Bride of New France by Suzanne Desrochers (review)

Bride of New France is Suzanne Desrochers’ debut novel. A popular success, Bride stems from Desrochers’ Master’s thesis, conducted at York University, which combines history and creative writing to paint an unromanticized portrait of the lives of the filles du roi before and after their arrival to New France in the late-seventeenth century.

The filles du roi were young women, mostly under the age of twenty-five, whose forced migration to New France between 1663 and 1673 was part of a population-building program for the colony sponsored by King Louis XIV—hence, the term “King’s Daughters.” Bride of New France is told from the perspective of the fictional Laure Beauséjour, a stubborn yet naïve inmate of Paris’s notorious Salpêtrière hospital which housed the poor, prostitutes, the mentally ill, and orphans, many of whom, including the filles du roi, were expelled to New France over the course of the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Like many of her real-historical counterparts, the orphan Laure finds her life irrevocably changed when she is sent to Canada. Unlike the mythical filles du roi that Desrochers learned about as a child, however, Laure sees her life in Canada as a fate nearly worse than death, and certainly worse than imprisonment in the dreadful Salpêtrière.

In her feminist historiography, Desrochers offers readers what she describes in the historical notes as a “counterweight” (292) to traditional romantic nationalism, which celebrates the “grand historical narrative of the filles du roi as founding mothers” (292) of New France. Laure’s characterization enacts a corrective to traditional history on at least three levels: Laure is a reluctant housewife to Mathurin, a coureur de bois and absentee husband; she begrudgingly adjusts to the material hardships of habitant life; and she becomes sexually uninhibited, finding an outlet for sexual self-expression in her affair with Deskaheh, a young Iroquois man. Yet for all the revisionary potential that inheres in Laure, Bride is peopled by relatively conventional secondary characters. Laure has an affair with, and is impregnated by, an Iroquois who may not carry “potions of mysterious poisons” (77) as Laure is taught to believe of native North Americans prior to her departure from Paris. Instead, Deskaheh conforms quite uniformly to the Rousseauesque ideal of the “noble savage.” Laure’s husband, Mathurin, represents a fairly stereotypical coureur de bois, happier in the woods—and in the arms of aboriginal women—than he is at home with his wife. Once in New France, Laure encounters what seems to be the same character in different guises—that is, women and men who desire little else than the means to return to France.

The novel’s conclusion, although somewhat contrived, fulfills the novel’s revisionary aims. Chafing against habitant life, Laure is suddenly freed of her husband, not through her own initiative, but because Mathurin drowns on his way home to meet the new baby he thinks he’s fathered. The baby’s real father, Deskaheh, adopts the child. Laure permits this adoption because she agrees with her midwife that baby Luce, the product of miscegenation, will be better off raised by her aboriginal family: “This baby brands Laure as a transgressor, a woman who spits in the face of the King’s dreams[,] ... [who] fornicate[d] with a Savage enemy” (287). A widow stripped of her only child, Laure returns with her midwife to Ville-Marie, as the city of Montreal was known then, in order to find another husband. Although her final thoughts are of “the sea” (288), Laure’s lack of agency means that she will never see the sea again, remaining an expatriate in Canada.

Historical fiction has always been a slippery genre, not only for writers seeking to represent the past when “the historical record is sparse on details” (Desrochers 289), but also for book reviewers who weigh aesthetic against historiographical considerations. Aesthetically, Bride of New France is written in evocative, often metaphorical, prose. In considering the novel’s historiography, I...