BORDER SPACES AND LA SURVIVANCE: THE EVOLUTION

BORDER SPACES AND LA SURVIVANCE: THE EVOLUTION
OF THE FRANCO-AMERICAN NOVEL OF NEW ENGLAND (1875-2004)
By
CYNTHIA C. LEES
A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT
OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
2006
Copyright 2006
By
Cynthia C. Lees
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to express my gratitude to the members of my supervisory
committee, five professors who have contributed unfailingly helpful suggestions during
the writing process. I consider myself fortunate to have had the expert guidance of
professors Hélène Blondeau, William Calin, David Leverenz, and Jane Moss. Most of all,
I am grateful to Dr. Carol J. Murphy, chair of the committee, for her concise editing,
insightful comments, and encouragement throughout the project. Also, I wish to
recognize the invaluable contributions of Robert Perreault, author, historian, and FrancoAmerican, a scholar who lives his heritage proudly. I am especially indebted to my
husband Daniel for his patience and kindness during the past year. His belief in me never
wavered.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iii
LIST OF FIGURES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
ABSTRACT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viii
CHAPTER
1
SITING THE FRANCO-AMERICAN NOVEL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1
1.2
1.3
Brief Overview of the Franco-American Novel of New England . . . . . . . . . . 1
The Franco-American Novel and the Ideology of La Survivance . . . . . . . . . . 7
Framing the Ideology of La Survivance: Theoretical Approaches to Space
and Place . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
1.4
Coming to Terms with Space and Place . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
1.4.1 The Franco-American Novel and the Notion of Place . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
1.4.2 The Franco-American Novel and Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
1.5
Attempts to Script a Franco-American Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
1.6
Exploring Uncharted Territory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
2
WILDERNESS, RURAL, AND URBAN SPACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
2.1
2.2
2.3
2.4
2.5
2.6
Space and Place in Two Franco-American Novels of Immigration . . . . . . . . 44
Jeanne la fileuse: Topographies of Lower Canada and Fall River . . . . . . . . 49
“Les campagnes du Canada”: The Articulation of the Ideology of La
Survivance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
2.3.1 The Archetypal Coureur de Bois in “Les campagnes du Canada” . . . 57
2.3.2 The archetypal Seigneur and Fils de la Liberté in “Les campagnes
du Canada” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
2.3.3 Lavaltrie and Contrecoeur: The Representation of Place . . . . . . . . . 62
“Les filatures de l’étranger” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
2.4.1 Fall River, Massachusetts: Idealized Urban Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
2.4.2 Jeanne Girard and Granite Mill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
2.4.3 The (Un)Making of a Hero . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
The Working Class, the Franco-American Elite, and Spaces of Inequality . . 75
Canuck: A Novel of Dis-location . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
iv
2.6.1 Lowell and the Fabric of Despair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
2.6.2 From Lowell to the Cantons de l’Est: Places of Metamorphosis . . . . 94
2.6.3 Lessons from “La vie d’un errant” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
2.7
Place and Placelessness in Jeanne la fileuse and Canuck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
3
GENDERED SPACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
Considerations of Gender in La Jeune Franco-Américaine and Les
Enfances de Fanny . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
3.2
Doctrinal Intertexts in La Jeune Franco-Américaine and Les Enfances de
Fanny . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
3.3
Patriarchal Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
3.3.1 Jeanne and Jean Lacombe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
3.3.2 Fanny Johnston and Mr. Lewis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
3.4
La Jeune Franco-Américaine and the Angel in the House . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
3.5
Gendered Space in Les Enfances de Fanny . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
3.6
The Ideology of La Survivance in La Jeune Franco-Américaine and Les
Enfances de Fanny . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
3.1
4
THE SPACE OF DISCONTENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
The Foundering of the Ideology of La Survivance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
Jack Kérouac: “All my knowledge rests in my ‘French-Canadianness’” . . 172
4.2.1 The Town and the City: Spaces of Conflict and Disorientation . . . . 177
4.2.2 Narrative Space and Voice in The Town and the City . . . . . . . . . . . 182
4.2.3 Spaces of Spiritual Questing: A Tale of Fathers, Sons, and (Holy)
Ghosts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
4.3
Marie Grace de Repentigny Metalious: “The Ultimate Iconoclast of
French-Canadian Institutions” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
4.3.1 No Adam in Eden: The Double Discourse of an Ethnic
Autobiographer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
4.3.2 The Mythic Habitant and Coureur de Bois Debunked . . . . . . . . . . 206
4.3.3 Social Space and Discrimination: “Canuck Girls from the South
End” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
4.4
Charleen Touchette: Franco-American and Pied Noir . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
4.4.1 Woonsocket, Rhode Island: A Space of Oppression and Abuse . . 219
4.4.2 “Indian Country”: The Search for Roots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
4.5
Surviving La Survivance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234
4.1
4.2
5
REMEMBERED SPACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236
5.1
5.2
Memory and the Ethnic Self in L’Héritage and Le Petit Mangeur de fleurs 236
Writing Memory in le Parler Populaire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240
v
Le Petit Mangeur de Fleurs and the Space of Childhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248
5.3.1 Narrative Strategies for Configuring Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251
5.3.2 Memorable Places and Proustian Moments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255
5.4
L’Héritage and the (Un)burying of Cultural Memories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
5.4.1 Cultural Memory and Spaces of Transformation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266
5.4.2 Images of Loss and Fragmentation in L’Héritage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272
5.5
Identity and Language in Le Petit Mangeur de Fleurs and L’Héritage . . . . 275
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281
5.3
6
CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297
REFERENCES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 318
vi
FIGURE
Figure
1
page
Communication about the Spiritual Path . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232
vii
ABSTRACT
Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School
of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
BORDER SPACES AND LA SURVIVANCE: THE EVOLUTION
OF THE FRANCO-AMERICAN NOVEL OF NEW ENGLAND (1875-2004)
By
Cynthia C. Lees
May 2006
Chair: Carol J. Murphy
Major Department: Romance Languages and Literatures
This dissertation examines nine texts written by Franco-American novelists of
New England. Themes of migrancy, exile, and cultural survival (la survivance) ground
my study. I explore the negotiations of cultural, social, political, linguistic, and gendered
spaces as experienced—and chronicled in these novels—by the 1.5 million
French-Canadian laborers and their families who migrated to New England between
roughly 1865 and 1930.
The portrait of the migrant that emerges from these novels is one of Other to
American mainstream culture. The ideology of la survivance, a preservationist stance
adopted by the Franco-American elite, promoted the maintenance of ties to the French
language, French-Canadian cultural traditions, and Roman Catholicism and may have
ultimately contributed to the migrant's sense of otherness.
This dissertation counters narrow literary criticism of Franco-American prose
fiction as thesis novels and proposes instead a new reading of the texts as flawed
viii
ideological novels. I argue that the texts fail to sustain a convincing argument in their
defense of, or attack on, the tenets of cultural survival and therefore emerge as more
complex and ambivalent than the label roman à thèse implies. The ambiguities in these
texts subvert the message they seek to deliver, thereby undermining their pro- or
contra-survivance positions.
Theories about the metaphorical and material implications of socially produced
space frame the literary analysis in this study. This framework necessitates the crossing
of disciplinary borders, since my analysis draws upon literary theory, the social sciences,
women's studies, and cultural criticism. I apply key arguments advanced by such
pioneers of spatial hermeneutics as Michel de Certeau, Gaston Bachelard, Henri
Lefebvre, Pierre Nora, and Yi-Fu Tuan.
Three distinct periods mark the evolution of Franco-American prose fiction. An
initial phase of French-language novels published between 1875 and 1939 is followed by
the production of English-language texts. A change in linguistic gears occurs in 1983
with a return to writing in French by a modest number of Franco-American authors.
Language choice implies the stages of acculturation and assimilation of the minority
group. The recent reversion to French-language texts indicates a resurgent ethnic pride
and identification with Franco-American cultural heritage.
ix
CHAPTER 1
SITING THE FRANCO-AMERICAN NOVEL
1.1 Brief Overview of the Franco-American Novel of New England
For over sixty years the few scholars active in the field of Franco-American
literature have engaged in debate over the nature and, more fundamentally even, over the
very existence of such a corpus of literature. A brief, chronological sampling of opinion
on either side of the issue will provide a helpful historical background to the FrancoAmerican novel. Earliest opinions on this corpus of literature, views that surfaced in the
1940s, reveal some doubt about the viability of Franco-American letters. Louis Dantin,
poet, novelist, and well-known literary critic insisted, “Il n’existe pas de littérature
franco-américaine et il n’en existera jamais” (Quintal, La littérature i).
In a text published in 1949, Harry Bernard recognizes a fledgling literature
noteworthy in its presentation of an ethnic group “trop négligé en littérature ou montré
parfois sous de fausses couleurs.” Although characterizing the literature as regionalist,
Bernard does affirm that “les Franco-Américains . . . possèdent d’ailleurs une littérature à
eux, jeune encore, plus didactique que créatrice, et d’expression française” (64). Also in
the 1940s, Gabriel Nadeau, author of a Franco-American historical novel, La fille du roy,
urged the preservation of what he considered to be a fragmented corpus: “Il existe chez
les Franco-Américains une littérature dont les fragments épars méritent d’être ramassés et
assemblés” (Thériault 13). Sister Marie Carmel Thériault, who conducted the interview
with Nadeau on the existence of Franco-American literature, timidly concluded, “[N]ous
croyons qu’il en existe une” (17).
1
2
By mid-century, two Franco-American authors had gained national attention. In
both cases, their ethnicity was either ignored or suppressed. The first, Jack Kérouac, was
known not as the son of French-Canadian immigrants to Lowell, Massachusetts, but as
“King of the Beats” (Duberman 113). Journalists put down their pens whenever Kérouac
began to speak of his heritage, and the image they created of him “. . . ne correspondait
pas aux caractéristiques culturelles de base du milieu ethno-religieux dont il était le
produit” (Sorrell, “Jack Kérouac” 122). Recent scholarship on Kérouac, notably that of
Éloïse A. Brière, Robert Perreault, Susan Pinette, Constance Gosselin Schick, and
Richard Sorrell, has established the profoundly Franco-American identity of his œuvre,
most explicitly present in The Town and the City (1950), Doctor Sax (1959), Visions of
Gerard (1963), and Satori in Paris (1966). The second Franco-American writer to gain a
reputation outside of New England, Grace de Repentigny Metalious, earned recognition
as the author of Peyton Place rather than for her novel No Adam in Eden, a text
profoundly informed by her Franco-American heritage. In this 1967 novel, the narrator
questions, rejects, and ultimately seeks to subvert French-Canadian ethnicity. These two
writers who garnered an international following exemplify Franco-American novelists of
the second half of the twentieth century, writers whose evolving preoccupations with
nonimmigrant subjects moved them away from the maintenance of the French language,
cultural traditions of Quebec, and Roman Catholicism, social practices that furnished the
themes of some earlier Franco-American literature.
After decades of debate, a general consensus, reached in the early 1980s,
proclaimed the existence of a recognizable corpus of Franco-American literature. A
meeting of Franco-American writers and artists held in Orono, Maine, in August 1982,
welcomed a diverse group including a new generation of authors such as Grégoire
3
Chabot, Ernest Hébert, the late Jan Kérouac (Jack’s daughter), and Robert Perreault, who
rubbed elbows with the old guard represented by Paul Chassé, the late Normand Dubé,
Jacques Ducharme, and Gérard Robichaud, among others. A little over one hundred years
after the publication of Honoré Beaugrand’s Jeanne la fileuse (1875), “cette littérature si
souvent passée inaperçue” (Brière 111) had finally attracted some attention.
To what factors can one attribute so long a period of neglect? According to
scholars such as Ben-Zion Shek and Roger Le Moine, the Franco-American novel has
never garnered the critical attention it merits due mostly to its status as regional, minority
literature. Shek, writing on Jeanne la fileuse, praises its depiction of French-Canadian
labourers in the Northeast: “. . . [T]he book gives us the first portrait of industrial workers
in French-Canadian literature. It sheds light on the psychological problems of transition
from rural to urban industrial life. For these reasons, it is not without interest for the
student of realistic literature” (40). Jeanne la fileuse explores the impact of urban space
on an undifferentiated mass of workers who crowd into Granite Mill like worker bees. As
an urban novel, it presents the dangerous, unstable, and ever-changing space that engulfs
those who live in it. And yet this novel, for more than a century following its publication,
met with stony silence on the part of critics. It has only recently been made available to a
wider readership thanks to a 1980 Fides reissue. In his introduction to the text, Roger Le
Moine observes, “Le silence de la critique [était] plus néfaste que la pire des
condamnations. [Le roman] a été pratiquement oublié des critiques. Une conspiration du
silence n’eût pas donné d’autres résultats” (Beaugrand 43-44). Constance Gosselin
Schick explains the marginalization of Franco-American writers by the Québécois elite:
Le texte national québécois du dix-neuvième siècle et de la première moitié du
vingtième siècle se fait monolithiquement agraire et ultramontain seulement dans
la mesure où il exile tous ceux et celles qui en sont émigrés. Les Honoré
4
Beaugrand, Camille Lessard-Bissonnette, Louis Dantin . . . et maints autres ont
laissé des texts qui, comme Jeanne la fileuse, n’ont peut-être pas pu influencer
l’institution littéraire majoritaire. (“Jeanne” 1015)
Other factors besides critical indifference caused the Franco-American novel to
languish in relative obscurity. Claire Quintal, a leader in the movement for recognition of
the corpus, notes the widespread unavailability of Franco-American literature in past
decades. In her opening remarks at a 1992 Colloquium at Assumption College entitled
“Franco-American Literature: Writers and their Writings,” she describes the works as
“pendant longtemps si difficiles à se procurer, souvent éparses dans les journaux,
inaccessibles, sauf aux chercheurs” (La littérature i). The lack of French-language
publishers in New England between 1875 and 1940, when Franco-American literature
was largely being written in French, seems to have greatly contributed to the problem of
getting Franco-American texts into the hands of the reading public. Authors had no
choice but to publish their novels in serial form in French-language newspapers. Jacques
Ducharme, in The Shadows of the Trees (1943), describes the eagerness with which his
mother awaited the arrival of Holyoke’s French-language weekly newspaper, La Justice:
The first to receive it will be Mother. If she is not pressed for work at the
moment, she will sit down and read the feuilleton novel, which runs from week to
week. These novels are generally thrillers, each installment ending in suspense,
but often they are the only imaginative reading matter she will see from one end
of the year to the other. They are . . . rather romantic and are calculated to appeal
to the feminine readers. (123)
For subsequent generations of readers, the serializing of novels contributed to the
difficulty in locating such texts. Many works, such as Georges Crépeau’s novels and
plays along with two novels by Joseph Laferrière published in Lowell’s Clairon, have
been forever lost. Sadly, the newspapers’ archives were shredded.
5
Thus indifference on the part of the critics, lack of avenues of publication, and the
consequent unavailability of the texts themselves combined with the geographic,
linguistic, and cultural isolation in which the authors wrote produced very unfavorable
conditions for the growth of the corpus. In view of all these negative factors, Armand
Chartier admits, “[T]he existence of any Franco-American literary works at all is
surprising” (“Franco-American” 17).
Although scholars now recognize the existence of a discrete corpus of FrancoAmerican literature, there are those for whom it has been “connue . . . par rapport à sa
grande soeur du Québec” (Normandeau 17). Pierre Anctil has classified early FrancoAmerican literature (from 1875 to 1945) as a regional branch of Quebec literature. He
argues that Franco-American literature takes a new direction away from Quebec only
after World War II. He links this shift to the “breaking down of social barriers of the
Petits Canadas . . . and the transformation of social conditions. Franco-American
literature finally severed itself from its roots in Québec and thus became completely
autonomous” (A Franco-American vii). He establishes the work of Louis Dantin as
signaling a change in direction for the literary corpus. Certainly Les Enfances de Fanny,
published in 1951 (six years after Dantin’s death), moves quite pointedly away from
earlier concerns of Franco-American novelists in its portrayal of the African-American
community of Roxbury, Massachusetts.
Another critic of Franco-American literature, Maurice Poteet, characterizes the
work of New England francophone writers as “l’autre littérature québécoise.” Perhaps
anticipating puzzled reactions to his unusual definition, he goes on to clarify his terms:
“Dans notre recherche, nous nous référons fréquemment au roman franco-américain
(de Beaugrand à Blaise) comme à l’autre littérature québécoise. Cette signification de
6
‘autre,’ dans ce contexte de travail, signifie ‘complémentaire’ ou encore,
métaphoriquement, ‘l’autre côté de la médaille’” (“L’autre” 87).
In what ways can Franco-American literature in relation to the literature of
Quebec be considered as the other side of the coin? In the past there have been
individuals on both sides of the border who perceived New England as a Québec d’en
bas and who would have welcomed the recognition of literary and ideological ties
between the two regions. As for certain authors such as Honoré Beaugrand, Rémi
Tremblay, and Adélard Lambert, the lines between the two literatures have blurred, and
these writers have long been classified as belonging to both camps.
Perhaps a certain thematic complementarity presents itself in early texts of two
literatures sharing what David M. Hayne calls “the preoccupations of a linguistic
community intent upon assuring its own survival in an often uncongenial environment”
(13). Thus, in comparing Ringuet’s Trente Arpents (1938) or Hémon’s Maria
Chapdelaine (1913), two classic French-Canadian novels that treat emigration to New
England, to Beaugrand’s Jeanne la fileuse or Camille Lessard-Bissonnette’s Canuck
(1933), (written in New England from the perspective of the other side of the coin), one
discovers shared concerns about the massive exodus of unskilled labor to the States.
Beneath the shared thematic content exhibited by the literary production on either
side of the border lie deeper issues that divide the two literatures. For example, unlike
more recent generations of Franco-American writers (from the 1950s onward) who have
been faced with two possible language choices, French or English, Quebec writers have
written exclusively in French. Additionally, Poteet, (writing in 1986 in regard to
Perreault’s L’Héritage), refers to “le code de survivance” as still a dominant issue in
Franco-American fiction. For Poteet, the question of la survivance, (the maintenance of
7
French-Canadian cultural values, the French language, and Roman Catholocism in the
face of the pressures of assimilation into the dominant Anglophone culture), traditionally
a socio-historic frame for literatures on either side of the border, remains even in the late
1980s, an unresolved issue. Whereas this assessment may have been valid for early
Franco-American texts such as Jeanne la fileuse, Canuck, L’Innocente victime, Les
aspirations d’une race, and La Jeune Franco-Américaine, post-Depression era texts
depart from such narrow constraints and seem less concerned with resistance to change
than with the instability, fragility, and ultimate fragmentation of cultural identity in the
face of assimilation.
A far more pragmatic strategy for coping with change and for individual rather
than collective survival emerges in texts such as Hébert’s The Dogs of March (1979),
Robichaud’s Papa Martel (1961), and Côté Robbins’s Wednesday’s Child (1997), works
that establish Franco-Americans as part of the American mainstream. As early as the
1950s many Franco-Americans were publicly admitting that the battle against
assimilation had been lost. As a result, Franco-American literature, no longer situated in
defense of an illusory coherence of cultural maintenance, began to reveal rather than to
mask the spaces of discontent. It continues to open up spaces where dissident voices can
be heard.
1.2 The Franco-American Novel and the Ideology of La Survivance
At the very core of the Franco-American novel lies the exploration of the
ideology of la survivance and its influence upon the experience of French Canadians who
migrated to New England. This minority, by the 1920s, numbered over one million and
represented the region’s major non-English-speaking ethnic group.1 La survivance, the
maintenance of the ties of language, faith, and cultural tradition between the migrants and
8
Quebec province, dominated, (and continues to dominate in some twenty-first century
fiction—notably that of Normand Beaupré), Franco-American discourse. This
dissertation examines, from a diachronic perspective, nine Franco-American texts written
between 1875 and 2004, and targeted, in most instances, to a specific Franco-American
audience. Writing in a language other than English in the United States foregrounds
issues of identity. This choice meant, for writers such as Beaugrand, Lessard-Bissonnette,
Dantin, and still means, for Perreault, Chabot, and Beaupré, writing for audiences for
whom the representation of the self and the Other remains dichotomized and, quite likely,
unresolved. These individuals occupy borderlands between two cultures, spaces in which
identity emerges as complex, fluid.
The novels to be considered here all deal with the ideology of cultural survival.
Some of the novels actively promote this cause. Others subvert it. Still others emerge as
ambivalent, arguing on the one hand for a continuation of fidelity to the French language,
to Roman Catholicism, and to French-Canadian traditions while, on the other hand,
recognizing that the forces of assimilation have eroded much of the old way of life. Each
text analyzed in this dissertation offers, through different discursive treatments of space
and place, either a defense or a criticism of the maintenance of cultural ties with the
homeland. For instance, Beaugrand’s Jeanne la fileuse promotes French-Canadian
nationalism, the establishment of ethnic enclaves in Fall River, Massachusetts, and the
preservation, among Franco-American immigrants, of cultural practices tied to Lower
Canada. Metalious’s No Adam in Eden, on the other hand, seeks to unmask these cultural
practices as meaningless constructs that promote a permanent underclass of unskilled
labor, socially and linguistically segregated from the American mainstream. My own
contention is that la survivance, as an all-pervasive ideology of the Franco-American
9
elite, hid under patriotic, patriarchal, and religious rhetoric, social, political and economic
practices of power resulting in domination of the many by the few. Although urban,
industrialized New England presented an environment quite different from that of rural,
nineteenth century Quebec, the Franco-American elite vigorously attempted to preserve a
cohesive ethnic community and to promote this community in a regional literature not
unlike the Quebec agrarian novel.
In writing about Franco-American prose fiction, Poteet chronicles its stages of
development as regional literature, tracing the evolution of what he terms “une
importante minorité ethnicoculturelle aux États-Unis, historiquement une des plus
cohésives et des plus développées qui aient jamais existé” (“L’autre” 92). He goes on to
argue that the treatment of ethnic identity appears in an even more pronounced way in the
more recent English-language novels of, say, Kérouac, Metalious, Robichaud, Cormier,
Ducharme, and Archambault. Of their novels he writes, “Ils concernent tous . . . comment
devenir Américain” (“L’autre” 92). The Franco-American ethnic coherence with which
many scholars have concerned themselves has its basis in attempts to remain faithful to
what Poteeet terms “le code de ‘survivance’ du ‘to be or not to be.’ Le conflit, nature
véritable de la société et de la culture nord-américaines à la fois françaises et américaines
à bien des égards, tourne autour de cette question qui est posée sans cesse en FrancoAméricanie” (“L’autre” 95). The maintenance of ethnic identity, inextricably linked in
Franco-American prose fiction with notions of geography and mobility, provides a
springboard for my inquiry into how French-speaking peoples in New England came to
view themselves as beings in their own right and how notions of space and place
informed this identity.
10
Militant survivance, a movement to be explored in depth in chapter four, reached
its heyday in the 1920s and 1930s, a period considered the golden age of FrancoAmerican culture in New England. During that time, Josaphat Benoit published his
historical overview of the establishment of French-Canadian settlements in New
England. His L’âme franco-américaine (1935) provides a typical sampling of nationalist
rhetoric:
Ce sont des fils de colons canadiens, des petits-fils de Français, qui, après une
double transplantation en terre étrangère, prennent racine et s’épanouissent sur le
sol américain, en s’efforçant de garder leur langue, leurs mœurs et leur foi
religieuse. Ils apprennent l’anglais et le parlent fort bien, dans la vie économique
et politique, aussi bien qu’en société; mais ils parlent, lisent, et écrivent le
français à l’église, à l’école, au foyer, dans leurs assemblées nationales et leurs
journaux. (48)
This passage foregrounds the principle tenets of cultural survival—the insistence by those
who had the power of the pen and the pulpit upon the maintenance of French-Canadian
traditions, of the French language, and of Roman Catholicism, in the new urban
environment of New England.2 French-Canadian journalist Jules-Paul Tardivel carried
nationalism even further—beyond the borders of Canada: “Jusqu’où cette race s’étendrat-elle les bornes de ce nouveau territoire? de cette Nouvelle France? C’est le secret de
Dieu mais il embrassera toute la partie nord-est du continent américain, nous le croyons
bien. . . . Cet état franco-américain nous l’appelons de tous nos voeux” (qtd. in Weil 31).
In I Had a Father (1993), Franco-American author Clark Blaise (anglicized with
an e) describes what he terms a French-Canadian mentality, “a garrison mentality . . .
suspicious of outsiders, always defensive about the loss of language, culture, and
religion” (52). His father, Léo Blais, began working at the Amoskeag Mills in
Manchester, New Hampshire, at the age of nine, earning twenty-five cents a week for
sixty-six hours of work. Léo came from a family of small-town French Canadians from
11
the village of Lac-Mégantic, just twenty miles from the Maine border. In Blaise’s
depiction of the townsfolk, one catches a glimpse of the foundations of the ideology of
cultural survival: “They are quiet, Catholic, conventional people [with] memories of
hunting and fishing, of the marginal life of quarrying and dairy farming, or even scrublumbering from the logged-out bush. The terrible, suffocating suspiciousness of
outsiders, the touchiness, the preference to be left alone” (23), to Blaise, reflects the
exclusive nature of such an isolating ideology. The passage also reveals the affective
bond between the individual and the ancestral land, a bond that determined, for
generations to come, patterns of migration and remigration.
In the years following World War II, Franco-Americans, as evidenced by what
one finds in their prose fiction, began the difficult process of disengagement from their
historical roots, a process forced upon them by the consequences of migration. This
disengagement was neither painless nor rapid. In fact, over half a century had passed
between the publication of Jeanne la fileuse, with its promotion of the ideals of la
survivance, and the appearance of The Delusson Family (1939), a novel that provides
clear evidence that Franco-Americans had begun to consider an identity apart from their
historical roots in Quebec province. Forging links with the Anglo society, a
predominantly different culture with a different language and a different set of mores,
appears to have been a radical departure from the long-established goal of maintenance
of French culture, French language, and Roman Catholicism. Perhaps Franco-Americans
had begun to feel what Gönül Pultar terms “ethnic fatigue” in holding out “against a
totalizing matrix of Anglo-whiteness. Ethnic fatigue” asserts Pultar, “is the manifestation
of the outcome of the enforced biculturalism that so many Americans, whether white or
nonwhite, whether willingly or unwillingly, experienced while adhering to
12
Anglocentricism as the mode d’emploi of Americanization” (137). In describing the
process of acculturation, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. insists that “the smelting [sic] pot . . .
had, unmistakably and inescapably, an Anglocentric flavor. . . . This tradition provided
the standard to which other immigrant nationalities were expected to conform, the matrix
into which they would be assimilated” (28). Archambault’s Mill Village, Ducharme’s The
Delusson Family, and other Franco-American novels of the war years chronicle growing
cracks in the armor of the ideology of cultural survival despite renewed efforts by
Franco-American politicians, journalists, and clergy members to shore up its foundations.
How did the Franco-American elite promote the rhetoric of cultural survival?
This ideology flourished in both French-language novels and in daily French-language
newspapers in cities as diverse and geographically distant as Holyoke, Lowell, and
Worcester, Massachusetts, Central Falls and Woonsocket in Rhode Island, Manchester
and Nashua, New Hampshire, and Biddeford and Lewiston in Maine, all cities where
Franco-Americans constituted up to sixty percent of the general population. These cities,
along with Fall River, Massachusetts, constitute the major centers of Franco-American
literary output during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The authors I have chosen
to study represent all of these geographic areas, and each writer explores the notion of la
survivance from his or her unique perspective, either supporting it, partially rejecting it,
or seeking to completely subvert it. Clearly the debate over cultural survival emerges as
the core issue in Franco-American prose fiction from its inception to its present state. An
exploration of this literature reveals the subtleties and ambiguities inherent in resistance
to assimilation into the dominant Anglophone culture by a marginalized and largely
powerless ethnic group.
13
1.3 Framing the Ideology of La Survivance:
Theoretical Approaches to Space and Place
The exploration of la survivance furnishes the thematic content of my study and
organizes the pages that follow. As for the theoretical frame of the discussion, I intend
to apply to the chosen corpus of Franco-American novels the theories of a variety of
thinkers who write about space and place. Literary critic Leonard Lutwack signals the
growing importance of spatial notions as applied to literature. He writes, “As interest in
. . . the intellectual contexts suffers from the general disorientation of our time . . . we
can expect criticism to look more closely at the physical contexts within a literary
work, specifically its rendering of space, motion, things, processes, and places” (2).
Denis Donoghue urges a similar consideration of spatial notions in his observation that
writers “would do better to turn away from time toward space, from history toward
geography, topography, landscape, place” (qtd. in Davie 22).
The individuals whose critical ideas will be most helpful in exploring FrancoAmerican prose fiction come from a range of disciplines: literary theory, the social
sciences, women’s studies, and cultural criticism. This multidisciplinary approach
grows out of what Derek Gregory terms “a heightened sense of intellectual
experimentation, a blurring of the boundaries, and a determined attempt to reach out
beyond the centralisms and parochialisms of the Western academy” (5). Thus, rather
than apply one theoretical position to over a century of literature (for example, a
Marxist reading of Franco-American prose fiction, or a feminist reading, or even a
psychoanalytic reading) and thus risk lying in one’s own procrustean bed, I seek to
avail myself of some key arguments that have been advanced by a variety of
individuals. All of these thinkers emerge as pioneers of spatial hermeneutics. Theorists,
14
philosophers, and critics such as Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Fredric Jameson,
Pierre Nora, Yi-Fu Tuan, Gaston Bachelard, Gillian Rose, Linda McDowell and bell
hooks, to name but a few, have all explored the spaces that Sara Blair characterizes as
“simultaneously material and abstract that have functioned as arenas for the enactment
of social relations.” She explains that such thinkers have “concerned themselves with
. . . the intimate practices of emplacement, embodiment, and location through which
individuals, communities, and nations are bounded and bound together” (547).
Many critics have analyzed literary texts from a spatial perspective: literature,
of course, takes place and, in the process, reconfigures particular geographies
discursively. For instance, Simon Rycroft approaches Kérouac’s On the Road (1957) as
an inherently spatial novel comprised of a series of “complex and often conflicting
geographies within and about the text which can be explored with recourse to the
contextual environments” (425). These environments include both figurative and
concrete geographies. Motion through space may symbolize rebellion on the part of a
restless youth culture and its quest for spirituality. Physical places—New York,
Denver, San Francisco, Mexico City—provide environments in which the characters
challenge established norms. Issues of mobility and immobility therefore emerge as the
defining characterisitics of these spaces and places.
Why approach the ideology of cultural survival through an exploration of
various theoretical treatments of space and place? Because the history of the French of
New England, both cultural and literary, emerges as inseparable from their movement
through space and subsequent settlement in place and this notion informs FrancoAmerican prose fiction. Clark Blaise, in portraying his father Léo Blais, observes,
“Geography defines my father’s life. He was a pure product of old Québec, of a
15
decadent and ferocious Catholicism, of a hard and resistant frontier, and of the lure of
America, the promise of riches just over a mountain ridge” (104). And, just like “any
good French Canadian, he’d followed his instincts and gone south” (17). Léo, always
behind the wheel of a car, emerges as a modern-day coureur de bois, traveling across
the landscapes of the urban Northeast while negotiating a complex and illusive identity
which, for his son Clark, remains embedded in places:
He might never have known who or what he was, but anyone reading his
obituary in the Union-Leader knew immediately: he was typical, with a typical
birthplace, and a typical name, and a typical story to tell. He’d tried Florida and
Pittsburgh . . . only to end his days in the traditional capital of FrancoAmerica—Manchester, New Hampshire. In Manchester, when an old French
Canadian dies . . . the obituary etiquette dictates only “born in Canada,” which
means French and Catholic, with mass and visitation and burial at the usual
locations. In Manchester, Canada means only Quebec. (4-5)
The ideology of cultural survival has everything to do with place-bound identity
construction, since location, traditional values, religious beliefs, and language choice
all inform notions of identity. Theorists and philosophers in the waning years of the
twentieth century have become particularly interested in the ways in which space and
place enter into such identity construction. Their arguments about the metaphorical and
material implications of socially produced space frame my literary analysis.
1.4 Coming to Terms with Space and Place
The massive dislocation of French-Canadian unskilled labor to urban centers in
the six New England states in the years following the American Civil War produced a
large population of migrant workers. Charting their experience in the new urban locus
and their spatial practices ranging from the establishment of kinship networks in Petits
Canadas to the construction of Roman Catholic churches reveals much about the
maintenance of their values, traditions, and cultural identity. Sara Blair, commenting on
16
the importance of spatiality as the “organizing form of experience,” writes, “A growing
number of texts seek to reframe disciplinary conversations about cultural identity, the
homeland, regionalism, and the social body with respect to geography’s revaluation of
space and the social practices it informs” (547). Thus the emphasis critical inquiry
places on notions of spatialization responds to a growing cross-disciplinary recognition
of the importance of space and place in the construction of identity. Clark Blaise, a
writer fascinated by topographies, understands how affective ties to place inform
identity. Writing about his “attachment to geography” he observes, “When I ask, as I
always do, where do you come from? I mean to ask who are you?” (35).
Over the years the meaning of the words “space” and “place” has been fiercely
contested by any number of scholars (Blair 544). Since the late 1980s, cultural, literary,
and social theorists have joined in the debate over how and why places matter and how
to assess the relationship between space and place. These kinds of debates have been
informed, in part, by increasing migrancy and hybridity in modern times. Additionally,
since the 1960s, multiculturalism, with its recognition of ethnic, cultural, historical, and
religious differences among people, has added to the debate in its encouragement of
accommodation of minority groups without necessarily promoting assimilation into
mainstream culture.
Outward acceptance of ethnic differences and, in some political circles,
celebration of those differences have led to counterhegemonic discourse present in the
work of, for example, Charleen Touchette, Grace Metalious, and Ernest Hebert,
Franco-American writers of the second half of the twentieth century. These writers
have thought a great deal about space and place and how these constructs are neither
harmless nor innocent with respect to oppressive practices of control and domination
17
on the part of the empowered elite, be they Anglophone or Francophone. Their writing
serves to challenge long-accepted and often stereotypical views of the FrancoAmerican experience in New England and to expose agencies of repression couched in
the ideology of cultural survival.
Franco-American writers seem to have recognized from the publication of the
first Franco-American novel, Beaugrand’s Jeanne la fileuse, that spatiality—the
affective and social experience of space—informs individual and communal practices,
cultural identity, and industrial social order. In its split narrative Jeanne la fileuse
juxtaposes vast landscapes of Canadian forests with built structures of emerging urban
centers as it examines the effects of dislocation on everyday life. Although critical
attention to Franco-American texts has proven scant, Joseph Desrosiers, in his 1878
review of Beaugrand’s work, sardonically observed, “Avec une perspective aussi
brillante, nous ne devons plus nous étonner du grand nombre de Canadiens qui
émigrent aux États-Unis; mais si une chose doit plutôt nous surprendre, c’est que le
reste de la population ne se détermine pas à émigrer en masse” (404). Desrosiers thus
corroborates the unprecedented dimensions of the movement south of the border while
faintly praising Beaugrand’s deft treatment of the diaspora.
Whether in regard to this first Franco-American text or to Touchette’s It Stops
with Me: Memoir of a Canuck Girl, published in 2004, consideration of space and place
has become crucial to an understanding of how land, landscape, and the built
environment shape human interactions within and beyond the ethnic community. An
exploration of the work of Beaugrand, Touchette, and other Franco-American authors
reveals how their preoccupation with space and place goes beyond simply invoking
natural and constructed environments as effective metaphors to actually integrating
18
them into their literary terrain. For example, in the two texts noted above, the narrators
use places to frame their reflections derived from associations with certain locales, Fall
River for Beaugrand, Woonsocket for Touchette. In the end, however, these narratives
transcend place, and explore underlying notions of cultural heritage, faith, revolt,
repression, and so on.
Space and place emerge as related but not equivalent notions. These terms
designate, respectively, fluidity and fixity, or positionality and position. At some
points, the two notions seem to be less discrete than these designations imply. For
instance, Fall River as a place of social residence intersects with Fall River as an urban
space in which characters work out the conditions of power, marginality, class,
ethnicity, and so on. In light of the importance of natural and constructed environments
in the corpus to be considered, the exploration of the terms “space” and “place” that
follows will help to clarify these terms.
1.4.1 The Franco-American Novel and the Notion of Place
Place in the Franco-American novel emerges as a highly complex notion, one
critical to an understanding of identity construction. Characters react to places as they
seek to construct a viable self. Literary critic Leonard Lutwack examines the vital role
place occupies for the narrator. First of all, he needs to keep in mind “its concreteness
because place is necessary in the rendering of action which must have a specific locale
to occur in.” The critic further insists that place is crucial to the construction of the
character in his own right who “cannot fully exist without an environment to which
[he] owes his identity through constant orientation” (17). Lutwack argues that the
novel, from its inception, has been devoted to an exploration of how characters react to
specific environments (18).
19
The constitution of place in Franco-American literature reflects the historic
shifting patterns of migration among French Canadians between two defined
places—New England and Quebec. More than just restless instability on the part of the
working-class poor, the constant crossing and recrossing of the Canadian border can be
viewed as both economically- and ideologically-driven behavior. Historians and
cultural anthropologists attribute frequent return to the homeland to a number of
causes: slowdowns in the textile industry, breaks between seasonal jobs, celebrations of
important religious holidays including St.-Jean-Baptiste-Day and Christmas, and family
weddings, baptisms, and funerals.
With first- and even second-generation Franco-Americans bouncing between
two locales, place-based identity emerges as a particular concern in Franco-American
narratives in which individuals invest places with meaning just as places shape and
control the individuals who inhabit them. Thus the concept of dwelling in place evolves
as a central focus of many Franco-American texts reflecting the lived experience of
unskilled laborers. The significance given to places such as the ancestral homeland, the
urban tenement, the neighborhood, and the city reveals a preoccupation with
emplacement not uncommon among migrant populations and their literatures. Yi-Fu
Tuan’s thinking about place can help one to understand the manifestations of loyalty to
place present in Franco-American literature. “Topophilia,” Tuan’s neologism for the
affective bond between people and the places they inhabit, seems especially relevant to
the Franco-American sense of situatedness, a sense constantly shifting between the
urban centers of New England and the rural stretches of Quebec province.
Much of early Franco-American literature deals with the loss of the old place,
of the old ways, and, to a certain extent, of one’s old self. The thought of remigration
20
persists. For instance, in Jacques Ducharme’s The Delusson Family (1939), the
protagonist, Jean-Baptiste Delusson, returns in his old age to his native land: “He
revisited Saint Valérien and the truth was borne in upon him that he was at heart a man
of the soil. He was old to go through the process of readaptation, but the dream of some
day going back to the land held him in its spell anew. . .” (152). During the thirty years
he spent in Holyoke, Massachusetts, Jean-Baptiste tried to work out the terms of
exchange between the old place and the new. Although he did not exactly fail in his
attempt to remake his home in the new space, the lure of the old land reveals that he
has been, as Tuan puts it, “persisting as much as adapting” (Place 13). For human
geographers like Tuan, an exploration of place and space emerges as the essential basis
for understanding human behavior and human nature.
Place implies placelessness, and much of Franco-American literature concerns
itself with the rootlessness inherent in the nomadic existence of unskilled labor in the
New England states. Whether dodging child labor laws, moving from one city to
another in response to economic downturns, or accommodating seasonal work
schedules, Franco-Americans remained a labor force on the move for several
generations. Certainly Jack Kérouac’s On the Road speaks to the sense of place and
placelessness inherent in the Franco-American experience. His lesser known first work,
The Town and the City (1950), explores the disorientation of the members of the Martin
family in a narrative richly informed by place. The portrait of Galloway, based upon
the Lowell, Massachusetts, of Kérouac’s youth, foregrounds the dialectic between New
England and Quebec province with its allusion to both the intrusive presence of
manufacturing plants and to the fields and forests which recall those places left behind
in Lower Canada: “The textile factories built in brick, primly towered, solid, are ranged
21
along the river and the canals, and all night the industries hum and shuttle. This is
Galloway, milltown in the middle of fields and forests” (3). Kérouac’s attention to both
the images and the values attached to place exemplifies the importance of the construct
in Franco-American literature. Furthermore, the treatment of place in this literary
corpus implies an exploration of a developing ethnic identity and its struggle to find
meaning in the new urban locus.
1.4.2 The Franco-American Novel and Space
Space, from the standpoint of literary theory, cultural geography, anthropology,
sociology, feminism, or the visual arts, to name but a few domains, functions in all
manner of ways in individual and collective experience. Whereas in the past the word
“space” evoked mostly mathematical or scientific concepts, today’s use of the term
engenders a bewildering multiplicity of possible connotations. Mental space, material
space, social space, politicized space, and all kinds of specialized space (work, leisure,
ecological, architectural, interpersonal) demonstrate the proliferation of uses to which
the term is put. Literary critic John Vernon examines the central role space plays in
prose fiction. He proclaims the novel “the genre of location and property, the literature
whose form is primarily spatial and whose space is that of a map” (37).
A life-history narrative recorded during an interview by a worker of the Federal
Writers’ Project, with an individual identified only as a Franco-American grandmother,
reveals the importance of space in identity construction. The woman recalls the advice
given by a Quebec merchant to her father, Joe, on the eve of the family’s departure to
New Hampshire:
You and yours do not belong there, Joe. We are a rural race; our land is
extraordinarily fertile and should be made to produce enough for all. If the
Americans want to enlarge their manufacturing industry, very well, but our
22
people should not be ensnared by them. Nothing hurts me more, nothing makes
me sadder or more utterly discouraged for our future, than to see a Canadian—a
man whose ancestors have opened this soil, have tilled it, have lived on it, and
now sleep under it—admit that he is willing to see his children spend their lives
for the profit of these capitalists who draw hard gold from sweat and blood.
(Doty, The First 39)
A variety of spatialities present themselves in the merchant’s discourse. In terms of
physical space, the rural is privileged as the ancestral and the sacred, as a site of manly
labor. An allusion is made to historical space—the wilderness of New France that
explorers opened up to colonization. Social space, implied by the introduction of
manufacturing and the exploitation of the worker, suggests Lefebvre’s “repetitious
spaces,” which he defines as “. . . the outcome of repetitive gestures (those of the
workers) associated with instruments that are both duplicatable and designed to
duplicate: machines, bulldozers, concrete-mixers, cranes, pneumatic drills, and so on”
(The Production 75). Lefebvre’s repetitious spaces will prove particularly helpful in
considering mill spaces, their uniformity, and their deadening routine.
François Weil, writing on mill spaces, observes, “L’espace usinier s’agrandit, se
mécanisa et se sépara du monde environnant. L’usine émergea comme une forme
autonome, bruyante, sale, chaude, de taille immense—un environnement défini non par
son contenu humain, mais par son contenu mécanique” (58). The Quebec merchant
seems particularly aware of the dehumanizing space of the mill in his comments
emphasizing the enslavement of the children to capitalist masters, an issue explored in
Lessard-Bissonnette’s Canuck (1936).
Space is inherently dynamic and translates into movement, openness, and
instability. Place, on the other hand, represents pause, attachment, and stability. People
derive meaning from their attempts to organize space and place whether these
23
processes are successful or not. For example, the Franco-American grandmother
expresses a certain ambivalence about the immigrant experience during the recorded
interview. It would seem that her parents spent their lives being only half at home in
the new place:
There are things that you never know for certain. My father . . . probably would
have had as much, not in money but in property, if he had worked on his farm in
Canada. And the feeling of loneliness, of being a stranger, of being nothing but
an obscure cog in a gigantic machine, must have put a bitter taste in his mouth. I
think my mother was awfully lonely here. She never complained, but she lived
her life watching for the postman. (Doty The First 42)
Dwelling, for early Franco-American immigrants, can thus be seen as a process of
mediation between the polarities of rural and urban space. It is a process that involves
much looking back over the shoulder and waiting for the postman. Tuan posits a
dialectic between the rural and the urban, each serving as a kind of safety valve for the
other space (Topophilia 103). Thus the city may provide cultural and social exchanges
addressing the isolation felt by those in the rural space, while the natural environment
may satisfy a need for escape from the mill, from drudgery, and from urban blight.
Certainly most first- and second-generation Franco-Americans repeatedly reconfigured
their lives as they moved between the two spaces. Beaugrand’s Jeanne la fileuse
integrates rural and city space into the narrative and explores the tensions created by
the interplay of social practices in each milieu as characters seek to define themselves
in relation to the environments they inhabit.
1.5 Attempts to Script a Franco-American Identity
Recent awareness of francophone cultural hybridity in the postcolonial world
has focused attention upon identities as diverse as Franco-Vietnamese, FrancoManitoban, and Franco-Russian, to name but a few. There has, however, been little
24
critical attention paid to another hybrid group—the Franco-Americans of New England.
