The Francophone Women Authors of Canada

182 The Francophone Women Authors of Canada Laurence M. Porter Michigan State University The instructor who wishes to include Francophone women authors in a course on Canadian literature and culture is fortunate. At least half of the most prominent authors of Quebec—in terms of recent scholarly interest, and of the availability of their works in French and in English translation—are women. The craftsmanship, innovation, and range of their literary productions allow them to be included without hedging or apology, and to fit into a wide variety of course plans. And in Acadia—the Maritime Provinces—Antonine Maillet is a towering figure whose interest in history and oral tradition, as well as the intrinsic quality of her fictions, requires her inclusion in any serious course on French Canada. When designing literature and culture courses that treat Quebec, one must take account of several major intellectual problems. First, the French presence in Canada dates from the mid-sixteenth century, but before 1945, the major texts are non-literary (travel journals, religious and government documents, journalism in the nineteenth century) or mainly derivative of European models (lyric poetry in the nineteenth century). Secondly, some basic literary works, almost inevitable in traditional courses on Quebec literature, are feminocentric, but written by men, and scarcely feminist. Louis Hémon's Maria Chapdelaine depicts a mythic struggle among the forest, the city, and the farm for the settlers' loyalty. Hémon himself lived in Quebec only briefly, before returning to France; and his novel ends with the heroine's resigned acceptance of the unchanging drudgery of a farm wife. Yves Thériault's canonical "Eskimo novel" Agaguk reaches its climax when the title character's wife influences him not to kill their newborn girl—the most rudimentary of triumphs for feminist values, and one that powerfully reinforces antiquated ethnic stereotypes demeaning to a group that recently acquired quasiautonomous Association status in a vast territory. Michel Tremblay's play Les Belles-Sœurs, a classic pioneering experiment in using joual and a superb portrayal of working-class life in Montréal, starkly dramatizes the failures of sisterhood and female solidarity. If you are not familiar with the Québécois novel, and want to use it to illustrate pro-woman values, imagine the difficulty of spinning feminist gold out of the straw of La Cousine Bette, Madame Bovary, and Nana. Thirdly, although it seems enlightened to include readings about minority groups, literary works that treat such groups are not always politically correct themselves. See the discussion of Thériault's Agaguk just above. And perhaps the most-discussed production of the large Haitian exile community in Montréal FRANCOPHONE WOMEN AUTHORS OF CANADA1 83 has been Dany Laferrière's Comment faire l'amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer—tongue-in-cheek, but not everyone's sense of humor can encompass such playful self-satire. History is another consideration. With the noteworthy exception of Antonine Maillet, the most highly regarded works of Francophone Canadian literature did not crystallize around la grande histoire. To include Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska would alleviate this deficiency. A course limited to masterpieces risks overemphasizing aestheticism at the expense of historical substance. The best-known novel on the Quebec separatist movement, for instance, Hubert Aquin's Prochain Épisode, is an experimental fiction with a melancholic hero whose political role proves ineffectual, and who spends much of his time in a madhouse. Finally, Catholicism provided the overwhelmingly predominant religious and moral guidance that shaped the self-concept of French Canadians until the late 1950s. But nearly all Québécois literary works studied today oppose or ignore this sensibility. Here, nonetheless, one faces the same educational imperative as in studies of Metropolitan France before 1950—the need to understand the Catholic worldview, doctrine, and practice in order to understand even those cultural currents that utterly reject Catholicism. Anne Hébert's novella "Le Torrent" plunges one into a Catholic ambiance, but so negatively that it may offend, rather like Zola's La Faute de l'abbé Mouret. A more lighthearted treatment occurs in Marie Laberge's play C'était avant la guerre à l 'Anse à Gilles. The only remedy I can propose...