Writing of the Self in New Brunswick and Quebec

THE LAST DECADES HAVE WITNESSED A SURGE OF INTEREST in autobiographical writings.¹ Whether one looks at this as the reflection of a narcissistic world, or as a withdrawal from the study of structures and collective entities, there is a proliferation of literary and of scholarly works in literature and in history based on the “writings of the self”: journals, letters, memoirs, and autobiographies. In France this is largely due to Philippe Lejeune, who has been collecting unpublished autobiographical writings, analyzing them, and making them available to a wider audience. We are indebted to him for the concept of the “autobiographical pact,” where the reader must assume that the author is telling the truth.² The mining of these autobiographical texts has given rise to some outstanding contributions to the cultural and social history of Canada and of Quebec, and especially to the history of women. The two books under review are examples of the best of this type of scholarship: Gail Campbell’s “I Wish I kept a Record”: Nineteenth-Century New Brunswick Women Diarists and Their World and Patricia Smart’s Writing Herself into Being: Quebec Women’s Autobiographical Writings from Marie de l’Incarnation to Nelly Arcan.³

Both Campbell’s work on 19th-century women in New Brunswick and Smart’s study of Quebec women from New France to the 20th century demonstrate how the same kind of sources provide historians with evidence for a range of topics. Just as the census, government reports, and newspaper columns help us reconstruct historical experiences in different periods and at different times, personal writings such as diaries and letters also provide a rich well of information on the experiences and the perceptions of people during their lifetime. Using women’s autobiographical documents, Gail G. Campbell, a specialist in New Brunswick history, and Patricia Smart, a specialist in Quebec literature, investigate women’s personal writings for their own purposes. Campbell charts the lives of New Brunswick women from 1825 to 1910, principally from the diaries of 28 women, and none of whom are famous in any generally understood sense of the word. Smart explores the lives of more than 20 Quebec women, from New France to the 21st century, through their published and unpublished diaries and letters. Each work is rooted in a totally different context, from the mysticism characteristic of counter-Reformation Europe and New France to the self-introspection of the last two centuries. Campbell and Smart each ask their own questions. While both examine the construction of the self through personal writings, one enquires about the diarists and their writings while the other explores their place and time. Taken together, they offer rich insights into women’s lives in New Brunswick and Quebec.

Embedded in their own place and time, the diaries and letters are subject to their own aims, constraints, and unwritten rules. As Patricia Smart notes, “the amount of self-revelation in [private diaries] is limited by the conventions of their era” (116); and this is all the more true for diaries aimed at publication or those the author supposed were likely to be read by others. There is a fundamental difference between published journals and those destined to remain private. All but one of the diaries studied by Campbell are held in archives, while most of those examined by Smart have been published and often altered in the process. We will never know the content of Henriette Dessaules’s unedited diary, started when she was 14 and rewritten about 20 years later. We can only guess at her sister Alice’s self-censorship because she had to submit her writings to the nuns who taught her. Never intending it to be read, Joséphine Marchand not only hide her diary but she lied about it to her fiancé – telling him she had burned her notebooks – and Raoul Dandurand was never to see his wife’s journal that went on after their marriage. Censorship and self-censorship have to be taken into account even in private diaries, but even moreso when they are destined for a public readership...