Pierre Anctil comments, “Of all the ethnic groups that emigrated to New England, the
Franco-Americans are among the least known” (“The Franco-Americans” 41). Claire
Bolduc echoes Anctil in her characterization of this virtually unexplored ethnic group:
“Il ne suffit pas d’offrir une histoire romancée des exploits des Franco-Américains. Il
nous faut la vérité. . . . La vérité est que nous sommes un petit people méconnu, doué
d’une énergie impressionnante; nous ne sommes que des humains parmi d’autres. . . .
Mais nous ne sommes pas moins que cela” (104).
Seeking Bolduc’s “truth” about this ethnic group seems an expedition fraught
with peril. But seek one must in light of certain assumptions made in the past by the
few scholars who have attempted to discover an identity for this oft-overlooked
minority group. Franco-American identity has long been associated with the ideology
of la survivance. Indeed, this notion has achieved iconic stature in scholars’ attempts to
explain the creation and maintenance of French-Canadian enclaves in the industrial
centers of New England. These enclaves represented a complete infrastructure of living
quarters (tenements), the parish church, parochial schools, mutual aid societies, and
social clubs all designed to protect and to transmit to future generations the indigenous
cultural values of the clan.
The Petits Canadas provide a symbolic framework in which to consider the
social significance of space as it informs indentity. Claire Quintal argues that the Little
Canadas function as the very center and circumference of Franco-Americans’
community life. She writes, “Though outwardly their lifestyle as mill operatives
differed radically from the life they had known on the farms of French Canada,
inwardly, they continued to live as though they had never left their homeland” (“The
25
Little” vii).The space thus defined by the Petits Canadas serves as an agency of
difference in that as it furthers the cause of cultural maintenance it also promotes
physical and linguistic isolation, the perpetuation of an underclass of unskilled labor,
and the failure to articulate a coherent political agenda, all to the detriment of the
group’s advancement in New England power circles.
In The Enigma of Ethnicity: Another American Dilemma, Wilbur Zelinsky
characterizes as “the oldest [drive] . . . the tendency to cling together, to huddle with
our ilk. Its expression varies considerably over time and from community to
community, but this is the universal adhesive, however attenuated it may be today, that
binds together kinship, friendship, neighborhood groups, and intimate bands of
coworkers . . .” (157). Zelinsky goes on to emphasize the universality of language,
religion, and tradition as cultural attributes conducive to ethnic cohesion. These
attributes, markers of any ethnic fraternity’s sense of identity, denote common bonds
among all minority groups. To reduce Franco-American identity to a static, primordial
concern for the maintenance of separateness based upon retention of language, religion,
and cultural practices, seems a reductionist and inherently flawed definition of such
identity.
A more open reading of Franco-American prose fiction reveals an ambivalent
and complex negotiation of identity in which individuals are defined not only by what
cultural values they accept but also by what they reject. For example, Jack Kérouac led
a kind of life that seems the antithesis of conservative, Franco-American values.
Richard Sorrell describes the writer’s divided self:
Kerouac never forgot his origins. In fact, he never seemed sure that he desired
to ‘transcend’ his ethnicity; this ethnic identity crisis haunted him throughout
his life. The marginal ambivalence he felt towards his confining ethnic past
26
produced a dual personality: Beat versus Lowellite, Rebel versus Good Boy, he
was circumscribed by the very Franco, Catholic and mill town origins he was
trying to move beyond. (“Novelists”40)
On the one hand, Kérouac’s rebellious prose challenges static cultural norms grounded
in la foi, la langue, and les mœurs of the Canadian homeland. He writes,
It was drizzling and mysterious at the beginning of our journey. . . . ‘Whooee!’
yelled Dean. ‘Here we go.’ And he hunched over the wheel and gunned her: he
was back in his element, everybody could see that. We were all delighted, we
all realized that we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing
our one and noble function of the time, move. And we moved. (On the Road
127)
On the other hand, Kérouac laments the rootlessness that characterizes the FrancoAmerican experience in New England. In The Town and the City he observes, “A
family leaves the old house that it has always known . . . and moves somewhere else;
and this is a real and unnameable tragedy . . . People are lost when they leave their
homes” (239). The theme of mobility in Kérouac’s On the Road conflicts with the
stasis implied in much of The Town and the City and reveals the writer’s deep
ambivalence towards his Franco-American heritage, a culture rooted in the ideals of
home and family.
Certainly cultural survival is the dominant theme of much early filiopietistic
Franco-American prose fiction. For example, Adélard Lambert’s L’Innocente victime,
published serially in 1936, promotes resistance to assimilation through “. . . fidélité au
passé . . . [et] à la survivance française en Amérique du Nord” (Ducroq-Poirier 4).
Armand Chartier observes, “In the novel Lambert makes his attitude toward Quebec
especially clear. It lies somewhere close to cult and worship. Because of its glorious
past and its simple, peaceful present, Quebec embodies for him an ideal beside which
the appeal of American materialism vanished” (“Franco-American” 33). Indeed, the
27
lure of Quebec proved so powerful that Lambert returned there after decades of living
in the United States. Franco-American poet Philippe Sainte-Marie’s Les aspirations
d’une race (1928), his only novel, depicts fidelity to French-Canadian culture and
encourages immigrants to protect their language from the threat of English. According
to the narrator, French language and heritage “sont indispensables à la grandeur du
pays tel qu’il est: ce serait un malheur national s’ils disparaissaient de sa surface . . . ”
(qtd. in “Le roman” Péloquin 403). Although early Franco-American literature appears
to promote maintenance of faith, language, and cultural traditions as the bedrock of
identity, acceptance of such a one-dimensional construct would perhaps obscure
ethnicity’s multilayered nature. Upon further examination of the notion of cultural
survival, a more ambivalent, equivocal discourse emerges, one to be discovered in a
close reading of Canuck.
In questioning the validity of la survivance as the constitutive element of
Franco-American identity, one may find it helpful to determine whose interests were
best served by such rhetoric. The annexationists in Quebec, “blowing,” as
Morissonneau puts it, “the expansionist trumpet” (23), between roughly 1860 and 1880,
would likely have benefited by encouraging maintenance of ties to the homeland. In
throwing his support behind Quebec’s annexation of New England, Québécois writer
Edmond de Nevers predicted “Un jour viendra où la frontière qui sépare le Canada des
États-Unis aura disparu, où l’Amérique de Nord ne formera plus qu’une seule vaste
république, et nous avons l’ambition de constituer dans l’Est un foyer de civilisation
française qui fournira son apport au progrès intellectuel, à la moralité et à la variété de
l’Union” (376). At a time when Quebec cities could not provide enough jobs for the
influx of rural populations, annexation of industrialized New England emerged as a
28
viable solution to some politicians in Lower Canada. Not surprisingly, the plan found
support among Quebec politicians and businessmen alike. Pro-annexation members of
the clergy swelled the numbers of supporters north of the border.
South of the border, another group with a vested interest in promoting the
maintenance of French-Canadian cultural values emerged: that of the petty bourgeoisie.
This elitist group sought its own economic survival in emotional appeals calling for the
preservation of the cultural traditions of the homeland. The petty bourgeoisie controlled
the French-language newspapers, the Franco-American churches, the benevolent
associations, and the social clubs. Their wide power base allowed them to promote
ideals throughout the ethnic community, ideals that would ensure increasing revenues
for the various businesses they owned. Their financial success was tied to preserving,
intact, their clientele, the Franco-American working class. If socio-spatial changes
transpired, if, for example, the numbers of these workers dwindled through
assimilation, the profit margin of the ruling bourgeoisie would also decrease. Thus la
survivance, traditionally viewed as organic to Franco-American working-class identity,
may in reality have been an “illusory coherence” (to use Lefebvre’s term) that masked
the agenda of its supporters. It may have been a manipulative strategy by the elite on
either side of the border—the politicians, the clergy, and the bourgeoisie—to maintain
its place of power within larger groups.
In respect to the promotion of cultural survival in early Franco-American
literature, it would be inaccurate and unfair to characterize all pre-Depression prose
fiction as concerned with this ideology. Early Franco-American texts include crime
fiction, romances, mysteries, and two Civil War narratives. A careful analysis reveals
that those authors writing ideological treatises were almost all, themselves, members of
29
the French-language press. Some, such as Honoré Beaugrand and Jacques Ducharme,
actually owned the newspapers in which their work appeared. Others, such as Camille
Lessard-Bissonnette and Rémi Tremblay, were journalists with an established
following. Most preached against assimilation, acculturation, and secularization. Only
Lessard-Bissonnette, in her novel Canuck, made some attempt to demystify
stereotypical portraits of French-Canadian mill workers and loving, supportive kinship
networks. Other authors defended, justified, and eulogized French-Canadian cultural
values.
How this ethnic group viewed itself contrasts sharply with how the dominant
Anglophone culture perceived the minority. And both perspectives must, of necessity,
inform Franco-American identity. Reaction to the massive influx of French-Canadian
immigrants on the part of the Anglophone majority took three forms: silence, selfserving rhetoric, or impassioned hostility. In regard to silence, ignoring the presence of
large numbers of French-Canadian workers when writing regional or commemorative
histories has been a common practice among New England historians.3 An example of
capitalist rhetoric can be found in remarks about Franco-Americans made, in 1898, by
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a major shareholder in Lowell mills: “They are hardly to
be classified as immigrants in the accepted sense. . . . They have been, in the broadest
sense, Americans for generations, and their coming to the United States is merely a
movement of Americans across an imaginary line from one part of America to another”
(Laflamme 277). These kinds of conciliatory remarks threatened xenophobic New
Englanders and enflamed nativist prejudice, earning for the Franco-Americans the
unfortunate sobriquet “The Chinese of the East.”
30
The remarks of Labor Commissioner Carroll D. Wright (1840-1909), son of a
New Hampshire pastor, issued in 1881 by the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of
Labor, exemplify the kind of vituperative attacks made upon these mill workers, attacks
motivated by strong anti-Catholic feelings among the Anglophone population:
With some exceptions, the Canadian French are the Chinese of the Eastern
States. They care nothing for our institutions, civil, political, or educational.
They do not come here to make a home among us, to dwell with us as citizens,
and so become a part of us; but their purpose is merely to sojourn a few years as
aliens, touching us only at a single point, that of work, and, when they have
gathered out of us what will satisfy their ends, to get them away from whence
they came, and bestow it there. They are a horde of industrial invaders, not a
stream of stable settlers. . . . To earn all they can by no matter how many hours
of toil, to live in the most beggarly way so that out of their earnings they may
spend as little for living as possible, and to carry out of the country what they
can thus save: this is the aim of the Canadian French in our factory districts.
(469)
Commissioner Wright blamed French Canadians themselves for negative attitudes
harbored by what he termed “loyal American citizens,” and went on to counsel the
migrants to abandon “the maintenance of a distinct national identity within the heart of
the Republic” (qtd. in Weil 121). As to be expected, outrage was the most common
response from the Franco-American community, thousands of whose members had
fought for the Union Army in the Civil War twenty years earlier. In Les Chinois de
l’Est ou la vie quotidienne des Québécois émigrés aux Etats-Unis de 1840 à nos jours,
Normand Lafleur describes the angry reaction “des prêtres, des journalistes, des
contremaîtres de fabriques, des négociants, [de] tous les hommes les plus influents”
(36) of the community. I referred earlier to these members of the Franco-American elite
in regard to their role in shaping a cohesive, economically stable consumer society.
Perhaps the motive behind their immediate and highly vocal response to this attack on
their constituency can be seen as another attempt to encourage continued Franco-
31
American unity and the healthy business climate that this constructed cohesiveness
ensured.
In the past, denunciations of mill workers had been prevalent, and laborers had
learned not to be thin-skinned. Henri Lemay of Manchester, New Hampshire,
remembers the constant stream of abuse leveled at the migrant workers. As a
participant in the Federal Writers’ Project of the 1930s, he recalls the widespread
bitterness directed toward first-generation Franco-Americans: “Nous devons admettre
que les Américains et les Irlandais ne nous aimaient pas. Non, ils ne nous aimaient pas
du tout. Ils semblaient être très contrariés par notre venue” (Doty, The First 44).
Prior to the publication of Wright’s report, there seemed to be a lack of outcry
in response to comments such as those made by F. K. Foster, member of the
Massachusetts Senate, in testimony before a Senate Select Committee. He maintained
that French Canadians had proven to be “ignorant, immoral, and much worse than the
Chinese of California; in short, a scourge upon society” (qtd. in Garff 118). The
overwhelmingly irate reaction on the part of the Franco-American elite to the Wright
report represents somewhat of a shift in strategy demonstrating, perhaps for the first
time, a unified front against those who would disrupt the harmonious “business as
usual” in the Petits Canadas.
Among the carefully-crafted published refutations, this example of patriotic
(and xenophobic) discourse fashioned by the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste of Ware,
Massachusetts, stands out:
La comparaison que l’on fait de nous avec les Chinois est odieusement
injurieuse, par le fait qu’elle nous rabaisse au-dessous d’une nation païenne. Les
Chinois sont païens; nous sommes chrétiens. Alors que la guerre désolait et
couvrait de ruines une partie immense de la République américaine, les Chinois
ne versaient pas leur sang sous la bannière étoilée. Comptez ceux des nôtres qui
32
sont tombés seulement sur les champs de bataille de Gettysburg, de
Spotsylvania, de Charleston, de Richmond, de la Nouvelle Orléans et tant
d’autres lieux. (Lafleur 36)
The following year, Wright’s somewhat laconic retraction did little to appease
Franco-American wounded pride (Anctil, “Un point” 19). Monoindustrial cities such as
Lowell, Fall River, and Manchester continued to hinder Franco-Americans’ social
mobility and produced the kind of impermanent industrial unskilled labor force that
sociologists today would simply label “transnationals.” In an open letter to mill owners
published in 1870 in the daily Brunswick Telegraph a reader complained: “[T]he
operative population is never permanent, especially the French Canadians who all look
to a permanent home in Canada” (Locke 128). A pattern of settlement and
abandonment therefore characterizes Franco-American spatial practices for decades
after the Civil War and shapes what Zelinsky calls “an action-space” (Enigma xiv) in
which, by their concerted efforts, Franco-American workers attempted to live in two
countries simultaneously.
I have sought in this introduction to establish the unreliability of guideposts to
Franco-American identity based solely upon the ideology of la survivance. Certainly an
exploration of the literature of this ethnic group reveals a far more ambiguous and
problematic identity than may first be apparent. Yves Roby discounts Robert Rumilly’s
1958 study of the Franco-Americans of New England (a study once considered
authoritative), precisely because of its establishment of cultural survival as the
foundation of ethnic solidarity. In commenting on Rumilly’s L’Histoire des FrancoAméricains, Roby explains, “Elle ne répond plus aux besoins. Elle ne parle que de
survivance. Ça laisse l’impression que les Franco-Américains se sont battus vingtquatre heures par jour, 365 jours par année” (7). Focusing one’s search for ethnic
33
identity solely upon cultural survival also ignores the very real economic
considerations which initially motivated the migrants to settle in the industrialized
Northeast. The vast majority of Franco-American settlers were members of an
unskilled labor force. For this group, cultural survival may have been somewhat of a
low priority as all members of the family toiled together to eek out an existence.
Lack of a large corpus of literature about the Franco-American experience in
the six Northeast states, most particularly about the many workers who toiled outside
the system of mills—about those who worked in agriculture or as woodsmen or as
itinerant tradesmen—hinders one in searching for a clearer picture of just who were the
Franco-Americans of New England. Perhaps, in the final analysis, there can be no
definitive construct of Franco-American identity based upon the ideology of cultural
maintenance or, for that matter, upon any other absolute. Claire Bolduc’s statement that
“nous ne sommes que des humains parmi d’autres. . . . Mais nous ne sommes pas moins
que cela” firmly places Franco-American identity on an equal footing with that of the
dominant culture.
In closing this exploration of the problematic of Franco-American identity, I
turn once again to the concerns that Claire Bolduc voiced at the 1976 Colloquium on
Franco-Americanity held in Bedford, New Hampshire. A response from the academic
community has been slow in coming to her yearning for recognition of the place
achieved by the over one and a half million French Canadians who settled in New
England over the course of a century. Whereas, in the past, interest in Franco-American
studies has been mostly limited to a few doctoral dissertations on the historical and
sociological aspects of the group’s experiences in different New England cities,4 this
oft-ignored ethnic group has recently begun to attract the critical attention of cultural
34
anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and linguists.5 For example, an ongoing threeyear study undertaken by linguists Jane Smith (University of Maine) and Cynthia Fox
(SUNY Albany) assesses the linguistic structure of Franco-American French and the
social and economic factors influencing language maintenance in eight FrancoAmerican communities in New England.6 This research certainly points to a renewed
interest in this minority group. Smith observes that the systematic study “will help fill a
void in the linguistic literature on French in New England. . . . We’re hoping it will
provide a shot in the arm that will support people’s efforts to maintain it and will
encourage them to teach it to children” (Major 21). Ironically, Smith’s comments bring
one full circle. In an exploration of Franco-American identity, one seems unable to
escape the ideology of la survivance.
1.6 Exploring Uncharted Territory
Ethnographers, cultural anthropologists, and historians have analyzed the waves
of migration, the settlement patterns, and the social practices of the Franco-Americans
of New England from various perspectives that do not take into account the group’s
literary production. Indeed very little critical notice has, in the past, been given to
Franco-American literature. My purpose is to explore the treatment of la survivance in
this neglected corpus of fiction from 1875 to 2004 in order to open up to discussion a
literature frequently characterized as defensive or didactic in nature. Some novels,
L’Innocente Victime or La Jeune Franco-Américaine, seem to promote unquestioningly
the maintenance of la langue, la foi, et la culture françaises. Other novels, such as
Canuck, Les Deux Testaments, or Mill Village, emerge as ambivalent texts in which
protagonists suffer the anxieties of Otherness and challenge the differences that would
prevent them from fully participating in their adopted land. In later works, notably
35
those of Kérouac, Metalious, and Touchette, characters challenge the Franco-American
elite as well.
This dissertation seeks to respond to scholars such as Régis Normandeau, who
has called for a more expansive reading of Franco-American texts. He insists, “Il s’agit
en fait de sortir la littérature franco-américaine des archives où l’a trop longtemps
confinée une critique étroite” (18). How has critical discourse on the Franco-American
novel resulted in the kind of narrow reading Normandeau describes? First of all,
Franco-American literature’s status as ethnic writing in relation to mainstream
literature has pigeonholed it in a kind of marginalized cultural space. The fact that prior
to 1940 the literature was composed entirely in French has relegated it to, primarily, the
attention of Francophone literature scholars or to those in the Comparative Literatures
discipline. I regret being able to say so little about ethnic literature due to constraints
upon space. However, I do note with interest recent attempts to craft a more open and
inclusive definition of ethnic literature by scholars such as Werner Sollors, who, in his
text Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture, rejects the equating
of ethnic writing and parochialism. He offers the following expansive definition of
ethnic literature: “Works written by, about, or for persons who perceived themselves,
or were perceived by others, as members of ethnic groups, including even nationally
and internationally popular writings by ‘major’ authors” (243). Certainly this definition
seems particularly appropriate to writers like Kérouac, Metalious, Hebert, and Plante,
whose work, while internationally acclaimed, still can be perceived as deeply informed
by their Franco-American ethnicity.
A second factor that has contributed to narrow interpretation of and limited
attention to the corpus is its regional association with the Northeast. These novels are
36
set in places such as Holyoke or Fall River, Massachusetts, Biddeford or Lewiston,
Maine, Woonsocket or Providence, Rhode Island, or Manchester or Nashua, New
Hampshire. Indeed, Georges Crépeau’s Bélanger ou l’histoire d’un crime (1892) was
so clearly written for his Lowell, Massachusetts, audience that
in several instances he refers directly to actual places and persons so well
known to his local readers that he deems description unnecessary. The work is
still of interest to us today, even to non-Lowellites, because of the author’s
thorough knowledge of his fellow Franco-Americans and his ability to convey
something of their thinking, their spontaneous responses, their speech rhythms.
(Chartier, “Franco-American” 31-32)
The regional flavor of Franco-American prose fiction may have now actually begun to
work in its favor, given the recent resuscitation of the regional novel. In Mapping
American Culture, Wayne Franklin notes a “powerful reemergence of regionalism and
regional studies” (9) in American literature beginning in the 1980s, and he offers the
example of the “Northeast Kingdom” novels of Vermont writer Howard Frank Mosher.
I would add Franco-American David Plante’s trilogy The Family, The Country, and
The Woods, set in Providence, and the five Darby, New Hampshire, novels of Ernest
Hebert as examples of highly popular and critically acclaimed regional novels.
A third factor that has led to narrow critical interpretation concerns the neglect
of substantive issues that arise in Franco-American prose fiction, issues which defy the
easy closure that attribution to the ideology of survivance provides. Literary debate has
frequently been discouraged or precluded by recourse to this ideology, one that serves
as a convenient mnemonic peg on which to hang a static cultural agenda. Thus,
reducing the Franco-American novel solely to the promotion of resistance to
assimilation based on maintenance and transmittal of foundational cultural beliefs to
future generations seems a narrow and biased reading of the texts, especially in light of
37
the difficult topics that the corpus addresses. For instance, in La Jeune FrancoAméricaine (1933), what in today’s society one would call “date rape” is broached; in
No Adam in Eden (1967), alcoholism and dementia are explored; and in The Dogs of
March (1979), a scathing social critique, the reader encounters a kaleidoscope of
problems from mental retardation to child abuse.
High on my agenda, therefore, is the refutation of the accepted way of reading
the Franco-American novel as articulated in the following critique:
L’une des raisons d’être du roman franco-américain [est] de valoriser la
communauté franco-américaine en justifiant son implantation aux États-Unis et
en détaillant les mécanismes de sa survivance francophone et catholique en pays
anglophone et protestant. Une autre raison d’être du roman franco,
complémentaire à celle que nous venons de citer, est de stimuler chez les
Francos la volonté inébranlable voire féroce de demeurer fidèle à l’héritage
d’origine. (Péloquin “Le roman” 404-05)
While Péloquin’s comments, made in 1989, certainly hold true for many FrancoAmerican novels, especially the early ones, her remarks fail to take into consideration
the shift in focus evident in works published after World War II at a time when the
battle with assimilation was beginning to be viewed as a lost cause.
In the final analysis, this dissertation seeks to demonstrate that FrancoAmerican novels emerge as richer—and far more complex than traditional readings
would indicate—when investigated from the frame of space and place. I have chosen to
examine how spatial notions dissimulate or reveal the ideology of cultural survival as
evidenced in patriarchal domination, class conflict, social oppression, or the
marginalization of women, to name but a few of my concerns. Edward Soja, one of
America’s leading human geographers, points to the growing importance of space in
Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Theory. He writes, “We
must be insistently aware of how space can be made to hide consequences from us,
38
how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently innocent
spatiality of social life, how human geographies become filled with politics and
ideology” (6). Certainly, powerful groups have attempted to exert influence over
Franco-Americans through political, social, economic, and cultural means, and these
complex relations of domination and subordination emerge in the prose fiction of the
minority group.
My general approach will therefore address questions relating to how space and
place inform the ways in which Franco-Americans construct their identities as they
respond to their environment—living in it, moving through it, and assigning meaning to
it—and how they contest the practices of domination by more powerful groups. The
analysis of the spatial practices of Franco-Americans as depicted in the prose fiction
these practices produced must, because of constraints on the length of this study, be
confined to a relatively small sampling of narratives that provide as varied as possible a
treatment of the constructs of space and place.7 These texts have been selected as
representative of the development of the corpus over its 125 year literary history. Thus
I include both Beaugrand’s Jeanne la fileuse, which appeared in 1875, and Touchette’s
It Stops with Me: Memoir of a Canuck Girl, published in 2004.
In the selection of these and other novels, some attempt has been made to
provide examples of both French- and English-language texts and to establish parity
between the number of male and female authors studied. I have also endeavored to
provide narratives set in the major population centers of Franco-American settlement.
Thus, the settings include Fall River and Lowell, Massachusetts, Lewiston and
Biddeford, Maine, Manchester, New Hampshire, and Woonsocket, Rhode Island. My
analysis of the Franco-American novel in terms of the representation of space and place
39
does not necessarily promote these notions as a theoretical model applicable across the
entire corpus of French- and English-language texts, although the multiplicity of
approaches that such a reading offers may inspire what I hope will be a wider
application of its concepts in years to come.
Chapters 2 through 5 are devoted to exploring the Franco-American novel in its
various interpretations of space and place. Chapter 2 treats the tensions arising from the
rural/urban experience of space. Beaugrand’s Jeanne la fileuse and LessardBissonnette’s Canuck construct regional space quite differently. Beaugrand’s text
depicts the Lavaltrie and Contrecoeur region of Quebec and emphasizes traditional
community life in accounts of seasonal hay-making activities and country dances. This
bucolic environment contrasts with the urban locus of Fall River, Massachusetts,
introduced in the second half of the novel. Canuck’s narrative reverses the
consideration of how place informs identity as it moves from urban Lowell,
Massachusetts, to the rural Cantons de l’Est of Quebec province to explore the effects
of remigration on identity construction.
Chapter 3 shifts the focus to gendered space and the ways in which female
protagonists construct their identities in spaces of patriarchal and racial oppression. La
Jeune Franco-Américaine examines timely issues such as sexual harassment in the
workplace and the relative social mobility of men and women. This text has in the past
been labeled a “propaganda novel” (Chartier, “Franco-American” 32) in the service of
la survivance. An open and fair reading of the novel may reveal disturbing practices of
patriarchal power that a reductionist approach to the text obscures. Louis Dantin’s Les
Enfances de Fanny (1951), considered a masterpiece of Franco-American fiction,
explores the displacement felt by Fanny and her sons, African-American Virginia
40
natives, following their move to Roxbury, Massachusetts, and the efforts Fanny makes
to escape the submissive role she has always cast for herself. An amazing change in
direction for the Franco-American novel results from Dantin’s text which succeeds in
addressing the notions of “difference” and “otherness” from a completely new vantage
point—that of the African-American.
In Chapter 4, I change linguistic gears and examine three authors—Metalious,
Touchette, and Kérouac—whose novels are written in English. The chapter’s title, “The
Space of Discontent,” reveals how these writers negotiate nostalgic notions of place as
they contest the imprint of their particular ethnicity. Metalious and Touchette offer
depictions of dysfunctional families in texts that seek to subvert the notion of cultural
survival. Kérouac’s disoriented Martin family portrait, profoundly embedded in
Galloway, Massachusetts, focuses upon young Peter Martin’s attempts to sort out his
identity against a backdrop of social change. All three texts depict degraded forms of
the family and propel the Franco-American novel into new territory where sexual and
psychological abuse, alcohol and drug use, and degenerative disease of mind and body
promote the fragmentation and ultimate destruction of the family in its locus of despair.
Chapter 5 returns to French-language novels and the debate over assimilation
and la survivance among third-generation Franco-Americans. Normand Beaupré’s Le
Petit Mangeur de Fleurs (1999) continues a modest, post-1970s trend among a growing
number of Franco-American authors of writing in French. A fitting conclusion to this
study of how space and place inform the cultural practices of this minority group, the
narrative surveys one individual’s retrospective look at a childhood spent in a
Biddeford, Maine, Petit Canada and how that environment shaped what he calls “une
collectivité francophone à trait d’union entre deux cultures” (174). Antonine Maillet
41
speaks of the Francophones of New England who “pleurent l’effritement de leur langue
et de leur culture. Ils luttent silencieusement chacun à leur façon.” She characterizes
Beaupré’s novel as “un témoignage d’un lieu . . . que l’histoire n’a pas le droit
d’effacer” (qtd. in Beaupré n. pag.). Robert Perreault’s L’Héritage (1983), set in
Manchester, New Hampshire, portrays the search for identity by three generations of
Franco-Americans. Perreault’s decision to write in French, breaking a tradition of
forty-five years of English-language Franco-American novels, stunned and puzzled
critics.8 Perreault explains, “J’ai commencé à écrire en anglais mais, ça ne marchait
pas. . . . Je me suis rendu compte que mon expérience franco-américaine, je ne l’avais
vécue vraiment plus en français qu’en anglais. . . . Et puis, tout à coup, le livre est sorti
comme ça très facilement, en français” (Péloquin, “Le roman” 406). L’Héritage
provides the opportunity to examine the choice of writing in French or in English, the
use of dialect, and other linguistic issues in light of a narrative written partially in the
Franco-American dialect some scholars liken to joual.9
The conclusion provides a summing up of this study and its attempt to read
Franco-American prose fiction in new ways, that is, in terms of how space and place
have informed and continue to inform the cultural practices of the Franco-Americans of
New England, a group whose descendants now number around five million. I would
hope that this dissertation encourages scholars to take a look at the rich variety of
Franco-American narratives so unfamiliar to so many in the academy.10 These texts
have much to say about issues that continue to surface in the transnational times and
borderless spaces that constitute the twenty-first century.
42
Notes
1
The following texts provide comprehensive histories of the Franco-American
experience in New England: Yves Frenette, Les Francophones de la Nouvelle
Angleterre, 1524-2000; Maurice Poteet, Textes de l’exode; Claire Quintal, Steeples and
Smokestacks. The Franco-American Experience in New England; Robert Rumilly,
Histoire des Franco-Américains. For detailed information on migration patterns see
Yolande Lavoie’s “Les mouvements migratoires des Canadiens entre leur pays et les
États-Unis au XIXe et au XXe siècles: étude quantitative.”
2
Benoit’s comment that “ils apprennent l’anglais et le parlent fort bien” reveals
an exaggerated image of language competencies among the Franco-American unskilled
labor force, an image unsubstantiated and, in fact, contested in Franco-American fiction
as well as in personal narratives by those Franco-Americans interviewed during
Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration Federal Writers’ Project.
3
For example, although immigrants constituted two-thirds of the population of
Bristol, Connecticut in 1910, they are practically absent from Bruce Clouette’s and
Matthew Roth’s Bristol, Connecticut: A bicentennial history, 1785-1985. In the rare
case where ethnicity emerges in this commemorative document, only the Irish or
immigrants in general are mentioned, even though French Canadians constituted 90%
of the workforce in the four largest manufacturing plants of the city.
4
See, for example, these unpublished doctoral dissertations: Pierre Anctil’s
“Aspects of Class Ideology in a New England Ethnic Minority: The Franco-Americans
of Woonsocket, Rhode Island (1865-1929).” Paul Raymond Dauphinais’s “Structure
and Strategy: French Canadians in Central New England.” Susan Jaffee’s “Ethnic
Working Class Protest: The Textile Strike of 1922 in Rhode Island.” Philip T. Silvia’s
“The Spindle City: Labor, Politics, and Religion in Fall River, Massachusetts 18701905.” George Thériault’s “The Franco-Americans in a New England Community. An
Experiment in Survival.” Paul Dominic Vicero’s “Immigration of French Canadians to
New England, 1840-1900: A Geographical Analysis.”
5
In 1990, truly a watershed year for the revival of interest in the long-forgotten
group, the University of Southern Maine acquired the archival collection of the Centre
d’Héritage Franco-Américain and established the Franco-American Collection on
USM’s campus in Lewiston, Maine. The Franco-American Centre in Manchester, New
Hampshire, also chartered in 1990, became the repository for the library collection of
Franco-American writer, journalist, and folklorist Adélard Lambert, including some
40,000 texts and documents. The creation of various cultural exchange programs
between New England and Quebec province, such as the Festival Sans Frontières in
Jackman, Maine, and St. Théophile, Québec, also in 1990, attests to the growing
interest, during the last decade of the 20th century, in the promotion of FrancoAmerican cultural identity.
6
In one of the communities, Van Buren, Maine, 81% of the total population still
speaks French in the home.
43
7
Many novels not considered here—among them Coté-Robbins’s Wednesday’s
Child, Hebert’s The Dogs of March, and Duval-Thibault’s Les Deux Testaments—offer
carefully constructed explorations of the impact of space and place on identity
construction.
8
The last French-language novel prior to L’Héritage had appeared in 1938. Paul
Dufault’s Sanatorium, set in Rutland, Massachusetts, describes life in a sanatorium for
tuberculosis patients. Masterfully written, the novel studies issues of exclusion and
isolation applicable to both the solitude of the patient and to the individual
marginalized by the dominant culture. The novel, aesthetically winning, depicts the
beauty of the rural New England landscape in which the patients try to come to grips
with the weighty issues that terminal illness presents.
9
Joual is a variation of Canadian French spoken chiefly in Montreal and in
French-Canadian enclaves in New England.
10
Several sources of information have proved to be quite useful in preparing this
dissertation and would be of particular interest to scholars in their research. Three
libraries have been especially helpful: the Lambert Library housed in the FrancoAmerican Centre in Manchester, New Hampshire, with its collection of rare books,
proved invaluable to this study; the library of L’Université Laval in Quebec, with its
extensive holdings in Franco-American studies including rare religious pamphlets and
historical documents, furnished important background information; and the FrancoAmerican Heritage Center on the Lewiston-Auburn campus of the University of
Southern Maine was a treasure chest of information about Le Messager, its Editor-inChief, J.B. Couture, and its senior writer, Camille Lessard-Bissonnette. The
publications of the Association Canado-Américaine (Manchester) and the proceedings
of annual colloquiums of the French Institute of Assumption College in Worcester,
Massachusetts, have filled in many gaps in the cultural history of Franco-America.
Personal correspondence and interviews with authors Normand Beaupré, Ernest Hebert,
Robert Perreault, and Gerard Robichaud indicate the willingness of Franco-American
writers to discuss their work with researchers. Hareven’s and Langenbach’s Amoskeag,
the result of a four-year oral history project among textile mill workers of Manchester,
is a remarkable text, one that tells the story of the Amoskeag men and women who
negotiated the eight million square feet of floor space in the world’s largest textile mill.
The writings of Pierre Anctil, Éloïse A. Brière, Armand Chartier, C. Stewart Doty,
Frances Early, the late Madeleine Giguère, Dean Louder, Claire Quintal, Yves Roby,
and Janet Shideler provide needed historical and sociological frameworks in which to
examine literary texts. As of this date, no published text on literary history or criticism
of Franco-American prose fiction exists.
CHAPTER 2
WILDERNESS, RURAL, AND URBAN SPACE
2.1 Space and Place in Two Franco-American Novels of Immigration
In charting the convergence of space and place in the American cultural
landscape, Charles Olson evokes themes that I will explore in my analysis of two FrancoAmerican novels of immigration. He writes, “I take SPACE to be the central fact to man
born in America, from Folsom Cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here.
Large and without mercy. . . . Some men ride on such space, others have to fasten
themselves like a tent stake to survive” (3). Much of early Franco-American literature,
written largely for the working class, concerns itself with the ways in which migrants
reorder their lives and reestablish their homes in new surroundings—the way they “fasten
themselves like a tent stake to survive.” The textual reconfiguration of the Canadian
homeland can be viewed as a mimetic substitute for the homeland itself, for the territory
left behind, and the promotion of cultural values, as an attempt to keep displaced workers
linked to a common identity, one that comforts them and keeps them productive. Both
Honoré Beaugrand’s Jeanne la fileuse (1875) and Camille Lessard-Bissonnette’s Canuck
(1936), novels of immigration and repatriation, explore migrants’ feelings of alienation
and conflict engendered by the loss of old ground—the ancestral farm—and chronicle
their attempts to find their new place in an urban landscape, attempts that ultimately fail.
In both texts, French-Canadian families who settle in industrial centers of Massachusetts
eventually repatriate to Lower Canada.
44
45
Establishing cultural icons such as the tenement blocks of Petits Canadas,
deprivileged as they may have been, represent material acts of emplacement, selfdefinition, and imitation of the old way of life on the part of nineteenth-century
immigrants seeking to overcome the effects of dislocation. In emerging Franco-American
communities, such as those depicted in Jeanne la fileuse and Canuck, these material
structures lend the illusion of solidity and permanence to migrant workers attempting to
reconstitute the abandoned Canadian homeland on New England soil. Madeleine
Giguère, a noted sociologist, scholar, and a Franco-American, argues that the newly
transplanted urban dwellers of the first waves of migration after the American Civil War
were searching for a means of “carrying out the old way of life. As a result they
developed their immigrant communities as functional replicas of the village parish of the
old country” (i). First generation immigrants thus set about reproducing the parish
church, the French-language school, mutual aid societies, and social clubs, in order to
situate and materialize French-Canadian culture in New England. One might compare
their attempts to reproduce the traditional infrastructure of their homeland to living in a
modern-day theme park in which the “real” has disappeared and a carefully crafted
construct has taken its place.
The disconnect between the highly personalized old way of life in the farming
communities of Quebec province and the impersonal terrain of urban, industrial society
in the new land forged a literature that addresses the migrant’s affective and social
experience of space. Thus, the two novels of immigration considered in this chapter
articulate space discursively as a social product, inherently dynamic and unstable, and
address specific places, concrete and stable, where individuals negotiate social
46
relationships: between newcomer and native, between labor and management, between
parent and child. This record of the ordinary—the quotidian—functions contrapuntally in
relation to the larger considerations of space to which Olson alludes. Space looms large
on both sides of the Canadian border, vistas prove alluring, and new opportunities tempt
“some men [to] ride on such space.”
Jeanne la fileuse and Canuck foreground the tension between the lure of the open
road and the constructed comfort of hearth and home. Whereas on the one hand the
attachments of place—tenement, church, factory—promote a sedentary existence, open
space, on the other hand, engenders a counterdesire, in characters as diverse as Jeanne la
fileuse’s Pierre Montépel and Canuck’s Père L’Allumette and Vic Labranche, to venture
forth into new, unexplored territory. Although Wayne Franklin is referring to the lure of
the American frontier, his comments here on the paradox of spaciousness and
placefulness seem particularly relevant to themes I will explore in Jeanne la fileuse and
Canuck. He characterizes the conflicting pull of hitting the highway and of staying at
home as “a complex interplay between space and place, the thrill of the open road and the
certainty of home, westering and dwelling, migration and habitation . . .” (4). Franklin’s
comments bear directly upon a lifestyle deeply valorized in French-Canadian
folklore—that of the quintessential Canadian hero, the coureur de bois, who moved
continually west and north into open space.1 This figure occupies a privileged place in
Franco-American prose fiction from Beaugrand to Blaise.
The coureur de bois, legendary adventurer, trapper, and wilderness guide, has
embodied in mythic proportions, since the settlement of New France, the interplay of
space and place. This archetypal figure finds expression, in Jeanne la fileuse, in the
47
character of Pierre Montépel, who, according to the narrator, belongs to a dying breed.
Here, the narrator laments the virtual passing of the figure:
Le type est maintenant—à quelques rares exceptions près—presque entièrement
disparu. La civilisation moderne, la colonisation des contrées situées au nord de
l’Outaouais . . . ont tour à tour détruit ce qui restait encore de pittoresque et
d’original dans le caractère du canotier voyageur. Ce cachet indélibile du coureur
de bois que l’on rencontrait si souvent dans nos campagnes . . . est passé à l’état
de légendes. (88)
The wanderlust of the coureur de bois informs both Québécois and Franco-American
cultural history, and may explain why the narrator of Jeanne la fileuse casts the hero,
Pierre Montépel, as such a type. Paul Virilio affirms the importance of the archetype: “Le
veritable héros . . . américain, ce n’est ni le cow-boy ni le soldat, c’est le pionnier, le
path-finder, celui que porte son corps là où s’est posé son regard” (30). Virilio’s
observation applies also to the quintessential American masculine literary figure—the
pathfinder, present in prose fiction from Cooper to Kérouac.
French-Canadian lifestyles of mobility, those of the coureurs de bois and the
défricheurs—established long before the massive exodus of over a million Québécois to
the factories of New England—led to continual displacement, during the years between
the Conquest and the Confederation (1759-1867), of large segments of the population of
Lower Canada. These patterns of mobility, engrained in French-Canadian cultural
tradition, reappear in the discursive treatment of space in Jeanne la fileuse and Canuck.
Christian Morissonneau labels the life of adventure of the coureur de bois as “the craze
to move,” a life free from the constraints and routines of sedentary existence.2 The heroic
nomad—such as Étienne Brûlé, who explored with Samuel de Champlain, or Jean
Nicolet, who discovered Lake Michigan—found artistic representation in ballads and
legends, entered into the folklore of Quebec province, and, in turn, lived on in the
48
popular mind of French Canadians. Morissonneau posits that with the establishment of
urban centers in New England, the coureur de bois exchanged the forest for the mill, and
began his factory-hopping career, never quite at home in the new space but just passing
through.
The tension between rootlessness and rootedness is echoed by Roméo
Berthiaume, who, in describing his Woonsocket, Rhode Island, family’s lifestyle to
researcher Pierre Anctil, refers to Franco-Americans as coureurs de facteries [sic]. ³
Berthiaume’s great-grandfather joined in the first waves of migration around the time of
the Civil War, and settled in Gilbertville, Massachusetts. Subsequent generations of
Berthiaumes have crossed and recrossed the Canadian border for nearly a century,
working in New England mill towns and returning to farm their land in Quebec province.
In the urban space portrayed in novels such as Jeanne la fileuse, Canuck, The
Delusson Family, and Mill Village, in which nomadic and sedentary lifestyles compete
for ascendancy, narratives of abandonment and return are not uncommon. Thus, the
urban landscape depicted in the novels typically includes constructs of
permanency—church steeples, factory towers, tenement blocks—and symbols of
flight—railroads, rivers, and the Canada Highway—all of which lead back to the
homeland. Jeanne la fileuse is one such narrative of abandonment and return to
wilderness space in which the lifestyles of the coureur de bois, the habitant, or sedentary
farmer, and the immigrant mill worker clash. Canuck, another narrative of emigration to
an urban industrial center, chronicles the Labranche family’s experiences in factory
work, and their ultimate return to the Cantons de l’Est. Poteet’s observation that
“seulement Jeanne la fileuse et Canuck peuvent être qualifiés de roman de l’émigration”
(“L’autre” 92) inspired the pairing of the two novels explored in this chapter.
49
2.2 Jeanne la fileuse: Topographies of Lower Canada and Fall River
Honoré Beaugrand (1848-1906), novelist, journalist, world traveler, and
politician, founded the weekly French-language newspaper, La République, in Fall River,
Massachusetts, in 1873. His text, Jeanne la fileuse, recognized by scholars as the first
Franco-American novel (Péloquin, “Le roman” 403), was serialized in 1875. Some
scholars, notably Poteet and Santerre, however, dispute this long-established date (Poteet,
“Notre” 328). Published three years later as a book, Jeanne la fileuse continued to be
serialized in several French-language newspapers in the United States and in Canada
years after Beaugrand’s death. In the preface to the first edition, the author states that the
text responds to those in the Canadian elite who have vilified the émigrés. Beaugrand
alludes here to bitter remarks made by various politicians attempting to discourage the
massive exodus to New England of French Canadians whose numbers, by 1870, had
swelled to over half a million laborers and their families. A remark attributed to Tory
minister Georges-Étienne Cartier illustrates the emotional debate over rampant
emigration: “Laissez donc faire: ce n’est que la canaille qui s’en va. Les bons nous
restent et le pays ne s’en portera que mieux” (Beaugrand 26).
Certainly the implied reader of Jeanne la fileuse would have been on one side or
the other of the debate over migration and repatriation. In his Preface to the first edition,
Beaugrand identifies his target audience as “la classe ouvrière qui forme aux États Unis
la presque totalité de mes lecteurs” (76). It is this group that the omniscient narrator of
Jeanne la fileuse defends in his rejection of the unflattering portrait of the FrenchCanadian opportunist in search of a quick profit in the States. Jeanne’s fruitless attempts
to find work in Quebec province following the death of her father, and her subsequent
departure to Fall River to seek employment in the cotton mills, attest to the lack of
50
employment opportunities in Lower Canada during the second half of the nineteenth
century. In his validation of the workers’ motives for migrating, and his rebuttal of the
rhetoric of Quebec politicians who shifted the blame for unfavorable economic
conditions to the migrants themselves, the narrator discloses his overtly political agenda
in this roman à thèse.
In its reaffirmation of the old pastoral dream—the sacredness of the land in
agrarian tradition—the text intensely celebrates the natural landscape in scenes of rugged
beauty, for example, that serve as the backdrop for the entrance of Pierre Montépel. The
narrator’s repeated association of the land with certain experiences and values results in
archetypal place symbolism. For instance, forests represent adventure and freedom;
farmland, stability and community; urban centers, aspiration and opportunity. Rather than
provide the reader with long descriptive passages about rural Quebec or urban centers in
New England, the narrator relies upon the affective power of the representation of place
to convey the traditional values he promotes.
The binary structure of the novel (Part I, “Les campagnes du Canada”; Part II,
“Les filatures de l’étranger”) juxtaposes rural and urban space in its exploration of the
geographies of working class life. This narrative structure reinforces the dialectic
between two centers of production—agricultural and industrial. In his representation of
natural and constructed spaces, rural and urban loci, the narrator explores the complex
interplay of two seemingly oppositional arenas in which the characters are shaped by the
forces of nature and society, forces beyond their control.
