice focuses on the Gourdeau and Porée-Kurrer sequels. An analysis of questions of order, perspective, and the degree of autonomy accorded to Maria’s voice as a character and emerging narrator reveals that just as Gilles Carle’s post-Quiet Revolution, post-1980 referendum cinematic portrayal of Maria breaks with the conventional mindset reflected by Hémon’s novel and the 1934 Duvivier film by depicting a more vocal and self-directed protagonist, Gourdeau goes beyond Porée-Kurrer’s contemporary but traditional presentation to demonstrate that the past cannot and must not determine and circumscribe the future. 194 Le Québec à l’aube du nouveau millénaire In his Pour une lecture du roman québécois: de Maria Chapdelaine à Volkswagen blues, Aurélien Boivin observes, «Maria Chapdelaine est le roman du regard» (Boivin, 1996, p. 27). It is indeed striking that Maria says very little in the novel. For her and for other characters as well, the gaze is a way to communicate feelings and reactions (Boivin, 1996, p. 27). Maria’s gaze is often averted, hesitant to look directly at her suitors out of modesty, timidity or confusion. In addition, Maria is seen through the eyes of these three men, François Paradis, Lorenzo Surprenant and Eutrope Gagnon, rather than described by the narrator, but their gaze, like her own, is often quite furtive. This concept of the gaze is multiplied three-fold and becomes a sort of jeu de miroirs if one widens the discussion to consider the interplay of spatial and temporal frames of reference and questions of identity and alterity in the novel. First there is the author, Louis Hémon, a Frenchman seeing the Québécois with his foreigner’s eyes and writing for a French audience as indicated by the subtitle Récit du Canada français, which suggests the “otherness” of the world depicted in the story.1 With the publication of the novel in 1916 in Montréal, there is added a Québécois audience looking at themselves as seen by Hémon, recognizing perhaps even then a distorted reflection of their society. The jeu de miroirs becomes more complex when the cinematic adaptations are taken into account. The reflective aspect then applies not only within the world of the novel, le roman du regard, and between the novel and its audiences, but also between the novel and the film adaptations and among the three films themselves. The first cinematic adaptation is that of director Julien Duvivier in 1934, featuring exteriors filmed on location in the Lac-Saint-Jean region near Péribonka. Produced for the Société nouvelle de cinématographie française in Paris in cooperation with FranceFilm, the main distributor of French films in Québec, it starred Madeleine Renaud as Maria and Jean Gabin as François heading a French cast. In general, the film follows the novel in terms of characters and character development with three exceptions: Duvivier invents a village festival to highlight the suitors’ rivalry and add local color, Eutrope Gagnon does not recount the death of François Paradis and when Maria hears three voices at the end of the story, in this film they are those of Eutrope, Lorenzo and François. In the increasingly complex jeu de miroirs, a French director looks at the Québécois through the gaze of a French author for a French audience who, then, is receiving the story through a triply French filter – its own and those of...