From Mother to Son: The Selected Letters of Marie de l’Incarnation to Claude Martin by Mary Dunn (review)

This book is best understood as one segment of a two-part meditation by Mary Dunn on the difficult, intense relationship between famed seventeenth-century Canadian mystic Marie de l’Incarnation and her twice-abandoned son, Claude Martin. Claude was first abandoned at the age of eleven when his mother, Marie Guyart, a young widow, entrusted his care to family members and took the veil under the name “Marie de l’Incarnation.” Despite Claude’s repeated entreaties that she leave the convent, Marie then abandoned him a second time when she crossed the Atlantic to colonial Canada to commence her life’s calling as an educator of, and missionary to, Indigenous girls and women. Though mother and son would never meet again in the flesh, their separation prompted a copious, deeply emotional correspondence that seems to have played a critical role in the lives of both and that serves, Dunn argues, as a critical, but under-exploited, historical source for early colonial North America.

In her lengthy, well-argued introduction to the pair’s selected letters, Dunn notes that although this dual abandonment was a major preoccupation of both mother and son, this primal event has been under-analyzed by scholars, who have chosen to focus more on Marie’s extraordinary mystical life or her career as the pre-eminent female leader of colonial Quebec society. Dunn’s twin books – the work under review and a forthcoming book entitled The Cruelest of All Mothers (Fordham University Press) – both aim to address this curious lacuna by making Marie’s relationship with her abandoned son their primary interpretive focus. The Cruelest of All Mothers is a more personal, theologically inflected meditation, whereas From Mother to Son is more historically focused. Here, Dunn’s primary aim is to understand how Marie and Claude perceived the abandonment and how they handled the thorny issue during their three-decade-long correspondence (of which only Marie’s letters survive).

Dunn suggests that the two gradually surmounted their estrangement, coming to a hard-won rapprochement in the period immediately preceding Marie’s death. Claude, Dunn postulates, gradually came to embrace his mother’s passionate assertion that her decision to abdicate her maternal responsibilities was divinely mandated and undertaken not just for an abstract “greater good” but also for her own son’s ultimate spiritual benefit. As Claude moved from adolescence to adulthood, discovered his priestly vocation, and began to assert himself as his mother’s long-distance confidante and confessor, Dunn argues, the pair were finally able to confront their painful shared past and the ongoing reality of their geographical separation. The letters Dunn has selected, translated, and annotated with such extraordinary care constitute the primary proof of her thesis. Dunn allows Marie herself to have the last word of the volume, eschewing a conclusion (an omission that, in my view, gives the book a less-than-finished feel).

Given its specialized focus, Dunn’s collection of forty-one letters is of course much shorter than Guy Oury’s comprehensive compendium of Marie’s 277 extant letters. However, since Oury’s work remains untranslated from the original French, Dunn’s book has the distinction of making a selection of Marie’s correspondence available to unilingual anglophone scholars. However, the urgency of Dunn’s chosen task of translation is debatable. Given that Marie de l’Incarnation is already the best-known female figure of seventeenth-century New France, a better choice for immediate translation might have been Jesuit Paul Ragueneau’s 1671 work, La Vie de la Mère Catherine de Saint-Augustin, a fascinating spiritual biography of one of Marie’s younger female contemporaries. Despite her renown during her lifetime (Marie herself mentions Catherine on numerous occasions in her correspondence), this young demoniac nun’s astounding life story remains, largely because of these linguistic barriers, very...