In his treatment of rural space in Part I, the narrator paints a romanticized picture
of agricultural production; bucolic scenes of haying in a pastoral setting are followed by
open-air banquets and dancing under the stars. What buried text lies below the surface to
51
decipher? The portrait of Jean-Louis Montépel, a gentleman farmer who derives his
power from the land, reveals the unequal relationship between the landed gentry and the
agricultural laborers. This buried text foregrounds the exploitation of the rural peasant by
the ruling Tory elite.
In his implied criticism of the seigneurial system, the narrator refutes the urbanrural myth persisting in much early Québécois literature such as La Terre Paternelle,
Jean Rivard, le défricheur, and Maria Chapdelaine, a myth that equates urban and bad,
rural and good. In choosing to depict both the vast, unconfined space of the Canadian
landscape and the industrialized topologies of New England in an equally uncritical,
sentimental fashion, the narrator of Jeanne la fileuse fails to definitively privilege one
space over the other, resulting in an ambivalence that ultimately undermines his
reliability.
Raymond Williams, commenting on the opposition between the rural and the
urban, writes, “The contrast of country and city is one of the major forms in which we
become conscious of a central part of our experience. . . . The pull of the idea of the
country is towards old ways, human ways, natural ways. The pull of the idea of the city is
towards progress, modernization, development” (297). This pull of opposite forces in
Jeanne la fileuse creates tension and conflict as Jeanne and the Dupuis family try to come
to terms with exile from the cultural hearth of Lower Canada, an exile engendered by
their migration to Fall River, Massachusetts.
Aesthetically, Jeanne la fileuse cannot be considered as a sophisticated text. The
author himself insists, “Le livre que je présente au public . . . est moins un travail
littéraire qu’une réponse aux calomnies que l’on s’est plu à lancer dans certains cercles
politiques contre les populations franco-canadiennes des États-Unis” (75). This didactic
52
intent, coupled with a plot that Gosselin Schick calls “mélodramatique et cliché” (1009),
produces an ideological text, more polemical than poetical. Yet it remains a complex
work for several reasons.
First of all, the initial section of the novel, which narrates the customs and
cultural traditions of French Canada and focuses upon coureur de bois and habitant
archetypes, differs in tone and theme from the second part of the novel, which relates the
experiences of Jeanne Girard, a migrant worker in Fall River. The novel only loosely
integrates the two sections into a kind of unity achieved through a conventional love
story. Furthermore, the work remains a hybrid one since it mixes fiction with historical
events such as the Conquest (1759) and the Patriot Rebellion (1837-38). Obvious
historical data—workers’ employment records and the actual yardage produced by textile
mills—make it difficult for the reader to maintain the premise that the narrative is fiction.
This difficulty illustrates what Susan Rubin Suleiman considers to be the friction
between two modes of discourse—fictional and ideological. In her text Authoritarian
Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre, she explores the relationship
between fictional representation and historical reality, specifically how “the constraints
of the real perturb the structure of the fiction” (119). One of the points that she makes has
direct bearing upon Jeanne la fileuse. She posits that well-known historical events,
incorporated into the story line, impose constraints on the narrator, leaving him little
room to manoeuvre the characters since, as she puts it, “the framework invades the
painting” (120). This is precisely what happens when the narrator must weave the actual
Granite Mill fire into the narrative. Up until that point, fiction predominates, and the
narrator recounts the stories of three young people who leave their native region to seek a
livelihood elsewhere. Jeanne’s employment in the actual Granite Mill, one that burned,
53
spectacularly, in 1874, is snuffed out, and the narrator must accommodate the historical
details into the plot.
Further complexities involve Beaugrand’s narrator himself, who emerges as
highly invested in his story as he defends those French Canadians who migrated to New
England. Additionally, the narrator takes sides, judging Montépel negatively and Pierre
positively. To add to the complexity of the novel, the narrator abruptly changes sides in
Part II and begins to champion the very materialism of the capitalist system that he had
earlier condemned in the elder Montépel’s desire for wealth and social standing.
Although I agree with Gosselin Schick’s assessment of the novel as a roman à thèse
(1008) and with Maurice Lemire’s contention that the work is inherently flawed
(Dictionnaire 408-10), I would also point out the unexpected ambivalence that arises
from the narrator’s seeming contradictory stance.
2.3 “Les campagnes du Canada”: The Articulation of the Ideology of La Survivance
Aptly subtitled “Les campagnes du Canada,” the first half of the novel evokes,
particularly for the generation of readers who lived through the Patriot Rebellion (and the
political fallout in its aftermath), the importance of the land and the deep-seated cultural
beliefs inscribed therein. The land and cultural beliefs alike can be considered as lieux de
mémoire. In Pierre Nora’s Les lieux de mémoire (1984-1992), a variety of
scholars—from the disciplines of sociology, history, and literary studies, among
others—script the “memory places” of French cultural identity across the ages. This
study of symbolic sites that compose French national memory has application to my
exploration of the ideology of la survivance in that both constructs demonstrate how
memory unifies communities and forges social identities. Additionally, Nora’s sevenvolume work foregrounds the ways in which collective memory perpetuates, in
54
consciousness, lost cultural traditions. Les lieux de mémoire examines the geographical
places, commemorations, and cultural symbols that structure French cultural identity.
The materializing of the ideology of la survivance in written form by any number
of Franco-American authors reconfigures cultural myths, legends, and values to achieve
different goals. Rather than being a monolithic entity, the ideology of cultural survival
emerges as polyreferential, serving a multiplicity of purposes. For instance, Beaugrand’s
aim, as stated in the Preface of the first edition of Jeanne la fileuse, centers on his desire
to portray as faithful to the homeland those émigrés who were branded as traitors for
leaving Lower Canada. For this reason, he pointedly emphasizes the recreation of the
French-Canadian way of life in the new urban setting as evidence of the émigrés’ fidelity
to the homeland.
In his enumeration of the many lieux de mémoire of exiled French
Canadians—the Patriot Rebellion, the mythic coureurs de bois, the celebration of St.Jean-Baptiste Day, French-Canadian songs and legends—the narrator of Jeanne la fileuse
creates sites where he reconstructs the ancestral past in order to script an ethnic identity.
These constructed elements of cultural heritage commemorate that which no longer
exists. Nora explains that “à la différence de tous les objets de l’histoire, les lieux de
mémoire n’ont pas de référents dans la réalité. Ou plutôt ils sont à eux-mêmes leur propre
référent, signes qui ne renvoient qu’à soi, signes à l’état pur” (xli). The lieux de mémoire,
then, reconfigure a lost past in order to shape present constructs of identity for an ethnic
minority cut off from its roots. “Les campagnes de Canada,” therefore, articulates the
sites—symbolic and material—in which a French-Canadian national identity is forged,
constructing a nation in the realm of memory.
55
The Patriot Rebellion, its Republican ideology, and the coureur de bois lifestyle
of the Sons of Liberty figure prominently in Part I of Jeanne la fileuse. The narrator takes
pains to reconfigure the land as a comprehensive image of French-Canadian nationhood,
very much on the order of nineteenth-century Québécois texts that fashioned their own
lieux de mémoire in which “explorers and missionaries alike, along with the social,
historical, and geographical environment of New France, were rehabilitated and proposed
to the population by the literary establishment as founding their collective identity as a
French-Canadian nation” (Perron 132).
Wilderness space in “Les campagnes du Canada” represents the natural landscape
unmediated by the social values and political power inherent in British rule of its
Canadian territory. In transforming this natural landscape into literary idiom, the narrator
assigns to it certain cultural values, all the while remaining highly invested in his
nationalistic discourse. Almost twenty years before the publication, in 1893, of Frederick
Jackson Turner’s essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” the
narrator of Jeanne la fileuse ponders the vast open spaces of Québec province and the
influence that these spaces exert over the development of a distinctly French-Canadian
character, one worth defending and transmitting to future generations, in Lower Canada
or in Franco-American enclaves in New England. This dedication to the preservation of
French heritage in the face of pressure to assimilate into Anglophone culture represents
the roots of the ideology of la survivance, part of the baggage migrants brought with
them to New England. Gosselin Schick, in her article “Jeanne la fileuse et le
rapatriement des émigrés,” explains these roots:
La survivance de la mission civilisatrice et catholique, octroyée d’abord à la
France, mais abandonnée par ce pays qui s’acheminait de plus en plus vers le
sécularisme, dépendait maintenant du peuple du Canada français, qui n’avait qu’à
56
rester fidèle à sa religion, à sa langue, et n’ayant plus d’État, au sol natal, pour
témoigner à la grande mission française. (1007)
What prompted such a fierce promotion of French cultural heritage? On the heels
of the failed Patriot Rebellion of 1837, Lord Durham, on behalf of the British authorities,
issued a report promoting the assimilation of the French Canadians of Lower Canada.
Durham insisted, “I entertain no doubts as to the national character which must be given
to Lower Canada; it must be that of the British Empire . . .” (146). Following the
publication of the report, a concerted ethnic mobilization began with the goal of
preserving French nationhood against the threat posed by colonial rule. The agenda of
cultural survival, promoted by the clergy, the landed gentry, and the French-Canadian
politicians of Lower Canada, appeared most insistently in French-Canadian romans du
terroir beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing well into the twentieth.
According to Gosselin Schick, the aim of this genre “était de maintenir la fidélité et de
créer un texte national . . . ” (1007). Discursive nation-building, whether in FrenchCanadian or in Franco-American texts, articulates the preservation of a shared culture
and its values and traditions in the face of threats by the dominant, Anglophone culture.
Part I of Jeanne la fileuse echoes the roman du terroir, its literary contemporary,
in its promotion of nostalgic notions of life in rural Quebec province. Beaugrand’s
treatment of rural space diverges, however, from its depiction in the roman du terroir,
where place often implies a simplistic conceptualization of static, bounded areas (such as
the ever-present and sinister line of the forest in Maria Chapdelaine or the defined
acreage of the ancestral farm in Trente Arpents). Jeanne la fileuse differs most notably
from the roman du terroir in its characterization of emigration as an economic necessity
57
rather than “une perdition dans le matérialisme . . . et comme l’abandon de son heritage à
une assimilation creuse” (Gosselin Schick 1008).
Informed by the egalitarian discourse of the Parti Patriote, Part I of Jeanne la
fileuse privileges space as an open network of social interaction unfettered by
hierarchical class structure. This network may be best illustrated by the bonds of
friendship between Pierre, a Patriot sympathizer and only son of a bourgeois land owner,
and Jules, the son of a Patriot. The romance that evolves between Jules’s sister, Jeanne,
and university-educated Pierre, reveals yet another tear in the fabric of established social
structure. In his rejection of hierarchical class divisions, the narrator of Jeanne la fileuse
seems to embrace, at least for a while, a more inclusive ideology, one that dismantles
social and political hierarchy. As the narrative unfolds, however, it begins to contest its
own democratic ideology and ultimately champions the ruling capitalist class at the
expense of the workers, thus undermining its egalitarian agenda. Beaugrand himself, as a
journalist and member of the petite bourgeoisie, worked both sides of the migration issue
in painting, in his newspapers, a romanticized portrait of opportunities in the industrial
centers of New England, while, on the other hand, championing, in those same
publications, the repatriation of French-Canadian families to the homeland. The
narrator’s ambivalence in Jeanne la fileuse seems to reflect these ambiguities.
2.3.1 The Archetypal Coureur de Bois in “Les campagnes du Canada”
The first chapter of the novel opens with four lines of L’Abbé Casgrain’s poem
“Le Canotier” (1869), which functions as an epigraph:
Assis dans mon canot d’écorce
Prompt comme la flèche ou le vent,
Seul, je brave toute la force
Des rapides du Saint-Laurent. (81)
58
This poem pays homage to a solitary canoeist who, braving the mighty Saint Lawrence
River, returns home from the wilderness in springtime. The recounting of this oftrepeated journey, a long-established tradition among Quebec’s young men who worked
in remote chantiers during the winter months, functions as a micronarrative for the
massive migration that follows, one that dramatically alters the demographics of Lower
Canada. The joyous return of the workers in spring also serves as a metaphor for the
French-Canadian migrants’ repatriation, after their toil in New England, to the Quebec
farmlands they had abandoned. Thus, this overture to Part I of the text obliquely explores
work-related movements of large numbers of individuals, foreshadowing the massive
exodus of workers that occurs later in the narrative. Gosselin Schick argues that the song
that the coureurs de bois sing while paddling their canoes reveals, like the poem “Le
Canotier” itself, an intertextuality that seeks to ground “le roman dans le patrimoine
littéraire et culturel du Québec” (1010). The lyrics of the folksong, which recount a
young girl’s journey far away from her homeland and from the man she loves, also
function as a mise en abîme for Jeanne’s experiences far away from Canada in a Fall
River, Massachusetts, textile mill.
That the novel opens with the inscription of the rural space of Quebec into the
text implies the significance of archetypal space in Part I. The land, both farm and
wilderness, plays an important role in shaping the three younger characters—Jules, his
sister Jeanne, and their friend Pierre. Glorification of the land also serves to encourage
the reader’s affective ties to the homeland and to further the ideology of a shared culture
worth preserving. “Les campagnes du Canada” begins with the return of Pierre, who,
having argued with his father over the liberal bias and the cost of a university education,
returns to the farm after a nine-month self-imposed exile in the forests north of Ottawa.
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The period of gestation in the womb of the woods precedes the birth of the narrative,
which begins in the spring of 1872. Pierre, at the stern of the birch bark canoe,
maneuvers the craft through the narrows above l’île Saint-Sulpice, an image that evokes,
in its shape and liquidity, the birth canal. The return of the voyagers also foreshadows the
repatriation of migrant workers from New England. The work in the forest (and, by
implication, in the factories) is a series of “. . . journées d’un travail presque surhumain”
(86), a work fueled by “. . . la pensée du retour au foyer” (87).
Pierre, abandoning his university career in Montreal, had entered the wilderness
the previous fall. His clothing, described by the narrator as “moitié français, moitié
indien” (82), draws the reader’s attention to Pierre’s unresolved status, his hybrid
identity. What Morissonneau writes about the coureur de bois also describes Pierre’s
metamorphosis under the influence of wilderness space:
[He] cast his civilized clothing into the mighty Saint Lawrence and donned
garments suited to life in the wild. Forest and Indian, nature and primitive living
transformed him into a new man who in a regression from culture to nature,
traded the values of a hierarchical society for those of an egalitarian if not
libertarian one. (17-18)
Alienated by his father’s profit-driven lifestyle, by his “esprit pratique et calculateur”
(115), Pierre ultimately rejects the comfortable future his parents have outlined, that of a
lucrative business opportunity and marriage to a merchant’s daughter.
The journey from society into wilderness space has transformed Pierre and
rendered unacceptable his father’s vision of success. Unconcerned with the material gain
so important to his father, Pierre refuses a future predetermined for him and on his
parents’ terms. Certainly the relationship between nature and self-determination presents
a multifaceted topic of inquiry outside the scope of this paper. However, similar to the
place-centered writings of historian Frederick Jackson Turner or essayist Henry David
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Thoreau, writings that attest to the importance of connections between natural space and
development of character, Jeanne la fileuse can be viewed as literature of
inhabitation—that is, a constructed narrative that describes a journey through space (Part
I), or writing that documents residence in a specific place (Part II).4
Pierre’s wilderness experience profoundly influences his rejection of his parents’
capitalist dreams for him, dreams articulated by Jean-Louis Montépel: “Il est évident
qu’il est de notre devoir de lui faire une position. Ce métier de bûcheron ne convient ni à
ses aptitudes ni à notre dignité. Nous sommes riches, et il est humiliant de voir notre fils
unique se livrer à une occupation si peu en rapport avec son éducation” (127). Not
surprisingly, Pierre commits to carrying out his plan to marry Jeanne Girard, the daughter
of Montépel’s enemy, Jean-Baptiste. In the closing pages of Part I, Montépel’s bitter
tirade underscores the significance of place in the narrative and in the construction of
identity:
J’ignore ce que t’a dit le père Girard, mais sache bien que s’il a oublié, lui, les
rancunes du passé, je me souviens, moi, qu’il y a entre nous une haine de trentecinq ans et que jamais, de mon consentement, un Montépel de Lavaltrie tendra la
main à un Girard de Contrecoeur. (178)
Pierre Montépel is almost always described as being between places, as crossing
borders. In the opening pages of the text, the narrator situates him between the wilderness
and Lavaltrie. After falling in love with Jeanne, he often is seen in motion between
Lavaltrie and Contrecoeur. When one encounters Pierre at the end of the narrative, he is
travelling between Contrecoeur and Fall River, Massachusetts. This constant movement
implies his archetypal role as a coureur de bois. Furthermore, the continuous progression
of Pierre through physical space suggests his changing moral values; he moves away
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from his initial rejection of his father’s materialism and, ultimately, accepts the role of
landed gentry.
“Les campagnes du Canada” emerges as Pierre’s story—told in the third-person
voice. The narrator focuses the reader’s attention upon Pierre, whose relationship to the
action of the story remains more dominant than that of any other character. It is Pierre
who returns home from the wilderness, Pierre who seeks out the company of Jules and
Jeanne, and Pierre who breaks with his father over his proposed engagement. So
thoroughly does the narrator focus upon Pierre’s values and adopt them as his own, that
as Pierre waffles over his feelings of alienation from bourgeois materialism, the narrator
begins to promote such a lifestyle as within the reach of French-Canadian migrant
workers.
2.3.2 The archetypal Seigneur and Fils de la Liberté in “Les campagnes du Canada”
Although Part I remains Pierre’s story, the conflict between the two patriarchs of
the novel—Jean-Baptiste Girard, former Fils de la Liberté and Jean-Louis Montépel,
Tory and seigneur—represent two other archetypes present in “Les campagnes du
Canada.” Montépel, in his youth, acted as a British informant, and betrayed Girard and
his compatriots to the colonial authorities. A shrewd businessman, Montépel dedicates
himself not to republican ideals of egalitarianism but rather to the values of a hierarchical
society eager to solidify its position of power and to protect its profit margin. Montépel,
extremely short-tempered and self-promoting, relates quite poorly to his only child,
Pierre, whose university training seems the source of Jean-Louis’s feelings of inferiority.
The family’s social standing and continued success in the community weigh heavily upon
Montépel’s mind. This seigneur has little in common with stereotypical, rustic
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landowners such as Euchariste Moisan (Trente Arpents) or le père Didace (Le Survenant).
Jean-Baptiste Girard typifies the legendary Homo canadiensis, or coureur de bois.
A member, in his youth, of the Parti patriote under the leadership of Louis-Joseph
Papineau, Girard fought for a republic free of repression and independent of Great
Britain. His escape into the forest, into the wild space of nature, invokes the geography
that shapes him and informs his identity. As a coureur de bois, Girard appropriates some
of the mythic stature reserved for the true hero of French-Canadian culture. “Le coureur
de bois,” writes Lemire, “devient le héros dans lequel se reconnaît la majeure partie de la
population. Son existence libre de toute contrainte au milieu de la forêt aventureuse
apparaît comme un idéal de vie” (Le Mythe 14). The anti-authoritarianism inherent in this
unorthodox lifestyle free of constraints shapes Girard’s political views. Montépel’s and
Girard’s relationship to place creates a palpable tension in the narrative, one that depends
upon the shifting perspective of two lifestyles—that of gentleman farmer and of
adventurer—lifestyles rooted in the ancestral land. In contrasting the sedentary nature of
the seigneur with the mobility of the coureur de bois, the narrator makes use of landbased metaphors to foreground divisions between social classes. In this way, Montépel
and Girard can be considered representative of pre-Confederation Quebec, with its
political, social, and economic polarities.
2.3.3 Lavaltrie and Contrecoeur: The Representation of Place
In addition to the binary treatment of the landscape—as home to both seigneur
and coureur de bois—the narrator employs other strategies in the memorialization of
place in the text. From the opening chapter onward, toponyms fill the narrative. Consider
the opening paragraph: “En descendant le Saint-Laurent, à dix lieues plus bas que
Montréal, on voit gracieusement assis sur la rive gauche du grand fleuve, un joli village à
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l’aspect incontestablement normand” (81). Place names crowd the following pages and
function as an ever-present trope in the text: le bourg Lavaltrie, l’île Saint-Sulpice, le
village de Contrecoeur, Lanoraie, l’Outaouais, la Gatineau, Québec and so on. Thus, the
inventory of name places functions mimetically in a narrative that never strays far from
its rootedness in the geography of Lower Canada, and implicitly promotes the notion of
cultural traditions worth preserving and transmitting.
The geographical separation of the two villages by the presence of the river
implies the divide that exists between the two patriarchs of opposing ideologies. This
topographical divide reminds one of Proust’s reference to the two possible paths that
Marcel and his family could take in Combray in order to reach the countryside.
Méséglise, or Swann’s way, led through a field while Guermantes’ way followed the
river. The two diverging pathways, a metaphor for two social worlds—the rich
bourgeoisie and the artistocracy—converge at the end of the narrative. Madame Verdurin
enters the world of the aristocracy just as Jeanne joins the landed gentry through
marriage to Pierre Montépel.
Much of the conflict in the narrative results from the elder Montépel’s belief that
the families of Lavaltrie and of Contrecoeur should remain forever as separate and
distinct as the two villages on the provincial map. Throughout Part I, Pierre and the
Montépel clan are as much synonymous with Lavaltrie as the Girards are with
Contrecoeur. Their enmity may have contributed to Lemire’s assessment of the novel as
“une nouvelle version de Roméo et Juliette” (Dictionnaire 408). So intensely do the clans
inhabit these ancestral lands that the physical environment itself reflects the settlers’
social and political identities. Lavaltrie, home to the wealthy, long-established Montépel
family, bustles with prosperity, and its name graces the opening chapter of Jeanne la
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fileuse. Indeed, Lavaltrie’s luster can be traced to its founding fathers: “Baptisé du nom
de ses fondateurs, le bourg Lavaltrie fut jadis le lieu de résidence d’une de ces vieilles et
nobles familles françaises qui émigrèrent en grand nombre au Canada vers le milieu du
XVIIe siècle” (81). Lavaltrie’s poor relation, Contrecoeur, lying on the opposite shore and
a league downriver, does not enjoy as glorious a heritage as Lavaltrie. In its checkered
past, Contrecoeur proved itself to be a hotbed of Patriot activity, even sheltering a secret
rebel militia. Girard, recounting to Pierre his own involvement in the Patriot Rebellion,
explains that “[l]e village de Contrecoeur, se levant à la voix du grand tribun populaire,
Louis-Joseph Papineau, s’était préparé pour la lutte et formait avec Saint-Denis et SaintCharles, le centre de l’insurrection” (147).
The narrative thus establishes a reciprocal relationship between the constitution of
places and people. The places in Part I are concrete and symbolic, made up of both
seigneurial lands and humble cottages as well as myths and legends. The boundaries of
Lavaltrie and Contrecoeur function as agents of exclusion, as lieux de mémoire, creating
collectivities with shared, distinctive identities. The economic inequality inherent in the
gentrified Lavaltrie and the rustic Contrecoeur mirrors the social class divisions between
wealthy landowner, Montépel, and penniless Patriot, Girard.
The rupture between Pierre and his father that closes Part I of the novel prefigures
the break between French-Canadian families and the homeland chronicled in Part II. A
far more permanent rupture in the family fabric, however, awaits Jeanne Girard. On the
heels of the departure of Pierre and her brother, Jules, for seasonal work in the woods, the
patriarch, Jean-Baptiste, succumbs to an attack of apoplexy. In her orphaned state, the
heroine glimpses the enormous changes that face her: “Jeanne sentait qu’elle allait entrer
dans une sphère nouvelle et ce n’était qu’en tremblant qu’elle mettait le pied sur le seuil
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de l’existence inconnue qui se présentait devant elle” (215). Jeanne’s identity, no longer
defined and circumscribed by her role as daughter, opens up to the external world to
reconstitute itself in the new urban space of Fall River, Massachusetts.
Thus, Pierre, Jules, and Jeanne all move toward peripheral places and away from
the Lavaltrie/Contrecoeur center. Pierre and Jules in their wilderness space seem no less
exiled than Jeanne in her unfamiliar city space. All three characters must, therefore, deal
with the disorientation and the disruption resulting from such exile.
2.4 “Les filatures de l’étranger”
The topography of Part II, dedicated to Jeanne’s experiences in the industrial
environment as she becomes a weaver of fabric and of her own identity, is dominated by
the symbols of urban space—by train stations, tenement houses, and factories. “Les
filatures de l’étranger” evolves into a combination of popular romantic novel (in which
Jeanne is reunited with her true love), Bildungsroman (in which she travels to a new land,
experiences a measure of independence, and works to finance her return trip to the
homeland), and historical novel (in which the immigrant experience in Fall River is
chronicled). “Les filatures de l’étranger” is, therefore, as much Jeanne’s story as “Les
campagnes du Canada” is Pierre’s. Part II can also be read as an historical or journalistic
text with its factual references to rail service schedules, to wages earned for piecework,
to cost of lodgings, and to the disastrous Fall River mill fire. These historical details
indicate, according to Gosselin Schick, the narrator’s intention to justify the actions of
those who sought employment outside Quebec province and to remove the label of
“traitor” with which they had been saddled. She describes Jeanne la fileuse as a “roman
écrit aux États-Unis pour des lecteurs franco-américains . . . ayant pour but de les
défendre contre la condamnation du discours québécois” (1008).
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The narrator provides data on French-Canadian migration to the United States
beginning in 1775, denounces the Canadian government’s economic policies, and gives
detailed footnotes on increase in yardage produced in Fall River mills between 1865 and
1877, all in the space of a few pages. Interspersed with these notes and explanations, the
plot continues to unfold, moving Jeanne and her new friends, the Dupuis family, from
Contrecoeur to Fall River. The introduction of lengthy factual information (including the
operating budget of thirty-three local mills and the salaries of weavers, warpers, and
carders) serves to interrupt the unity of action and creates a hybrid work, one that, as
Chartier points out, hesitates between historical document and work of imagination:
“Beaugrand takes great pains to situtate [the novel] within its historical context. The
result is substantive as social history but aesthetically dubious, especially when the
novelist-just-turned-historian turns pamphleteer, denouncing the idleness of the Canadian
government when inhabitants by the tens of thousands sought relief by immigrating
southward” (“Franco-American” 26).
In his introduction to Les lieux de mémoire, Pierre Nora explores the intersection
of history and memory. Memory, a phenomenon of the present, according to Nora,
creates imaginative communities that bond groups together emotionally, while history, a
representation of the past, intellectually analyzes and organizes empirical data. Nora
explains,
Mémoire, histoire: loin d’être synonymes, nous prenons conscience que tout les
oppose. La mémoire est la vie, toujours portée par des groupes vivants et à ce
titre, elle est en évolution permanente, ouverte à la dialectique du souvenir et de
l’amnésie. . . . L’histoire est la reconstruction toujours problématique et
incomplète de ce qui n’est plus. (xix)
The narrator of Jeanne la fileuse, in striving to assemble fragments of salary schedules,
inventories of goods on hand, and reports on employee performance, attempts to record
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and preserve the historical record of French-Canadian experience in Fall River. The
historical details he includes in the text emerge as particularly biased, chosen to portray
in the best possible light the immigrant experience in Fall River. In this way, the narrator
seeks to present a flattering portrait of migrant life in New England through the inclusion
or exclusion of certain historical data. Although both history and fiction can be
considered constructed, fragmentary entities, the repeated introduction of historical data
into the narrative unsettles the reader and frustrates his attempts to read the text as a work
of the imagination.
Despite the six-chapter detour around the plot as the narrator consciously strives
to situate the storyline in its historical context, the tension established in Part I of Jeanne
la fileuse between mobility and sedentarism continues in the second section as the focus
of the narrative shifts from patriarchs to progeny. Jules and Pierre experience a nomadic
life in the wilderness whereas Jeanne is grounded in the urban locus where she has been
transplanted, deprived of the opportunity to move. During her year in Fall River, she only
ventures out of the tenement to walk to Granite Mill. She represents the fixed place, the
gendered base, to which Pierre will ultimately return. The reunion of the couple in Fall
River then propels their movement through space in a joyous return to the homeland, a
return that mirrors patterns of settlement and abandonment established by many first- and
second-generation Franco-Americans.
2.4.1 Fall River, Massachusetts: Idealized Urban Space
Jeanne’s move to Fall River, Massachusetts, a radical uprooting dictated by
widespread unemployment in Contrecoeur, exemplifies unskilled labor’s participation in
the Quebec diaspora. Such movements, termed “betterment”migrations, indicate the
voluntary nature of the exodus from Lower Canada.5 These waves of migration did not go
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unchallenged in the mass media of the day. Fueled by the nationalistic rhetoric of Quebec
politicians dismayed by the massive exodus of one-third of French-Canada’s population,
writers of the period depicted the urban landscape in New England as an immoral space
of self-interest, danger, and destruction.6 The narrator, in refuting this negative portrait,
idealizes urban space, and Fall River emerges as a land of opportunity. In this way he
seeks to justify the migration of unskilled laborers from Quebec province to urban
centers in the Northeast.
In crafting a positive portrait of the city in which Jeanne must make a new
beginning and renegotiate her identity, the narrator depicts a bucolic and closed space
where French-Canadian immigrants such as Jeanne can continue to embrace and to
uphold the traditional values of their homeland: “La ville manufacturière de Fall River,
Mass. est située sur la rive droite de la baie Mount Hope près de l’embouchure de la
Rivière Taunton . . . à 18 milles au nord de Newport-sur-mer” (238-39). The narrator
praises Fall River’s abundant “voies de communication par terre et par mer” and the
“nombreuses lignes de chemins de fer et de bateaux à vapeur, offrant toutes les facilités
désirables au commerce et à l’industrie” (243). The text chronicles the establishment of
French parishes, French-language schools, mutual aid societies, and social clubs. These
institutions contribute much to assure “la position matérielle sociale, religieuse et
politique de la population canadienne française de Fall River” (247). It seems, in light of
the structural support system sketched by the narrator, that Jeanne inhabits a utopia,
conducive to individual and collective progress alike. The urban environment of Fall
River, in the hands of the narrator, thus becomes a positively invested city space in which
the French-Canadian family can reproduce its cultural values.
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Historical accounts of the housing and the salaries of immigrants to Fall River
paint a less than utopic picture of the city. Consider, on the one hand, the narrator’s
cheerful description of affordable tenements:
Chaque corporation industrielle possède un certain nombre de logements
(tenements) économiques à l’usage de ses ouvriers, et le prix du loyer est retenu
chaque mois, sur les salaires de la famille. . . . Ces habitations sont généralement
groupées autour des filatures et possèdent tout le confort désirable. Les Canadiens
de Fall River n’ont certainement pas à se plaindre à ce sujet. (255)
William Bayard Hale, writing in 1894, describes tenements in that city as not “fit to
house a dog” (298), and compares French-Canadian neighborhoods to slave quarters. He
mentions rats that drive out lodgers in mill housing, and insists that squalid living
conditions prevail. As for wages, Beaugrand’s text trumpets the lucrative salaries earned
by mill workers. “L’ouvrier des filatures,” he writes, “gagne actuellement un salaire qui
lui permet de vivre, sinon dans le luxe et dans la richesse, au moins dans une aisance
relative” (265). Historical data reveals that textile workers were among the most poorly
paid laborers of the time. The disconnect between the narrator’s positive vision of
working and living conditions and a variety of negative accounts published in
newspapers, journals, and governmental reports reveals the hidden agenda of powerful
interests among the Francophone elite. This group seems intent upon recruiting and
keeping an unskilled labor force of consumers who need the products and services that
they, as shopkeepers and community professionals, provide.
Romanticizing the effects of industrialization on Fall River, the narrator
characterizes the Yankee inhabitants as a “peuple qui accorde l’hospitalité la plus franche
et la plus cordiale, à tous ceux qui désirent marcher dans la voie honorable du travail, du
progrès et de la civilisation” (247). Letters to local newspapers, bitter debates in the
Massachusetts legislature about immigrant laborers, and widespread debate about the
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foreign element invading New England foreground nativist sentiment against the French
Canadians and do not support the picture of a cordial and hospitable Anglophone
community. In its distorted representation of living and working conditions in Fall River,
the text seems to function as a propagandist recruitment tool for the capitalist sector
(including Beaugrand as owner of two newspapers) in attracting unskilled labor from
Quebec province. Only later in the narrative, following the catastrophic fire at the mill,
does one sense a shift towards a more ambivalent treatment of urban space.
2.4.2 Jeanne Girard and Granite Mill
As the months drag on, Jeanne suffers from the fatigue that a seventy-two hour,
six-day workweek engenders. As she awaits Pierre’s and Jule’s safe return from the
wilderness, however, little in the narrative suggests that she is torn between the two
spaces that function as poles of her existence. Contrecoeur, the rural pole, locus of
solitude and rootedness, contrasts sharply with Fall River, the urban pole and place of
sociability and impermanency. Jeanne, a young woman who adapts quickly to work in
Granite Mill, functions as a kind of “poster child” for the successful millworker engaged
“dans la voie honorable du travail” (268). In fact, the narrator insists that “Jeanne . . . se
trouvait dans une position relativement heureuse” (269), thus banishing any feelings of
nostalgia or homesickness she might have experienced. He glibly points out the benefits
of exchanging farm for factory: “Il est facile de comprendre que la rigueur mécanique de
tous les travaux de la filature, produise, au début, un sentiment de lassitude physique et
d’esclavage moral, chez les gens qui n’ont connu jusque-là, que les occupations paisibles
et le laisser-aller assez général de la vie des campagnes” (254). Regret over the loss of
individual freedom and the boredom resulting from the monotony of repetitious
tasks—both normal reactions to such a monumental change in occupation—quickly pass,
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according to the narrator, when the first payday arrives and the worker feels “la
satisfaction bien naturelle de pouvoir toucher régulièrement le prix de son travail” (255).
Pride in the upward mobility possible for hard-working immigrants and praise for
Granite Mill’s owners seem a puzzling about-face for a narrator so eager to condemn
Montépel’s greed and his dedication to increasing his personal fortune. In the second
half, the text diverges pointedly from the ideology of egalitarianism so prominent in the
Patriot discourse of Part I. This contradiction illustrates the way in which the narrative
subverts its own agenda. Such ambivalence repeats itself, unmistakably, in the very title
of the work. Jeanne la fileuse equates the name of the heroine with her occupation. The
narrator explains,
Toute la colonie franco-canadienne de Fall River citait Jeanne Girard que l’on
avait surnommée ‘Jeanne la fileuse,’ comme un modèle de bonté, de modestie et
d’assiduité au travail. Son surnom de ‘Jeanne la fileuse’ lui venait de ce que le
système de filage auquel elle travaillait avait été introduit depuis peu dans les
filatures de Fall River, et de ce qu’elle se trouvait au nombre des rares ouvrières
canadiennes qui avaient adopté ce genre de travail. (268)
Historically speaking, the introduction of power looms necessitated the employment of
skilled weavers from the British Isles. Few French Canadians, as the text indicates, were
deemed accomplished enough to hold such a position in the mills. In establishing
Jeanne’s success as a weaver, the narrator attributes to her a rare talent and, on a more
practical note, the higher wage that this ability commands.7
In the title of the novel, the narrator equates the person, Jeanne, with the
occupation of fileuse. This introduces a dehumanizing aspect, one that reduces the
heroine to the product of her labors. The narrow definition of “weaver” implies that this
task is at once the center and circumference of her existence. She emerges as weaving an
identity conforming to a fixed pattern. The frame of the loom delimits a closed space in
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which Jeanne can work. These established, predetermined patterns deny creativity and
self-expression, just as the ideology of la survivance urges an undifferentiated
construction of self within the strict tenets of the doctrine. As Jeanne weaves, she
produces a commodity for which the capitalist system pays her piece by piece. The faster
she works, the more money she earns. Her experience of time, then, is no more her own
than her experience of space. Thus, for Jeanne, identity emerges as the exclusive domain
of established ideology and mechanized toil. She has, in fact, no meaning and no value
apart from her role as the extension of a power loom: person and product are one.8
Many historians have researched and written extensively on working conditions
in the textile mills of New England.9 Jacques Rouillard gives an account of the weaving
room that sharply contrasts with the narrator’s depiction of mill work:
Dans les salles de tissage, la vapeur utilisée pour empêcher les fils de se rompre
rend l’atmosphère très humide, ce qui cause des rhumes et des pneumonies chez
les travailleurs. L’été, des températures de plus de 95 degrés Fahrenheit, parfois
même de 120, font perdre connaissance à plusieurs ouvriers complètement
déshydratés. L’éclairage est insuffisant, le bruit assommant ; les ouvriers
souffrent de maux de tête fréquents, de maux d’yeux et de surdité. (Roby 28)
Mary Dancause, whose husband spent forty years as a loom fixer, corroborates
Rouillard’s account: “In the weave room, where my mother worked, there the noise was
terrible. It would shake and everything. I remember it was very hot and humid. They
didn’t open the windows much. If the wind came through, the thread broke and you’d
have to tie it again” (Hareven 56).
Granite Mill, as idealized in Jeanne la fileuse, bears no resemblance to the above
descriptions. The mill, imposing its impressive architectural imprint upon the landscape,
dominates the urban space of Fall River and the collective consciousness of its workers.
Writing about mill yards, Randolph Langenbach observes that “[t]hese carefully designed
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and meticulously maintained spaces were a supreme expression of unbounded confidence
. . . in the belief in continuing material progress . . .” (20). The narrator of Jeanne la
fileuse shares this confidence and seeks to portray the mill in an uncritical, romanticized
fashion.
The ambivalence of the text becomes even more apparent as the mill, a construct
carefully manipulated by the narrator’s pro-capitalist ideology, self-destructs in a hellish
fire. In a chapter entitled “L’incendie du Granite Mill,” based on the disastrous fire of
September 19, 1874, flames burn men, women, and children alive. This fire, coming at
the end of the narrative, lends both tension and unexpected complexity to the text.
Beaugrand incorporates into the novel actual accounts of the Granite Mill blaze
published in his newspaper, L’Écho du Canada. Jeanne Girard’s name, for example, is
simply added to the top of the list of actual workers injured in the fire. This weaving of
fiction and “fact” underscores the historical contextualization of the second half of the
novel as the course of history—the Granite Mill blaze of 1874—determines the action
and defines the plot.
2.4.3 The (Un)Making of a Hero
The heroic death of Michel Dupuis, burned alive saving Jeanne and two children
from the flames, has its source in the factual account of one John Bosworth, an account
published in L’Écho du Canada. Ironically, the tragedy occurs the day before Jules’s and
Pierre’s expected arrival in Fall River. The young men are traveling by train and happen
to pick up a copy of that city’s French-language newspaper in the Boston’s South Station,
thus learning about the fire and Jeanne’s injuries. In his Introduction to Jeanne la fileuse,
Roger Le Moine proclaims the episode of the fire “sans fonction idéologique” (42). The
incident emerges as crucial—from my perspective—to Pierre’s stature as the hero of the
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text. Montépel, in his role as coureur de bois, absents himself at key junctures in the
narrative, thus contributing to the reader’s impression of him as inadequate or ineffective
(Gosselin Schick 1014). He is the stuff of legends, not of daily life. As such, he fails to
save Jeanne on two occasions. After the unexpected death of her father, Jeanne travels to
Fall River under the protection of the Dupuis clan, poor migrants who welcome her into
their family. Their eldest son, Michel, who hides his love for Jeanne, ultimately sacrifices
his life to save her from the flames. On both occasions, Pierre, the man of action, whom
the narrator characterizes as “un idéal d’accomplissement de l’individu” (43), fails to
provide any meaningful help for Jeanne, his fiancée. The habitant, sacrificed to
Montépel’s happiness, emerges as the true hero of the narrative.
After the young people are reunited, Jeanne relates the details of the disaster: “. . .
la jeune fille avoua que sans Michel qui l’avait forcée à se précipiter en bas, elle serait
brûlée vive, tant elle se trouvait paralysée par la frayeur” (304). That she was frozen by
fear—literally stuck in place—merits a brief observation. Jeanne, whether in Contrecoeur
or in Fall River, has been trapped in place. Although enjoying the economic
independence that comes from earning a weekly salary, she can no more move freely in
her new urban environment than she could in the village of Contrecoeur. Jeanne, married
to a seventy-two hour workweek, has been stuck in place for the better part of a year. She
has awaited rescue by her coureur de bois, the man in motion who, for the past eleven
months, has been “lost” to her at the times she needs him the most.
A brief Épilogue confirms the repair of the rupture between Pierre and Jean-Louis
Montépel, who, in signing over his estate to his son, ensures a comfortable future for the
new landowner and his bride, Jeanne. The members of the Dupuis family, after three
years in Fall River, rescue the family farm and return to live out their days on the
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ancestral land. Although these French Canadians seem to mirror the typical, temporary
nature of settlement patterns among first- and second-generation migrant workers, one
surprise does await the reader. Jules, with the help of Pierre, establishes a grocery store in
Fall River and becomes a successful small business owner, enjoying, in his own modest
way, a part of the American dream.
In depicting both rural Quebec and urban Fall River, the narrator presents a
romanticized image of both places. Insistence upon the egalitarian ideology of the Parti
patriote in Part I of the narrative represents a rejection of colonial rule and the
exploitation it implies. This position sits uncomfortably with the pro-capitalist stance of
the second half of the narrative that champions industrialization (with its inherent
exploitation of the working class). Jeanne la fileuse therefore emerges as an ambivalent
text, one that leaves the reader with unsettling questions: does the Granite Mill fire belie
the utopic portrait of urban life? does the repatriation of Jeanne and the Dupuis family
undermine the narrator’s defense of those French Canadians who settled in New
England? and does Pierre’s ultimate choice of a sedentary lifestyle over the mobility of
the coureur de bois imply the narrator’s acquiescence to the dictum, “Restons chez
nous”? Perhaps the only certainly about the text is uncertainty: Pierre’s return to Lower
Canada counterbalanced by Jules’s entrance into the business community of Fall River
leaves unresolved the debate over the massive French-Canadian emigration to the
industrial centers of New England.
2.5 The Working Class, the Franco-American Elite, and Spaces of Inequality
Between the publication of Jeanne la fileuse in 1875 and Canuck in 1936, New
England Petits Canadas became a permanent locus of poverty, high mortality rates, and
overwhelming pollution with its source in both human and industrial waste. The four-
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and five-story tenements, built after the Civil War, often had a single outhouse for the use
of all the occupants of the building. In Lowell, Massachusetts, the setting of Canuck,
there were no regularly scheduled garbage collections. In 1883, the mortality rate in
Lowell’s Ward 5, a densely settled section of the Franco-American enclave, was 47 per
thousand, the highest in the city, and half of these deaths were children under the age of
five (Brault 60).
It was between 1880 and 1888 that widespread disease broke out in Brunswick,
Maine, in French-Canadian neighborhoods, due to overcrowding and unhygienic living
conditions. The Brunswick Telegraph, during the summer and fall of 1886, carried on a
campaign of raising public awareness about deplorable conditions in the Cabot
Company’s one hundred tenements in which the employees lived. An editorial
proclaimed, “It is somebody’s business to see that the sewers, cesspools, and privies are
cleaned out and then, if the sickness continues, a look must be taken at the interior of the
dwellings; it is of no use to look further after the causes of disease than at the banks of
the cove reeking with filth” (qtd. in Giguère 128). Death records maintained by St. John’s
Parish reveal a staggering mortality rate among French-Canadian workers and their
children living in Brunswick. For example, in 1886, between May l and September 10, a
total of seventy-four fatalities were recorded in the French neighborhoods of Brunswick,
almost all from diphtheria. In 1887, the statistics confirmed seventy-two French
Canadians dead. Only two Irish fatalities were recorded during those years (Brault 61).
In Lewiston, Maine, the neighborhoods of Petit Canada bordered the
Androscoggin River. As late as 1983, pollution still blighted the area where “the foul
odor of the river, due to sulfite wastes from paper mills upriver, permeated the crowded
neighborhoods” (Parker 12). In 1971, Wayne E. Reilly, a reporter for The Maine Times,
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described “decaying buildings” backed up to the river “topped with brown swirls of
chemical whipped cream” (13). The misery of the living conditions of unskilled workers
is portrayed in Canuck and in a large number of other Franco-American novels such as
L’Innocente Victime, Mill Village, The Delusson Family, and Wednesday’s Child, texts
that all chronicle the filth and pollution that threatened the health of the dwellers in
Franco-American enclaves.
The workplace, another locus of inequality and oppression, changed little between
the end of the nineteenth century and the years prior to the World War II. Two factors
seem to have contributed to the lack of improved working conditions in the mills. First of
all, Franco-American unskilled laborers never united to challenge these oppressive
conditions. McDonald, in 1896, not without an obvious nativist bias, observes that the
French Canadian “is contented with his work, and usually, with his wages and he does
not expect undue consideration. He is not over-energetic or ambitious. His main concern
is to make a living for himself and his family” (12). In an essay on social spatialization,
Rob Shields raises the “disturbing question of people’s co-operation, docility, and
complicitous self-implication in systems of inequality and in the survival and the
expansion of the capitalist economic system” (191). He argues that social and economic
spatial practices create and perpetuate inequality. Certainly in the case of FrancoAmerican workers, obedience and submission, practices inherent in Roman Catholicism,
were unquestioned behaviors.
