Louise Dupré : Le Québec au féminin (review)

The first monograph on the work of contemporary Quebecoise poet, novelist, and scholar Louise Dupré, this book covers the first two decades of her career, beginning in the early 1980s. A member of the Académie des lettres du Québec (since 1999) and the Royal Society of Canada (2002), Dupré has written ten poetry collections, two novels, a short story collection (L'Eté funambule, 2008), two plays (including 2006's award-winning Tout comme elle), and has collaborated on several artists' books, among numerous other creative and scholarly pieces published in journals or book form. Since Jézéquel's research was completed in 2006, her analysis of Dupré's works omits the more recent titles; a more comprehensive bibliographical listing can be found in the 2009 Voix et images special dossier on the author (101.2, hiver 2009; 97-118).

Paterson and Watteyne's introduction to the Voix et images dossier begins by affirming that Dupré's importance to contemporary Quebec literature "n'est plus à démontrer" (7), yet Jézéquel repeatedly suggests that Dupré's work is not well known enough. The fact remains that this is the first book entirely devoted to Dupré, and as such, it is as much about presenting her to an uninitiated readership as it is about offering a reading of her literary evolution. With respect to the former, one can say that this book does its job, but its contribution is less substantive when it comes to sustained theoretical and textual analysis.

Despite its title, Louise Dupré: Le Québec au féminin rather takes as its overarching motif the notion of space, which Jézéquel construes literally at first, and then increasingly figuratively. The introduction is primarily historical, situating Dupré in post-Quiet Revolution Quebec, and affirming that as a "[r]eflet du siècle, son oeuvre pourrait constituer le témoignage d'une génération de femmes contemporaines qui ont vécu [l']évolution" (20) of the province. Such affirmations would carry more weight with further contextualization of Dupré's contributions, collaborations, and impact. Chapter One usefully outlines Dupré's publications and the thematics that she explores. It is not until the end of this chapter (pp 53-4) that the author presents an outline and rationale for the remainder of her study, however. A more precise book title might have better paved the way for the focus on space in the ensuing six chapters. Taken in order, these chapters deal with the spaces of the city, the country, and the house with its garden and rooms; with the locus of the body; with the space of family relations, particularly with the parents; with the periods of a woman's life measured by decades, termed by Jézéquel "Un nouvel espace femme;" with the journey in/of writing, both as travel and as subjective displacement or exploration; and, finally, with the act of writing—as Dupré affirms, "Mon pays est l'écriture, mon voyage, mon espace" (212)—followed by a brief conclusion and bibliography. Within each chapter, Jézéquel draws from various works and genres to illustrate the recurring elements of Dupré's poetics, but the analysis, notwithstanding references to French and Quebecois secondary sources, remains largely descriptive and appreciative in tone, rather than offering close readings. This is one of the difficulties of working on a living author who displays no sign of exhausting her creative élan. Indeed, critic Hughes Corriveau hailed Dupré's most recent book of poetry, Plus haut que les flammes, as "un grand livre" (Le Devoir, Nov 20, 2010).

Numerous mistakes (including with Dupré's titles), misquotes (notably of Brossard), documentation issues and inaccuracies, and some formatting irregularities leave one wishing this book had seen a more thorough copyedit. Although Jézéquel notes that Dupré's narrators are not autobiographical "mirrors" (227), there is nonetheless a perceptible tendency to read for...