Unearthing the Subject behind the Woman-Object: The Representation of Muriel Guilbault in Claude Gauvreau’s Beauté baroque

PATRICIA SMART Unearthing the Subject behind the Woman-Object: The Representation of Muriel Guilbault in Claude Gauvreau's Beaule baroque In an authoritative and exquisitely illustrated study of the Montreal Automatiste movement published a few years ago, Ray Ellenwood traces the chronology of the Surrealist-inspired group of artists led by PaulEmile Borduas, whose most dramatic single contribution to Quebec culture was the 1948 manifesto Refus global. With a humility characteristic of those scholars who have thoroughly covered the terrain they set out to explore, only to find that it has proved inexhaustible, Ellenwood concludes his study with a number of unanswered questions, including the following one: 'Who will finally give us an account worthy of Muriel Guilbault as enigmatic woman and artist?'} This study has no pretension to be such a 'final' account, but is rather an initial attempt to extricate some sense of the person of Guilbault, a popular theatre actress of the 1940s in Montreal, from the image created by her apparently adoring admirer Claude Gauvreau, a playwright and poet who was also a member of the Refus global group. It is an ironic testimony to the ascendancy of the written word over the more ephemeral performance arts that, while Guilbault's name was undoubtedly better known to the Quebec public than any of the fourteen other avant-garde artists who signed the incendiary manifesto, her primary inscription in Quebec cultural history today is as an almost fictional character: the muse and incarnation of l'amour fou described by Gauvreau in his Surrealistinspired autobiographical novel Beaute baroque/ written shortly after her suicide in 1952, and the inspiration behind the numerous female protagonists of his theatrical works, whose suicides consistently act as catalysts in the unfolding of the male protagonists' own tragic destinies. It was for Muriel that Gratien Gelinas created the role of Marie-Ange in Tit-Coq, the 1948 play that is generally regarded as the beghming of an authentically Quebecois theatrical tradition. A few years earlier she had played in Huis dos at the Salle du Gesu, to great critical acclaim; and Sartre himself was treated to an impromptu performance by the actors in his hotel room on a visit to Montreal, following which he invited Muriel to Paris to play the role there. In May 1947 she thumbed her nose at the large and adoring public she had by then acquired through her daily appearances on radio by performing opposite Claude Gauvreau in his Dadainspired one-act play Bien-etre. The play closed after a single disastrous UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 63, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1994 MURlEL GUILBAULT AND CLAUDE GAUVREAU 529 performance, during which the large audience, attracted by Muriel's name but unprepared for what they were to see, laughed hysterically from the play's opening line on; by the end of the evening there were fewer than ten people left in the theatre. Muriel's acting was, according to a number of sources, an extraordinary blend of spontaneity and intelligence. According to the painter Pierre Gauvreau, Claude's brother and another of the signatories of the manifesto, Ishe had an infused knowledge of everything poetic, with no barrier between her and the complexity of the works [...] And she was a fighter, always ready to risk everything, always.'3 On 2 January 1952, at the age of twenty-eight, Muriel Guilbault took her own life. Mining the writings of her famous male admirer for traces of the 'real' Guilbault is a precarious but necessary venture, for Gauvreau not only aspired to be her lover but was her friend and confidant during the period preceding her suicide, and his BeauM baroque is less a novel than an example of 'life-writing,' reminiscent in some ways of another Canadian work written some eight years earlier: Elizabeth Smart's barely fictionalized account of her own love affair with George Barker, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.4 Both works are attempts to capture in writing, the experience of obsession and complete possession by the Other which the surrealists described as II'amour fou,' as well as being passionate attacks on the puritanism and hypocrisy of societies which refuse to allow such...