A second factor weighed heavily in the oppressive practices of mill management:
the collusion of the Franco-American elite. A closer look at the role this elite played in
keeping the Franco-American workers employed—even under strike conditions in which
they served as knobsticks (strikebreakers)—will reveal the silencing of any “voices from
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the margin” ( Harvey 110). David Harvey explores the tension inevitably produced by
class consciousness, division of labor, community solidarity, and political loyalties in his
consideration of the social practice of space in the workplace. The Franco-Americans
who toiled in the manufacturing plants literally knew “their place” and acquiesced to the
subaltern position that they were assigned. McDonald’s description of docile, compliant
laborers emerges as the common perception of these individuals, one that the narrator of
Canuck seeks to contest. The mills were places of powerlessness, ethnic wastelands,
where segregated workrooms contributed to the isolation of Franco-Americans from the
Irish and Scots population. And the working class looked in vain to their community
leaders for help.
The Franco-American elite of priests, physicians, journalists, lawyers, and
merchants—most of whom supported ultraconservatist platforms—did little to advocate
for unskilled labor. Many French-language newspapers such as Holyoke’s La Justice or
Worcester’s Le Travailleur, as well as benevolent societies such as the Association
Canado-Américaine or the Union Saint-Jean-Baptiste d’Amérique, openly supported the
French radical right and gave little attention to the needs of the working-class FrancoAmerican; their interest was simply elsewhere. Charles Maurras, Léon Daudet, and
Maurice Barrès, Nationalists of the French radical right, were widely read by the FrancoAmerican elite and quoted in New England French-language newspapers. The ideology
of la survivance, with its emphasis on maintaining traditional family values and Roman
Catholicism, fit in quite well with the agenda of the French radical right. The FrancoAmerican elite, informed by French rightist ideology, considered itself part of the vast
and borderless Francophone space of North America comprised of New England,
Quebec, and the former Acadian lands of the Maritimes. In contact politically and
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economically with Lower Canada, their interests lay not in the working class pockets of
New England’s inner cities, but in the larger French-speaking world including the
Hexagon.
In his comments on the few Woonsocket, Rhode Island, textile workers involved
in attempts to unionize, historian C. Stewart Doty explains the lack of advocacy on behalf
of the working class by the elite: “In those struggles most members of the FrancoAmerican elite . . . stood on the other side of the picket lines. They remained loyal to the
tenets of the French radical right, and, in doing so, the elite separated itself from the great
mass of Franco-Americans” (Doty, “Monsieur” 538). A study of cultural practices within
the Franco-American community thus reveals class-specific political loyalties that
influenced the ways in which unskilled labor negotiated its relationship to the workplace
and to community leaders.
The ultraconservatism of the Franco-American elite in the 1930s and 40s
represents an ideology that evolved over decades. Earlier examples of the great divide
between social classes date from the 1870s. In his article “Neighbors from the North:
French-Canadian Immigrants vs. Trade Unionism in Fall River, Massachusetts,”
historian Philip T. Silvia examines labor disputes and the role that French-Canadian
immigrants played as strikebreakers, often at the behest of a coalition of management and
the French-speaking elite both interested in dominating and controlling workers’ space.
Silvia chronicles the role of Father Bedard, priest at Notre Dame Church in Fall
River, and of lawyer Hugo Dubuque in that city’s textile strike of 1879. These two
individuals encouraged the resolutely anti-strike position of French-Canadian workers
who were interested only in keeping their jobs. These workers regularly ignored child
labor and maximum hour laws, stood ready to accept any wages, and remained anti-
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unionist all in response to the dictates of the elite. Silvia explains, “In effect, there was an
alliance, a shared conservatism, between the established Yankee and the Canadian
newcomer, each assisting manufacturers in preventing any Old World-style revolutions”
(51). In speaking of the Irish and the English reaction to French Canadians, Silvia
continues, “Old immigrant trade unionists harbored little compassion for and no sense of
class solidarity with these cultural strangers. Whether as willing allies or as dupes of
management, these most recent arrivals now represented the enemy below” (55).
Submissiveness and productivity on the part of unskilled labor were championed and
praised as moral “values” by the Franco-American elite eager to maintain its privileged
space in the framework of capitalism.
In The Production of Space, Lefebvre comments on the distortions and
discrepancies evident in the practice of space, and how space dissimulates false
ideologies in that it “cloaks conflicts and differences in illusory coherence and
transparency” (393). For Lefebvre, space and place, although related terms, are not
equivalents. He uses place to designate a particular use of space, and space to designate
individuals’ attitudes towards social production and power. Space, according to Lefebvre,
is culturally constructed. As a social construct, space can be inscribed with deeply
ingrained attitudes about gender, race, class, and power, a key notion in this analysis of
the ideology of cultural survival. In exploring the Franco-American practice of space and
the literature such practice produced, one should keep in mind Lefebvre’s “illusory
coherence” as it applies to the ideology of la survivance. The promotion of such an
agenda of exclusion in urban centers in New England seems to suggest an attempt by
those who held the power of the pen to articulate a nationalistic literature. Such a
literature promotes cultural nationalism over assimilation, hides spaces of discontent, and
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attempts to foil a fledgling sense of counter-space where dissident voices—such as
Dantin’s and Kérouac’s—clamor to be heard.
From an enormous corpus of conflicting studies in postcolonial theory, I have
chosen one of Fredric Jameson’s essays on subaltern literature and nationalism that has
implications for my study of Franco-American prose fiction. One would have difficulty
characterizing this fiction as belonging to third-world literature. However, Jameson’s
analysis of such literature certainly has application to culturally different texts such as
Franco-American novels. Additionally, the national allegory hypothesis Jameson posits
has relevance to how early Franco-American literature serves the elite’s interest of
nation-building.
In broad terms, subaltern literature represents an anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist
struggle against practices by an elite that would render inferior those considered as Other
due to ethnicity, race, class, or gender. French-Canadian migrants can be likened to
colonial subjects in that they were forced into the capitalist system and subsequently
exploited by it. The resulting economic inequalities and powerlessness in the political
arena experienced by the migrants translates into a cultural struggle for preservation of a
unique way of life. In early texts, this struggle motivates the promotion of the ideology of
cultural survival. Neil Lazarus explains that “[minority literature] gestures towards a
world in which autonomy and popular self-determination will be politically meaningful
concepts” (57). Certainly the Franco-American community leaders dreamed of and
agitated for a Francophone collectivity diametrically opposed to the dominant
Anglophone culture’s social, religious, and linguistic traditions. This collectivity finds its
expression in the literary promotion of ideology of la survivance in the face of oppressors
who would seek to eliminate the language, faith, and cultural traditions that French-
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Canadian immigrants brought with them. In a very real way, early Franco-American
literature confirms Jameson’s “national allegory” hypothesis of subaltern literature. This
hypothesis, presented in his essay “Third-world Literature in the Era of Multinational
Capitalism” (1986), drew heavy fire from a variety of intellectuals, third-world or not,
and continues to generate scholarly discourse.
In his essay Jameson argues that texts of backward zones of capital promote
themselves overtly as vehicles of national consciousness. The reading of these texts from
a Western point of view, Jameson posits, is informed by the reader’s attitudes,
perceptions, and tastes, among other things. The disconnect between the Western reader
and the third-world Other reader contributes to negative Western reactions to subaltern
texts. Jameson explains,
We sense, between ourselves and this alien text, the presence of another reader, of
the Other reader, for whom a narrative, which strikes us as conventional or naïve,
has a freshness of information and a social interest that we cannot share. . . . [T]o
read this text adequately, we would have to give up a great deal that is
individually precious to us and acknowledge an existence and a situation
unfamiliar and therefore frightening. (317)
Here he indicates that the prejudices of Western readers prevent a nonjudgmental reading
of subaltern texts. Noncanonical texts, according to Jameson, will always fail to offer
“the satisfactions of Proust or Joyce” (316) precisely because the yardstick by which
these texts are measured borrows, as he puts it, “the weapons of the adversary” (316).
Western readers therefore assign negative value to texts which, from their standpoint,
seem hopelessly outmoded and parochial, a charge leveled in the past at FrancoAmerican literature.
Subaltern texts, Jameson maintains, “are all in various distinct ways locked in a
life-and-death struggle with first-world cultural imperialism—a struggle that is itself a
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reflexion of the economic situation of such areas in their penetration by various stages of
capital, or as it is sometimes euphemistically termed, of modernization” (319). This
observation certainly has relevance to texts such as Jeanne la fileuse, Canuck, Les
aspirations d’une race, and L’Innocente Victime. In their militant promotion of la
survivance, early Franco-American texts engaged in a “life-and-death struggle” against
assimilation into what Jameson terms “first-world cultural imperialism.” These early
texts orchestrate a national consciousness grounded in the French-language, French
culture, and Roman-Catholicism, a space in which the working class is urged by the
Franco-American elite to resist assimilation into the dominant Anglophone culture.
Jameson’s notion of third-world literature and nationalism contributes, therefore,
significant insights into the nation-ness embodied in the literature of cultural survival.
2.6 Canuck: A Novel of Dis-location
Camille Lessard-Bissonnette’s Canuck appeared in 1936 in serial form in Le
Messager, Lewiston, Maine’s French-language daily newspaper. Born in 1883 in SainteJulie-de-Mégantic, a region of asbestos mining in Quebec province, Lessard-Bissonnette
taught in a rural school for several years before emigrating with her family to Lewiston in
1904. The author writes from and about the spaces she herself occupied—both the
enclosed space of the city and the dispersive space of the Quebec countryside. She
worked in the textile mills of Lewiston for several years before joining the Messager
staff as editor of Chez Nous, the women’s page. Her career follows the path outlined by
Franco-American scholar Paul Paré: “Those Francos who did some writing, either
fiction, poetry, or historical works, were nearly all involved in some way with
newspapers” (237). In fact, her career continued well into her retirement years as she
contributed articles regularly to Le Messager and to Montréal’s La Patrie.
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The parodic irony of the title of the novel, Canuck, gives some indication of the
willingness of the narrator to deal with the negative aspects of immigration, a willingness
not readily apparent in the narration of Jeanne la fileuse.10 Éloïse Brière characterizes the
racial slur as “ce mot qui a si souvent blessé l’oreille franco-américaine” (117).
Surprisingly, the slur is uttered by French-Canadian girls who mock the heroine, Vic,
dressed unfashionably in a shapeless frock, metal-tipped boots, and a rustic straw hat. In
this incident, Vic is knocked to the ground, kicked, and beaten by the three mill workers,
who then attempt to throw her into the canal in what the narrator terms “[c]ette manie de
persécuter les nouveaux arrivants qui ont l’air plus chien battu que les autres” (14). The
ugliness of the scene propels the reader into the rough streets of Lowell, Massachusetts,
in the winter of 1900, a year that saw the French-Canadian population of the city swell to
twenty-six percent of the total. The residence patterns of the migrants indicate their
constant dislocation between Lowell and Quebec province. Lack of a stable working
class in Lowell has been well documented by historians who affirm that after more than
thirty years of French-Canadian settlement and abandonment patterns, some measure of
permanency began to be established around the turn of the century (Early, “The FrenchCanadian” 181).
The bloodying of Vic in the opening pages of the novel depicts the hostile
welcome immigrant workers faced in New England, even from their own countrymen.
Vic’s beating underscores the contentious nature of many French-Canadian migrants and
serves to demystify the myth of the docile, subservient French-Canadian mill worker so
prevalent in prose fiction and historical essays. This migrant population often did battle
with the Irish mill workers: “Contemporary sources and oral interviews with long-time
residents in Lowell demonstrate that the French Canadians and the Irish harbored
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feelings of ill-will towards each other from the very beginning” (Early, “The FrenchCanadian” 23). The owner of a sawmill in downtown Lowell had to build a separate
cabin “pour que ses employés canadiens-français puissent prendre leurs repas sans
risquer d’être insultés ou assommés par une pierre” (Doty, The First 31). Tensions
between the two groups ran high as competition in the workplace fueled animosities.
The narrator portrays Lowell, home to the United States’ first large-scale textile
enterprise, as a tumultuous, overcrowded, and unsanitary place.11 Canuck begins with an
exploration of urban space as it impacts the lives of the Labranche family—Vic, her twin
brothers, and her parents. The novel, more localized and situated than Jeanne la fileuse in
its representation of city space, determinedly explores the characters’changing
relationships to the urban setting and their ultimate abandonment of it.
The narrative depicts a Lowell far different from the utopia Nathan Appleton and
his partners sought to create in founding the Merrimack Manufacturing Company and far
different from poet John Greenleaf Whittier’s vision of Lowell as “. . . a city springing
up, like the enchanted palaces of the Arabian tales” (qtd. in Moran 7). Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow, Appleton’s son-in-law, held vast shares of stock in the Lowell mills, as did
many aristocratic Boston families (Moran 55). Ironically, Longfellow, an abolitionist
who decried slavery, seemed unconcerned with working conditions in his own mills
(Moran 54). Canuck describes the Lowell mills’ thirteen-hour work days that began at
five in the morning, reducing the members of the Labranche family to virtual slaves.
Rémi Tremblay, Franco-American novelist, journalist, and contemporary of LessardBissonnette, writes of this period: “Les portes des manufactures s’ouvraient à cinq heures
du matin et se fermaient à sept heures du soir, avec relâche de midi à une heure pour le
dîner, ce qui faisait bien treize heures de travail par jour. Et il en était ainsi durant toute
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l’année. Pas de Noël, pas de Jour de l’An; une seule fête dans les douze mois: le 4
juillet” (67).
The death of Besson, Maurice’s consumptive, hunchback twin brother, breaks the
oppressive routine of toil in the mills. Unable to function in the new, urban, dynamic
space, Vic’s parents return to the old, rural, static place—the family farmstead; Maurice
begins his studies in a Quebec seminary. Vic stays behind in Lowell and, in yet another
dislocation, changes jobs and living quarters. The more lucrative salary she earns in a
shoe factory enables her to finance Maurice’s education for the priesthood.12
Thus, the middle chapters of Canuck, with their emphasis on dislocation, attest to
a new spatiality—both geographic and psychological—as though the death of Besson,
like a stone tossed in a pool, produces a ripple effect felt by each of the characters. As
they move through space they each develop and change in sometimes subtle, sometimes
striking ways. For example, Vic evolves from victim of physical violence at the hands of
her trio of attackers to master of the family farm following the death of her father. She
also begins a spiritual journey in which she challenges the rhetoric of la survivance in her
questioning of church doctrine and blind faith.
The sudden appearance of Père L’Allumette in the final chapters of the novel
foregrounds a further spatial expansion of the text. A mystical figure, a sort of Cajun
coureur de bois, Père L’Allumette has wandered the North American continent for over
twenty years from the tropical bayous of Louisiana to the vast forests of Lower Canada.
This visionary traveler, a key figure in the narrative, mirrors the incessant wandering and
dislocation among the major characters that ground the novel. Père L’Allumette lives
beyond the farm and serves as a catalyst for the final opening up of space. The narrative
technique in Canuck can be likened to an inverted funnel that expands progressively
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upward from a narrow base to a wide aperture. Singular and unexpected events interrupt
this narrative and impede its smooth expansion, bringing radical changes in the course of
the various characters’ lives. Unlike the individuals in Jeanne la fileuse who at the close
of the narrative are stuck in place, the characters in Canuck seem finally to be lost in
space.
2.6.1 Lowell and the Fabric of Despair
In the opening pages of Canuck, Vic and Maurice explore the crowded city of
Lowell on foot. The vantage point of pedestrian in the city recalls de Certeau’s notion of
lieu as a place constructed by the individuals and groups who move through it and, in the
process, confer meaning upon it. He writes in L’Invention du quotidien, I: Arts de faire:
“En somme, l’espace est un lieu pratiqué. Ainsi la rue géométriquement définie par un
urbanisme est transformée en espace par des marcheurs” (173). For de Certeau, a place
such as a street represents stasis; space, on the other hand, is dynamic, existing through
movement. Spaces are therefore activated by the movement occurring in them. Thus de
Certeau argues that space is a performed place. These performances, however, can
conflict. For example, Vic’s attackers challenge her use of the very space that they
believe they control. Power relations thus mediate movement through the Petit Canada’s
poorest neighborhoods and determine where and when those outside the power circle can
walk.
Vic and Maurice’s walk establishes Lowell in a series of snapshot images
sequentially mounted in the text. “Le trottoir en avant de la gare” becomes a springboard
launching the two observers into the city space where unsettling pictures flash before the
pedestrians’ eyes : “. . . la rue sale qui s’éveille, les maisons grises qui s’ébranlent, les
vitres ternies dont les toiles se lèvent . . .” (4). All of these images convey the bustle of a
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city throwing off sleep to begin its day as the newly-arrived Labranche clan begins its life
in Lowell. These images of a morning routine, one that the Labranche family will soon
share, reproduce the scene first with a wide-angle lens (le trottoir, la rue), then zoom in
to houses, to windows, and finally to curtains. The progressive reduction in scope of the
characters’ construction of the neighborhood, in line with de Certeau’s notion of space as
practice, also indicates their attempts to come to terms with the urban environment.
Adjustments of this nature—that is, the fine-tuning of the picture—seem to be a
prerequisite to grasping the meaning of the new locus and the individual’s place in it.
Maurice, too excited by the unfamiliar scene, misses the details that Vic studies: “. . . les
bâtisses à ‘tenements’ qui semblent toutes pareilles, les ‘shops’ poussiéreuses, les usines
enfumées ;” her evaluation of this textual photo gallery reveals disdain and resignation.
Disillusioned, she mumbles, “C’est ça les États! Et c’est ici que je vais vivre”(4).
Reading the built environment of Lowell as social text, Canuck’s narrator gives
voice to the effects of migration and the resulting dislocation on working-class FrenchCanadian families and their subsequent attempts at emplacement in the urban setting. The
Labranche family’s frame of reference, rooted in the rural values of their isolated
preindustrial village, orients them to a world quite different from the urban, industrialized
city they encounter in Lowell. The characters’ feelings of exile and displacement testify
to disembedded and fragmented identities. The following metaphor likens the
immigrants’ attempts to establish identity to the production of textiles: “The fragile
weave of existence is increasingly fashioned on the warp and woof of incoherence,
uncertainty, instability, and discontinuity” (Yaeger 154). The lifestyle of the Labranche
family in Lowell typifies the poverty, violence, and disease that immigrant families
encountered in its overcrowded neighborhoods. An examination of the places that the
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Labranche family experiences reveals alternating portraits of domestic, interior space and
exterior, urban space. The interior space, a poor, sparsely furnished tenement apartment,
frames the repetitive events of the Labranche’s daily life. The exterior space functions as
a locus of singular, negative incidents such as the attack on Vic or the harassment of her
sickly brother.
The characters’ responses to place, narrated from their different perspectives,
reveal a rejection of the industrialized space they encounter in the new urban setting.
Lowell, built according to utopian or philanthropic principles, exemplifies the
articulation of space as a social product. A number of historians have explored this city’s
construction as a model of environmental engineering that inspired nineteenth-century
British industrialists bent on social reform.13 And yet Lowell, for the Labranche family,
represents a negative place, one that on his deathbed Besson summarizes in these terms:
“C’est sale, c’est poussiéreux, c’est laid” (34). As early as the 1850s the city had
become decidedly overcrowded. Thomas Dublin itemizes the chaotic growth in a three
and a half acre tract adjacent to the mills:
In the central district . . . we find the City Hall . . . the post office, city library, two
churches, three banks, one grammar school and three primary schools, . . . ninety
stores . . . two smithies, several machine shops, a foundry, coal and wood yard,
three livery stables, and two hundred and fifty-four tenements, inhabited by one
thousand and forty-five individuals. (Women 135)
Looking down on the streets below from a perch afforded by the tenement
apartment’s living room window, Besson spends the long hours that his family toils at the
mill studying the individuals who constantly negotiate the maze of city streets. Besson’s
panoramic view of Lowell “le transporte en voyeur” (de Certeau 140). Too ill to work,
the child spends “ses heures libres dans la fenêtre, au 4eme, à regarder la rue, mais plus
souvent la voûte azurée” (19). The obvious opposition here between earth and heaven
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may mask less apparent complexities. Besson’s perch functions as a liminal space, a
threshold beyond which circulate individuals whom de Certeau might characterize as
always questing and always absent. “Marcher,” he insists, “c’est manquer de lieu. . . .
L’errance que multiplie et rassemble la ville en fait une immense expérience sociale de la
privation de lieu” (155). Urban space, unstable and ever-changing, filled with individuals
constantly on the move, reflects the dislocation present throughout Canuck. Its
characters, incessantly in motion, represent, on a small scale, the mass of pedestrians
beneath Besson’s window. From de Certeau’s view, these marcheurs attempt to make
sense out of space in what he terms “l’énonciation piétonnière” (150). These incessant
spatial patterns frame the picture of migrant rootlessness that repeats itself daily under
Besson’s gaze.
No less a seeker than the passersby that he daily studies, the sickly child also
experiences the deprivation of place. The narrator establishes this parallel displacement
in a description of Besson’s dreams of the homeland: “L’enfant rêvait aux arbres, aux
prés verts et aux fleurs de la ferme canadienne . . . aux goujons des ruisseaux, aux fraises
des champs, aux mûres des bois, mais il rêvait aussi au ciel . . .” (19). The harmony of
nature depicted in the passage contrasts sharply with the city as a jumble of fragmented
forms exemplified in the maze of crowded streets filled with individuals rushing to and
fro.
The introduction in this chapter of a white rat that negotiates the maze of
apartment rooms mirrors the scampering of pedestrians through the labyrinth of city
streets below. At night the rat, Besson’s pet, sleeps in a diminutive box, an image that
functions as a mise en abîme for the Labranche family’s shoebox-apartment existence.
Besson’s other pet, a sparrow with a broken wing, seems even more pathetic than the rat:
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“Besson aurait bien aimé posséder un serin chanteur, afin que des chants d’oiseau lui
tinssent compagnie quand il serait seul, mais un moineau avec une aile brisée, c’était
mieux que rien” (22). The two caged creatures imply the despair, loneliness, and feelings
of entrapment that characterize Besson’s relationship to the city.
Maurice, Besson’s twin, experiences Lowell as a mill employee. Disregarding
Maurice’s desire to go to school, his father sends him to work at the age of ten, in
violation of child labor laws. (It was common practice to send children from seven to ten
years of age to the factory rather than to school and easy to deceive company officials
glad to hire extra hands.14) Maurice emerges as the victim of exploitation in the
workplace and of abuse at the hands of his father in the home. The inhumanity of the
factory environment coupled with the violence in the family setting reveal Maurice’s
subjection to systems—economic and patriarchal—that he cannot control.
After three years in the mill, Maurice accepts a better job there without consulting
his father. This change necessitates the loss of a half-day’s wage. Upon hearing the news,
his father explodes in rage. As Vic defends her brother’s actions Vital screams, “Je vais
vous montrer, encore une fois, qui est maître ici, si c’est Maurice ou moi! Je l’attends et
il va manger la meilleure volée qu’il n’a jamais eue de sa vie” (25). The outburst reveals
Vital’s perception of Maurice, who takes on meaning only through the contribution of his
salary to the household bank account. The individual, swallowed up in the collectivity of
the family unit, had to surrender the pay envelope to the father, treasurer of the clan. This
phenomenon repeated itself in French-Canadian tenements throughout New England
(Roby 70). Maurice also suffered physical abuse in the home, a pattern that emerges from
Vital’s threats to deliver the worst beating of the child’s life.
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This incident provokes a confrontation between Vic and her father in which she
vows to leave the family unit should he follow through with his threats. Monetary loss, in
the form of Vic’s salary, is an effective bargaining tactic to use with such a miser. When
Vital lashes out with a promise to call the police to bring her back, Vic retaliates with a
threat of her own:
Fais-moi revenir par la police et moi, de mon côté, je te ferai prendre ma place
toute chaude dans la patrouille! N’oublie pas que tu as commis un acte criminal
en forçant Maurice à travailler aux fabriques alors que tu aurais dû l’envoyer à
l’école! Tu l’as fait passer pour 15 ans afin d’exploiter la santé, les sueurs et le
sang de cet enfant, à ton profit! Qu’est-ce que tu penses que la police dirait si je le
lui apprenais? (25)
Vic’s rebellion against her father reveals a deeper revolt “contre la tyrannie de toute une
société. Cette exploitation des moins forts, une cruauté vécue par sa mère, par son frère et
par Vic elle-même, est fustiguée par l’héroïne dans [cet] épisode” (Shideler 35). After
three years of abject oppression in Lowell, Vic, at this moment of crisis, confronts her
father, and by extension, the patriarchal structure of society and the mill corporation. A
new self-confidence and self-sufficiency propel the heroine to leave the family unit and
to change jobs at this decisive moment in the narrative. Such an assertiveness also leads
her to explore Lowell, to move beyond her feelings of alienation and fear, and to seek to
possess—rather than to submit to—the city.
Many years before, after he had rescued her from her attackers, Vic’s liberator
had offered her his card. Unable to break free from her bondage to the factory and to her
father, she did not pursue the relationship. Her father had, in the past, forbidden her to
walk about the city for fear of having to incur the expense of replacing her shoes. Only
now, after her liberation from Vital’s obsessive control, can Vic move beyond the
confinement, oppression, and solitude that capitalism and patriarchal power had imposed
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upon her. In a very real sense, her actions represent a kind of vic-tory over forces that, in
the past, had curtailed her individuality and freedom. She desires to establish
relationships with others, to recreate herself as a social being as she explores, free from
the old constraints, the city of Lowell. Thus, the outward manifestation of openness to the
Other is explored spatially in the text as Vic frequents shops in a better neighborhood and
pays a visit to Mme Fénélon, her rescuer’s genteel mother, in their well-appointed
mansion. As Vic moves from room to room she realizes that the gracious home is “si
différent de celui où elle a toujours vécu . . . si beau, calme, et bon” (37).
This first visit leads to the establishment of a number of new contacts as Vic
works through constructing her place in the world. The lasting friendship that she
establishes with Mme Fénélon enables her to cross social boundaries, and she becomes a
regular visitor to the card parties that her mentor hosts. Canuck offers a rich exploration
of the multiplicity of place in line with Doreen Massey’s definition of the concept. She
posits that places “are not so much bounded areas as open and porous networks of social
relations.” She further argues that “what is to be the dominant image of any place will be
a matter of contestation and will change over time” (121). This notion of place certainly
corresponds to Vic’s changing relationship to individuals and her interaction with them.
As her confidence grows, so too does her circle of well-placed acquaintances.
In the opening chapters of the novel, the representation of the urban setting
emphasizes Vic’s isolation and anguish. As the vic-tim of physical abuse at the hands of
her three attackers and of psychological abuse by her father, Vic responds to these
difficulties with tactics of flight or avoidance. Whether she is dodging a sharp, wellplaced elbow to her back or escaping her father’s wrath in her lonely room, Vic’s
existence in Lowell reveals profound alienation and unrelenting solitude. After the
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confrontation with her father, she begins to actively subvert his control by removing
herself from the family’s apartment, establishing a home at Vaillancourt’s boarding
house, and supplying creature comforts to her mother and brothers. As she gains the
confidence and maturity that her new-found sense of place confers, Vic begins to
network with a surprising number of individuals. Her expanding sense of self and place
converge.
2.6.2 From Lowell to the Cantons de l’Est: Places of Metamorphosis
For Vic, city space becomes an arena in which she can explore the impact of the
exterior environment upon her own subjectivity. The narrator thereby establishes a
connection between urban experience and individual self-exploration. Vic, a protagonist
whose sense of the city blossoms as she herself becomes open to new and turbulent
sensations, exemplifies the complementary nature of subjectivity and topography. Thus
Vic’s encounters with urban and rural space in the middle chapters of Canuck provide
insights into her inner space and her changing sense of identity.
In these middle chapters one hears a second narrative voice—Vic’s own—in
lengthy conversations with her mentor, Mme Fénélon, her rescuer, Raymond Fénélon,
and her suitor, Jean Guay. Her diary entries over a five-year period further document the
stages in her changing sense of self. That she begins her diary on the first of November,
1906, “ce soir des Morts” (48), suggests the withering of the unconsummated
relationship even before it blooms. This journal can be deemed a kind of “travel diary” in
two respects: first, it chronicles a journey to greater self-awareness as the heroine seeks
to define and situate herself with respect to the others she encounters. Secondly, it
literally traces the routes that the couple follows in their five-year relationship in transit.
These routes lead, for example, from workplace to boarding house, to and from Mme
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Fénélon’s mansion, and from post office to park, as Vic makes use of any pretext to walk
with Jean. In her diary she makes constant reference to footsteps, to pathways, to routes,
to climbing steps, to walking hand in hand. These images underscore the sense of always
being betwixt and between two places, unable to resolve her relationship with Jean whose
promises to marry her wear quite thin. In the portrayal of Jean as constantly in
motion—whether avoiding Vic at various social functions or waltzing by her at soirées in
the arms of others—the narrative emphasizes the disorientation and displacement
inherent in the urban immigrant experience and the characters’ search for selfknowledge.
Jean can be viewed as somewhat of a latter-day flâneur, one drawn to the
bustling, electrified streets of Lowell. Keith Tester describes flânerie as “. . . a recurring
motif in literature, sociology and art of urban, and most especially, of the metropolitan
existence.” Making the point that flânerie has been traditionally associated with Paris and
Walter Benjamin’s statement about modernity inspired by Baudelaire, Tester admits that
“the flâneur has been allowed, or made, to take a number of walks away from the streets
and arcades of nineteenth-century Paris” (1). Jean Guay seems a likely candidate for
flâneur status. An independently wealthy male and a bit of a dandy, Jean remains a
spectator of love rather than a participant in it. Toying with Vic, Colombine, and a host
of women, Jean pursues his trek through relationships as unproductive and unresolved as
his wanderings through the streets of Lowell. To wander implies to drift without
direction, to experience space in a nonconstructed manner, certainly a metaphor for
Jean’s indecisiveness about his various relationships. His meanderings also serve to
foreground the heterogeneous city space through which individuals, once they have left
the stable, provincial village, drift, morally or physically lost. Jean’s wanderings also
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point to the inability of the transplanted migrants to read or to totalize the new urban area
as a whole, rather than as a fragmented, text.
Vic’s diary jottings during the love affair progressively reveal a heightened sense
of her own identity as an independent subject who has begun to think for herself. She has
also begun to feel the passion and torment of unfulfilled sexual desires and to dream of
future happiness with Jean. This long-postponed sensual awakening—Vic has reached
the age of twenty-six—ends in the bitter disillusionment that rejection by her suitor
occasions. After Jean rejects her, she asks God “A quoi cela sert-il d’être bonne si on est
recompensée comme je le suis?” (44). She writes about the disappointments of life
having forced her to “monter les marches d’un calvaire” (48), and concludes by warning
God: “Demain, je cesserai d’être vertueuese pour me lancer sur la pente où, dit-on, on ne
rencontre que des roses sans épines. . . . Mon Dieu, n’ai-je pas droit à ma part de
bonheur?” (44). As the heroine grapples with despair, she finds herself rescued a second
time by Raymond Fénélon, who declines her provocative invitation: “Prenez-moi,” she
implores him, “et faites-moi oublier!” (45). In comforting her, Raymond reveals his love
for her, a love he has long kept hidden.
Malgré tout, Dieu t’aime puisqu’Il a dirigé tes pas vers moi dans la plus grande
tempête qui ait passé sur ton front. Cet orage va se calmer et tu finiras par
comprendre que tout ce qui arrive est pour le mieux. Dieu va se charger
d’arranger les choses pour toi sans que je m’en mêle. Les desseins de la
Providence sont bien profonds, Vic. (46)
This prophetic last sentence, the same spoken to her by the priest at the time of Besson’s
death, annoys Vic and prompts her to defiantly ask, “Va-t-il encore s’ouvrir une autre
tombe sous mes pas pour changer le cours de ma vie?” (46). An answer comes the
following day in a telegram from the Cantons de l’Est: “Ton père paralysé. Ai besoin de
toi. Viens. Maman” (47).
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As Vic negotiates the double loss of Jean and her father in the weeks to come, her
diary entries reveal a growing questioning of things spiritual. The presence of the parish
priest, the spiritual guidance that Raymond offers, Maurice’s studies at the seminary, and
Vic’s own sense of having merited God’s punishment—all these elements indicate the
pervasive place of religion in Franco-American culture in general and in the heroine’s
spiritual questing in particular.
Commenting on a gift from Jean, Vic calls her cross necklace “un lugubre bijou”
and wonders aloud, “Quelle idée avais-tu en me faisant un tel cadeau, Jean? Cependant,
lorsqu’elles sont suspendues à mon cou, si je sens la croix et la chaîne sur ma chair, je
sais sourire en pensant que cela me vient de toi, Jean” (61). Vic’s sense of burden,
articulated here, exemplifies Franco-American beliefs in “the trial of life and the ultimate
reward of everlasting peace or punishment . . . [after] the person has borne his or her
cross” (French 187). Thus, religious overtones not apparent in Jeanne la fileuse permeate
the pages of Canuck as Vic questions and contests established dogma emboldened by her
emerging sense of self-assertiveness.
Although it is not feasible or necessary here to chronicle the complex history of
the establishment of French-Canadian parishes in the new locus, one should note that
places such as the church edifice, the rectory, and the parochial school influenced, on a
daily basis, the French-Canadian experience of city space and promoted the values of
cultural survival. The great Catholic concentration in New England can be attributed, in
large part, to French-Canadian settlement patterns in urban centers of the Northeast
(Zelinsky Exploring 84). Cultural anthropologists point out that many first-generation
Franco-Americans clung to Roman Catholicism as a means of ensuring their linguistic
and cultural survival in the new urban space.15 In this attempt at maintaining the old
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ways, they were supported by the clergy, by editorials in French-language newspapers,
and even by speeches made by Quebec politicians, with repatriation as their hidden
agenda.
Journalist, sociologist, and author of The Delusson Family, Jacques Ducharme
insists upon the link between language and faith in his study of the French-Canadian
migration to New England: “It is impossible to deny the mystic bond that exists between
the language and religion of the Franco-Americans” (The Shadows 66). Writing just
seven years after the publication of Canuck, he argues that the Church, as a social
institution, has always been uniquely positioned to preserve the linguistic identity of the
inhabitants of the Petits Canadas. “Experience has shown us,” he writes, “that faith and
language are almost synonymous. The rise or fall of the clergy is the rise or fall of the
whole nationality”(The Shadows 85). The church, as a physical structure in the urban
space, localized and grounded the experience of neighborhood life: “I was in Fall River
one time and asked some directions,” explains Ducharme. “‘It’s over by Notre Dame.’
This meant that I should use the church of Notre Dame de Lourdes to get my bearings. I
had the same experience in Lewiston, in Southbridge, in Lowell, and elsewhere. The
cardinal point of the compass for the Franco-American is his parish church”(The
Shadows 63).
In urban centers such as Lowell, Fall River, or Woonsocket, the mill stood in the
shadow of the steeple. Both the smokestack and the steeple profoundly shaped the
Franco-American’s sense of place at the turn of the century. According to historian Nive
Voisine, the immigrants remained faithful to “le catholicisme non pas parce qu’il leur est
imposé, mais parce qu’il apporte des réponses à leurs questions et qu’il continue d’être
pour eux un lieu d’identification” (33). Vic, in her distress, feels dissatisfied with the
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answers proffered by the priest and by Raymond. Her dissatisfaction indicates the
narrator’s willingness to depart from traditional, conservative portrayals of life in Little
Canada, such as Nive Voisine’s, in order to record the stages in the heroine’s
unconventional metamorphosis. Vic’s religious questioning also indicates that the
ideology of la survivance may have been less universally accepted than its widespread
promotion would indicate.
In contesting the idealized depiction of the Roman Catholic immigrant family,
Canuck “fait éclater le mythe du bon pater familias canadien-français. [Le roman] fait
aussi éclater le mythe du Canadien-français insensible au matérialisme, car c’est bien
l’appât du gain qui anime le comportement du père” (Brière 118). Vital Labranche’s
cupidity reveals itself in his reluctance to contribute to the collection plate. Vic
complains that although she contributes her entire weekly salary of twenty dollars to the
family bank account, her father is unwilling to part with “10 cents pour payer [la] messe”
(27). Claude-Henri Grignon’s Un homme et son péché (1933) portrays a quintessential
miser—Séraphin Poudrier—whose avarice leads to the death of his young wife Donalda.
This anti-terroir text, published in Montreal three years before Canuck, points to the
stirrings of a contestation of long-held values associated with the French-Canadian
habitant.
Despite her father’s past miserliness, Vic does not hesitate to come to the family’s
aid and travels by train to the Cantons de l’Est by the same route she had followed eleven
years before in her journey to Lowell. The narrator’s insistence upon mapping the
stations by name—Nashua, Manchester, Concord, Laconia, St. Johnsbury—emphasizes
the distance between the abandoned urban center and the ancestral land regained. The
journey is arduous, desolate, foreboding. Winter’s landscape of “les arbres dénudés . . . la
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terre blanche . . . les cours d’eau recouverts de glace . . .” makes no impression on Vic,
who is continually haunted by a single image, that of “son père terrassé par la maladie,
son père, à ce que lui écrivit sa mère, qui n’était pas le même depuis la mort de Besson”
(63). The locomotive, stopped in its tracks by huge drifts of blowing snow, is no more
able to move than Vic’s father, who lies paralyzed in a farm house far away. After a
delay of several hours, Vic finally reaches the station only to discover that there are no
sleighs able to cover the six-mile distance at the height of the storm. Even the next day
the team of horses struggles through drifts, dumping Vic and the driver into waist-high
snow. Finally rescued by a neighbor, Vic covers the final mile in a bob-sleigh.
The chapter of the blizzard, entitled “La vie des campagnes,” traces Vic’s escape
from the narrow spatial framework of her former city life into the vast, wintry landscape
of the Cantons de l’Est. The open feeling of the terrain that this expanded perspective
conveys foreshadows Vic’s personal growth and transformation in the regained rural
locus. The heroine takes responsibility for the management of the ancestral lands
following the death of her father and sees to all the details of running a profitable
farm—the spring sugaring, the summer haying, the autumn harvesting, the winter
repairing of equipment. The cycles of rural life establish the measured rhythm of Vic’s
existence, and the place once lost to her and found again compensates, to some extent, for
the loss of Jean and the deaths of her father and of Mme Fénélon.
In the open vistas of the Cantons de l’Est, Vic distances herself from the crush of
human propinquity experienced in urban space. The unique spatialities of Lowell’s
teeming neighborhoods, loci of crime, poverty, disease, and heartbreak fade from her
consciousness as Vic begins to find her place in the world. Her metamorphosis, one that
began in the city of Lowell, enters the home stretch in the Eastern Townships.
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2.6.3 Lessons from “La vie d’un errant”
Père L’Allumette, the errant of the chapter’s title, functions in a number of ways
as a pivotal character. Although his introduction in the final chapters of the novel adds to
the disjunctive structure of a novel serialized in the weekly French-language press, his
presence signals a further expansion of space to include the exotic bayous of Louisiana
and the indigenous French-speaking population that calls this marshland its home. These
francophone speakers hors Québec call into question the entire issue of cultural survival
and imply the loss of place and identity that the ceding, in 1803, of the last lands of New
France to the United States engendered. The choice of Louisiana as the vagabond’s home
functions as a trope of lost Eden. Lord Durham’s Report, mentioned earlier in regard to
the Patriot Rebellion, held up Louisiana as a model of assimilation of French language
and culture:
The influence of perfectly equal and popular institutions in effacing distinctions
of race without disorder or oppression . . . is memorably exemplified in the
history of the state of Louisiana. . . . And the eminent success of the policy
adopted with regard to that state, points out to us the means by which a similar
result can be effected in Lower Canada. (154)
Lord Durham applauded the attempt of “every aspiring man to merge his French and
adopt completely an American nationality” (156). In a very real way, the introduction of
Louisiana into the text serves to remind the Franco-American readers what could happen
to their culture should Roman Catholicism and the French language continue their retreat
in the face of the pressures of assimilation. The narrator thus invests Père L’Allumette
with considerable cultural baggage in his annual peregrination between Bayou Teche and
Lower Canada.
His story, one of crime and reformation, involves the murders of his young wife
and her older brother, a man he mistook for an amorous rival. His repentance includes his
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return, after a lengthy prison sentence, to work as a hired hand on the family sugarcane
plantation in St. Martinville, a city considered, in the nineteenth century, the petit Paris
of Louisiana. His changed appearance hides his true identity, and only on her deathbed
does his mother seem to recognize him. He makes no claim upon the estate, content to
receive the exotic pet bird that was his mother’s favorite. That delicate, caged creature
symbolizes, perhaps, the fragile nature of bonds of affection. Forced to endure the cold
climates that Père travels through, the tiny bird withers and dies, and thus Père loses the
last link to his beloved mother.
This brief summary masks the polysemous nature of the account. In the diary
discovered after his death at the Labranche farm (his annual destination for over twenty
years), Père L’Allumette describes his mother’s garden, a space that exerted a
transforming influence on his character. The depiction of this enclosed space reveals
Père’s deepest, most private reflections on his homeland and his past. Far from being a
European garden of symmetrical, well-ordered rows of shrubs, Père’s flamboyant bower
displays an undisciplined, lush jungle of dense tropical plantings of all varieties. In a
lovingly crafted ten-page botanical description of the sensual garden, Père underscores
the exoticism of the spot and introduces to the reader all manner of vegetation from
foreign locales: Chinese camellias, Japanese bamboo, Brazilian roses, tulip trees from
India, cotton trees of Java, and the ylang-ylang of the Philippines, to name but a few.
Père L’Allumette conveys the colors and perfumes of his earthly paradise from
the perspective of a stroll through the garden:
Des immenses parterres dégorgeaient les “hibiscus,” les “frangipanis” et les
orchidées sauvages. Le violet du bougainville se mariait au mauve du hyacinthe
d’étang, tandis que le jaune et rouge vif du “canna” se mêlait au bleu ciel du
bonnet-bleu-texan. D’un côté, —quand c’est la saison propice, –étincelait la
royale poincianna aux couleurs flamboyantes. Un peu plus loin l’on distinguait
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l’acacia aux fleurs en boules jaunes odorantes. Ici, c’était l’enivrante “asoka”
sacrée, fleur avec laquelle certaines sectes hindoues et chinoises décorent leurs
temples païens. (94)
Père’s walking tour of the garden towards the end of the novel counterbalances the stroll
that Vic and Maurice take in its opening pages. Filled with peaceful lagoons of exotic
beauty, murmuring fountains, and the song of birds in the aviary, this visually sybaritic
environment refutes the gray, cacophonous, and smoke-filled urban streets that Vic and
her brother investigate that first morning in Lowell. Thus the binary treatment of
civilization and nature, urban and rural spaces, discord and harmony, establishes two
opposite and mutually exclusive territories. The opposition of the “real” and the
fantastical, implied in this treatment of space, prepares us for the startling, mystical
dénouement to follow.
Thirty years before texts on the significance of gardens became fashionable,
Camille Lessard-Bissonnette designs Père L’Allumette’s garden as the antithesis of urban
space.16 The garden—an exotic, alien locale set apart from every day
experience—functions as an au-delà, a world beyond, an idealized, pastoral, fantastical
place. Leo Marx has studied the clash in American culture between the urban and the
rural. In writing about the opposition between garden and mechanized space he observes,
“For more than a century our most gifted writers have dwelt upon the contradiction
between rural myth and technological fact. The desirability of a reconciliation between
natural and civilized conditions of man has always been implied by the pastoral
landscape” (354). Père’s bower functions as the antidote to Marx’s “garden in ashes,
ruined by the machine” (26).
The character Père L’Allumette plays as critical a role in the narrative as his
garden does. His vagabond lifestyle, as revealed in his diary, sparks Vic’s desire for the
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world beyond the Cantons de l’Est. His tales of exotic, open landscapes appeal to one
who has toiled her life away in bounded spaces—be they urban or rural. In the year
following Père’s passing, Vic becomes deeply discouraged. She walks each evening on
the cliffs of the family-owned land and stares endlessly into space. In her actions she
recalls de Certeau’s marcheur, delimiting and defining her own space as she traverses it;
the height from which she does so renders her a voyeur as well:
De la crête de ce perchoir, qui se prolongeait comme une falaise, on distinguait,
par les jours clairs, les clochers de quatre églises. Si ce n’eût été du travail qui
l’appelait à la ferme, elle aurait passé des heures à regarder dans le lointain. . . .
Au fond de son cœur il y avait un vide profond comme un abîme dans lequel elle
avait peur de regarder. (106)
An unexpected, fantastical event occurs that evening and opens, literally, the heavens to
Vic in the form of a meteor that strikes the Labranche land. The resulting abyss—an
outward manifestation of the chasm in her heart—reveals a rich vein of molybdenum
situated on the family’s land. Raymond Fénélon, the geologist from Lowell, reappears at
Vic’s request to explore the mine’s potential; he discovers an extensive deposit of
minerals that hastens the sale of the land at a fabulous price. The implication of this
incredible discovery seems clear: Canada is Eldorado, not the United States, where,
instead of streets paved with gold, the Labranche clan finds only grinding poverty and
endless toil. The ancestral land yields, in this case, a fabulous monetary reward whereas
America holds no hidden treasure.
The final migrations of the novel include Maurice’s and Mme Labranche’s
journey to Rome for his final preparation for the priesthood. Raymond, a new breed of
coureur de bois who, equally devoted to the natural world as those adventurers in
Canadian folklore were, moves with his new bride, Vic, south of the border in pursuit of
Mayan ruins. These migrations seem a fitting conclusion to a text jarred by
constant dis-location.
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2.7 Place and Placelessness in Jeanne la fileuse and Canuck
Jeanne la fileuse and Canuck both testify to a sense of place-loss and a feeling of
placelessness even as they insist upon the physical presence of the family, the farm, the
city, the tenement, and the mill. Indeed, these novels seem place-saturated texts where
characters react to and accommodate specific, physical locales while attempting to
construct their identities. For example, the experience of the city of Lowell has
everything to do with Vic’s sense of identity, just as gentrified Lavaltrie conditions the
way that Montépel thinks about himself. Against the backdrop of these fixed sites, the
characters, in an on-going process, seek to negotiate their sense of self. Thus place and
space designate, respectively, fixity and fluidity, residence and renegotiation of identity.
The place of the family in Jeanne la fileuse and Canuck proves an important
milieu in which the characters shape their identities. Jeanne la fileuse elaborates a postConquest politics of identity rooted in the heritage of the families of Lower
Canada—families of habitants, of patriotes, and of sympathizers with the Crown. Any
deviation from established, collective ideology and family values in the years following
the Patriot Rebellion was unexpected and unwelcome. Thus Pierre, in breaking with the
socially accepted practices associated with wealthy landowners, shocks his bourgeois
father and mother. His work in the woods represents a revolt against the social hierarchy
he finds repressive. Yet his return to the family farm valorizes the very lifestyle he had
condemned. This about-face may be due in part to Beaugrand’s enthusiastic support of
repatriation, a government initiative, during the waning years of the nineteenth century,
that failed miserably. Given his own political stance on the issue, it may have been
tempting for Beaugrand to negotiate the return of Pierre, Jeanne, and the entire Dupuis
family to the ancestral lands. Unlike the characters of Canuck—Vic, Raymond, and Père
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L’Allumette—who open up to the world, Pierre, Jeanne, and the elder Montépels seem to
fold back upon themselves, rejecting the world beyond Lavaltrie. Only Jules, who stays
behind in Fall River, seems to progress beyond the constricting space of kinship
networks.
Family roles in the opening pages of Canuck seem equally constricted, as all
individuals work to ensure the survival of the group. Yet Vic’s revolt, Besson’s death,
and Maurice’s departure modify the traditional family constellation. No longer linked
together by the common goal of survival in an alien place, the Labranche clan must
reconstitute itself in new and creative ways. Certainly the death of the father decenters
the family. Vic, in assuming the role of surrogate patriarch, emerges as a competent and
confident head of the household and calls into question the predetermined gendered roles
in traditional Quebec families. Successfully managing the property for ten years with the
help of just one farmhand, Vic displays the kind of leadership and management skills that
reflect, perhaps, the author’s own success as a career woman.
The characters in Canuck, who live in the new environment of post-World War I
society, greet the emerging order with enthusiasm and optimism. The individuals in
Jeanne la fileuse lack this energy and seek the stability and predictability that a return to
the family farm implies. Indeed, family and farm must be considered in tandem, as the
interplay between the two shapes the destinies of the Labranche and Montépel clans. That
the Montépels choose to inhabit the land whereas the Labranches opt to sell it and move
on indicates the wide divide between the former’s static existence and the latter’s kinetic
lifestyle. These differences in lifestyles also surface in the ways in which the individuals
deal with the urban experience in general. As city-dwellers, the characters in both
Canuck and Jeanne la fileuse intensely experience the alien, teeming industrial centers of
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Lowell and Fall River. For Vic and her brothers, the city streets represent a place of
violence and thuggery, yet Vic continues to be out and about in them and Maurice vows
to take on, singlehandedly, the bullies that threaten Besson. For Jeanne and the Dupuis
family, who seem never to roam beyond their tenement, the city represents an unfamiliar
place of unrelenting toil. Nostalgic for the old traditions of the homeland, the family even
scrapes together enough money to send Michel to Montréal for a special celebration of
the Saint-Jean-Baptiste holiday. Championed by Quebec politicians, this extraordinary
event presents an opportunity to “redonner aux émigrés le désir de rentrer au bercail”
(Beaugrand 23), an overture that fails to spark the desired repatriation. Loss and
destruction tragically descend on Jeanne and the Dupuis family after Michel’s return
from Canada: the Granite Mill conflagration claims his life. The Dupuis family
ultimately returns to Contrecoeur, leaving behind only a marble monument in honor of
Michel. Ironically, his body is never found in the charred ruins of the factory. Perhaps the
destruction wrought by urban forces is so complete that all individuality is annihilated.
For the various characters of Jeanne la fileuse, the urban locus is a negative place
that they ultimately abandon. Unable to adapt to the city experience, these individuals
seem to be confined within the walls of Granite Mill or within the rooms of their
tenement house. Canuck’s characters cope better with the demands of city living. Vic,
Raymond, Maurice, Mme Labranche and Jean Guay stride through the streets of Lowell
and finally even venture far beyond the borders of North America—to Mexico and
Central America, to Rome, and to Paris, respectively.
The characters of Jeanne la fileuse achieve a settled existence in a well-defined
place: Lower Canada for the Montépels and the Dupuis family, Fall River for Jules. They
ultimately choose “to fasten themselves like a tent stake to survive” (Olson 3). The
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individuals in Canuck, on the other hand, “ride on space” (Olson 3), remain in flux, as if
to symbolize the incessant displacement of the modern human condition. The open-ended
disposition of their fates comes as no surprise in a novel dedicated to the kind of nomadic
experience typified by Père L’Allumette, a novel constructed upon the successive
abandonment of place.
Notes
¹ Robert Perreault, author, scholar, and Franco-American, characterizes the
coureur de bois as “. . . a breed of men unlike any other. These men were adventure
seekers, lovers of the savage outdoors who made their living primarily in the fur trade.
They lived in forests, on lakes and on rivers.” Perreault’s “One Piece in the Great
American Mosaic. The Franco-Americans of New England” offers a comprehensive
historical overview of the group’s evolution from its arrival in New England in the midnineteenth century through its assimilation in the second half of the twentieth century.
2
For a full analysis of the ideological construct of the coureur de bois, see
Christian Morissonneau’s “The ‘Ungovernable’ People: French-Canadian Mobility and
Identity,” book article in French America: Mobility, Identity, and Minority Experience
across the Continent.
3
Pierre Anctil’s 1980 Ph.D. dissertation at the New School for Social Research
entitled Aspects of Class Ideology in a New England Ethnic Minority: The FrancoAmerican of Woonsocket, Rhode Island (1865-1929) provides an historic overview of the
immigrant experience in an urban center in southern New England.
4
A helpful exploration of the literature of inhabitation can be found in Don
Scheese’s “Thoreau’s Journal: The Creation of a Sacred Place,” in Mapping American
Culture.
5
Robert Coles has studied domestic migration in America focusing on groups that
leave home voluntarily to improve their situations in Migrants, Sharecroppers,
Mountaineers.
6
The Saint-Hyacinthe (Quebec) newspaper of February 8, 1873, prominently
featured an impassioned commentary on the waves of migration to the mills: “Les
Canadiens, saisis d’un vertige déplorable et incompréhensible, quittent une des plus
belles terres du monde, quittent le grand air des campagnes, pour aller s’enfermer dans
les boutiques et manufactures des États-Unis, où l’on ne respire que le crime, la maladie
et la mort” (Tardivel 2). United States census data reveals that warnings of this nature
were ineffective in slowing the emigration of French Canadians to the industrial centers
in the New England states. In southern Massachusetts alone, the numbers of FrenchCanadians swelled phenomenally between 1890 and 1897: in New Bedford the
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population grew from 4,976 to 15,300 and in Fall River, from 18,585 to 30,080
(MacDonald 7). Perhaps the vituperative nature of the journalistic attacks in Quebec
prompted Beaugrand to defend so completely the adopted homeland of the mill workers
and to paint with such flattering strokes the urban space into which they settled.
7
The transition from handloom to power loom created a serious shortage of
trained operators. Skilled weavers from the British Isles were employed at higher salaries
and were awarded more comfortable company-owned apartments than their Canadian
counterparts. See Jonathan Prude’s The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory
Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810-1860.
8
A weaver such as Jeanne would have overseen six to eight power looms during
her twelve-hour shift. Each loom turned various color threads (needed for gingham and
tartan plaids) into cloth, and the weaver supervised the boys who supplied fresh weft
bobbins to the machines (Roby Les Franco-Américains 81). Failure to replace bobbins
promptly resulted in imperfections in the cloth and fines levied against individual
operators. According to personal narratives recorded during the Federal Writers’ Project
of the 1930s, weavers worked in closed, noisy, and dusty places. The narrator, however,
puts a positive spin on working conditions.
9
The work of Tamara K. Hareven and Randolph Langenbach on the textile mills
of the Amoskeag Corporation of Manchester, New Hampshire, details working
conditions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See Family Time and
Industrial Time. The Relationship between the Family and Work in a New England
Industrial Community.
10
One should note that in English Canada the term “Canuck” now has a positive
connotation: a professional hockey team is named the Vancouver Canucks, and in news
reports the term is used, for example, as in “four Canucks wounded in Afghanistan.”
11
For a first-hand account of Lowell at the end of the nineteenth-century, see
Harriet H. Robinson’s Loom and Spindle or Life among the Early Mill Girls.
12
Shoe stitching paid a weekly wage almost double that of textile factory work
and, with the introduction of shoe factories powered by steam, manufacturers steadily
hired more and more workers to run the McKay machines. Dublin’s chapter on shoe
workers in his Transforming Women’s Work offers insights into the shoe trade which,
although of lesser economic importance to antebellum Lowell than textile production, did
employ thousands of French-Canadian workers.
13
14
See historical accounts by Elizabeth Wilson in The Sphinx in the City.
In 1872 an overseer at a Southbridge, Massachusetts, textile mill remembered
telling parents that the law did not allow the hiring of children under age ten. “The next
day,” he observed, “they were all ten.” See Iris Saunders Podea’s article “Quebec to
‘Little Canada.’ The Coming of French Canadians to New England in the Nineteenth
Century.” The Aliens: A History of Ethnic Minorities in America.
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15
See Roby (Les Franco-Américains 99-126) for an historical overview of the
founding of French-Canadian parishes in New England. See also Richard Sorrell’s
unpublished dissertation: “The Sentinelle Affair (1924-29) and Militant Survivance: the
Franco-American Experience in Woonsocket, Rhode Island.”
16
Kenneth Clark in Landscape into Art, Derek Clifford in A History of Garden
Design,, and Roy Strong in The Renaissance Garden in England, all explore gardens as
places of pleasure that reflect the societies to which they belong. Strong further argues
that the garden affords insights into the meaning of space in the individual psyche.
CHAPTER 3
GENDERED SPACE
3.1 Considerations of Gender in La Jeune Franco-Américaine and
Les Enfances de Fanny
La Jeune Franco-Américaine (1933), written by a woman for a largely female
audience,1 and Les Enfances de Fanny (1951), two Franco-American novels in which
female protagonists endeavor to construct their identities within an oppressive,
patriarchal culture, invite a consideration of gendered space. Such space, socially
constructed around notions of appropriate behavior and activities for men and women,
proves to be a locus of submission and inequality for protagonists Jeanne and Fanny.
Their attempts to take control of the space in which they interact with other individuals
ultimately fail. Jeanne never succeeds in constructing an identity apart from the accepted
and traditional roles of daughter and, at the narrative’s close, new bride. Fanny, an
orphan, rejected by her sister and, later, by her husband and her son, experiences a series
of losses leading to the ultimate loss of self as she becomes the victim of a brutal murder.
Both texts foreground a masculinist ethnocentricity that precludes creation of
spaces for women. Women’s space, according to Elaine Showalter, “is the space of the
Other, the gaps, silences and absences of discourse and representation, to which the
feminine has traditionally been relegated” (36). Les Enfances de Fanny and La Jeune
Franco-Américaine concern themselves with the spaces of disempowerment of women
and with the ways in which gender plays a critical role in the construction of identity.
These texts examine feminine resistance to masculine power, a resistance that proves
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ineffective in both narratives. In each case, the heroine’s approach to the space relegated
to her differs significantly. Fanny emerges as willing to venture forth into new territory to
make a place for herself and her sons. Jeanne, on the other hand, constantly retreats from
the world, a place she fears and flees. She perceives the home as her only space of
protection. In the end, Jeanne and Fanny remain powerless Others very much in the sense
of Simone de Beauvoir’s observation on societal perceptions of women: “Etre féminine,
c’est se montrer impotente, futile, passive, docile” (99).
Ellen Bayuk Rosenman defines patriarchy as a social system in which men
monopolize power on the basis of an alleged natural right or capacity that women are
said to lack (30). Les Enfances de Fanny and La Jeune Franco-Américaine both explore
the constraints on the protagonists’ attempts to construct a viable self in the patriarchal
space that they inhabit. Jeanne and Fanny fail in the process of constructing a distinct self
and continue to see themselves as the incomplete Other in comparison to a series of
dominant male figures who manipulate them. At the end of her life, Fanny achieves some
sense of equality in her brief love affair with Donat Sylvain, but this new sensation is
brutally quashed by Charlie Ross, who slays her in a fit of jealous rage. La Jeune FrancoAméricaine and Les Enfances de Fanny can be read as explorations of their female
protagonists’ gendered experience of space and place, as an atlas of their attempts to
construct identities in spaces of oppression and danger. In both texts, the world outside
the home emerges as a harmful environment. Jeanne nearly drowns at a seaside resort,
fights off the advances of two employers, and escapes from a brothel where she has been
lured by her New York friends. After moving to urban Roxbury, Massachusetts, Fanny
meets her death at the hands of a violent, rejected suitor.
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What are the implications of a gendered interpretation of how the two
protagonists experience social space? Theorists validate in different ways the gendered
nature of identities, experiences, and cultural practices. For instance, some consider
gender to be the primary basis upon which identities are constructed and social relations
experienced (Rose, Feminist 71). From this standpoint, one’s core identity derives from
one’s gender. Gender emerges therefore at the apex of the hierarchy of social differences,
with other considerations such as race, class, and ethnicity contributing to the
construction of identity, but all the while being of secondary importance.
Such a theoretical position has implications for the way one would interpret, for
example, Fanny’s displacement from her own culture and her attempt to define her
position between two places—her native Virginia and her adopted Roxbury home. The
opposition between these two places compounds Fanny’s identity problems, as does the
tension created by those individuals who ostracize her on the basis of her race. A
consideration of the interplay of race, class, and ethnicity with gender foregrounds the
complexities of how gender interfaces with other components of identity. In Fanny’s
case, it might be difficult to identify her status as a woman as the primary factor in
constructing her sense of self, given her African-American racial identity and the
inequalities inherent in such identity. These difficulties invite considerations of other
theoretical positions concerning gender and the construction of self.
Many critics disagree with privileging gender as the primary analytic category to
explain differences and inequalities between men’s and women’s social experiences.
Linda McDowell observes that many theorists “now speak about ‘feminisms,’ preferring
the plural rather than the singular to emphasize the diversity of their perspectives and
approaches” (9). For these theorists, other differences—such as the importance of
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ethnicity, class, and race—contribute, alongside of gender, to how women shape their
identities and to how they perceive and use space, both public and private. They contend
that the diverse social forces at work in identity construction render the process of
shaping the self a complex one, irreducible to a single, overriding force. These critics
also point to the very real difficulty of separating out gender from the other components
that shape identity. Gillian Rose explains that one of the problems of establishing gender
as the primary social difference is “the assumption that it is possible to identify . . .
different and distinct components that make up an individual’s identity, and then identify
which experiences emerge out of gender differences and which are shaped by, for
example, race and sexuality” (Feminist 76).
In Fanny’s case, social differences inform the gendered nature of her experiences.
For instance, her gendered experiences are transformed by her race, her working-class
affiliation, and her Southern roots. Situations such as Fanny’s corroborate Rose’s
conclusion that “gender as a stable analytical category becomes displaced” (Feminist 79).
Jeanne’s attempt to find her own place in the world seems frustrated by a value system
imposed upon her by her ethnicity, a system that promotes la survivance at any cost.
Thus both protagonists must come to terms with very real forces that compound the
inequalities associated with gender. For purposes of my analysis, I intend to consider
Fanny’s and Jeanne’s social experience of space and place as informed by a variety of
forces based upon the premise that gender, race, ethnicity, and class are mutually
constituted.
In their text Feminist Geographies: Explorations in Diversity and Difference,
Rose and her co-editors argue that space hides hierarchical social systems in which
invisible ideologies and cultural values are inscribed. From this perspective, these
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theorists contest and challenge the meanings given to the workplace, the home, and social
space by economically and politically powerful voices, male voices that seek to impose
their own values and priorities on the less empowered. This notion has implications for
the ways in which the ideology of cultural survival insinuates itself into both narratives,
and I will explore the ways in which these texts can be considered as ideological novels. I
contend that Jeanne and Fanny, as disempowered protagonists, never successfully
construct viable, distinct identities in the gendered spaces they inhabit, notably the
workplace for Jeanne and the home for Fanny, since they are not able to make their
voices heard above the controlling male discourse that determines their social
experiences.
3.2 Doctrinal Intertexts in La Jeune Franco-Américaine and
Les Enfances de Fanny
In Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre, Susan
Rubin Suleiman defines the ideological novel as a text that seeks “through the vehicle of
fiction, to persuade [its] readers of the ‘correctness’ of a particular way of interpreting the
world” (1). Ideological novels make reference, either explicitly or implicitly, to doctrines
that exist outside the text, doctrines that are “always ‘there’ and whose presence . . .
determines the thesis of the novel” (Suleiman 56). La Jeune Franco-Américaine can be
considered an ideological novel in that it identifies itself with the doctrine of la
survivance and promotes this system of beliefs to its readers. The prescribed behaviors
that the text delineates—adherence to Roman Catholicism, marriage within one’s ethnic
group, and maintenance of the French language—constitute a doctrinal intertext that
privileges a single system of values, an unambiguous code of conduct, in an attempt to
promote stability and unity within the Franco-American community.
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La Jeune Franco-Américaine, characterized by Chartier as a roman à thèse
(“Franco-American” 32), has often been viewed negatively by critics who find that the
text’s propaganda in the cause of cultural survival invalidates it aesthetically. The novel
may indeed lack a certain artistic validity in its didactic insistence upon maintenance of
the ideology of la survivance. The narrative emerges as far more complex and
ambivalent, however, when read from a gendered perspective. In this light, the thesis that
the narrator sets out to prove, paradoxically turns upon itself, negating the very message
that it seeks to promote—one that champions the sanctity of the Franco-American family
and the sacredness of the marriage vow.
The language of the unsaid unmistakably subverts the clear exposition of an
authoritarian position that the reader is urged to affirm. What seems most intriguing
about La Jeune Franco-Américaine is that it misses its mark. Rather than limiting the
reader’s possible reaction to the story (which ideological novels do by positing one
“correct” viewpoint), the ambiguities that surface in the text encourage a variety of
interpretations. This proliferation undermines the realization of the traditional goal of the
roman à thèse—to convince or to persuade the reader of the justness of a single,
unambiguous cause.
How does La Jeune Franco-Américaine undermine its own message? The
relationship between Jeanne and her father lies at the heart of the problem. Throughout
the text, this relationship remains ambiguous and troubled, raising disquieting suspicions
and rendering the narrative’s thesis unconvincing. Jeanne’s behavior often resembles that
of a wife rather than that of a daughter. For instance, returning from a walk Jeanne “se
rendait chez son père qu’elle charmait d’une caresse et qui lui faisait oublier pour un
moment les soucis sans nombre qui le minaient” (4). Note, in this passage, the phrase
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“elle charmait d’une caresse.” One questions the appropriateness of a daughter caressing
her father. The relationship between the two leads one critic to comment, “Jeanne est liée
à son père par une sorte de complexe d’Électre qu’elle ne peut dépasser” (Brière 114).
Just as French-Canadian Laure Conan’s Angéline de Montbrun (1881) promotes
an ultramontane and nationalistic French agenda in the face of pressures to assimilate
into the dominant British culture, so, too, does La Jeune Franco-Américaine preach a
highly separatist doctrine against assimilation into mainstream America. And both texts
imply an unhealthy rapport between father and daughter, one in which what remains
unspoken emerges as far more important than what is articulated. A scene late in La
Jeune Franco-Américaine suggests improprieties that lead the reader to question the
extent of the father-daugher relationship:
Les heures furent douces et les têtes-à-têtes nombreux. Jeanne lui apparut plus
belle encore. . . . Le père ne dit rien, mais dans un mouvement plein d’affection et
de compréhension, il enserra la jeune tête, et y déposa un baiser prolongé. C’était
un soir où la nuit descend tiède et enveloppe de son ombre légère, les aveux les
plus sincères, où les confidences se font, où se mêlent à l’unisson deux âmes
unies par les plus tendres liens. (64)
The romantic backdrop of soft evening air, enveloping the couple in its shadows,
contributes to the suggestive tone of the passage, one that turns upon such unsettling
images as “têtes-à-têtes nombreux,” “un baiser prolongé,” and “deux âmes unies par les
plus tendres liens.” What confessions (“aveux”) do the two individuals make to each
other?
Following the deaths of their mothers, Angéline and Jeanne become commodities
of exchange between father and fiancé. Commenting on the transaction that disposes of
Angéline, Madeleine Gagnon writes, “La fille soumise . . . assistait silencieusement à
l’échange que l’on faisait d’elle sans qu’elle n’y participe, car après tout, elle passait du
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Père au fiancé” (66), and argues that the text implies the colonial disempowerment of
French Canada resulting from the arbitrary rule of a new authority, the British Crown.
Although Gagnon was writing in Quebec at a time when nationalist politics colored
literary interpretations, the parallel she draws between political and familial power
structures is a valid one. How do the heroines “pass from Father to fiancé” in these texts?
Certainly the father’s domination of the daughter is evident. In sexual terms, however, its
extent is merely implied, and more so in Angéline de Montbrun than in La Jeune FrancoAméricaine. In the end, both female protagonists emerge as the victims of male control
and metaphorically represent the demise of French culture in North America and its
submission to British or American rule.
Les Enfances de Fanny, less overtly a roman à thèse than Gastonguay’s text,
promotes its own agenda based upon an anti-survivance message of racial intermarriage,
the questioning of religious beliefs, and the desire to break down all barriers based upon
ethnicity. The narrator explores the religious practices of revivalists, charismatic healers,
and more traditional Baptist ministers, and gives no textual space to Roman Catholicism,2
a reaction, perhaps, to the historical controversies that, at the time, raged over local
control of parish funds.
According to Suleiman, certain historical contexts, more than others, encourage
the development of ideological novels. She explains, “The roman à thèse flourishes in
national contexts, and at historical moments, that produce sharp social and ideological
conflicts. . . . Furthermore, the genre is more likely to exist in a cultural tradition that
fosters the involvement of writers in social and intellectual debates or problems” (16-17).
Louis Dantin wrote Les Enfances de Fanny during the 1930s, the so-called golden age of
Franco-Americanity in New England, and just after the great debate known as l’agitation
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sentinelliste. This bitter debate over cultural survival, one that I explore in depth in
chapter four, split the Franco-American community into two warring factions. Against
this historical backdrop, and with writers such as Alberte Gastonguay, Camille LessardBissonnette, Paul Dufault, Gabriel Nadeau, and Rosaire Dion-Lévesque fanning the
flames of ardent Franco-American nationalism in French-language newspapers, novels,
and poetry, it should not seem surprising that Dantin, a literary critic and poet, became
involved in the debate over cultural survival.
Dantin often expressed his personal views on the subject, rejecting the notion of
la survivance as an illusion out of step with modernity:
Ce ne sont pas seulement les chemins de fer et les cheminées d’usine qui rendent
ce rêve illusoire, c’est tout un monde d’institutions et d’idées surgi depuis
lors. . . . C’est le système parlementaire et le féminisme; c’est la dernière guerre
mondiale; c’est le sol qui nous porte et l’air que nous buvons. Nous murer dans
le cloître des souvenirs, ce serait fuir la vie, rester immobiles quand tout marche
et nous condamner à une impuissance inerte. (Gloses 61)
Donat Sylvain, the white, bourgeois poet whom Fanny loves, articulates the antisurvivance message of the text: “Qu’étaient ces variations qui divisaient les races? Quelle
sottise d’y voir des obstacles à la fraternité, à l’unité humaines!” (217).
Much like La Jeune Franco-Américaine, Les Enfances de Fanny subverts its own
straightforward agenda with a plot twist that complicates its message and that contradicts
its thesis. Donat’s insistence upon escorting Fanny to the theater and to dances, at a time
when biracial couples were both unusual and unaccepted by mainstream society,
ultimately leads to Fanny’s murder. The ending is more than ironic. She embraces the
narrator’s notion of crossing borders and daring to be free. And with what result? She
dies for having done so. (Fanny is, after all, an allegory for Franco-America.) Her death
undermines the message of brotherly love that orients the thesis. Even if one considers
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the tragic ending as all the more reason to promote such a message in the first place, the
text still takes on a complexity that draws the reader into a plurality of interpretations,
and, suddenly, the binary simplicity of the roman à thèse—right/wrong, good/bad—is
lost. The “right” interpretation eludes the reader.
The narrators of La Jeune Franco-Américaine and Les Enfances de Fanny preach
to readers in order to convince them of the rightness or the wrongness of the ideology of
la survivance. Detours arise, however, that turn the narration away from its stated goal
and introduce unsettling elements that ultimately frustrate the narrators’ more
straightforward intentions. The ambiguous father-daughter relationship in La Jeune
Franco-Américaine and the death of the heroine in Les Enfances de Fanny cast doubt
upon the thesis and ultimately invite other readings and interpretations that negate the
absolute truths that the ideological novel propounds.
3.3 Patriarchal Space
La Jeune Franco-Américaine opens with a cast of characters that includes
Jeanne’s grandfather Carignan of Beauce, his nameless wife, and their eldest daughter,
Eulalie, Jeanne’s mother.3 At the age of sixteen Eulalie conforms to traditional
expectations and agrees to an arranged marriage to “Jean fils d’Antoine” (2). The
omniscient third-person narrator emphasizes, from the outset, the genealogies that define
characters by situating their names in relation to male kinship networks. The word aïeux
prominently appears in the narrative’s second sentence and serves to establish belonging
and identity in terms of collectivities and group traditions. For instance, Jeanne’s father,
repeatedly referred to as “Jean fils d’Antoine,” establishes belonging to the family circle
as intrinsically linked to paternal lineages. As her name “Jeanne” implies, she remains
merely the projection of her father Jean’s narcissistic persona.
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In her analysis of inequitable gender relations and the oppression of women in a
number of societies, McDowell defines patriarchy as not only “the law of the father, the
social control that fathers hold over their daughters” but also, in a broader sense, “the
system in which men as a group are constructed as superior to women as a group and so
assumed to have authority over them” (16). What informs this imbalance of power?
McDowell explains that “women and their associated characteristics of femininity are
defined as irrational, emotional, dependent and private . . . in comparison with men and
masculine attributes that are portrayed as rational, scientific, independent, public and
cultured” (11). Men, from their more rational, competent perspective, are therefore
deemed necessary to provide direction for flighty women. This assumed masculine
authority translates, for Jeanne Lacombe, into a lifelong position of subservience to a
series of dominant males in relation to whom she attempts to define herself.
When Jeanne tries to persuade her father of her boyfriend’s suitability to become
her husband, she naturally situates Carl within his own patriarchal constellation. She has
internalized the importance of kinship ties and seeks to reproduce them by linking her
suitor to his ancestors. Because Carl represents a foreign element, he cannot win her
father’s support. Upon hearing the news of the engagement, Jeanne’s father seems
shocked. At this point, Jeanne invokes Carl’s ancestral ties in the furtherance of her
cause:
Eh! père, n’es-tu pas heureux de mon bonheur et ne te donnai-je pas pour fils un
enfant de nos plus nobles familles américaines? Tu disais l’autre soir que ton bras
droit était vraiment Monsieur Smith, le père de Carl? Il t’aidera davantage
maintenant que son fils deviendra ton gendre. (7)
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Jeanne, in falling in love with Carl, a non-Franco-American and a Protestant,
seems aware of the unacceptable dreams she holds for the future—a future Other—that
entirely diverges from the traditional way of life of her parents and grandparents:
Après une lourde journée de labeur . . . les familles se réunissaient pour parler de
la terre qu’ils avaient quittée, des progrès du moment et des ambitions futures. . . .
[P]our clôturer la soirée on chantait en chœur les doux chants de la mère patrie.
On ne s’endormait que lorsque la prière en famille avait été faite, coutume qui
règne encore en 1932 dans un grand nombre de nos familles franco-américaines.
(2)
What kind of knowledge distinguishes family members from other individuals not part of
this group? Clearly the passage cited above emphasizes the collective memory of the
family in its discussion of the land left behind and in the singing of songs of the
homeland—in short, the validation of the ideology of cultural survival. Spiritual
knowledge, transmitted to the children through the tradition of family prayers, a custom
which, according to the narrator, remains widespread in the Franco-American community
even in 1932, also defines membership in the family circle. Carl represents knowledge
foreign to the group. As a non-Franco-American, he has no roots in the soil so sacred to
Jeanne’s family, he is unaware of the songs of the homeland, and he cannot speak the
language of the group. In addition, he lacks spiritual knowledge due to his Protestant
faith. In fact, Jeanne’s father considers him “l’étranger sans religion” (6).
In the past, as Jeanne entered high school, for instance, the family patriarch
questioned his daughter’s loyalty to the clan. She seemed to him “un peu légère,” and he
feared that the “contact de nationalités étrangères” would distance her from her roots. “Sa
fille gardera-t-elle la mentalité de ses pères ou fille d’une éducation mixte et cosmopolite
se transformera-t-elle au point d’oublier ses aïeux et leurs nobles gestes?” (4-5), asks the
narrator. The proposed marriage between Jeanne and Carl, a non-Franco-American,
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represents a radical change in this stable patriarchal space, one that attempts to redefine
traditional family space and implies that such spaces are never static but always sites of
contestation. Patriarchal space, used here metaphorically, represents the social relations
of power embedded in Franco-American culture that reduces women—in this case,
Jeanne—to passive underlings.
Thus Jeanne begins to manifest an independent consciousness ready to assert
itself beyond the control of her father. This bold act would breach the parameters of the
micro-universe that tradition and race have long ago established for her. The narrator
reveals the patriarch’s sense of disappointment and humiliation in his reaction to the
engagement of his daughter to an Anglophone: “Sa fille ne porterait pas un nom canadien
comme le sien, et à la face de sa race, il jurerait ne pas avoir de fille” (6). Certainly one
notes the possessiveness that the expression “comme le sien” conveys as well as a certain
cruelty in the denial of the daughter’s existence should she pursue her dreams. In
commenting upon the growing independence of young women in newly industrialized
centers and possible behaviors not within established traditions, David Leverenz
observes, “[T]he daughter remains a potential site of localized kinship shame” (11). In
moving beyond her traditional place in the family through the creation of an independent
self as evidenced by her contemplation of a non-Franco-American mate, Jeanne crosses
limits imposed by her culture and seems poised to dishonor her race.
A terrifying dream derails Jeanne’s efforts to assert her autonomy when she
envisions herself praying over the body of her dead child. Her husband watches and says
nothing, unable to speak her language and unfamiliar with the prayers she has known
since childhood. During an outing the following day, the couple’s plans come apart as
Carl insists that they marry in a Protestant church. Jeanne realizes that her dream is a
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reminder of the insurmountable gulf between their two cultures. She muses, “Non, nous
commençons déjà par ne plus nous comprendre. La foi de mes pères s’est éveillée à
temps” (10). In rejecting Carl, Jeanne demonstrates her loyalty to the faith of her
forefathers, to the tenets of the ideology of cultural survival. She also remains an
obedient daughter, fulfilling the role Leverenz characterizes as “a human signifier of the
father’s dynastic power” (34).
Fanny, like Jeanne, seeks her identity in a male-dominated society. She mimics
masculine behaviors that she observes around her and, in so doing, sorely tries the
patience of her older sister and guardian, Linda. Just twelve years of age when the
narrative opens, Fanny adopts certain modes of behavior quite unsuitable, so her sister
insists, for a young lady, “Honte à toi,” Linda scolds, “quand sauras-tu enfin que tu es
une fille et que tu dois te conduire comme telle?” (14). Behaviors that Linda objects to
include running through fields, climbing trees, chasing cows and chickens, stomping
flower beds, and soiling one’s clothing, activities the elder sister deems inappropriate for
a girl. In commenting on culturally-shaped behavioral expectations for girls, Simone de
Beauvoir writes,
[U]ne mère généreuse, qui cherche sincèrement le bien de son enfant, pensera
d’ordinaire qu’il est plus prudent de faire d’elle une “vraie femme” puisque c’est
ainsi que la société l’accueillera le plus aisément. . . . On lui impose des règles de
maintien: tiens-toi droite, ne marche pas comme un canard; pour être gracieuse,
elle devra réprimer ses mouvements spontanés, on lui demande de ne pas prendre
des allures de garçon manqué . . . . [B]ref, on l’engage à devenir, comme ses
aînées, une servante et une idole. (31-32)
Fanny, a beautiful mulatto, acts out masculine behaviors and repeatedly suffers the
punishment that her transgressions incur: “Elle n’aimait que les courses à travers les bois,
les sauteries folles dans les herbes, les jeux rudes des garçons auxquels elle se mêlait,
forte et agile comme pas un d’eux” (16). After mishaps such as falling off a roof or into a
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well, or being chased by an irate bull, Fanny’s thirst for adventure remains undiminished,
despite Linda’s rebukes.
In Les Enfances de Fanny, the exploration of gender roles—societal notions of
femininity and masculinity, within the historical framework of the text—along with the
relationships these notions define, drive the narrative forward to its unavoidable
conclusion. The unequal power relations inherent in patriarchal systems dominate a text
that, from the outset, contests the superiority of aggressive masculine behavior, with its
basis in brute force, over the weaker and submissive sex.
In the face of her sister’s chastisements, Fanny justifies her unladylike behavior:
“Charlie Ross courait après moi, il voulait me battre: j’ai grimpé” (14). In their final
confrontation, Fanny will have no escape route. Her sister’s ironic prediction, informed
by her strict religious upbringing, will tragically come true: “C’est le diable qui court
après toi, ma petite, et il t’aura si tu n’y prends garde” (15).
Although Fanny vows to change her tomboy behavior, a scene two years later
reveals that perhaps it is only Charlie Ross’s behavior that has changed—progressing
from boyhood taunting to something far more brutal. “Un jour, au plus fort d’une bataille
entre elle et Charlie Ross, celui-ci était parvenu à la terrasser; et tandis que de toutes ses
forces il la maintenait sur le sol, il l’embrassa carrément sur chaque joue” (19). Charlie’s
transgressive behavior reveals Fanny’s physical vulnerability and foreshadows her death
at the hands of a man she has known since childhood.4
The incident of the kiss results in Fanny’s disgrace rather than in Charlie’s
punishment, and Fanny’s reputation suffers. Linda resorts to the only help available and
approaches Mr. Lewis, the schoolmaster, with her problems. All night Fanny torments
herself: “Qu’est-ce que son maître penserait d’elle? Sourirait-il désormais à sa rencontre?
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Lui laisserait-il porter ses paquets, ses messages? Comme elle s’ennuierait isolée,
repoussée de son grand ami” (22). The bond between Fanny and the thirty-two year old
teacher, Mr. Lewis, demonstrates the inequality inherent in patriarchal gender relations.
Mr. Lewis, son maître in both senses of the word, assigns Fanny a number of daily tasks
in the classroom. Eager to please her teacher and master, Fanny thus assumes the
submissive posture of a servant, an unpaid one at that.
Although Fanny, at age fourteen, has ignored her body’s softening contours, Mr.
Lewis and Charlie Ross have not. In rebuking Fanny for her brazen conduct, Mr. Lewis
hides his deeper emotional attachment to the girl whom he has always perceived as “un
rayon de pureté complète” (21). He fantasizes about the encounter between Charlie and
Fanny:
Il ne pouvait l’imaginer touchant, même de si peu, au monde vulgaire des sens.
La découverte qu’il en faisait lui causait un émoi étrange et une peine presque
personnelle. L’image de ce garçon pressant de ses grosses lèvres les joues
fraîches de Fanny, et peut-être sa bouche, le choquait comme un sacrilège. (21)
The terms in which he couches his physical attraction to Fanny reveal his need to see
himself as simply her mentor or spiritual advisor, fulfilling the role of guardian to the
orphan. Light, purity, freshness, and distance from a tawdry world constitute the images
Mr. Lewis entertains in his thoughts about Fanny. The creation of these angelic images
may be an attempt to cloak or to excuse his baser instincts towards a child almost twenty
years his junior. Charlie’s irreverent treatment of her shocks and offends him as he
pictures the boy planting his lips upon her face. Perhaps he already considers Charlie his
rival.
Moved as much by Fanny’s protestations of innocence as by her blazing eyes, Mr.
Lewis forgives her wayward behavior and extracts the promise that she will forever shun
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Charlie and his cohorts. Her surrogate father thus exerts his power over her to his own
advantage. Repentant and demure, Fanny bursts into tears, provoking a not unexpected
reaction on the part of her teacher:
Paternellement il l’attira à lui, et ses bras enserraient la gamine palpitante. Puis,
emporté par le désir de la consoler, hanté peut-être à son insu par cette autre
caresse qu’elle avait subie, d’un geste spontané, presque inconscient, il pressa
doucement sa joue contre la sienne. (24)
Fanny senses that certain barriers between them have fallen and, in her confusion, she
laughs nervously. After debating about what to report to her sister, she follows her
instincts and keeps Mr. Lewis’s secret love to herself. True to her promise, Fanny avoids
Charlie Ross, who soon warns her, “Gare . . . si je t’attrape toute seule. Je t’embrasserai
malgré toi” (27).
3.3.1 Jeanne and Jean Lacombe
La Jeune Franco-Américaine appeared in serialized form in Lewiston’s daily
French-language newspaper, Le Messager.5 On the surface the narrative seems a simple
one. Following two failed love affairs with Anglophone men, a young Franco-American
woman escapes her overly controlling father, a widower and mayor of Lewiston, and
moves to New York City. There a variety of men, young and old, find her attractive. The
heroine remains unchanged by the city space, a locus of glamour, wealth, and power,
choosing to reproduce her traditional way of life with its emphasis on faith, language,
and culture. She manages to preserve, intact, her traditions, along with her virginity, in
the face of temptations that come her way. Returning home to her father when things
begin to go very badly for her, she ultimately weds a young man whom she had dated in
New York City and whose mother is French.
This rather straightforward narrative, one that promotes the ideology of la
survivance, portrays a physically vulnerable, financially dependent young woman who
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never succeeds in defining herself on her own terms. In the closing pages of the narrative,
Jeanne remains a commodity to be exchanged between patriarch and fiancé. Éloise Brière
sees Jeanne as living “en effet en état de siège permanent, croyant chacun prêt à lui ravir
soit sa langue, soit sa religion. . . . La présence du père—de la voix du Québec—est ainsi
manifeste et Jeanne se conserve intacte pour lui” (115). The wealthy man whom she
ultimately weds represents the ideal husband, one who seems to meet all criteria
established by her father: Jacques, a Columbia University-educated linguist with a
French mother and American father, has what Brière terms “une indéniable supériorité
culturelle et linguistique” (116). Jacques therefore seems a worthy successor to Jean, one
who supposedly will ensure the maintenance and transmission of cultural values to future
Franco-American generations. The narrative closes with the happy picture of Jean
bouncing his grandson on his knee: “C’est trop de bonheur, pensa Jeanne. L’ange du
souvenir déroula sous ses yeux doux, le décret d’or, signé du sang pur de sa race,
transmis de père en fils et qui a sa place d’honneur au cœur de la jeune Francoaméricaine” (65).
Jeanne’s father, Jean Lacombe, an enigmatic man, seems most proud of his
French-Canadian heritage and his power in the community where he has risen to the
position of mayor. An outsider who has penetrated the inner circle of political influence,
he finds himself respected on the streets of Lewiston as well as in his native Quebec:
Il était fier d’être de race française, de pouvoir dire à ses frères du Canada qu’il
faisait sa part pour conserver la langue maternelle, et qu’il avait réussi à monter
les degrés de l’échelle politique sur un sol qui n’était pas le sien. Partout on le
respectait, son nom vibrait dans toutes les bouches et là-bas sur la terre natale, on
aimait à le nommer. (5)
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Jean Lacombe moves in highly public spheres of power and influence and basks in his
widespread approval rating. His daughter, however, remains confined to more private
space—the home, her tiny office, or musty stacks in the library where she works.
Jean and his daughter experience space inequitably, indicating the gendered
practice of space inherent in the patriarchal system in which males determine allocation
of both physical and social space. In “Theory and Space, Space and Woman,” Ruth
Salvaggio posits differences in gender-influenced notions of space. She argues that
women’s conceptualizations of space are grounded in their experiential practice of it, a
practice delimited by the imposition of boundaries, “subjective and physical, that women
themselves have observed” (262). These boundaries reflect the traditional association of
women with the home, rather than with the public arena. Coventry Patmore’s The Angel
in the House (1854), a versified love story in four installments, depicts the wife as the
presiding angel over domestic affairs. The Victorian ideology that Patmore’s
observations on marriage codified and reflected designated the house as a refuge, a
private sphere, ruled by the wife in order to maintain the husband’s social standing in the
business world. Such a notion of wife as angel implies the kind of oppressive patriarchal
authority imposed upon women within marriage that creates domestic spaces of social
and economic inequalities. Jeanne’s space within the text is subsumed by her father’s
very public display of the space of power, what Claudine Hermann terms a space of
“domination and conquest, a sprawling, showy space” (169). Thus the novel faithfully
recreates actual social practices of material space and validates the patriarchal society it
portrays.
Jean’s solid reputation, political power, and financial security seem to him small
compensation for the loss of his beloved wife Eulalie. Whenever he looks at his daughter,
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he sees “l’épouse aimée dont Jeanne lui rappelait l’image” (4). The patriarch’s violent
physical reaction to Jeanne’s engagement to Carl reveals his possessive nature as well as
his anger over her attempt to move beyond his control: “Le père blêmit, sa main trembla,
il était foudroyé. Son sang franco-canadien bouillonna en lui, il avait envie d’écraser
l’étranger . . . qui venait de lui ravir sa fille bien-aimée, son adoration” (6). Jeanne
quickly learns that her father’s affection has a price, one that she will pay in order to
ensure his continued approval. After her rejection of Carl, father and daughter resume
their closeted life together:
Il fallait la voir le soir après son travail, caresser d’une douce main, réchauffée
par un sang généreux, le front pensif du père où quelques fils d’argent ornaient les
tempes. C’était alors le tête-à-tête par excellence, où l’âme ne connaît plus de
repli . . . et l’air répétait l’harmonie toute céleste que produisent les mots
consolateurs et sympathiques. Il était toujours tard la nuit lorsqu’ils se séparaient.
(13)
Such a suggestive scene as the one above derails the narrator’s attempt to promote the
kind of sacred family ties that constitute the triad of the ideologies of la survivance. The
language of seduction, couched in phrases such as “caresser d’une douce main,”
“réchauffée par un sang généreux,” “le tête-à-tête par excellence,” “l’harmonie toute
céleste,” along with the observation that “il était toujours tard la nuit lorsqu’ils se
séparaient,” creates doubts on the part of the reader as to the nature of the father-daughter
relationship.
The failure of Jean’s business during the Depression introduces another unsettling
element into a narrative that overtly champions the woman’s place as being in the home.
While Jean stays home, Jeanne must assume the role of breadwinner, working as a
secretary for a lawyer who falls in love with her. She dances around his sexual advances
in order to keep her much-needed job. Little by little, she finds herself falling in love
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with him. In the end, however, after Flaherty has divorced his wife in order to propose to
Jeanne, the religious young woman refuses to marry a lapsed Irish Catholic. Thus Jeanne
continues to seek to please her father by upholding the values he projects upon her,
values centered upon the ideology of la survivance. An opportunity to work in a New
York City library presents itself, and Jeanne, in spite of her university education, accepts
a post for which she is overqualified. This new chapter in her life brings little freedom
and much victimization at the hands of Baron Kenovitch.
3.3.2 Fanny Johnston and Mr. Lewis
Mr. Lewis, Fanny’s surrogate father and future husband, rises in Southern society
to the rank of teacher. At the turn of the century, not long after Reconstruction, that
would have been no small accomplishment for an African-American. Before
Emancipation, the South had established laws banning the education of slaves. Even after
Booker T. Washington’s founding of a Normal School for Colored Teachers at Tuskegee
in 1881, the South continued to be intolerant of the education of blacks: “The black
domestic served as a symbol in a social order, assuring whites of their advantaged status
and ensuring that blacks not forget their own subordinate place. By challenging this
order, the educated negro caused much apprehension among the privileged” (Grandison
338). Many young people who attended Tuskegee Normal School or similar institutions
received training to join an agricultural or industrial skilled labor force. Thus Mr. Lewis,
as a teacher, one who had chosen to train his mind rather than his hands, commands
Greenway’s respect. He views his standing within that community with pride.
Despite the attention paid to Mr. Lewis by Fanny’s sister Linda and several other
eligible women in the community, he has remained single. Perhaps loneliness or sexual
frustration finally overwhelms him, and he turns his attentions to his young pupil. He
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attempts to maintain his position as Fanny’s mentor even as he slips into the role of
suitor, all the while keeping their physical contact to a few caresses during the times they
steal away into wooded areas:
Monsieur Lewis avait une conscience. Cette enfant l’avait captivé, elle était
devenue nécessaire à sa vie; mais il la respectait, il répugnait à l’idée de lui faire
du mal. Et la lutte continuait en lui entre sa passion toute humaine et la mission
morale qu’il s’était donnée. (31)
The outcome of the unequal struggle between a self-imposed moral mission and an all
too-human passion seems decided from the outset.
Always concerned with his own comfort, Mr. Lewis, a melancholy man who feels
burdened by his workload, becomes a boarder in Linda’s house. There he can enjoy
Fanny’s constant companionship without the inconvenience of their meetings in the
woods, trysts that have occurred almost daily over several months. His mentoring
evolves into intimacy one spring morning when “Monsieur Lewis, qui était homme,
perdit la tête, et d’un geste violent il la renversa sur le lit” (36). In writing about
incestuous and pederastic desires, Leverenz observes that “[w]henever needs for
uncritical love and recognition abound among men of power, pederasty and incest hover
nearby in a nimbus of culturally structured fantasies” (122). The unequal relationship
(between Fanny, a child barely fourteen, and a thirty-two year old man) feeds Mr.
Lewis’s need for unconditional love and approval. After the incident, he is most ashamed
of what others will think of his behavior should it become public knowledge: “Il avait
compromis son propre honneur, son avenir, l’œuvre qu’il poursuivait avec tant de zèle, le
respect qui l’entourait de la part de tous. Tout cela sombrerait si jamais sa faute était sue”
(37). The portrait Leverenz sketches of latent incest found in paternalism accurately
describes Mr. Lewis’s persona and his despair at being discovered: “On the surface
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shimmers a display of dignity and helpful power, edged with self-pity. At the little lower
layer loom unacceptably sexual desires for dependent underlings. . . . Still lower lurk
feelings of fraudulence, unreality, and shame” (122).
Fanny, still a child, displays a total ignorance of what has happened between
them, remarking, “Vous m’avez fait mal! Vous m’avez proprement punie d’avoir lancé
ces oreillers” (38). She views sexual abuse as her just punishment for having teased Mr.
Lewis while he corrected homework papers. For Fanny and countless other children, the
home, traditionally viewed as a protective space, offers no safety from sexual assault. Mr.
Lewis’s polished manners and respectability conceal a rapist. In an attempt to avert his
downfall, Mr. Lewis marries the girl, not without causing some gossip about the
difference in their ages. His position of power within the community, however, protects
him from further scandal. “La réputation de Monsieur Lewis était si établie, si haute, que
les mauvaises langues reculaient au seuil d’imputations plus graves” (43).
Commenting on purported misogynist sexism, bell hooks characterizes
“patriarchy as a master narrative” (Yearning 25) and compares modern phallocentric
domination of the home with longstanding traditions
enabling white men and black men to share a common sensibility about sex roles
and the importance of male domination. Both groups have been socialized to
condone patriarchal affirmation of rape as an acceptable way to maintain male
domination. It is this merging of sexuality with male domination within
patriarchy that informs the construction of masculinity for men of all races and
classes. (Yearning 59)
In this and similar passages, hooks claims that men assert their power over women’s
bodies through violent acts. She posits a male commitment to maintenance of patriarchy
and the domination and privilege that patriarchy ensures. She notes that patriarchy cuts
across race and class in affirming men’s control over women. This point bears upon the
patriarchal relationships in both novels under consideration here.
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hooks further argues that rape serves as a gendered metaphor for imperialism and
subsequent exploitation, since the sex act “reenacts the drama of conquest, as men of the
dominating group sexually violate the bodies of women who are among the dominated”
(Yearning 57). As the granddaughter of a slave raped by the plantation owner, Mr.
Johnston, Fanny suffers the same fate as her grandmother. In Fanny’s case, however, the
abuse is at the hands of a black, rather than white, man. hooks terms the violation of
black women’s bodies as “the right and rite of the male dominating group” (Yearning
56). Charlie Ross’s need to dominate Fanny, through his constant leering attention and
sexual innuendo, ultimates in a penetration of an even more violent nature as the blade of
his knife seeks and finds its target. From childhood on, Fanny never succeeds in escaping
the violence inherent in patriarchal space.
Mr. Lewis’s total domination of Fanny continues after their marriage. Once
installed in their new house, Fanny toils ceaselessly to prove worthy of her new husband.
In arguing that houses belong to women as “their special domain,” hooks explains,
“Since sexism delegates to females the task of creating and sustaining a home
environment, it has been primarily the responsibility of black women to construct
domestic households as spaces of care and nurturance in the face of the brutal harsh
reality of . . . sexist domination” (“Homeplace” 33). As Fanny develops into a thoughtful
and caring partner, Mr. Lewis makes no effort to reciprocate, to meet Fanny’s needs or to
promote her well-being: “Du matin au soir elle brossait, lavait, astiquait, fourbissait les
meubles, ayant à cœur que tout fut rangé, reluisant, quand son mari revenait de l’école.
Elle le servait comme eût fait une petite esclave. Elle lui portait son café au lit, elle cirait
ses souliers, taillait ses ongles . . .” (44). Despite her tender solicitude for him, Mr. Lewis
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loses interest in Fanny and begins an affair with Martha Bledsoe, an affair that lasts for
years.
Fanny’s role as slave to her husband remains fundamentally unchanged
throughout their marriage. Neither one is able to progress beyond their former teacherpupil relationship. Mr. Lewis sees her as the child who sat upon a school bench reciting
her lessons: “Il ne pouvait l’imaginer pleinement son égale” (45). As for Fanny, even
after the birth of her four sons, all before she reaches the age of nineteen, she persists in
calling her husband “Mr. Lewis.”
3.4 La Jeune Franco-Américaine and the Angel in the House
The spaces of patriarchy that I have explored above relegate women to the more
private and domestic domain of the home, whereas the public arenas of politics, the
economy, and the professions, belong to men. Jeanne Lacombe occupies space assigned
to her by her father, by Flaherty, by Jacques, and by Baron Kenovitch. In this
marginalized space, she remains unable to escape from frequent attempts made by the
men in her life to control her. For example, Flaherty meets Jeanne’s resistance to his
proposal of marriage with a combative stance:
Flaherty ne s’attendait pas à une lutte aussi difficile, ce soir il était vaincu, mais
demain il reviendrait à la charge et cette fois Jeanne succomberait. Après tout elle
avait des lubies qu’il lui ferait oublier bien vite. C’était encore une enfant,
impressionnable, qui avait gardé toute sa candeur, mais lui, saurait raisonner ces
enfantillages et lui montrer la vie sous un angle nouveau. Au fond de lui-même il
se disait, je l’aime et elle sera mienne. (17)
This passage, through its use of free indirect discourse, imposes upon the reader the
ingrained rhetoric of patriarchy in its insistence on a woman’s capricious and infantile
nature. The narrator, instead of discrediting this perspective, promotes it as a
predetermined truth. In an ideological novel, even in a failed one such as La Jeune
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Franco-Américaine, the reader is treated, from the outset, as one who shares certain
uncontested values with the narrator. With its images of conquest of a weaker opponent,
the passage reveals the kind of power that men seek to exert over Jeanne. Certainly
Flaherty views Jeanne as a possession that ultimately will become his. He sees their
relationship as a battle that he has temporarily lost. Tomorrow, he vows, he will begin the
campaign again, charging ahead, and Jeanne will be defeated. He also sees himself as a
rational being who must explain to an impressionable, unreasonable child his plan for
both of them.
From his position of power, Flaherty represents masculine knowledge that defines
itself “through its own ability to know only if there are others who are incapable of
knowing” (Rose, Feminism 9). This masculine knowledge operates in tandem with selfperception. Rose argues that “the white bourgeois heterosexual man perceives other
people . . . only in relation to himself. He understands femininity, for example, only in
terms of its difference from masculinity. He sees other identities only in terms of his own
self-perception; he sees them as what I shall term his Other” (Feminism 6). Flaherty,
unable to understand Jeanne’s objection to his divorced status, sees her only in light of
his own perspective. The narrator explains, “Il ne pouvait saisir la mentalité de Jeanne.
Pour lui, tout être vivant est libre et sa conduite ne dépend d’aucune autorité” (16). Torn
between her attraction to Flaherty and her desire to remain faithful to the ideology of la
survivance, she realizes that “elle voulait être fidèle à sa foi, à sa noble destinée. Et dans
une muette prière, elle confia la cause difficile à la Puissance de là-haut” (19). Like the
Christian martyrs, Jeanne stands aside, assumes a passive role, and leaves her fate to
divine authority. This posture reinforces the submissive nature of women that
consistently emerges from the text.
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Despite her university education, Jeanne accepts secretarial work throughout the
narrative and thereby undervalues her capabilities. A chronic underachiever, she seems
willing to transcribe and to type the words of her male employers while her own voice
remains mute, corroborating Showalter’s depiction of women’s space as one of “silences
and absences of discourse” (36). After Flaherty “la prit à son service,” Jeanne proves
herself to be a competent, compliant secretary: “Son travail était sans reproche, et
volontiers, elle . . . donnait un coup de balai à son manteau, ne laissait jamais monter le
thermomètre au-delà du degré voulu par le maître, mettait en ordre son pupitre . . .” (11).
The narrator explains that for girls like Jeanne, “le travail est très à l’honneur [et] parmi
les jeunes filles bon nombre demandent au travail une saine distraction” (11). The
narrator depicts women’s work as ludic, as a diversion; the word saine implies
patriarchal control as well. In emphasizing Flaherty’s credentials as a Harvard Law
School graduate, the narrator both validates his intellectual superiority and establishes a
class distinction between him and Jeanne. Her work, characterized only in negative
terms—sans reproche—includes personal services such as keeping the lawyer’s overcoat
lint free. The image that reduces her to a pupil, putting her desk in order for le maître,
suggests her underling status. Flaherty’s power seems implied by the precise degree
setting on the thermometer, a boundary Jeanne never transgresses although the passage
hints that she may indeed feel uncomfortably cold.
After losing Flaherty to her best friend and leaving his employ, Jeanne takes a
brief vacation to a seaside resort where she nearly drowns. The narrator contrasts
Jeanne’s fragility with the two hardy men who rescue her: “Le soleil les avait brunis; ils
ressemblaient à des statues de la Grèce antique” (25). Jeanne, saved by powerful, perfect
specimens of masculinity, must rest in her room two days before reappearing in the hotel
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dining room, a fact that emphasizes her fragility. When she does meet her rescuers again,
they are charmed by her beauty and grace, and Jacques gallantly wishes her a pleasant
evening: “Faites de beaux rêves sans interdire l’entrée du prince charmant” (24). Jeanne
remains throughout the narrative more of a Sleeping Beauty than a Wonder Woman. She
seems always in need of a Prince Charming to rescue her from a threatening
environment. She often seeks out the solace of her room or, when she moves to New
York City, her tiny apartment. The limited room there serves as a spatial metaphor for
limited opportunities in the male-dominated world.
The string of men in Jeanne’s life all demonstrate their domination over her. In La
Jeune Franco-Américaine, men emerge as both more powerful and more valuable than
women, in line with Marilyn Frye’s explanation of gender-specific power and prestige.
Using an analogy between foreground and background, she writes,
Imagine phallocratic reality to be the space and figures and motion which
constitute the foreground, and the constant repetitive, uneventful activities of
women to constitute and maintain the background against which the foreground
plays. It is essential to the maintenance of the foreground reality that nothing
within it refer in any way to anything in the background. (167)
Early on, the narrator establishes Ludwig’s and Jacques’s solid standing in the
foreground, as it were, of their respective professions: Ludwig manages “une grande
usine de New York,” where he devotes himself entirely to the business; Jacques directs
acquisitions of “anciens manuscripts et de livres antiques” for the New York Public
Library. Jeanne, when pressed to disclose her profession, admits, “Je viens de laisser mon
emploi, et pour le moment je ne pense qu’à un bon repos . . . .” The two men then praise
her for the magical fingers with which she transforms works by Liszt into “une harmonie
angélique” (24). Jeanne’s ability to play the piano seems to fulfill their expectations of an
appropriate accomplishment for a young woman, and underlines her decorative but
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useless status. She can easily slip into the background like music that is played in public
places—in elevators and dentists’ offices, for instance—and ignored.
As the conversation draws to a close, Ludwig glances from Jeanne’s lovely face
to an oil painting of a nature scene. Jeanne explains to him that the artist is a “peintre
bien connu et recherché pour la beauté de ses paysages” (25). As they all admire the
work of art and say their goodbyes, the clock strikes twelve. Beyond the evocation of the
end of Cinderella’s wonderful evening with Prince Charming, the exchange has other
implications that bear upon the space of power of men and women. The transition
between Jeanne’s loveliness and the beauty of the landscape in the oil painting—a
depiction of rugged mountains in the Alps—foregrounds the association of women and
nature. In many societies women are considered as being closer to nature while men are
viewed as civilized.
Inspired by Jeanne’s beauty, Ludwig studies the painting in the hotel lobby,
perhaps unconsciously equating her with the beauty of nature and thereby objectifying
her. The association between femininity and nature implies the unequal power that men
and women command.6 As Ludwig shifts his glance between Jeanne and Dyer’s painting,
he symbolically associates Jeanne with Mother Earth. She has already been marginalized
by her lack of professional standing in the marketplace. Here she falls under the
civilizing control of those in power. Even the painting, with its phallic depiction of the
massive peaks of the Alps, privileges the virile power of male domination. Physically
attracted to Jeanne, Ludwig may indeed be contemplating an attempt to conquer and
colonize the territory she represents.
The dislocation of the heroine to New York City provides an opportunity to
consider how Jeanne fares in an unfamiliar place. Leonard Lutwack uses the term
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“transplantation plot” to describe how the narrator can unsettle a character in
“transvaluing his values by removing him to an exotic place” (73). For Jeanne, New York
City offers the possibility of escape from the patriarchal space she has always inhabited.
Instead of taking advantage of her new freedom, however, she continues to maintain
close ties to her father: “Avant de se mettre au lit, elle écrivit à son père. Et quand vint le
temps de cacheter la lettre, elle y déposa un long baiser” (27). Immediately after finishing
her letter, Jeanne looks out for the first time on the evening lights of New York City.
Rather than being fascinated by the architectural wonders of the skyline, Jeanne feels
comforted by a lighted cross she sees in the distant cityscape, a cross that symbolizes
what one critic calls the “lutte qu’une jeune fille catholique doit mener dans un tel lieu de
perdition” (Brière 115). The ideology of la survivance, which Jeanne has internalized,
remains an inescapable force in her life. Limited to the doctrines she has accepted, her
perspective, even in New York City, remains a narrow one.
Ludwig continues his pursuit of Jeanne in New York City although he knows his
friend Jacques has had occasional dates with her. He invites them both to his sister’s
curious, sprawling apartment where she serves German beer and names all the flowers
she cultivates that are native to Germany. Her living room depicts “un salon entièrement
allemand. Tous les meubles, les peintures, les draperies, les vitres même rappelaient l’art
allemand. Dans un coin à l’ombre, une magnifique tapisserie tissée en 1793 attirait
l’attention et l’admiration” (35). Why does the narrator insist upon Ludwig’s German
heritage? Ludwig, like Carl and Flaherty, represents knowledge foreign to Jeanne’s
closed family. A Protestant, even a French-speaking one, would not meet with her
father’s approval should she seek it. Ludwig also symbolizes another immigrant group,
one portrayed as perpetuating its own ethnicity.
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Whether the narrator sees the maintenance of German heritage as corroborating
the importance of the ideology of la survivance—or threatening it—remains unclear.
What does emerge here is the resistance on the part of other immigrants to assimilation
into Anglophone America, a resistance well-documented in the immigrant press:
“Immigrant newspapers addressed their readers not simply as Americans-in-the-making
but as members of transnational diasporas with enduring obligations to the homeland”
(Jacobson 167). The resistance of other ethnic groups in the face of assimilation may
serve to bolster the narrator’s own arguments about the importance of cultural survival.7
Ludwig remains faithful to his heritage, and Jeanne, too, clings to her cultural
values. He declares his love for Jeanne and asks her to travel with him to the West Coast.
Faced with such a panorama of open space, Jeanne panics and retreats to her tiny
apartment: “Elle se demandait si elle ne devait pas retourner vers son père” (39).
However much she would like to return home to her father, she realizes that her salary
defrays his household expenses. She knows that she must stay the course in New York
City.
To comfort herself, she invents a fairy-tale scenario: “Un jour viendra où l’amour
comme elle le conçoit sera son partage, car l’ami rêvé était l’homme sur lequel elle
pourrait appuyer sa tête et il serait si bon qu’à ses côtés, elle se sentirait toute petite, si
petite qu’il s’emparerait de tout son être, et la cacherait bien vite dans son cœur” (39).
Jeanne sees herself only as Other to a dominant man who will support and protect her.
Throughout the narrative, she remains emotionally dependent on her father or on a
surrogate father. She wishes to become small, so small that her ideal mate can engulf or
subsume her very being in his. The desire for a hiding place that she articulates suggests
the pattern of retreat she establishes whenever difficulty confronts her.
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After backing away from relationships with Carl, Flaherty, and Ludwig, and after
her near catastrophe at the seaside, Jeanne flees to her room, her womb substitute. In this
confining space, in self-imposed retreat, Jeanne clings to her traditional values:
“Souviens-toi,” she says to herself, “que dans tes veines coule le sang le plus pur, le plus
noble et qu’il n’appartient pas à la jeune Franco-Américaine de le rendre impur. C’est le
sang des preux et des martyrs” (39). Christian martyrs seem to be much in Jeanne’s
thought, perhaps as a projection of her own sacrifices: convinced of her mission to
maintain racial purity, she rejects each of her suitors in a sort of masochistic selfrepression.
At this low point in her experience, she accepts a dinner invitation from her
employer, Baron Kenovitch. Jeanne substitutes the baron for the father she misses with
disastrous results, setting into motion events that demonstrate the heroine’s vulnerability
outside the home.8 Although the baron emerges as what today would be termed a sexual
predator, his description, in this 1930s novel, only hints at his nature: “L’amour très
humain était son idole, il ne vivait que pour jouir. Sa vie avait été un long roman et à
cinquante ans . . . il voulait attirer les cœurs, se les attacher par des liens d’une tendre
affection, afin que plus tard au déclin de la vie, il se souvînt des heures heureuses des
années écoulées” (40). He lures Jeanne to his apartment, and at dinner he entertains her
with tales of his prowess as a hunter. Jeanne becomes the prey as she finds herself locked
in his library and attempts to fend off his advances. Only by resorting to trickery is she
able to make her escape. The baron unlocks the door to prepare a cocktail that Jeanne has
requested, and she flees, coatless, down the stairs. Jeanne’s predicament in the confined
space of the library functions as a metaphor for women locked into male spheres of
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domination. This spatial imagery of enclosure and entrapment emphasizes Jeanne’s
captive status in the private spaces of male control.
In this melodramatic incident, the attempted rape of Jeanne serves to call into
question the spatiality of women’s bodies and female sexuality. In writing about how
critics challenge these traditional spatial metaphors such as “inside/outside,
surface/depth, empty/full,” Julie Gibson-Graham explores rape as “a fixed reality” (309)
in women’s lives, given the rapist’s physical superiority and the woman’s violable state.
According to Gibson-Graham, women’s bodies tend to be viewed by some men “as an
empty space waiting to be invaded/taken/formed” (310). This critic’s radical stance
concerning gendered male behavior does seem to apply to Baron Kenovitch, who
establishes his physical superiority in the account of the slaying of a Bengali tiger. He
views Jeanne as “une proie si docile” (41).
Women’s space emerges as absence, men’s space as presence. A woman’s lived
space, Gibson-Graham argues, therefore reflects the vulnerability of her inner space:
“Vacant and vulnerable, female sexuality is something to be guarded within the space of
the home. Confined there, as passive guardians of the womb-like oasis that offers succor
to active public (male) citizens, women are rightfully out of the public gaze” (310). For
Gibson-Graham, societal attitudes differentiate a woman from a “man by her otherness,
her passivity, her vulnerability, ultimately her vacuousness” (311).
Throughout the text, the narrator emphasizes Jeanne’s vulnerability outside the
home, and sometimes associates her with angels, thus appropriating the Victorian icon of
the “angel in the house.” For instance, Jacques fantasizes about what an accommodating,
caring wife Jeanne would be: “[L’]âme aimée saurait bien se rendre à ses moindres désirs
et dans l’ombre de l’appartement voltigeaient des petits anges à têtes blondes et brunes.
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Le sommeil de Jacques fut hanté de visions angéliques” (48). Undoubtedly, the tiny
blond and brunette angels represent the function of motherhood, the hallowed space of
reproduction.
A second dangerous incident outside the home finds Jeanne lured to a brothel by
her new friends Helen and Russell. Once again she flees danger, but on this occasion,
having been plied with alcohol, she passes out in the street. Another Prince Charming
rescues her, bringing her to a hospital where, unable to bear contined separation from her
father, she vows to return home. She fantasizes that “entourée de sa chaude affection, elle
refera ses forces en charmant sa vieillesse de son sourire et de sa gaieté” (63).
Returning to the patriarchal home for protection, Jeanne seeks what Elizabeth
Langland terms “a haven, a private domain opposed to the public sphere” (291). Jacques
visits her there and asks her to marry him. In accepting Jacques’s proposal, Jeanne
exchanges one protector (of sorts) for another, quite content to fulfill the gendered role of
“angel of the house” that is assigned to her. The narrator emphasizes that “la joie règne
dans la maison” (65), privileging the home as Jeanne’s “sanctum and sanctuary”
(Langland 294). Jacques inherits a fortune from his uncle, and Jeanne therefore rises in
society, not through any effort of her own, but simply through an advantageous marriage.
In La Jeune Franco-Américaine, the narrator privileges the home as a secure and moral
refuge for women, apart from the outside world, a male locus of power, prestige, and
political status.9 Jeanne emerges as a passive victim, suffering under the control of a
string of men who cast her in the role of either household angel (Jean, Carl, Flaherty,
Ludwig, Jacques) or whore (Baron Kenovitch, Russell). Her two attempts to venture
forth into society end in an attempted rape and in solicitation for prostitution.
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What subverts the narrator’s depiction of the home as a shelter from the outside
world is the language of the unsaid, the implication that the father-daughter relationship
may be an inappropriate one. In 1933, when the novel was serialized in Le Messager,
such a shocking relationship would have remained unarticulated. A close reading of the
text, however, reveals that beneath the ideology of Roman Catholicism and the FrancoAmerican values expounded lies a disturbing obsession shared by both Jeanne and her
father Jean for physical and emotional closeness. This obsession, similar to the one
portrayed in Angéline de Montbrun, calls into question the safety and sanctity of the
home as a protection against the outside world.
The final, irrefutable indication that all is not as it appears between Jean and
Jeanne comes late in the narrative: Jean Lacombe suddenly loses his eyesight and his
blindness is pronounced incurable. Such a melodramatic flourish at the end of the work
seems perplexing. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), a foundational text in the canon
of feminist fiction, also presents a fallen colossus in need of tender care. Mr. Rochester’s
blindness and dependency give Jane the opportunity to delineate and dominate her own
space. Jean’s sightless condition, however, confers no such authority upon Jeanne.
Passive to the end, the daughter is simply brokered between her father and fiancé, and
Jeanne remains enclosed in the private arena, denied any mode of liberation or selfdetermination.
Is one to consider the blindness as God’s punishment for Jean’s relationship with
Jeanne? (Freud would find a castration symbol here.) Certainly the erotic dimension of
the relationship changes when Jean, the former authority figure, now assumes the
vulnerable role once occupied by his submissive and pliant daughter. Is the blindness
perhaps a way of reducing the most powerful male character to a helpless invalid? Unlike
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Jane Eyre, Jeanne gains no space in which to construct a self capable of independent
action; her aunt assumes command of the household. Thus, her father’s weakened state
serves mostly to puzzle the reader. In the final analysis, the sudden misfortune that
befalls Jean certainly invites a multiplicity of readings of the text, thereby undermining
its status as a roman à thèse. One is left with the impression of La Jeune FrancoAméricaine as an unstable, contradictory text. Its modernity, therefore, may be its best
feature.
3.5 Gendered Space in Les Enfances de Fanny
Chartier calls Les Enfances de Fanny “an autobiographical novel [of] a passionate
affair with a black woman” that relates “Fanny’s life in the South and in Roxbury before
her love affair with Dantin” (“Franco-American” 32). Franco-American poet Rosaire
Dion-Lévesque oversaw the publication of the work six years after the death of his friend
Louis Dantin (1865-1945), himself a poet and a widely-published literary critic of North
American French literature. Dantin, living in self-imposed exile in Cambridge after
having left the priesthood in Quebec, paints a nuanced and affecting portrait of life in
Greenway, Virginia, and in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Dion-Lévesque describes the lonely
decades that Dantin worked in the offices of Harvard University Press:
C’est à Roxbury, cette petite Afrique de Boston, que Dantin trouve chez les noirs
l’affection et la sympathie dont il avait une soif ardente. . . . Ce sont les noirs qui
lui ont fait entendre les paroles consolatrices; c’est au milieu d’eux que son âme,
éprise de justice s’est révoltée contre le crime de la démarcation sociale entre
Noir et Blanc. Et c’est cette époque de sa vie que raconte son roman posthume
Les Enfances de Fanny, contenant tant de pages autobiographiques et
émouvantes. (209)
Whereas La Jeune Franco-Américaine actively seeks to promote an agenda of
separateness and exclusion based upon the tenets of the ideology of la survivance,
thereby promoting rather than contesting a patriarchal view of women, Les Enfances de
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Fanny argues for the pulling down of barriers that separate cultures, races, and social
classes. Dion-Lévesque writes of the author, “Louis Dantin n’était pas un être ankylosé
dans le passé, mais un homme bien moderne” (206). Rather than championing the
exclusionary ideology of la survivance, Dantin promotes an inclusive vision of racial
tolerance in Les Enfances de Fanny.
The relationship between Fanny and Donat Sylvain, for example, bridges wide
social, cultural, and racial gaps in pre-Depression America. Though both novels
foreground the controlling, patriarchal society in which female protagonists attempt to
establish an independent and viable self, Les Enfances de Fanny depicts a heroine quite
unlike Jeanne Lacombe. While Jeanne seeks to maintain the cultural traditions of the
past, traditions that exclude all non-Francophone suitors, Fanny insists upon her right to
share the company of a white, bourgeois gentleman. She explains, “Toutes les barrières
sont impuissantes et faites pour qu’on les saute. Blancs, noirs, jaunes ou cuivrés, ce sont
tous des hommes et des femmes avec des vernis différents, et tous enfants du même bon
Dieu. S’ils en viennent à s’éprendre, il n’en doivent de compte à personne” (257). As she
marches confidently into what she believes will be a better future for herself and her
sons, she unwisely discounts Charlie Ross’s warning: “Il y a des choses qu’on a le droit
d’empêcher” (258).
The process of Fanny’s discovery of self parallels her journey from rural
Greenway, Virginia, to urban Roxbury, Massachusetts. Her quest frees her from a
number of impositions—harsh “whites only” laws rampant in the South, confinement in
her cottage, and submission to Mr. Lewis. Fanny’s construction of a more expansive
space brings her personal autonomy. Commenting on the relationship between space and
freedom, Judith Fryer writes, “Spaciousness, then, means being free; freedom implies
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space. It means having the power and enough room in which to act. It means having the
ability to transcend the present condition, and that transcendence implies, quite simply,
the power to move” (49-50). Fanny has no “power to move” in her restrictive life in the
rural South. She lacks the freedom to construct an independent self and sees herself as
Other to the patriarch who dominates her.
What sort of closed space does Fanny inhabit in Greenway? Fanny’s home, a
humble cottage, reflects the pride she takes in her role as wife. The tiny dwelling,
scrupulously clean, becomes her entire world. To Fanny, marriage signifies housekeeping
and waiting upon Mr. Lewis. Langland describes a woman’s role as angel in the house as
“feathering a nest with only the master’s comfort in mind” (301). Despite Fanny’s best
attempts to do just that, she slowly comes to understand that she derives no emotional
support or comfort from the home she has created for Mr. Lewis. He dominates the
house, even choosing the songs Fanny sings. His favorite one, “Grandfather’s Clock,”
ironically foreshadows his own passing and implies masculine control of feminine time.
This seems a fitting metaphor for the way Mr. Lewis runs his home. Like the hands on a
clock, all the activities in the household move in a regulated, repetitive rotation. Mr.
Lewis establishes the schedule, including a self-indulgent Thursday itinerary—a day
spent with his lover, Martha Bledsoe. Fanny knows about the relationship (Charlie Ross
tells her), and arranges an overnight visit each week to her sister’s house, thus removing
herself from her own home in accommodation of the lovers. She shoulders the blame for
the unfortunate situation: “Qu’était-elle, après tout, pour contredire Monsieur Lewis? S’il
ne l’aimait pas uniquement, c’est qu’elle n’était pas digne de lui. . . . Elle avait encore sa
mission, le servir et lui être douce” (52).10 Mr. Lewis remains unaware of her selfsacrifice and her kindness in the face of his duplicitous behavior.
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Fanny’s accommodation of Martha reveals a negative sense of her own worth and
her powerlessness to control her own space. She cannot change the way in which Mr.
Lewis uses their home, and therefore she returns to her childhood cottage. In this way,
she fulfills societal expectations that women be self-effacing. As Fanny seeks attention or
some response from her husband, he withdraws more and more from her and their four
sons. The home, a locus of support and empathy for some women, remains a cold and
unsupportive environment for Fanny. At this point in her young life, she begins to feel
“une immense lassitude” (67) and “la perspective d’un avenir condamné à des tâches
encore plus pesantes la frappait-elle d’une sourde terreur” (68). Fanny actively begins to
plan her journey to the North, to freedom.
Resettlement in Roxbury, away from Mr. Lewis, offers Fanny the opportunity to
establish meaningful relationships with people her own age, an opportunity denied her in
Greenway. In the first thirty-two years of her life, she has not developed any sense of
autonomy. Unlike Jeanne Lacombe, Fanny ultimately emerges as a strong figure: she
breaks with the controlling patriarch, travels a great distance, and rejoins her sons as the
head of the household. Needing no Prince Charming to rescue her, Fanny comes to the
aid of her struggling sons. In fact, she rediscovers the boldness that she exhibited as a
child. For a long time she has regretted her lost youth: “A trente-deux ans elle avait
derrière elle toute une vie de labeur et de servitude. Elle n’avait pas eu de jeunesse. Une
roue aveugle l’avait saisie enfant et la broyait depuis lors dans ses engrenages. Ç’avait
été une longue enfance que ces années vouées au service de son maître dans une
soumission naïve” (67-68).
In escaping from a life of servitude in Virginia to some sense of autonomy in
Massachusetts, Fanny experiences a feeling of independence for the first time. Unlike
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Jeanne, who allows Jacques to select an apartment for her, Fanny carefully chooses a
suitable lodging for herself and her sons. That Fanny’s three sons settle in Roxbury
should not be surprising. Despite Emancipation, blacks found themselves restricted to the
least expensive land available in urban spaces. Fanny’s tenement, for example, takes up
half a block of Shawmut Avenue, one of the poorest sections of the city. All three sons
move in with Fanny and, in establishing herself as their support, she redefines herself as a
strong, nurturing mother. Édouard and Georges need her constant guidance: the former is
a dreamer and a poet who attempts, without success, to establish a literary magazine; the
latter emerges as simply a bad seed who, after his arrest at a brothel, moves in with one
of the prostitutes, unsure of whether the baby she has borne is his. Frank, Fanny’s only
real success story, lands a job as a chauffeur and regularly contributes to the family bank
account. A fourth son, Robert, the youngest, has long ago become a nomad and drifts
across the country. Fanny grieves over the loss of contact with him.
Fanny’s tenement apartment represents a space free from patriarchal domination
and an index of her growing economic and social independence. In this new urban space,
she gains some sense of control over her own life. Upon her arrival in Roxbury, “il lui
semble qu’un manteau de plomb a glissé de son être qu’il opprimait. . . . Fanny sent
renaître en son âme les instincts endormis de son enfance, sa belle audace et ses élans
impétueux” (74). Thus her lively, happy new apartment, constantly filled with visitors,
mirrors the expansion of her self-esteem and self-confidence—the very evolution of her
inner self.
Whereas Jeanne Lacombe remains a conforming woman who obtains economic
and social advancement through an advantageous marriage, Fanny develops into a selfassertive, confident woman who makes her own way in the world. Reversing the
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traditional gendered roles of man as provider and woman as dependent, she sends money
to Greenway for Mr. Lewis’s support. Roxbury offers Fanny the space in which to prove
her capabilities. Beyond her new confidence, Fanny also finds the joy, spontaneity, and
enthusiasm missing from her life. This second childhood in a new city explains the plural
enfances in the title of the novel. As in her first childhood, however, she must contend
with Charlie Ross, who follows her to Roxbury, menaces her, and ultimately destroys
her.
The narrator harbors no illusions about the social and economic oppression of the
inhabitants of Roxbury: “Là plus de trente mille noirs, semi-noirs, bruns et brunes de
toutes les teintes, soutiennent une lutte vaillante contre les forces, économiques et autres,
qui conspirent à les écraser” (75). When African-Americans left the rural South after
1900, racial barriers prevented their access to fair wages. In cities like Roxbury, AfricanAmerican women found few community-based economic opportunities. A small number
of female entrepreneurs ran beauty salons, dress shops, and millinery stores (Freedman
138). Many women, like those in Madame Sidney’s brothel on the first floor of Fanny’s
tenement, depended upon illicit work in houses of prostitution or in illegal saloons,
known as “blind pigs.” Cécile, Georges’s lover, works in both Madame Sidney’s brothel
and in an illegal club.
The narrator empathizes with African-Americans’ attempts to transcend the
poverty of the urban space of Roxbury:
Cette foule est pauvre sans être misérable. Elle a, dans son esprit ingénieux, dans
sa frugalité, son endurance et sa gaieté, d’admirables ressources. . . . Les enfants
ne sont pas déguenillés; ils vont à l’école en costumes bien propres, les garçons la
tête rasée dru, les filles en nattes soigneusement tressées. Le dimanche à l’église,
hommes et femmes étalent une élégance bourgeoise. (77)
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Fanny herself serves as an example that not all African-American migrants embody the
“disorder and backwardness represented by the rural South” (Wolcott 274). AfricanAmerican women who migrated to urban centers like Roxbury “were viewed as the
caretakers of neighborhoods and homes, responsible for the visual appearance of
community, family, and private property” (Wolcott 275). Although this notion puts a
positive spin on a woman’s work and invests her with added importance, these new
responsibilities seem to further burden the angel in the house, rendering her the angel in
the neighborhood.
African-American leaders formed Urban Leagues and Dress Well Clubs “to fight
increasing segregation, ensure employment for the large numbers of incoming migrants,
and aid in the ‘uplift’ of the race. The leaders sought to create a cohesive identity that
emphasized respectability, thrift, and cleanliness” (Wolcott 278). hooks sees the creation
of what she terms “homeplaces” as an act of commitment to racial uplift (Yearning 47).
These spaces of community interaction—like Fanny’s tenement—although grindingly
poor, serve as what hooks calls “a small private reality where black women and men can
renew their spirits and recover themselves” (Yearning 46). Certainly Fanny strives to
provide such a place for other residents in the tenement building. Her whist parties, with
Georges’s accordion music, singing, dancing, and light refreshments, keep the neighbors
a close-knit, mutually supportive group.
Despite the comraderie among the tenement dwellers, oppressive social
conditions prevail. Only by the combined effort of all the members of a migrant family,
for instance, can economic survival be ensured: “Pendant que le mari bûche à ses
besognes de manœuvre, la femme lave les planchers dans les hôtels, fait le ménage des
maisons riches; les mioches font des courses, cirent les souliers et ramassent du bois de
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rebut pour la provision de l’hiver” (76). There are obvious parallels here between the
experiences of African-Americans and Franco-Americans in urban space—for instance,
the ways in which they negotiate their transplantation in the new environment and the
strategies that they employ for economic survival. Very much like the crowded Petits
Canadas in any number of cities,
Roxbury est une fourmillière où s’enchevêtre une vie curieuse et sympathique. On
y assiste à l’effort d’une race refoulée pour sa petite place au soleil: un soleil
étranger et qu’elle n’a pas choisi. On y coudoie, sur d’humbles scènes, tous les
drames humains: le succès, l’épreuve, la défaite, l’humour, la tragédie; mais, plus
qu’ailleurs peut-être, un courage obstiné joint à une patience infinie. (79)
The narrator thus insists upon the difficult acculturation process that African-Americans,
like Franco-Americans, undergo in the Northeast. He also signals the way in which the
dominant cultural group feels threatened by the migrants, a reaction not unlike the
nativist sentiment harbored against Franco-Americans: “L’expansion continue de la race
noire crée un problème ardu, inquiétant, pour l’Amérique anglo-saxonne” (80).
As Fanny seeks to enter the world of waged work outside the home, what kinds of
opportunities present themselves to her? In pre-Depression America, society expected
women of color to work in service industries: as laundry workers, hotel maids, office
cleaners, or domestics in private homes (Freedman 138). Lacking a high school
education, Fanny places the following advertisement in her son’s newsletter: “Une
femme de couleur, d’âge moyen, travailleuse, obligeante, entendue au ménage, sollicite
un emploi pour quelques heures par jour” (168). Donat Sylvain, a book illustrator and
poet, employs her to clean his Commonwealth Avenue apartment. Complimented on her
work by her employer, Fanny feels a new pride in herself, a pride that translates into the
purchase of a maid’s uniform. She explains to Monsieur Sylvain, “C’est que j’étais le
seul objet chez vous qui eût l’air négligé. Et puis, des fois, j’ouvre la porte à vos clients,
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aux fournisseurs” (194). The fact that she views herself as an object reveals much about
the role that has been assigned to her in the patriarchal space that she has always
inhabited.
Prevented from articulating a distinct sense of agency by an objectifying
masculine gaze that seeks to dominate and possess, Fanny has, in the past, never
considered herself as an autonomous subject. Although she uses the word négligé in the
sense of “untidy,” the more telling connotations of “neglected” and “overlooked” convey
her experience in Mr. Lewis’s home. In Bonds of Love, Jessica Benjamin explores how
recognition promotes the development of a distinct self: “Recognition is that response
from the other which makes meaningful the feelings, intentions, and actions of the self. It
allows the self to realize its agency and authorship in a tangible way” (99). Donat Sylvain
acknowledges Fanny’s work and worth, and this positive recognition contributes to the
new way she thinks about herself.
As their relationship progresses, Fanny dares to believe that she may be loved
“non plus comme une élève soumise, mais comme une égale. Par un homme de son âge
qui ne lui devrait rien, qui viendrait à elle de plein gré” (202). Fanny’s dreams reveal
both her readiness for a mature, caring relationship and her unhappy past with Mr. Lewis.
She regrets the inequities inherent in their marriage, a union in which she was never able
to transcend her pupil status. In her new relationship with Donat Sylvain, one based upon
trust and openness, Fanny begins to enjoy the attentiveness of a man who comes to her
freely and without a hidden agenda. She inspires the poetry he composes and, listening to
his verse, “elle en sentait malgré elle une dignité et une majesté l’envahir” (216).
Like Jeanne Lacombe’s suitor, Ludwig, Donat Sylvain symbolically associates
Woman with the beauties of Nature:
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Dans sa couleur il retrouvait les teintes d’abeilles dorées, d’orchidées rares, de
bois polis, de châtaîgnes mûres, de fines topazes, de cafés délicats, d’élytres
miroitants et de gorges d’oiseaux. Dans ses membres aux formes parfaites il
admirait la souplesse des jeunes palmes et la grâce des gazelles. L’harmonie de
ses gestes était celle de rameaux balancés en cadence. Sa voix portait l’écho de
cordes vibrantes sous les brises. (216)
His portrait of her appeals to the physical senses; it invokes rich colors, polished woods,
tropical orchids, and harmonious sounds. Donat also captures her graceful movement in
his choice of terms such as souplesse, grâce, l’harmonie de ses gestes, rameaux
balancés. Many of the other images, however, abeilles dorées, orchidées rares, élytres
miroitants, gorges d’oiseaux, convey a fragility that anticipates Fanny’s tragic end.
At this point in Fanny’s life, Charlie Ross turns up in Boston, and, too
kindhearted to turn him away, Fanny rents him a vacant room in her apartment.
Influenced by African-American radicals, Charlie “avait écouté des apôtres itinérants
prêchant la révolte; et son âme peu subtile en avait conçu pour tous les blancs sans
distinction une rancune voisine de la haine” (226).11 Charlie immediately falls in with
African-American laborers who agitate for union membership. Their hatred for their
white employers fuels Charlie’s rage when he discovers that Fanny’s employer, a white
gentleman, is her friend. His growing alcoholism and Cécile’s gossip about Fanny and
Donat attending the theater propel him to Donat’s apartment.
Charlie demands of Fanny, “Je veux savoir si oui ou non tu vas renoncer à ce
blanc et t’en revenir avec nous, avec ceux de ta race. . . . C’est pour ton bien. Je t’aime, tu
le sais, et je te veux à moi. Mais, par le ciel, si je te perds, aucun maudit étranger ne
t’aura” (269-70). Charlie’s heated reaction to Fanny’s choice of a suitor, one outside the
closed community that race and social class define, could easily have been articulated by
Jean Lacombe in response to Jeanne’s choice of Carl as her suitor. Charlie and Jean both
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share an intolerance of others, a patronizing tone, and a jealous obsession about the
women they love. Unlike Jean, however, Charlie possesses a violent temper, one that
impels him to draw his knife against Fanny: “Charlie Ross n’entendait rien, repris de sa
manie, et continuait à peser sur la lame, l’enfonçant plus avant dans la chair palpitante. Il
ne s’arrêta qu’en sentant le liquide chaud qui inondait sa paume. Il regarda et vit la mare
noirâtre qui déjà s’épandait sous eux.” (272). Charlie flees, and Fanny, mortally
wounded, lies to Donat in order to spare Charlie: “En pelant mes légumes, je suis tombée
sur le couteau” (275).
Racism and sexism intersect in Fanny’s tragic end. Charlie, the victim of racism,
steams under the weight of repeated rejections by white employers. He insists, “Nord ou
Sud, ils sont partout les mêmes. Que je leur mendie du travail, il leur suffit de me
regarder pour qu’ils déclarent, ‘Rien à faire’” (226). Charlie’s hatred of whites propels
him to Donat’s door, intent on destroying the symbol of all he cannot attain. Throughout
Charlie’s pursuit of her, Fanny remains unattainable. For three decades he chases after
her as the object of his desire, but, in the end, she eludes him. He seeks to dominate her,
just as Mr. Lewis had dominated her. In killing Donat, he would have avenged himself
doubly—he would have struck down a white man and taken possession of Fanny. The
scenario, of course, goes horribly wrong and Charlie emerges as both a victimizer and a
victim.
In Donat Sylvain’s apartment, Fanny finds a refuge, a supportive and loving
home, a place unlike any she has ever known. That last morning, before Charlie’s knock
at the door, Fanny thinks back over her childhood in Greenway, perhaps reflecting upon
how far she has come and upon the life she has created for herself, her sons, and Donat.
Fanny’s laughter, her lovely voice, her irrepressible enthusiasm and goodwill, endure to
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the end . . . and beyond. For Donat, “Fanny restera un fantôme tragique, une âme
présente, plus qu’une image, flottant à ses côtés, éternellement jeune, compagne encore à
travers les courants qui l’entraîneront à leur gré et pourtant perdu sans espoir” (283).
Fanny’s double self-sacrifice—saving Donat’s life and protecting her killer—reveals her
profound generosity of spirit and self-abnegation. Her act also demonstrates that
patriarchy—the space of domination and conquest—remains a powerful hierarchy that
cannot be vanquished since “the disposition of space for man is above all an image of
power, the maximum power being attained when one can dispose of the space of others”
(Hermann 168).
3.6 The Ideology of La Survivance in La Jeune Franco-Américaine and
Les Enfances de Fanny
La Jeune Franco-Américaine promotes the exclusionary ideology of la
survivance to its overwhelmingly female readership, whereas Les Enfances de Fanny
urges a vision of cultural, racial, and religious tolerance based upon the author’s personal
convictions about racial equality. Despite its story line about the settlement of AfricanAmericans in the North, Dantin’s text is also a metaphor for the French-Canadian
experience in New England. Parallels between these two hyphenated groups can be
established even though, at first glance, the subject seems unusual for a Franco-American
author. For instance, both groups were viewed by the culturally dominant, Northern
white population as backward and uneducated, that is, as Other. Historian Edward L.
Ayers writes about attitudes toward the South: “The Southern Trough, which cuts across
Mississippi and Alabama, embracing parts of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Georgia . . .
appears to most Americans as the least desirable place in the United States to live . . .
.The whole South appears to be a vast saucer of unpleasant associations” (63). Dantin, in
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depicting the difficulties of rural, Southern African-Americans to establish themselves in
the Northeast in relation to a politically, economically, and culturally dominant white
society, focuses on a group distinctly subaltern. The struggles of this ethnic minority, one
that has crossed distinct border spaces, spaces at once geographical and metaphorical,
evoke similar efforts on the part of Franco-Americans to construct an identity in an alien
environment.
Like that of Franco-Americans, the way of life that African-American migrants
from the South brought with them is now considered to be in decline and dissolution.
Commenting on the threatened extinction of a distinctly Southern culture, John Egerton
warns that “all our strengths—of family and history and tradition, of geography and
climate, of music and food, of spoken and written language—are endangered treasures”
(255). This protective stance reminds one of the ideology of la survivance with its
emphasis on the maintenance of cultural tradition, family, and the French language.
According to Egerton, many African-Americans desire to hold on to their own identity,
their kinship networks, their indigenous foods; in short, to maintain their culture in the
face of assimilation. Thus, the desire for maintenance of cultural values and traditions in
the new urban locus emerges as a shared concern of African-Americans and FrancoAmericans alike.
Nonstandard language usage can be seen as another point of commonality
between the two minority groups. The use of Vernacular Black English by many AfricanAmericans identifies these speakers as belonging to a distinct language group based upon
regional identity and minority affiliation. Ayers argues that “[a]ccent accentuates
difference where there is supposed to be commonality; it testifies to an inability or
unwillingness to go along, to fit it” (71). He considers the accent of African-American
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Southerners “rich in meaning and consequence. [This] accent is often understood, inside
the South as well as beyond its borders, as a symbol of poor education and low ambition”
(71). Franco-Americans have, in the past, faced ridicule for their heavily accented
English. In Wednesday’s Child, Côté Robbins describes her attempt to lose her French
accent: “I hardly open my mouth to speak. I’m working on a new accent in secret. A
Boston accent. I’m practicing Bostonian speech patterns in my girl brain and come spring
I no longer say ‘thoo-turty-tree’ or ‘mudder and fadder.’ I enunciate and pronounce my
words as if I had chewed them forty times each” (79).
Certainly the Northern white culture negatively perceived minority groups such as
Franco-Americans and African-Americans who migrated to the industrial cities of the
North at about the same time. These ethnic groups both desired to maintain their cultural
values and traditions in the face of the pressure of assimilation. The similarities between
the groups may explain why Dantin chooses to explore the African-American experience
in the urban Northeast as a metaphor for the Franco-American settlement process.
La Jeune Franco-Américaine and Les Enfances de Fanny both examine space as a
gendered construct. The two female protagonists move in masculine-controlled space but
with very different results. Jeanne flees whatever seems threatening or difficult, and
Fanny comes to confront oppression and danger. In the end, however, Jeanne survives the
hazards she encounters while Fanny perishes. Ironically, both women find themselves
betrayed by other women who are themselves manipulated by dominant men. In Jeanne’s
case, her best friend, Jacqueline, seduces Flaherty; and in New York, her friend Helen
lures her to a brothel, influenced by her pimp’s desire for the additional income Jeanne
could provide him. Fanny suffers the consequences of having evicted Georges’s
girlfriend, Cécile, from her tenement apartment after Cécile seduces Édouard. The young
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woman, seeking revenge, then reveals Fanny’s relationship with Donat to Charlie, a
betrayal that leads to Fanny’s death.
The texts both reveal social systems of repression—patriarchal, economic, and
racial—where invisible ideologies and cultural values are inscribed. Patriarchal space
functions as the means by which men isolate and oppress women. Fanny confronts and
escapes oppression by Mr. Lewis only to meet her death at the hands of Charlie Ross.
Although she succeeds in creating a space in which to live an open, autonomous
existence, this fragile construct crumbles under the weight of masculine domination.
Jeanne Lacombe, on the other hand, fails to challenge patriarchal space, preferring to
forego independence in exchange for the protection her father’s home affords her. Any
attempt to discard the values he has instilled in her since childhood would threaten her
entire way of looking at the world, since the ideology of la survivance orients her to a
closed world, one intolerant of difference.
Whereas Fanny ultimately chooses a man whose race, culture, religion, and class
differ from hers, thus living the narrator’s anti-survivance message, Jeanne progressively
narrows her search for a husband finding, at last, a Roman Catholic, French-speaking,
Columbia University-educated man with a large fortune. Jeanne’s selection of a husband,
however, may be more problematic than first appears. Her attempt to narrow the field of
suitors actually fails to produce the desired result. She ultimately weds outside of her
cultural group, since neither of Jacques’s parents is French-Canadian. (His mother
emigrated from France to marry an American.) Although impressed with Jacques’s
command of standard French, Jeanne feels less than satisfied about his spotty presence at
mass and vows to encourage more regular attendance. An examination of Jacques’s
credentials therefore reveals a non-Franco-American who may indeed be a lapsed
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Catholic. Additionally, Jacques and Jeanne live in an Anglophone environment in which
some assimilation will obviously occur. The reader is left to wonder how truly FrancoAmerican their children will be. The ideology of la survivance seems imperiled at the
close of the narrative, and the text thus emerges as a failed roman à thèse.
Notes
1
Women authors played a highly visible role in Franco-American literature. Forty
percent of Franco-American novels between 1875 and 1940 were written by women
(Brière 116).
2
Louis Dantin, after years in the priesthood in Europe and in Quebec, left the
Church. He settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he worked for three decades at
Harvard University Press.
3
French Canadians, mostly from the Beauce area of southern Quebec province,
settled Lewiston, Maine, where the narrative opens. When Jeanne Lacombe’s father
becomes Mayor of the city just before the Depression, the population of Lewiston would
have been approximately 32,000, with over sixty percent Franco-American immigrants.
These settlers would have traveled largely by horse and carriage down the Canada
Highway through northern Somerset County (Maine), following the Kennebec River into
Augusta. Lewiston, lying southwest of Augusta, became a center for both textile mills
and shoe factories. James Hill Parker, in Ethnic Identity: The Case of the French
Americans (Lanham: UP of America, Inc., 1983), fixes the borders of Lewiston’s Petit
Canada as “the Androscogin River, Cedar, and Lincoln Streets. Located near the mills,
twenty-six percent of the city’s population is contained on 1.5 percent of the land”
(emphasis added) (11).
4
bell hooks, in Yearning race, gender, and cultural politics, explores the
behaviors among black men whom she characterizes as dominating and aggressive. She
urges the revision of “notions of masculinity in ways that break with sexism. . . . Careful
interrogation of the way in which sexist notions of masculinity legitimize the use of
violence to maintain control [and of] male domination of women, children, and even
other men, will reveal the connection between such thinking and black-on-black
homicide, domestic violence, and rape” (Yearning 77). Clearly Fanny and her best friend
Maud emerge as victims of abuse at the hands of black men empowered by conventional
gender norms that explain and excuse male violence as a reaction to societal pressures or
discrimination.
5
Le Messager, founded in 1880 by a young doctor named Louis Martel, belonged
to a handful of French-language dailies that printed a women’s page. Although some
coverage was given to Canadian news and sporting events, Le Messager’s chief objective
was in the promotion of the ideology of la survivance. To that end, the newspaper
lobbied tirelessly and unsuccessfully for the appointment of a French-Canadian bishop
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for the State of Maine. It also lobbied against the reduction in the use of French as the
language of instruction in parochial schools. A staunch defender of Franco-American
cultural identity in the face of assimilation, Le Messager continued to publish until 1968,
the venerable daily being the last French-language newspaper in New England.
6
Sherry Ortner suggests that since men are identified with culture, which attempts
to control nature, then “women, because of their close associations with nature, must also
be controlled and contained” (72). Rose concurs, affirming that one of the most important
dualisms in Western thought is the distinction between Nature and Culture and, by
extension, the association between the feminine and the natural and the masculine and
the cultural. She points to the objectification of women who “are hunted, colonized,
consumed and forced to yield and to produce. . . . As with women as a class, Nature and
animals have been kept in a state of inferiority and powerlessness in order to enable men
as a class to believe and to act upon their natural superiority/dominance” (Feminism 7071).
7
At the time of publication of La Jeune Franco-Américaine, the German
population of America was well over 20,000,000. Debates had raged for decades about
the Anglo-dominance of public education and social services despite massive numbers of
Irish, German, French, Polish, and Italian immigrants in American cities. Editorials in
immigrant newspapers urged a political alliance between the Irish, French, and German
workers and complained that “the great currents of Teutonic and Celtic blood flowing
through the veins of the nation count for nothing in the current climate of rampant AngloSaxonism” (Jacobson 168).
8
Leverenz’s thoughts on daddy’s girls in Edith Wharton’s narratives bear upon
the relationship between Jeanne and the older man. Leverenz argues that “several of
Wharton’s narratives . . . dramatize the predatory sexual dangers in young women’s
dependence on middle-aged men of money and power.” He characterizes such men as
being at a “narcissistic impasse” and explains that “they look toward little or not-so-littlegirls, who can make them feel strong, tall, and youthful again” (46).
9
Juliet Blair, making reference to the domestic ideology of the angel in the house,
observes: “Women . . . are defined in relation to men, as daughters, wives, mothers, and
so on, and they perform for them, as housewives, servants, nannies, mistresses, and so
on. Women have functioned as men’s private life, displayed in the reception room. There
is room for a woman at every level; but not a room of her own” (212).
10
hooks challenges the assumption that a woman who devotes herself to creating
a supportive home environment simply does what society expects of her. She explains,
“Sexist thinking about the nature of domesticity has determined the way black women’s
experience in the home is perceived” (Yearning 44). hooks argues that society views selfsacrifice as natural to women, “implying that such a gesture is not reflective of choice
and will. The assumption then is that the black woman who works hard to be a
responsible caretaker is only doing what she should be doing” (Yearning 45). According
to hooks, this viewpoint devalues both women themselves and the attempts they make to
rise above poverty and sexism (Yearning 46).
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11
The decade of the 1920s, when Fanny moves to the Northeast, has been
characterized as a crucial transition period for African-Americans (Wolcott 274). Having
thrown off the yoke of slavery and having, to some extent, escaped the exploitation that
characterized the years of Reconstruction, African-Americans began to agitate for
improvements in living and working conditions.
CHAPTER 4
THE SPACE OF DISCONTENT
4.1 The Foundering of the Ideology of La Survivance
The close of the nineteenth century witnessed much activity dedicated to the
continuation of the ideology of la survivance. In 1896, for instance, the Association
Canado-Américaine was established in Manchester, New Hampshire; in 1899, La Société
Historique Franco-Américaine in Boston, Massachusetts, began to produce Frenchlanguage materials for use in parochial schools; in 1902, La Société des Forestiers
Franco-Américains dedicated itself to “fournir à ses membres une éducation morale,
sociale, et intellectuelle, et de donner de l’assistance aux veuves et orphelins. Sa devise
est: Rallions-nous! Union. Bienfaisance. Patriotisme” (Dubé 39). Additionally, members
of the Franco-American elite formed professional groups such as L’Association des
Médecins Franco-Américains and La Société des Avocats Franco-Américains de la
Nouvelle Angleterre.
These groups and other benevolent societies held a 1916 Congrès in Woonsocket,
Rhode Island, dedicated to studying “les questions sociales en vue de diriger les FrancoAméricains dans la bonne voie, de leur enseigner les devoirs qu’ils ont à remplir envers
l’autorité civile et religieuse, la patrie américaine, et leur foyer” (Dubé 42). The Congrès
urged support of “la bonne littérature surtout les journaux franchement catholiques” and
promoted “la semence des bons principes dans toutes les sphères de la société” (Dubé
43). Forces beyond the control of the Congrès, however, already threatened the
continuation of the exclusionary ideology of la survivance.
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165
Between 1920 and 1930, a new wave of French-Canadian immigrants, driven
from Quebec by four successive years of recession, flooded southern New England.1 In
1923, this new diaspora caused much alarm among the québécois elite, who witnessed
the exodus from Quebec Province of over 400 individuals each day: “De juillet 1925 à
juillet 1926, 105,000 Canadiens sont partis du Québec pour les États-Unis, deux fois et
demie notre surplus annuel de natalité. Suicide de race, tuberculose nationale, disparition
par familles entières” (Dugré 138). Not since the decades following the American Civil
War had such massive numbers of workers moved south to New England. The exodus
was equally unpopular with Franco-Americans in New England, some of whom
represented third-generation families and who viewed the newcomers as a threat to their
economic well-being.
The 1920s saw a number of economic downturns, including a long and bitter
strike in 1922 at the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company in Manchester, New
Hampshire. A twenty-percent cut in wages, coupled with an increase in working hours,
precipitated the lengthy job action. Amoskeag and a host of mills in New England faced
other challenges during the 1920s, including increased competition from Southern mills
and shrinking markets (Brault 90). Between 1929 and 1933, seventeen textile mills in
Massachusetts’s Connecticut Valley closed, leaving 57.5 percent of the region’s laborers
unemployed. The Amoskeag never did recover from crippling strikes and closed its doors
in the midst of the Depression, leaving eleven thousand laborers idle. Deprived of work,
the Franco-Americans of Manchester scattered. The years prior to World War II
witnessed the decline and fall of the cotton industry of New England and with it “la fin
de la micro-société franco-américaine”(Péloquin, “Les attitudes” 668).
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An overview of the attack upon the ideology of cultural survival will prove useful
to my analysis of three writers—Jack Kérouac, Grace de Repentigny Metalious, and
Charleen Touchette. Their prose challenges the primacy of that ideology. In fact, VictorLévy Beaulieu, literary critic and québécois author, finds the cultural climate of 1920s
New England (especially the Bishop of Providence’s attack on the use of French in
parochial schools and the defense mounted by a self-appointed watchdog group known as
the Sentinelists) to be essential to an understanding of Kérouac’s work. He writes,
The Kérouac of Lowell is incomprehensible if one does not know what went on
in New England between 1923 and 1929, i.e. during Jack’s childhood—The
Kérouac of Lowell takes on his full meaning only with the Sentinelist Movement.
The Sentinelists knew very well that if the Bishop of Providence realized his
goals it was the end of the Franco-Americans—In other words, it was the longor short-term assimilation of the Franco-Americans and the dismantling of the
parish. . . . I write this so you can know what kind of world Jack was born
into. . . . (25-26)
The assault on the ideology of cultural survival struck at all three of its principal
tenets: French traditions, French language, and Roman Catholicism. First of all, the
newly arrived French Canadians’ presence became “la source de tension pour ceux qui
souhaitent transformer leur genre de vie et l’adapter à la réalité américaine. Pour ceux-là,
les émigrés représentent un frein à une évolution inévitable et nécessaire” (Roby 284).
The newcomers’ willingness to serve as strikebreakers particularly inflamed sentiment
against them:
Les Canadiens français, récemment arrivés du Québec, qui franchissent les lignes
du piquetage, sont particulièrement détestés. Selon certains observateurs, ils sont
nombreux. Le 24 novembre 1922, le Boston American mentionne que deux mille
ouvriers, soit le tiers de ceux qui sont rentrés au service de l’Amoskeag à
Manchester, sont des briseurs de grève du Canada.2 (Roby 288)
Economic concerns therefore drove a wedge between newly arrived French Canadians
and established Franco-American workers. The newcomers accepted diminished wages
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and consented to work beyond the number of hours mandated by law. Established
workers held them responsible for management’s hardline stance. Only the FrancoAmerican elite championed their swelling numbers: “Accueillis à bras ouverts par le
clergé et les élites traditionnelles parce qu’ils renforcent le réseau institutionnel des Petits
Canadas, ils sont, d’autre part, souvent méprisés et repoussés par les gens ordinaires
qu’ils côtoient tous les jours. . . . En période de chômage, on les accuse d’accaparer les
rares emplois qui restent” (Roby 289-90).
Other cultural changes, largely due to nativist sentiment following World War I,
stimulated assimilation of ethnic minorities in America. For Franco-Americans,
therefore, pressure to assimilate came from both within and without. Although the elite
still promoted the ideology of la survivance and believed “qu’il n’est pas possible d’y
parvenir qu’en recréant le Québec français en Nouvelle Angleterre” (Roby 329),
unskilled workers began to enroll their children in public schools and to abandon the
Petits Canadas to immigrants from Eastern Europe. Writing in 1943, Jacques Ducharme
observes that too often Franco-Americans clung to the old ways “without turning enough
to the future. The Franco-American motto—Notre langue, notre foi, nos
traditions—forces an ideology based on history rather than on initiative. Few have noted
that the coming to New England constitutes a break in tradition, and that the ideology is
no longer sufficient” (The Shadows 140-41). Societal pressure to assimilate also
increased. For instance, this period witnessed the growth of the Ku Klux Klan in New
England and its persecution of Franco-Americans in major cities and small towns. In
Madison, Maine, KKK members burned crosses on the lawns of Franco-American paper
mill workers. Roby concludes that during the 1930s “la survivance [devient] un objectif
de plus en plus utopique” (330).
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A second assault on the ideology of la survivance took aim at the French
language, the goal being to reduce or to eliminate it entirely. Attacks by Englishlanguage newspapers and state legislatures focused upon French-language newspapers
and French-language schools. The Visitor, a Providence, Rhode Island, Catholic
newspaper, suggested the progressive introduction of English into foreign language
newspapers. Baltimore’s Manufacturers Record urged “the prohibition of all foreign
language newspapers in the United States” (qtd. in Roby 297). State and federal
governments attempted to curtail the use of foreign language as the medium of
instruction in private schools (Brault 87). For example, in 1918, Connecticut’s Governor
Marcus Holcomb signed into law a bill requiring English as the language of instruction
and administration of all public and private schools in the state. After angry protests by
Franco-Americans, the legislature amended the law to include instruction of a foreign
language for one hour during the school day (Roby 291). In 1923, the United States
Supreme Court struck down all laws restricting the teaching of subject matter in a foreign
language as infringing upon the Fourteenth Amendment (Brault 87). By that time,
however, Franco-Americans had become embroiled in a far more contentious battle—the
ideological struggle known as the Sentinelle crisis—one that Roby terms “une véritable
querelle fratricide” (290).
This five-year, highly public battle between the Irish and the Franco-Americans
of Woonsocket over the control of diocesan institutions and revenues has furnished the
subject matter of a number of articles and dissertations.3 The trouble began over a law
passed in Rhode Island in 1922, similar to the Connecticut legislation, banning
instruction in public and private schools in a language other than English. Mgr. William
Hickey, Bishop of Providence, lost the support of his Franco-American parishioners
169
because of his promotion of the policies of the National Catholic Welfare Conference.
These policies affirmed that instruction in Catholic schools would be solely in English
(Roby 302). After raising half a million dollars to build Mount Saint-Charles Academy, a
day and boarding secondary school for boys in Woonsocket, Franco-Americans learned
that Mgr. Hickey intended to require instruction in English rather than in French. Under
the leadership of Elphège J. Daignault, militant Franco-Americans established a weekly
newspaper, La Sentinelle. They carried out what Roby terms “guerilla warfare” (290) in
their campaign to ensure the continuation of instruction in French in parochial schools.
Daignault inflamed Franco-Americans with his rhetoric: “Quelles armes utiliser pour
nous défendre contre les assimilateurs, contre les Franco-Américains qui vendent nos
droits en faisant mine de les défendre?” (Roby 289). Daignault and his associates
organized a pew-rental strike,4 held a rally in Worcester that drew ten thousand
protestors, and filed a civil lawsuit in Rhode Island courts against Bishop Hickey. The
controversy split Franco-Americans into two camps and spilled over into parishes in
Manchester, New Hampshire, and in Worcester, Massachusetts. These parishes had
grown unhappy with diocesan policies that tied their hands and purse strings. L’Union
Saint-Jean-Baptiste d’Amérique took a firm stand against the agitators. L’Association
Canado-Américaine supported them (Brault 88).
In the end, sixty-two Sentinellistes were excommunicated, and control of diocesan
monies was retained by the Bishop. Roby argues that the Sentinelle Affair can be seen as
la lutte entre partisans radicaux et modérés de la survivance, entre ceux qui ne
croient possible d’assurer la survivance des traits distinctifs de la nationalité
franco-américaine qu’en recréant le plus exactement possible le Québec français
en Nouvelle Angleterre et ceux qui pensent, au contraire, qu’on n’y arrivera qu’en
composant avec la société américaine. (323)
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La Tribune, Woonsocket’s anti-Sentinelliste daily newspaper, rallied the faithful in its
call for obedience to diocesan hierarchy. Other newspapers soon followed La Tribune’s
lead. On January 19, 1925, L’Avenir National proclaimed, “Dans la vie religieuse, dans la
vie de l’Église, c’est le diocèse qui est la cellule vitale. L’organisme paroissial ne vient
qu’après le diocèse. Garder sa langue, c’est bien; garder sa foi, c’est mieux” (qtd. in
Roby 329). Those who had promoted the ideology of cultural survival for over five
decades finally encountered resistance from within Franco-America. More moderate
voices, ones opposed to the triad of faith, language, and culture, began to make
themselves heard. Immediately, a group formed calling itself Le Comité Permanent de la
Survivance Française en Amérique.5 The new organization concentrated its efforts on the
promotion of French-language radio broadcasts, the continuance of a half-day of
instruction in French in parochial schools, and the encouragement of continued use of
French as the language of fraternal and benevolent societies.6
The authors examined in this chapter, voices from within FrancoAmerica—Kérouac, Metalious, and Touchette—at once embrace and refute what
Péloquin terms “la conscience collective franco-américaine [qui] a été fixée sur un passé
glorieux fictif” (“Les attitudes” 667). In doing so, all three reveal a deep ambivalence
toward their ethnicity and an intriguing fascination with the ideology of cultural survival.
Their voices of discontent speak loudly—and in English—and refuse the hegemonic
identifications assigned to Franco-American culture by the powerful Francophone elite.
That their works are largely autobiographical suggests that their writing serves as an
exploration of their ethnic personhood and how that identity conforms to or rebels against
Franco-American culture. These authors expose and question adherence to traditions and
values imposed on themselves and their ethnic group by the voices of power—the clergy,
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the politically and socially influential, and the French-language press. Richard Sorrell
maintains that these writers did not lead lives “which the Franco-American elite would
have considered exemplary or even acceptable” (“Novelists” 38). The popular image of
Kérouac and Metalious as undisciplined, sexually liberated rebels contrasts sharply with
their repressive cultural heritage and its “maintenance of traditional nationality and
religion, and militant defense of conservatism, Catholicism, and the family” (Sorrell,
“Novelists” 38). Touchette breaks the silence imposed by her family as she chronicles the
sexual abuse that she, her cousins, aunts, and grandmother all endured at the hands of
male predators within her Franco-American clan. Each of the three authors in this chapter
finds it necessary to expose that which the institutional bases of Franco-American power
would seek to conceal. In so doing, these individuals raise voices of discontent to counter
the space of acquiescence left too long unchallenged by a silent underclass. The writers’
roots in working-class neighborhoods impel their creation of characters that hunger for a
piece of the American dream, an opportunity historically denied to Franco-American mill
workers.
Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, both
identifies with and rejects his working-class Franco-American heritage, an ambivalence
to be found throughout his work. For example, he writes, “The poor Canucks my people
of my God-gave-me-life” (Doctor Sax 8). He later admits, “I can remember the faces of
the Canucks of Lowell . . . hung-jawed dull faces of grown adults . . . Bums! all! . . . I
don’t want to be buried in THEIR cemetery!” (Visions of Gerard 15-17). Yet, all his life
he identified with those same “Canucks” and signed his name with the accent mark in his
correspondence and on the canvases of his artwork. In this chapter I will explore the
spaces of conflict in which three Franco-American authors alternately embrace and reject
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their ethnicity as they confront their ambivalent feelings about their language, religion,
and cultural heritage.
4.2 Jack Kérouac: “All my knowledge rests in my ‘French-Canadianness’”
The last decade of the twentieth century witnessed the publication of no fewer
than nine biographies of Jack Kérouac, three in 1998 alone. A variety of scholarly articles
and texts have also appeared recently. These works testify to a growing interest in
Kérouac’s œuvre in academic circles and to its continued popularity with the general
public. On the Road (1957), Kérouac’s best-known novel and a landmark work in
American literature, still sells over 100,000 copies annually (Hemmer 119). In his text
Les Franco-Américains 1860-1980, François Weil calls Kérouac “le plus grand écrivain
d’origine franco-américaine” (205). Weil contends that Kérouac’s novels constitute “un
témoignage intéressant sur le rejet partiel que pouvait entraîner la culture de la
Survivance” (205). Other Kérouac scholars, notably Richard Sorrell and Eric Waddell,
explore the ambivalence that a partial rejection of French-Canadian cultural heritage
implies. For instance, Sorrell describes the conflicting feelings Kérouac harbored for his
hometown. On the one hand, Kérouac laments that his family “should never have left
Lowell” (Book of Dreams 50). On the other hand, Sorrell explains that
Kerouac disliked Franco Lowell for the constraints it placed upon moving up or
out. . . . Jack never really left Lowell, however, in the sense that he became
estranged from the place. A part of him was always trying to return. His escape to
a freer beat environment was, at best, only partially successful for a few years.
(“Novelists” 43)
In her introduction to On the Road, Ann Charters, Kérouac’s first biographer,
attributes his feelings of being “on the margins of society, [to] . . . his French-Canadian
identity” (xxi). She contends, “Writing On the Road, Kerouac finally found his own
voice and his true subject—the story of his own search for a place as an outsider in
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America” (xx). Kérouac felt deeply alienated outside his Lowell Petit Canada and wrote
to a literary critic, “I am amazed by that horrible homelessness all French Canadians
abroad in America feel” (Selected 228). Certainly On the Road can be read, as Charters
suggests, as Kérouac’s personal search for identity, a quest anchored in his efforts to
make sense of his own ethnicity. Taking a broader view, however, one should also
consider the ambiguities inherent in a text that seeks to contest and to redefine the
dominant postwar culture of the 1950s. From Kérouac’s viewpoint, this culture of
consumerism collided with the confining ideology of Franco-American traditional values
of thrift and suffering. Kérouac’s father, Léo, taught him the family motto, one that the
father claimed had come to New France with the Brittany Kérouacs: “Aimer, Travailler,
Souffrir.” Jack Kérouac “took the motto, particularly the last word to heart, obsessed
with the idea that predetermined, terrible fates circumscribed his life. . . that suffering
was indeed the core of his preordained fate” (McKee 14).
Although not usually considered to be overtly influenced by Kérouac’s tortured
sense of his cultural heritage, On the Road emerges, upon careful analysis, as a text as
profoundly ethnic as The Town and the City (1950), Doctor Sax (1959), or Visions of
Gerard (1963). In repeatedly crisscrossing the American continent, Sal Paradise, the
narrator of On the Road, seems a modern coureur de bois, much like his literary ancestor,
François Paradis, ill-fated adventurer of Maria Chapdelaine. Sal Paradise’s exploits,
however, present a corrupted interaction with the natural world. Rather than the true
wilderness François experiences, Sal encounters, as his name suggests, a dirty paradise
that noise, technology, and consumerism have deformed. His name also evokes sol, a
reference to the sacredness of the land that both On the Road and the romans de terroir
celebrate.
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Kérouac, according to Beaulieu, emerges as “a coureur of roads in the same
tradition as the old Canadien coureurs de bois—which meant an endless plunge into the
anarchy of the moment and the beauty of the movement” (74-75). In using the theme of
mobility in On the Road to voice his resistance to established norms, Kérouac challenges
the sense of home and family values rooted in both Franco-American culture and
mainstream America of the 1950s.
Like Charters, other Kérouac biographers such as Barry Miles, author of Jack
Kerouac, King of the Beats (1998), foreground the autobiographical nature of Kérouac’s
prose fiction. Miles observes that “one of the greatest limitations of his work was that he
only wrote about himself” (xiv). Chartier, too, insists that “chacun des ouvrages de Jack
Kérouac, que ce soit un roman ou un recueil de poèmes, fait partie d’une vaste saga
autobiographique où Jack décrit les aspects les plus explicitement ethniques de son vécu”
(“Jack Kérouac” 84). Kérouac himself corroborates Chartier’s concept of a “saga
autobiographique,” insisting, in Some of the Dharma (published posthumously in 1997),
that he has “only ONE BOOK to write, in which everything, past, present, and future . . .
is caught like dust in the sunlight” (277). The “one book” to which he refers is the
Duluoz Legend that represents the evolving story of his life. Kérouac had planned to
compile his various novels into a single roman fleuve, but died before completing the
project. This cohesive volume would have greatly clarified Kérouac’s work for his
readership. His more than twenty novels were not published in the order written nor, in
fact, were they written in chronological sequence mirroring the various periods in his life
that they describe. In reading these works, one is confronted with a kaleidoscopic view of
the shards of Kérouac’s search for self, shards that convey the jumble of the writer’s
shifting values and conflicted sense of his ethnicity.
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In a letter dated September 8, 1950, to Yvonne Le Maître, literary critic of
Worcester’s Le Travailleur, Kérouac reflects upon the knowledge that he considers
central to his literary creation and to his very being:
All my knowledge rests in my ‘French-Canadianness’ and nowhere else. The
English language is a tool lately found . . . so late (I never spoke English before I
was 6 or 7), at 21, I was still awkward and illiterate sounding in my speech and
writings. What a mix-up. The reason I handle English words so easily is because
it is not my own language. I refashion it to fit French images. Do you see that?
(Selected 228)
Gerald Nicosia, author of Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac,7 relates
that Kérouac read Joyce’s Finnegans Wake aloud for the “verbal pyrotechnics and
sleight-of-tongue” (147). Nicosia describes Kérouac’s “love of the language, his
enthusiasm for putting words together just to hear their sound even if they didn’t always
make sense. . . . His own freshness with the language was due, Jack thought, to having
learned English as a second language” (147). Like Nicosia, Matt Theado, in
Understanding Jack Kerouac, attributes Kérouac’s inventive use of English to his
bilingualism and to his “need to discover meanings on the fly” (10). Even at the age of
fourteen, Kérouac spoke a heavily-accented English, and throughout his life he continued
to speak in French to his mother, Gabrielle, whom he called Mémère.
Commenting on the writer’s bilingualism and biculturalism, Waddell compares
Kérouac to James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, and Dylan Thomas, writers who were caught
between “deux langues, deux cultures. . . . des hommes désespérément sensibles, formés
par des valeurs traditionnelles, imprégnés des rêves du passé, des hommes de milieux
minoritaires véhiculant un message universel et l’exprimant dans une langue qui n’était
pas la leur” (6-7). For Kérouac, as he explains in his letter to Le Maître about The Town
and the City, writing “a universal American story” depended upon his success in
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concealing his own ethnicity. He also notes, “French Canadians everywhere tend to hide
their real sources. They can do it because they look Anglo-Saxon. . . . Believe me, I’ll
never hide it again, as once I did when I first began ‘Englishizing myself’ to coin a term
(Me faire un Anglais)” (Selected 229).
“Ti Jean,” as he was known to family and friends, spent his childhood in Lowell’s
Petit Canada, just north of the Merrimack River. Kérouac’s cultural memories,
intimately associated with place, permeate The Town and the City, and Galloway, the
writer’s Lowell, emerges as a locus of security and belonging. Sorrell contends that “his
early years in Lowell had a coherence which he never regained. . . . For young Kerouac,
the focal point of these neighborhoods was his group of childhood and adolescent friends,
mostly other Francos. The immigrant, peasant, mill town mannerisms that he acquired
during those years stayed with him all of his life” (“Novelists” 42). In a letter to Neil
Cassady, Kérouac explains his sense of his Otherness: “You never spoke my tongue nor
lived in foreign neighborhoods . . . it was I, sad grownup Jack of today, mooning ragtail
among the tincans and clinkers, in the hot strange sun and jabbering hum of FrenchCanadian time” (Selected 255). The childhood years spent in Lowell’s Petit Canada
neighborhoods emerge in Kérouac’s portrayal of the “gloom French-Canadian homes
seem to have” (Doctor Sax 95).
This space of gloom, according to Beaulieu, pervades Kérouac’s work; he sees his
œuvre as “evidence of a desperate and unsuccessful flight from the Québec gloom which
was his inescapable heritage” (167). Beaulieu assigns to Kérouac the task of expressing
“the death of others” and contends that “anachronic men exist, people who keep the
minutes for collectivities in the process of disappearing, prophets we don’t hear, knights
of the Apocalypse before whom we veil our eyes. Jack was one of this gloomy lot” (168).
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These “collectivities in the process of disappearing” are, of course, the Franco-Americans
of New England, individuals whose culture and language are being eradicated, at the time
Kérouac writes, by the forces of assimilation. The Town and the City, Kérouac’s first
novel, chronicles the experiences of the Franco-American Martin family in the 1930s and
40s. Tension arises as the characters agonize over discarding their cultural baggage in
order to pursue the American dream.
4.2.1 The Town and the City: Spaces of Conflict and Disorientation
In Maggie Cassidy (1959), the narrator characterizes two antagonistic loci as
“sweet Lowell” and “sour New York” (178). This description gives an indication of how
these places are treated in The Town and the City, a novel largely ignored by
contemporary critics.8 One could indeed make a case for considering the work a failed
roman de terroir. Its glorification of the land and its insistence upon agricultural pursuits
as man’s sacred calling emerge in the comments of Marguerite Martin to her wayward
son Peter, comments that fail to keep him rooted in Galloway:
“[T]he best kind of life, as far as I’m concerned, was the life we used to live on
my grandfather’s farm in New Hampshire. . . .My uncles are still living like that
in New Hampshire and others in Canada, and that’s the best life there is. They
work hard all right, but they get rewarded for their work, they live, and they’re
happy and healthy. . . . You can have your Communists, and your neurotics and
all that stuff, but give me a good old church-going farmer for a man—a real
man.” (412-13)
Marguerite’s views articulate traditional arguments employed in the roman de terroir,
views meant to persuade Quebec’s youth to shun the bright lights of New England cities
in favor of the benefits derived from tilling the ancestral land. Although another of
Marguerite’s sons, Joe, buys a New Hampshire farm and returns to the land with the
remnants of the Martin clan, Peter remains disoriented and uncommitted. He ultimately
sets off alone, in true coureur de bois fashion, to wander the wilderness space that
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beckons to him outside the parameters of Galloway. Peter still harbors deep nostalgia for
his hometown, yet he searches for excitement in what lies beyond his ken, experiencing
an oscillatory ambivalence towards his ethnicity, his roots.
The Town and the City, a text that Tim Hunt calls “Kerouac’s most directly
autobiographical book” (78), foregrounds the writer’s feelings about his French-Canadian
heritage and his attempts to work through what John Clellon Holmes terms “the hunger
that was gnawing in him then . . . [over] the breakup of his Lowell home, the chaos of the
war years, and the death of his father” (77). Fictional masks of the author abound in The
Town and the City, and the characters, according to Charles Jarvis, “become something
more than mere flesh and blood; they become extensions of Kerouac; they become great
heroes who walk the land and make the earth tremble, and all the ‘feats’ they perform are
Kerouac’s” (1).
Critics have long argued over which character most closely resembles Kérouac
himself. In his letter to Le Maître, Kérouac denies any kinship with Francis:
I am not Francis Martin. I never was anything like Francis Martin. Francis Martin
is a caricature of some of the friends I have had who were typical intellectual
outcast-types, “decadent” types, from whom I admit I learned a lot but not
everything—and not the most important things. . . . In Lowell, I never acted like
Francis. I defend myself strongly on this point because I want you to like me.
Francis was my villain. (Selected 228)
In “Avant la route, le village,” Poteet associates Mickey Martin most closely with
Kérouac due, perhaps, to Mickey’s constant confusion. When one first meets Mickey he
is “stunned by the sudden discovery that he does not know who he is, where he came
from, what he is doing here. . .” (15). (And is this not precisely what is at issue in the
Franco-American experience in New England?) Later, after the Martin family has moved
to a tenement house on Moody Street, “Mickey started home from school in the wrong
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direction . . . suddenly plunged in an awful confusion as he positively could not
remember which way he was supposed to go to get home” (240). He loses his way on
two other occasions (243, 247). His disorientation mirrors Kérouac’s treatment of the
themes of dislocation and exile throughout his œuvre and the conflict between his ethnic
heritage and mainstream American culture. Waddell observes, “L’œuvre de Jack
marquait le déclin de l’univers franco-américain (puisqu’il semblait raconter un monde
qui échappait à tous, y compris à lui-même) et l’impossible intégration au grand tout
anglo-américain” (8).
Other critics, notably Charters, Nicosia, and Sorrell, consider Peter Martin’s life
to most closely parallel Kérouac’s own. I would argue that all five of the Martin brothers
reflect different periods in Kérouac’s life and different facets of his persona: Francis, the
intellectual snob and latent homosexual; Joe, the hard-drinking nomad; Charley, the shy
and awkward boy; Peter, the hometown football hero; and Mickey, the mystical dreamer.
The narrator chooses to focus most intently upon Peter, the middle son and his father’s
favorite. Like Kérouac, Peter obtains a football scholarship to an Ivy League School.
(Kérouac’s Columbia becomes Peter’s Penn.) And like Kérouac, he drops out during his
sophomore year, able to tolerate neither the athletic training regimen nor the intense
snobbery of students who mock his strange clothing and peasant roots. Peter fails to
fulfill his father’s dreams for him just as Jack disappoints Léo Kérouac’s fondest hopes
for his son, hopes that Jack would become a college football hero. Beaulieu refers to
Jack’s “Canuck childhood and adolescence” as
that lost Paradise which had to be regained in the new American skin. The
Father’s mistake was to think it was possible to arrive at the one without losing
the other, to attain American comfort without leaving the old French Catholic
heritage behind—in a great attempt at exorcism Jack brought it all to the surface
in The Town and the City. (53)
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The complex novel, then, addresses the tension that arises when individuals attempt to
live in border spaces between two cultures, spaces of conflict and fragmentation.
The five-hundred page saga of the Martin clan of Galloway, Massachusetts,
explores a theme central to Jeanne la fileuse, Canuck, and La Jeune Franco-Américaine:
the great cultural divide between family-oriented life in an ethnic enclave and vaguely
decadent life in the city. The opening section portrays life in a small mill-town on the
Merrimack River. In Part Two, the children become old enough to leave home, and the
novel follows the adventures of the three oldest boys—Joe, Francis, and Peter. Part Three
depicts the War years and Peter’s adventures in the Merchant Marine. The family’s
experiences in Brooklyn and the widening gap between Peter and his father over Peter’s
quasi-criminal friends comprise the fourth section. Part Five chronicles the long and
painful death of George Martin and reassembles the entire cast of characters (except for
Charley, killed on Okinawa) for the patriarch’s funeral in Galloway.
The Town and the City, according to Charters, contrasts “the innocence of the
country and the small town life with the destructive experiences of a big city” (67). The
text certainly succeeds, most notably in Part Two, in establishing a sharp contrast
between Galloway and New York City. The quarrel in this section between Francis and
Peter serves as a metaphor for the antagonism between town and city values. Small-town
Peter brings the innocence of Galloway with him to a New York prep school and finds
himself out of place in the city. Francis, mentored by an older, sophisticated gentleman,
adopts a snobbery and cynicism that fit in well with city life but cut him off forever from
his hometown. Any resolution of the conflict between town and city values seems
impossible. Even knowledge gained from life’s most wretched experiences seems
inadequate for characters attempting to come to terms with their present gloomy
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existence and their lost joyful past. For example, Liz, Peter’s sister, wanders America
from coast to coast, finally landing in New York City and realizing that
her life must have been imbedded in something dark. Something undiscoverably
beautiful and now gone. Why had she run away from home to go to cities,
honkytonks, and claptrap? When that dark secret gladness brooded back there in
Galloway, and waited for her, and mourned like the wind at night in October, and
something knocked against the house making summons and grieving, she was not
there. Knowledge and awareness told Liz that sorrow was the fool’s gold of the
world, and she smiled, a smile that was her determined new key to things and
understanding. But it was a poor key that did not fit, in any lock in the world,
anywhere, ever. (The Town and the City 458)
This excerpt, one that captures Liz’s musings in free indirect discourse, foregrounds the
merger of the narrative voice with the character’s sorrow, a suffering reminiscent of the
Kérouac family’s motto. The passage demonstrates the inherently geographical, placesaturated nature of The Town and the City. The continual va-et-vient of the various
characters between the two places of the title underscores issues of mobility and
immobility, issues that emerge as central themes in Kérouac’s œuvre. In the above
passage, images of rootlessness and rootedness convey the torment that Liz feels over her
lost home. This torment mirrors the alienation felt by Franco-Americans torn from their
homeland and transplanted to urban centers of New England. Images of flight and loss
(“something . . . beautiful and now gone,” “run away,” “she was not there”) compete with
those of stasis and permanency (“home,” “Galloway,” “house”) against the unsettled
backdrop of “the wind at night,” creating an impression of permanent transience not
unlike the lifestyle of the coureur de bois.
The gloom that Beaulieu finds in Kérouac’s work permeates the passage in lexical
choices such as “dark,” “brooded,” “mourned,” “grieving,” and “sorrow.” Only the word
“smile” counters all of this glumness, and Liz’s smile proves to be naïve and pathetic, a
mask of bravery in the face of her imminent failure to establish a stable place for herself
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in the world. The image of Liz’s “new key to things and understanding” proffers some
hope of her discovery of another door (synecdochically implying another home). This
hope is dashed when, in the last sentence, the reader learns that the key fits no existing
lock. Liz is therefore doomed to remain forever an outsider, the possibility of entry
denied her. In this sense, the passage implies the alienation felt by Franco-Americans
relegated, by the nature of their minority status, to a position outside of American
mainstream culture, a position forever Other.
4.2.2 Narrative Space and Voice in The Town and the City
In the Preface to Big Sur, Kérouac explains the autobiographical nature of his
writings, asserting that the corpus can be read as
one vast book like Proust’s . . . [the books] are just chapters in the whole work I
call the Duluoz Legend. . . . The whole thing forms one enormous comedy, seen
through the eyes of poor Ti Jean (me), otherwise known as Jack Duluoz, the
world of raging action and folly and also of gentle sweetness seen through the
keyhole of his eye. (2)
In its morphology, the name Duluoz, a recurring character in Kérouac’s work and his
adopted persona, alludes to both his French-Canadian roots and to the land of Oz that,
behind the curtain, proves to be a sham. This reference to Oz may be a commentary on
the spiritual vacuum inherent in a materialistic American culture dedicated to personal
gain. Kérouac’s rejection of the middle-class, Anglo-American assumption that material
progress is virtuous and desirable underscores, for Bradford Daziel, “the essentially
Franco-American nature of [his] work” (14).
Kérouac’s comments on narrative perspective as a voyeuristic act reinforce the
notion that he stands outside of the mainstream and observes the “world of raging action
and folly” without directly participating in it, another allusion to the immigrant’s
impotence. Additionally, the comments are crucial to understanding his approach to what
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Bradley J. Stiles terms the writer’s “self-location” (72). The child who functions as the
“keyhole” through which the reader experiences the “raging action and folly and . . .
gentle sweetness” of the fictive world in works such as The Town and the City, Doctor
Sax, Visions of Gerard, Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46 (1968),
and Pic (1966) does not narrate the Duluoz Legend. Instead, the narrator reports the
child’s impressions and functions as a kind of adult sounding board for his reactions.
Stiles posits that “within this fictional recreation of himself, Kerouac describes a
bifurcated self, with Ti Jean representing the soul/subject being observed through the
Duluoz ego/narrator’s consciousness” (72). In The Town and the City, the narrator’s adult
interpretation of a child’s innocent and quasi-mystical view of Galloway figures
prominently in Part One, in which Mickey Martin “listen[s] to the river’s rush, the
soughing thunder of the falls” (3) and contemplates the mysteries of life. Early in the
novel, Mickey experiences a kind of enlightenment in which he discovers that “all
children are first shocked out of the womb of a mother’s world before they can know that
loneliness is their heritage” (15). This citation reveals Kérouac’s perpetual inner battle
between his desire for freedom and his need for womb-like security, his attraction to
solitude and his yearning to belong.
It is Mickey, the child, who experiences Midnight Mass, and through whose
perspective the adult narrator mediates the scene:
Inside the church there was the delightful smell of overcoats fresh from the cold
night mingled with the incense and flowers. . . . [H]is pensive gaze fell once more
on the manger scene beside the altar, and a shiver of surprise ran through him. For
a moment he imagined that he himself lay in the crib. . . . He too, Michael Martin,
was a child with a holy mother, therefore he too would be drawn to Calvary and
the wind would begin to screech and everything would get dark. This would be
sometime after he was a cowboy in Arizona on the Tonto Rim. (178)
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The child’s contemplation of sorrow, suffering, and death, a projection of the narrator’s
preoccupation with the agonies of Christian martyrdom, mirrors Kérouac’s lifelong quest
for spirituality. The juxtaposition of images of darkness with the celebration of Jesus’s
birth, the “delightful smell of overcoats,” and the fragrance of flowers and incense
foregrounds the mixture of sorrow and joy inherent in the human condition as portrayed
in The Town and the City. Mickey’s perception of his mother as holy reflects the writer’s
devotion to a mother he considered saintly and self-sacrificing, a woman to whom he
would return at various points in his adult life. At the point where the commemoration of
Jesus’s birth intersects with the drama of the crucifixion, the narrator defuses the tension
by interjecting an ironic reference to Arizona and the Tonto Rim. This reference shifts
the point of view to the child’s, informed by his love of comic book cowboys. The
allusion to wide open space also removes the constraints of the church setting, releasing
Mickey from his hemmed-in physical position as well as from his thoughts of suffering
and death.
Throughout the text, Mickey and other Martin children attempt to grasp at a
mystical and undefinable essence characterized as “something strangely tragic,
something beautiful forever” (7), “something dark, warlike, mournful and far” (238),
“something gleeful, rich and dark, something rare and wildly joyful” (411), and
“something furiously sad, angry, mute, and piteous” (443). This “something,” never
discovered, imbues the novel with the childlike, “gentle sweetness” that confers upon The
Town and the City its profound sense of melancholy and nostalgia and reflects Kérouac’s
own deep sense of compassion for humanity.
In his examination of what he terms “a species of lifewriting bridging between
autobiography and fiction” (10), R.J. Ellis studies narrative structure in Kérouac’s novels
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and the writer’s inventiveness in “devising narrative experiments that effectively treat
and analyze the crucial social and cultural dilemmas and contradictions of his time” (11).
The duality implied in the narrative structure of The Town and the City, for instance,
certainly foregrounds the social and cultural challenges facing both the small New
England town and the urban center adopted by the Martins, as the text explores the
changing social fabric of postwar America.
Echoing Stiles’s concept of the bifurcated self in the narrative structures of
Kérouac’s work, Ellis explores the ways in which this narrative perspective creates a
certain unreliability in both the narrator-as-storyteller and in the protagonist (Stiles’s
“soul/subject”) himself. Much of the unreliability, according to Ellis, emerges in the
Brooklyn setting of The Town and the City in which the narrator and Peter Martin both
experience ambivalence about the city. Peter’s conflicting feelings are revealed in this
passage: “To Peter the course of his life now seemed to cross and recross New York as
though it were some great rail-yard of his soul. . . . It thrilled his soul: but at the same
time it had begun to mortify his heart” (362). The narrator constantly wavers in his
portrayal of the city, just as Peter Martin is both attracted and repelled by the metropolis.
Peter’s parents also alternately condemn the city as a place of “scab and wreckage” (431)
and praise it as “all right for shows and stores and excitement” (413).
The narrator juxtaposes Galloway and New York City in order to showcase the
changes that the war years bring to rural and urban America. In so doing, he allows the
characters to disappear and reappear after a considerable lapse of time. In other words, he
experiments with narrative space. Much like cinematic space, in which the moving of the
camera or the changing of its angle shifts the focus and breaks up the spatial coherence
while introducing new characters and viewpoints, the narrative space in The Town and
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the City fractures kaleidoscopically as different points of view are entertained and
abandoned. For example, rather than follow Joe through the various stages of his life, the
narrator loses touch with him after he joins the Air Force. Two years later, Joe resurfaces
and finds his father dying and life as he knew it lost and gone forever. At this point in the
narrative, the reader loses sight of Marguerite’s self-imposed, cheerful view of the
family’s prospects and entertains Joe’s anger and bitterness:
“What a hell of a family this turned out to be. Hell knows, I was bad enough
myself—but this! Who would have thought it, when were all kids in Galloway, in
the house—when he was big and fulla pep. If there was some way to make
everything go back the way it was, or something like that, not let it go on like this
till he dies. And he is going to die, anybody can see that, and it won’t be long.”
(448)
Not only has the world been transformed by the passage of time, but Joe himself has
changed in measurable ways: “Something strange had happened to Joe in England,
something like exasperation, disgust, terrific moody joylessness. He suddenly ‘didn’t
care anymore’” (444).
This narrative technique is one that privileges a series of moments in the
characters’ lives at the expense of the progressive development of these characters. As an
artist experimenting in oils, pastels, and charcoal, Kérouac was accustomed to working
with media that could be visually apprehended all at once and may have brought this
technique to bear upon his literary creations as well, seeking a more pictorial approach to
narration. In his exploration of aesthetic perception in literature and the plastic arts,
Joseph Frank, in The Idea of Spatial Form, analyzes the substitution of spatial
relationships for temporal progression in poetry and prose fiction. Frank argues that
writers such as Proust, Pound, Joyce, and Eliot “intend the reader to apprehend their
work spatially, in a moment of time, rather than as a sequence” (10).
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To illustrate his argument, he examines Flaubert’s country fair scene in Madame
Bovary, in which the action occurs simultaneously at three different levels, cutting back
and forth between the crowded street, the speakers’ podium, and the window above the
activity. According to Frank, this scene illustrates the spatialization of form where, for
the duration of the scene, “the time-flow of the narrative is halted; attention is fixed on
the interplay of relationships within the immobilized time-area” (17). The narrator of The
Town and the City, in his introduction of the eight Martin children and their parents,
achieves this kind of simultaneity of action occurring at different levels. And just as in
Flaubert’s country fair scene, the back and forth cuts between the different characters
check the forward course of the narrative. This technique is quite different from the
chronological development seen, for example, in Canuck or Les Enfances de Fanny.
In the opening pages of the text one meets a large cast of characters—Marguerite
and George Martin and their eight children—all going about the living of their lives
simultaneously and, like Flaubert’s characters, on different plateaus. For instance, while
down-to-earth Charley tinkers in the cellar, Francis, in his attic room, high above
mundane existence, contemplates things of the intellect. George, the family patriarch, an
irrepressible man of motion, charges through the streets of Galloway between his printing
shop and the poolroom he supervises. Joe, flat on his back and recovering from a car
wreck, dreams of a coureur de bois lifestyle, updated with “a motorcycle wild with
rabbit-tails” (11), a fur trapper’s diminutive game. And little Mickey Martin, dragging his
sled down by the frozen Merrimack, studies the factory windows, all red with the sun’s
final blaze, and wonders why he feels so lost.
These portraits, seen from Ti Jean’s innocent, clear perspective on life, fracture
linearity and thus stop the time-flow of the narrative. The reader’s attention is drawn to
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what Frank calls “the interplay of relationships within the immobilized time-area” (17).
Alluding to the simultaneity of action and the cinematographic feel of the text in his
observations on the author’s treatment of the war years, Theado writes, “Kerouac
constructs huge complex “cycloramas” of America’s war preparation. [He] tries to
capture the manifold activities of everyone at once, like those photograph books that
feature pictures from all over the country at the same moment” (49).
The narrator repeats this technique for composing narrative space throughout the
sprawling text, and he moves, in the New York City sections, towards a mix of voices as
well, a mix in which Ti Jean’s alternates with those of bohemians, junkies, hoodlums,
and Peter’s parents, brothers, and sisters. This chorus of voices implies the discontinuity
and fragmentation of a family enmeshed in postwar America. Peter’s new friend, poet
Leon Levinsky, insists, “Everybody is going to fall apart, disintegrate, all characterstructures based on tradition and uprightness and so-called morality will slowly rot away.
. . . Don’t you see, it’s just the beginning of the end . . .” (370). Peter’s plunge into the
beat subculture produces a rift between father and son. This rift mirrors the tension
between town and city, between tradition and change, and fulfills Levinsky’s prophesy.
Kérouac’s preoccupation with the contradictory values of the dominant culture
and the dissident subculture, a concern that would reappear throughout his fiction,
emerges in the narrative’s focus, in the second half of The Town and the City, on a
bizarre group of characters. This preoccupation accounts for the mix of voices and the
decisive shift in style from the romanticized prose of the Galloway sections to the leaner,
edgy writing in the later pages of the text. The Town and the City thus announces
Kérouac’s long journey of narrative experimentation that finds expression in works as
extraordinarily diverse as Doctor Sax, a nightmarish, stream of consciousness novel
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about his Lowell childhood, Old Angel Midnight, a prose poem published posthumously
in 1993, and Pic, a novella narrated in dialect by an African-American child. This
narrative experimentation, faintly present in his first work, accounts for much of
Kérouac’s radical approach to literary production, an approach that never fails to startle
and satisfy the reader.
4.2.3 Spaces of Spiritual Questing: A Tale of Fathers, Sons, and (Holy) Ghosts
“I have always wanted to write epics and sagas of great beauty and mystic
meaning,” Kérouac explained to Bill Ryan in 1943 (Selected 36). The Town and the City
fulfills this wish in the sheer scope of the work, in the lyric quality of its prose, and in its
preoccupation with suffering and death. Throughout the novel, Kérouac explores the
spiritual struggles of the Martin clan, struggles that imply his own quest for the ultimate
meaning of existence, informed by his Franco-American, Jansenist-tinged brand of
Roman Catholicism. Chartier contends that “la spiritualité informe l’œuvre
kérouacienne” and that this spirituality “a sa source dans le catholicisme de son
enfance. . . . Il a été élevé dans cette religion et il a été marqué pour la vie par la sainteté
de son frère Gérard” (“Jack Kérouac” 94).
Gerard’s brief life—he died at the age of nine of a rheumatic heart
condition—deeply influenced his younger brother. Indeed McKee attributes Kérouac’s
lifelong quest for spirituality to the need to emulate his brother’s saintliness (17), and
Jarvis recalls the writer’s claim that he had become Gerard, “living on, writing, sucking
up the wondrous wells of life. Gerard was not dead; he was alive; Kerouac was living
proof of that” (180). Gerard’s memory haunted the writer, and his passing early
on—Kérouac was four years old at the time—taught him that suffering and death could
come at any point in life. The event fueled the writer’s constant awareness of mortality,
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an awareness that permeates his prose. Kérouac’s quest was for a space in which he
might comprehend the odd brevity of life and the intense suffering of mankind. Peter
Martin, Christ-like in his identification with the social outcasts of Times Square, comes
closest to this spiritual quester. The criminals, addicts, prostitutes, beggars, and drifters
“horrified him. . . . [Y]et all the lives of the world came from the single human soul, and
his soul was like their souls. He could never turn away in disgust and judgment” (36364).
The Town and the City, a saga of hope and despair, opens with the shortest
sentence in the novel: “The town is Galloway” (3). Just like the classic “once upon a
time,” the phrase serves to establish a fictional space, seen doubly—once by Ti Jean (in
this case, Mickey Martin) and again by the narrator describing the scene many years
later. The pithy sound bite seems a test of the narrator’s voice, a check of the equipment,
so to speak, before he launches into a five-part novel that rushes and roars along in a
torrent of words like the Merrimack River, whose presence opens and closes the text
(Theado 42).
In the opening pages, the narrator’s fascination with suffering and death is evident
as he pans the river’s basin, letting his gaze come to rest on Galloway’s hillside
cemetery. In that peaceful setting, children who have drowned in the river lie beside
ancient men like Tony LaPlanche “who molders by the old wall” (4). The narrative
returns to the river at its close, following the funeral service for the patriarch of the
family, George Martin, whom Kérouac considers “the greatest hero” of the novel (qtd. in
Nicosia 308). The river, “continually fed and made to brim out of endless sources and
unfathomable springs” (3), represents life itself and impels little Mickey Martin to ponder
“the wellsprings and sources of his own mysterious life” (3). The Merrimack’s source,
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“far north of Galloway, in headwaters close to Canada” (3), hints at the characters’
emotional, ancestral, and spiritual home, just as the surname “LaPlanche” evokes the
French-Canadian roots of the town’s inhabitants. Throughout the text, the narrator makes
several more oblique references to a return to one’s ethnic origins.9
Galloway evokes gallows, and the death of dreams, traditions, and individuals
abound in this ten-year saga of the Martin clan. From the outset, the palpable gloom of
the opening pages of a narrative awash in water imagery establishes the mournful flow of
life, that like the Merrimack itself “enters an infinity of waters and is gone” (3). Ben
Giamo contends that a distinct “Catholic religious aura . . . envelopes the story” (3).
Certainly the narrator’s preoccupation with suffering, futility, and the meaning of life
supports Giamo’s observation. The river, the mills, and the cemetery, sites that comprise
the opening portrait of working-class Galloway, “make it a town rooted in earth, in the
ancient pulse of life and work and death” (5), a triad not unlike the Kérouac ancestral
motto, “Aimer, Travailler, et Souffrir.”
In caring for his dying father, Peter comes to understand that triad, realizing that
life is “love and work and true hope” (12). He and his father finally accept
that life [is] like a kind of work, a poor miserable disconnected fragment of
something better, far greater, just a fragmentary isolated frightened sweating over
a moment in the dripping faucet-time of the world, a tattered impurity leading
from moment to moment towards the great pure forge-fires of workaday life and
loving human comprehension.(13)
The Town and the City explores working-class poverty in industrialized Galloway and its
consequences—deprivation and ill-health. This passage depicts such an existence as
“poor,” “miserable,” “isolated,” “tattered” and “fragmentary.” An obvious tension exists
between the discordant material state and the hoped-for spiritual reward portrayed as
“something better, far greater.” This promise of future salvation depends upon one’s
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labors on Earth, rendered here as “the great pure forge-fires of workaday life.” The
excerpt not only implicitly criticizes a fifties’ culture of rampant consumerism but also
foregrounds the author’s Franco-American attitude towards human labor. In her article
“Francos and Non-Francos: Some Tentative Comparisons,” sociologist Claire Bolduc
contrasts mainstream America’s emphasis on personal gain and achievement with
Franco-Americans’ belief in the redeeming nature of physical toil (2).
The passage implies the force of a mysterious presence that repeatedly prods
along the uncomprehending characters in The Town and the City. In the end, father and
son do not grasp the meaning of existence—that “something” that they grope
towards—and they feel the ghostly void of loss and disillusionment that their futile
search engenders. All of the characters experience this quest for spirituality in one form
or another. Marguerite Martin, in calling her children to dinner, contemplates the
“otherworldly red light of late afternoon. . . . And she paused, uneasy, standing there on
the porch in that strange red light, and she wondered who she really was, and who these
children were who called back to her, and what this earth of the strange sad light could
be” (25). Even George Martin, whose greatest pleasure in life is playing the horses,
seems overcome by the mysteries of life:
There was something in Martin’s heart that never ceased its wondering and
sorrow. There were days when everything he saw seemed etched in fading light,
when he felt like an old man standing motionless in the middle of this light and
looking around him with regret. . . . He gazed brooding at his children, and
wondered what it was that weaved and weaved and always begat mysteries, and
would never end. (44-45)
Joe, the eldest son, searches for something beyond his wild antics and restless wandering,
but doubts he will ever find what he seeks: “To all his friends and to his family he was
just Joe—robust, happy-go-lucky, always up to something. But to himself he was just
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someone abandoned, lost, really forgotten by something, something majestic and
beautiful that he saw in the world” (67).
In New York City, Peter, plunged into despair, snuffs out his old dreams:
“Everything that he had ever done in his life, everything there was—was haunted now by
a deep sense of loss, confusion, and strange neargrief . . . because it was no more” (359).
The gigantic advertisement painted on a brick wall facing the Martin’s apartment mirrors
Peter’s gloom: “One vast part of the red wall displayed . . . a man holding his head in
despair. Some indistinct writing beside him, blurred and dirtied by weathers and soot,
proclaimed the indispensability of some forgotten medicine.”(343). The billboard, an
allusion to the eyes of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Dr. Eckleburg (“dimmed a little by many
paintless days under sun and rain . . .” [23]), captures the hopelessness and brooding
presence of one who has found no relief from pain, a state not unlike Peter’s. All of the
characters wrestle with feelings of exile and disorientation resulting from the loss of their
home; in this way they embody the alienation of Franco-Americans severed from the
homeland.
The relationships between Peter and his father and between Francis and Peter
emerge as central to the quest for spirituality in the face of conflict between old traditions
and changing values in postwar America. In the growing rift between Peter and George
Martin, Peter, in his father’s eyes, represents a lack of responsibility and morality that
George blames on the malaise caused by the war. He complains to Peter, “You seem to
have no sense of honor at all! Everything your mother and I taught you is gone, it’s all
twisted up in that damn silly head of yours till I can’t make you out for the life of me. It
hurts, you devil. It hurts. I’m your father and I’m worried about you” (422). Following
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this angry scene, in mulling over the perplexities of life, Peter comes to perceive the role
of the divine in human affairs:
[W]hen the child grew up and sought advice he got only fumbling earnest human
words . . . and the child was left cold with the realization that nobody, not even
his father, really knew what to do. And yet, that children and fathers should have
a notion in their souls that there must be a way, an authority, a great knowledge, a
vision, a view of life, an order in all the disorder and sadness of the world—that
alone must be God in men. (424)
This passage, in its tone of resignation and gloom, recalls Liz’s failure to find the key
that will unlock life’s mysteries. Like his sister, Peter searches for some universal truth,
some understanding of how to go about living in a world of suffering. Peter searches here
for the way through life’s troubles, yet he finds only incomprehension, disorder, and
sorrow. He finally awakens to the notion that knowledge and vision do not exist outside
the self where all is disorder; they dwell within—“God in men,” as he puts it. Peter thus
gains some insight into the realm of things spiritual, and this leads him to abandon his
beat crowd and to move back to the Brooklyn apartment where “[h]is father was
dying—and his own life was dying, it had come to a dead end in the city. Peter did not
know what to do with his own life but somehow he knew what to do about his father,
who was now not only his father, but his brother and his mysterious son too” (468). Peter
gropes here towards some mystical unity of the human family, despite the fact that his
nuclear family is falling apart.
In returning home, Peter rejects his hoodlum friends and aligns himself once more
with his Roman Catholic upbringing. He accepts the “tragic aloneness of existence”
(468) as man’s ultimate fate. While his father lies dying, Peter receives word that his
close boyhood friend Alexander has been killed in action in Italy. In the days following
George Martin’s death, Charley’s body is discovered on Okinawa. Death heaped upon
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death conveys to Peter the message that he must persevere in the face of monumental
loss. Peter’s sense of the inevitability of suffering, his fatalism, and his pessimism about
human existence in a hostile world reflect Kérouac’s particular ethnicity and the
desolation experienced by French-Canadians residing in the “raw, gricky [sic]
hopelessness, cold and chapped sorrow of Lowell” (Visions 13).
More than any other Franco-American writer, Kérouac exposes the emptiness of
Franco-American ritualistic religious practices while, at the same time, he searches for
some experience of the holy. In The Town and the City, the narrator refuses to take sides
in the religious debate that rages between George and Peter and Peter and Francis. The
narrator prefers to avoid dogmatism by foregrounding confusion and resignation.
Whereas George Martin criticizes Peter for his lack of moral fiber, Francis Martin, the
Harvard-educated intellectual of the family, ridicules and rejects Peter’s faith. The first of
two conversations that pit Peter against Francis occurs at Christmastime during Peter’s
first year of college. Peter prefers “his own kind of people,” who know enough not to
attempt “to explain the world” (155). Francis retorts that he does not “believe in
mysteries” (155). He explains to Peter, “You ought to know by now there’s no Godliness
anywhere, and there certainly is no God to comfort and watch over us. Maybe you might
even, in the sophistication of modern times, be forced to admit there must be a devil even
in spite of the fact there is no God” (157). Peter’s and his brother’s opposing religious
beliefs represent the dichotomy in Kérouac’s own character. In alternately embracing and
rejecting the Roman Catholicism of his Petit Canada upbringing, the author reveals the
ambivalence over his cultural heritage that would shape his Duluoz Legend.
A second conversation between Peter and Francis on the weekend of their father’s
funeral allows Peter to articulate his vision of suffering. The two go fishing with their
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older brother Joe—there is a biblical echo here of Matthew 4:18-22, verses that tell of the
disciples’ fishing after Jesus’s death—and they observe the black bass that Joe hooks
struggling in the shallow water. Peter relates to the fish “as though he himself had a hook
torn through his mouth and was chained to the mystery of his own dumb
incomprehension” (494). He wonders aloud how to carry on in the presence of suffering.
Peter realizes that everything that lives is eventually caught and suffers, and that the only
way to exist in this world is in pain and loss: “This is what happens to all of us, this is
what happens to all of us! . . . Back and forth, back and forth, with a hook in [our]
mouth” (493-94). Francis and Peter go head-to-head in a debate over faith and disbelief.
Finally Joe breaks up the argument, awed that Peter has been quoting the Bible at
Francis. The three brothers then talk “with a kind of understanding they had never had
among one another before. It was as though Peter had revealed their common situation,
and their differences in it, their individual sorrows . . . making them see one another with
serious eyes. This was, after all, so much like the action of the man who had been their
father” (496-97).
Peter has conveyed knowledge to his two brothers and has taken on the role of a
mentor, a father. He has “revealed their common situation.” In other words, he has
communicated some universal truth about the human condition. This sense of
commonality is very much like Kérouac’s own humanity, revealed in a letter to Neal
Cassady, as he worked on The Town and the City: “I refuse to believe that anyone in the
world is not of my own feather, really, in the long run, I refuse to believe it” (Selected
117). Peter’s revelation of both suffering and salvation—the hook in the mouth and the
brotherhood of man—suggests the importance of religion in Kérouac’s life, whereas the
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presence of the doubting Francis conveys the author’s own unbelief. Explaining the
duality inherent in the author’s views on religion, Sorrell comments,
Comme il convient à un membre d’un groupe national à qui son élite religieuse
proposait une couronne d’épines, Jack était obsédé par la souffrance, comme
moyen de rédemption et de sainteté. . . . La vie de Kérouac a été caractérisée par
un sens mystique de témoignage religieux et une recherche spirituelle pour
justifier les horreurs de la vie. Néanmoins, Kérouac n’était pas le type traditionnel
de catholique soumis, idéalisé par l’église franco. Il était conscient des forces
négatives, écrasantes de son éducation religieuse qui l’enveloppait et le rendait
parfois hostile à sa religion. (“Jack Kérouac”125)
After George’s funeral, Peter heads west in true coureur de bois fashion, “going
off to further and further years, alone by the waters of life, alone, looking towards the
lights of the river’s cape, towards tapers burning warmly in the towns, and looking down
along the shore in remembrance of the dearness of his father and of all life” (499). The
solitary nature of this journey precludes the possibility of his ever finding a sense of
belonging. Destined to be the stranger, he will look through windows at candles burning
on others’ tables.
Like Maria Chapdelaine, Peter hears ghostly voices. They ask, in an obvious echo
of Jesus’s questioning of his disciple, “Peter, Peter! Where are you going Peter?” (499).
The answer is not given. Unlike Maria, Peter chooses to leave home. In the last line of
the novel he disappears from view: “He was on the road again. . . . He put up the collar of
his jacket, and bowed his head, and hurried along” (499). The ghostly voices, “the dear
voices of everybody he had known” (499), are ones Kérouac himself heard. “Where are
you going?” applies to his own efforts to make sense of a career choice so different from
his working-class, ethnic roots.
Poteet interprets the novel, particularly the death of the father, as a metaphor for
the death of Franco-Americanity in New England, arguing that the voices of immigrants
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are, “comme celle de George à la fin, enterrées et, ainsi sublimées dans un texte bien
américain” (“Avant” 392). Theado contradicts this assessment, finding in the text the
failure of the American dream: “Boosterism, good spirits, looking forward hopefully,
giving it the old college try: none of these classic American optimisms could save
George and protect his family” (44). Certainly death and suffering permeate a narrative
that privileges the characters’ quest for salvation in the face of perpetual darkness. The
text’s failure to send a clear message about the conflict between Franco-American and
mainstream cultural values reflects Kérouac’s lifelong ambivalence about the dual poles
of his existence—his attraction/revulsion to his repressive Franco-American cultural
heritage and his desire for upward mobility and material comfort within the dominant
culture. In the end, the loss of the father’s world creates in Peter (and in Kérouac too) a
nostalgic longing for the stable past, coupled with an acceptance of the desolation and
spiritual void of the present.
Kérouac was writing in a nickel notebook the morning he died, sketching out his
new novel, The Spotlight Print, the name of his father’s print shop in Lowell. That triad
of visions—the father, the son, and the disembodied printed page—sums up Kérouac’s
spiritual quest as a French Canadian abroad in America.
4.3 Marie Grace de Repentigny Metalious: “The Ultimate Iconoclast of
French-Canadian Institutions”
Grace Metalious (1924-64) and Jack Kérouac have much in common: their
grandparents emigrated from Quebec to New Hampshire around the turn of the century;
they were born into grindingly poor, working-class families and raised in major mill
towns with large Franco-American populations—Manchester, New Hampshire, and
Lowell, Massachusetts, respectively; both wrote autobiographical accounts of their
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Franco-American heritage—No Adam in Eden (1963) and The Town and the City; their
best-selling novels, Peyton Place (1956) and On the Road, were published at nearly the
same time; and they both died of alcoholism, Kérouac, at the age of 47 and Metalious at
39. Beyond the similarities these biographical details imply, lies a deeper link between
the two: both belonged to a group “de marginaux, de dissidents, qui critiquaient le
modèle culturel que proposaient les élites” (Weil 205).
Although the two writers challenged long-established group values, Weil
contends that neither author made much of an impact on 1950s Franco-American culture
in New England; their counter-culture discourse proved too radical to attract much
support among this traditionally conservative ethnic group.10 According to Weil, these
dissident voices serve to plant the seeds of discontent by calling into question the divide
between an outworn cultural ideology and the changing social values of the postwar
years. These seeds bear fruit in the 1960s, when French-language newspapers fold,
parochial schools discontinue the use of French in the classroom, and the last St.-JeanBaptiste Day is held in Lewiston, Maine.
Although most readers know of Kérouac’s French-Canadian heritage—Sorrell
explains that his ancestry is “duly noted on the back cover of his novels” (“Jack Kerouac
and Grace” 15)—readers remain largely unaware of Metalious’s roots. Kérouac
published over twenty novels, poetry, and essays, and a wealth of biographies about the
author continues to surface. Metalious produced just four novels; the last two treat
French Canadians in New England and Quebec in a most unfavorable light. Only two
biographies about Metalious have been published, one of them highly unreliable, written
by her husband George and her friend June O’Shea.
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Critics, like the general reading public, also lack an understanding of the ways in
which Metalious’s cultural framework colors her fiction. For example, in Desolate
Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America, Dennis McNally describes how
“rigidly traditional virtue masquerades as salaciousness” (235) in Metalious’s Peyton
Place. This Kérouac biographer does not make the connection between the two writers
based upon their shared cultural heritage. His comments on Peyton Place merely stem
from the close publication dates of their two best-sellers. If McNally had been aware of
Metalious’s Franco-American cultural heritage, he might have understood the gloom, the
bleakness, and the rigidity that inform her first novel, Peyton Place.
Metalious, who never attended college, was scorned by a Franco-American elite
that judged her portrayal of the culture as offensive. Weil alludes to the particularly
negative comments of Chartier, a scholar and Franco-American himself, who writes,
Grace Metalious, dans No Adam in Eden, nous fait pénétrer dans des ténèbres
encore plus profondes [que celles de Kérouac]. Toutes nos valeurs traditionnelles
s’y trouvent subverties au point d’en devenir méconnaissables. Or, s’il n’est
nullement question ici de regretter ou de défendre les bondieuseries de jadis, il y a
lieu de déplorer encore une fois qu’un auteur de renommée internationale projette
de nous une image aussi vexatoire et désobligeante. (“Pour” 88)
Chartier refers here to No Adam in Eden’s equally negative depiction of the Québécois
habitant of Sainte-Thérèse and the Franco-American mill worker of Livingstone (read
Manchester), New Hampshire. Beaulieu, unlike Chartier, applauds Metalious’s attempt to
portray “characters burned up by alcohol, the factory, and contempt, human rags sunk to
their ears in the old rotted dream of a Québec d’ en bas” (23). Beaulieu recognizes
Metalious’s rejection of the hegemonic identifications perpetuated by an elite foisting
outmoded visions and a useless set of social practices upon a poor, uneducated labor
force.
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Whereas Kérouac “hung suspended between the ethical boundaries, fascinated by
the perverse as well as the holy, unable to commit himself to either” (McNally 11), and
therefore never able to betray his origins (Chassé 20), Metalious, in both The Tight White
Collar (1960) and No Adam in Eden, rebels totally against the traditional FrancoAmerican values that she finds repulsive. In these two texts, Sorrell identifies
“Metalious’s hatred of her origins and her desire to transcend her beginnings”
(“Novelists” 46). In my exploration of No Adam in Eden, I have not found much critical
companionship, since scholars have tended to overlook Metalious’s literary production.
An utterly negative, despairing portrait of Franco-Americanity emerges in No Adam in
Eden, one that inspires Sorrell’s pronouncement that Metalious can be considered “the
ultimate iconoclast of French-Canadian institutions and ideas” (“Novelists” 47).
4.3.1 No Adam in Eden: The Double Discourse of an Ethnic Autobiographer
Metalious’s last novel, No Adam in Eden, a harsh indictment of French-Canadian
culture, is the author’s self-proclaimed swan song.11 After its completion, she insisted, “I
don’t have anything more to say” (qtd. in Toth Inside 308). The autobiographical text,
one that also functions as a biography of her great-grandmother de Repentigny, her
grandmother Royer, her mother Laurette, and her sister Bunny, traces four generations of
French Canadians from their roots in Quebec province to the mill town of Livingstone,
New Hampshire. Metalious recreates her great-grandmother de Repentigny’s life in
Montreal, her Mémère Royer’s childhood in a tenement on Manchester’s French west
side and her adolescent years as a millworker at Amoskeag, her mother Laurette’s
struggle with alcoholism, her snobbishness, and her attempts at upward mobility, and her
sister Bunny’s three failed marriages. The women of the novel—Henriette, Monique,
Angelique, and Alana—characterized by Grace’s husband George Metalious as “vicious,
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venomous, violent, and vile” (178), ultimately destroy themselves. Only Lesley, Alana’s
sister and Grace’s persona, finds lasting happiness by marrying outside of her ethnic
group and by giving birth to three children in as many years.12
In “The Ethnic ‘Storied’ Self and the American Authored Self in Ethnic
Autobiography,” Barbara Frey Waxman explores how the notion of multiple selves
renders an autobiographical text problematic and unreliable and how factors such as
gender and ethnicity further complicate the process of self-exploration. Waxman explains
that in such a text the ethnic autobiographer negotiates a double discourse, what she
terms “the ethnic narrative and the American mainstream narrative” (208). Although
Metalious condemns her heritage and attempts to expunge her ethnicity, she still remains
the product of the unique cultural traditions that have formed her. It is for these reasons
that the narrative emerges as a kind of borderland between two cultures. Try as she may
to move beyond her roots, Metalious’s engagement with French-Canadian values, with
Roman-Catholicism, and with the French language is a relationship that cannot be easily
severed.
In explaining shared traits among ethnic autobiographies, Waxman enumerates
three areas of double discourse: “[E]thnic autobiographies commonly attempt to balance
individualism and community; American English and their ethnic group’s linguistic
sensibilities; and American cultural values and pursuits and ethnic traditions and beliefs”
(208). No Adam in Eden addresses all three of these notions. First, the text contests the
collectivity of the Franco-American community by creating solitary, highly
individualistic characters, unable or unwilling to form bonds within the ethnic group. In
the case of Henriette Montambeault and Angelique de Montigny, snobbishness and
vanity prevent them from establishing meaningful relationships with other group
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members. The collective is devalorized in that the only scenes of communal celebration
degenerate into brawling and drunkenness.
Second, the text repeatedly explores the implications of language choice and
the ways in which the French language marginalizes the characters who speak it. For
example, Monique, based on Metalious’s Mémère de Repentigny, comes to New
Hampshire as a child, works in the mills, and yet never learns English, consciously
refusing to assimilate. Her decision causes her daughter Angelique great shame at the
public school, where classmates ridicule her un-American mother. Angelique vows to
speak unaccented English, and her father furthers her cause: “No, no, my angel. Not
‘dem.’ Them. Th. Put your tongue between your teeth. Now say it. Them. Th. Th. Now
say these. They. That. Theater” (152). After her father’s death, her grandfather enrolls
her in a French Catholic school, explaining, “C’est terrible. Un enfant qui ne peut pas
parler sa langue” (142). The grandfather’s attitude typifies those who have invested in the
ideology of la survivance in a desire to maintain the ancestral language.
Even Angelique’s cousins mock her: “Regardez. Elle parle anglais. Petite
Irlandaise!” (142). (This ethnic slur recalls the longstanding animosity between the Irish
and the French-Canadians, a mutual dislike that often escalated into violence.) Despite
her family’s opposition to her Americanization campaign, Angelique persists and
ultimately triumphs: “Angelique’s English had not a trace of accent, not even when she
used words with the horribly difficult th in them. . . . She could do anything just like an
American” (126).
Third, the narrative foregrounds the divide between American values and ethnic
traditions in spotlighting Angelique’s determined efforts to bury her cultural roots and
climb the ladder of success. Unlike Kérouac’s characters who struggle to negotiate two
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cultures, always torn between the pressures of assimilation and allegiance to their
ethnicity, Angelique feels no such ambivalence. Her mother cannot comprehend her
foreign ways: “Monique Bergeron realized that she knew her even less than she had
imagined. Angelique was an ungrateful, spoiled child whose foolish, Yankee ideas were
totally impossible” (133).
Metalious writes No Adam in Eden in an attempt to shape a new identity for
herself, one in which she moves from the margins of American culture to its center.
Waxman defines this act of writing identity as carving out “new versions of the self [that]
are self-consciously shaped within the context of the American mainstream culture; he or
she aims to construct an American identity by authoring this autobiography” (208-09).
The narrator explores Angelique’s identity, in order to construct a new version of it, in a
scene in which she is renamed by her date.
“All set, Angie?” asked Jamie.
“Of course,” replied Angelique. “But please don’t ever call me ‘Angie’ again.”
“Okay,” said Jamie. . . . “What shall I call you then? Angel?”
“Yes,” she answered. “If you like, you may call me Angel.” (156-57)
Angelique, after approving the anglicization of her name, accompanies her escort to the
Pilgrim Ice Cream Parlor. The name of the establishment is significant in its evocation of
the quintessential Yankee forefathers and the Anglophone culture to which Angelique
aspires.
Angelique’s rejection of her own ethnicity illustrates Sorrell’s contention that the
novel “says there is no hope within one’s nationality” (“Novelists” 47). He further claims
that Metalious seeks liberation from her ethnicity but is “restrained by [her] traditional
ethnoreligious heritage, resulting in frustration, marginality, cultural duality, and
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rebellion” (“Novelists” 47). Some of this frustration emerges in Metalious’s comment
that “when you’ve thrown up everything that’s inside you, it’s time to stop” (qtd. in Toth
Inside 309), an observation that indicates both her personal investment in the text and the
painful cost of such a purgation.
What issues come to light as the result of Metalious’s cathartic rebellion against
her ethnicity? Class conflict and discrimination against Franco-Americans loom large in
No Adam in Eden. The author’s desire for upward mobility, a recurring theme in the text,
has its origins in the pretentious childhood that she experienced. Although solidly
working-class women, both her mother Laurette and grandmother Florence de
Repentigny rejected their French-Canadian heritage and insisted upon their aristocratic
French roots. Laurette “stressed culture; she had [her daughters] reading the New York
Times Book Review by the time Grace was twelve. . . . [They] learned about silver, fine
table linen, Beethoven, and dressing well” (Toth 15). Oppression of women, another of
the novel’s themes, has its source in the limitations placed on women by traditional
patriarchal French-Canadian culture. Metalious witnessed her grandmother’s use of
housework as an outlet for untapped talents and blamed her ethnic heritage for its lack of
opportunities for development of women’s creativity.
No Adam in Eden emerges as a challenge to what the author considers to be the
constraints imposed by her cultural heritage: poverty, lack of advancement, and the
oppression of women. The narrative, a harsh and bitter one, is a text of
fragmentation—of class structure, of individual lives, and, in the final analysis, of
Franco-American culture.
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4.3.2 The Mythic Habitant and Coureur de Bois Debunked
No Adam in Eden cannot be considered a well-constructed story in the
conventional sense; the text stumbles between places and between times, and creates a
fragmentation not unlike Godard’s cinematic jump cuts, reminding the reader of
Kérouac’s narrative technique in The Town and the City. The text consists of a series of
vignettes, each with its own internal cohesion, presented in Books One through Four.
Taken together, however, the cameos of Armand, Monique, Angelique, Étienne, and
Lesley emerge as disjunctive portraits, only loosely connected, in a plot that abruptly
changes direction, sometimes jumping back three generations, sometimes zooming
forward two decades. Emily Toth, Metalious’s biographer, questions whether the
author’s late-stage alcoholism may have contributed to the disunity of the text. Such a
notion would call into question authorial design in regard to the narrative sequence. The
death of the author just five months after the book’s publication leads the reader to
speculate as to the reasons why this text differs in structure from the author’s three
previous novels.13
Despite the confusion that a nonlinear structure creates, the text does succeed in
subverting almost a century of literature that portrays French-Canadian habitants as pious
farmers working the land in fulfillment of their sacred calling. The negative depiction of
Armand Bergeron’s family and the ancestral farm in Sainte Thérèse deforms the image of
the habitant and of paternal land in agrarian novels dating back to Patrice Lacombe’s La
Terre paternelle (1846). These novels, ones that champion moral, cultural, and religious
values, have nothing in common with the portrayal of the debased Bergeron clan—a
drunken, foul-mouthed, lascivious lot. Their behavior would be unthinkable within the
traditional context of the roman de terroir.
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Writing about such novels, Paul Perron observes, “Quebec novels of the
agrarian/historical class attempt to define and establish a controlled, moral, and civil
closed space, where individual subjects play out and define the values of the group they
incarnate” (154). Rural Quebec emerges in these traditional texts as a world of restraint,
moderation, and devoutness. The outside world—the city—is seen as a locus of struggle,
violence, and excess. For the narrator of No Adam in Eden, rural Quebec itself embodies
these negative attributes. A portrait of the province emerges that foregrounds the brutal
repression of women, the lack of educational or economic opportunities for the masses,
and the cycle of poverty that crushes the aspirations of French-Canadian youth. Armand
Bergeron, a character based upon Metalious’s grandfather Royer, a man who deserted his
family, subverts the habitant myth.
The text opens during the years of Prohibition, an interesting time frame for a
narrator intent on revealing the oppressive culture imposed by those in positions of
authority within the Franco-American elite. (Metalious herself often chafed under the
harsh restraints placed upon her by figures of authority—notably her Mémères Royer and
de Repentigny and her mother Laurette.) Book One is devoted to Monique and to her
husband Armand Bergeron, who lies dying of alcoholism. The reader who knows the
details of Metalious’s own life wonders if this plot twist may be a commentary on the
author’s own demons. Armand’s slow death from cirrhosis, narrated with compassion
and sympathy, fills several chapters. Indeed, the only tears shed in the novel belong to
the attending physician and Armand’s friend, Dr. Benjamin Southworth, a character
modeled upon Metalious’s own Dr. Slovack.
Book One, the longest section of the novel, alternates between Amity, New
Hampshire, and Sainte Thérèse, Quebec, and sketches a decidedly different portrait of
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habitants working the family farm. The reader encounters Armand’s parents, Alcide and
Berthe, in front of the iron cookstove. The characterization of these individuals who work
the ancestral land shocks the reader familiar with typical roman de terroir families. Pious
male figures such as Samuel Chapdelaine (Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine) or Jean Rivard
(Gérin-Lajoie’s Jean Rivard, Le défricheur) are deformed into the lewd, hard-drinking
Alcide. Sensual Berthe bears no resemblance to her literary ancesters—Laura
Chapdelaine or Alphonsine Moisan (Ringuet’s Trente Arpents):
“And what kind of feeling does this give you, ma petite?” he asked as he pressed
her hand against his crotch. “Eh, tell me that, ma petite. What kind of feeling?”
Berthe pushed him away.
“You are a dirty old man, Alcide Bergeron. Performing like a young stallion at
your age.”
But she had to smile at him. . . . (8)
Armand, at fifteen years of age, looks forward to drinking each weekend with his
brothers and his father at the local bar:
Everybody got drunk on Saturday night. Ah, but what marvelous singing and
joking and fighting! Never had there been fights in the whole world to match the
brawls that started at Le Pechoir on a Saturday night. . . . All these years later it
seemed to Armand that he could still feel the lump on the back of his head where
one of the Cormier boys had once smashed him with a chair. But that one had got
his in the end. Those were sweet times, Armand thought. (10-11)
Armand’s attraction to violence has other, more unfortunate, outlets. During his courtship
of Monique, he tires of her maiden modesty: “Soon, it will be different, thought Armand
through a haze of whiskey. Very soon now. Then I’ll teach her what a man is for. I’ll
have her on her back begging me to give it to her” (77). An opportunity for retribution
presents itself on their wedding night when Monique leaves the reception early, disgusted
by the drunken behavior of the Bergeron clan. Armand, enraged, follows and attacks her:
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“He tore at the bedclothes and he tore at her nightgown and in the end he tore at her body
until he was exhausted. He knew that he had hurt her and he waited for her cries of fear
or pain and finally of submission that did not come” (81). The only response from
Monique is a verbal rebuke: “‘You are a pig, Armand Bergeron. A filthy, drunken
pig’” (82).
The narrator debunks the romanticized portrait of the coureur de bois as well.
Armand emerges as a trapper, but not the kind of fur trapper of legends; the antihero only
succeeds in trapping his pregnant wife:
“You needn’t think because I’m trapped now I’m going to wallow in your filth
with you.”
“You, trapped!” yelled Armand. “You trapped? That’s the greatest laugh of all
time!”
“Yes, I am trapped.” She made her hands into fists and clenched them against her
belly.
Trapped because I’m being forced to have a child I never wanted, a child put into
me because of your drunken lechery. Yes, I’m trapped all right, Armand . . . .” (99)
The debased coureur de bois becomes a coureur de jupes soon after the birth of his
daughter Angelique. He chases after a variety of women and settles upon a slovenly
hostess from a speakeasy in a neighboring town. When his wife threatens to tell their
daughter about his mistress, Armand replies, “If you ever tell Angelique anything about
that I will kill you. I mean it, Monique. I’ll kill you with my own hands” (112). Violence,
a recurring trait among the male characters of the novel, most often translates into
physical battering or sexual assault of women.
The lack of supportive, loving families in No Adam in Eden reflects Metalious’s
own home life, one in which conflict between husbands and wives led to the departure of
her father and both grandfathers, desertions that contributed to the poverty of her
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childhood years. The depiction of Monique’s side of the family reinforces the portrait of
abusive men in No Adam in Eden. Monique’s father, Toussaint Montambeault, a
blacksmith, hammers his family into shape as forcefully as he shoes horses. When his
second wife objects to Monique’s departure for Montreal to care for her ailing
grandmother, Toussaint warns, “You have said enough. If you say one more word, I shall
beat you until you cannot stand” (63). Thus, the narrator’s portrayal of the physically
abusive male members of the Bergeron, Montambeault, and de Montigny families
counters the stereotypical portrait of docility and submission usually associated with
French-Canadian workers.
Only Monique’s mother, who dies of consumption, garners the narrator’s
admiration, due entirely to her European heritage. Born in France, Claudette speaks “a
true French . . . not the bastardized patois used in towns and villages of French Canada”
and teaches Toussaint “to speak properly, and soon his friends and relations were bitterly
sure that he was lost to them forever” (35). The narrator’s portrayal of France as a space
of culture and refinement reflects the author’s pride in her French roots. She insisted, for
instance, that she had been christened Grace Marie Antoinette Jeanne d’Arc de
Repentigny. Her baptismal record, however, lacks the extra middle names, the product of
her imagination. Her great grandfather de Repentigny was a Parisian, and her mother
Laurette stressed her continental heritage, rejecting her ties to French Canada. No Adam
in Eden reflects the author’s disdain for those she called “Canucks” (Toth, Inside 9) and
thereby foregrounds the class conflict that informs Metalious’s work.
In debunking French-Canadian cultural icons, the text challenges the homage
traditionally paid to such constructs in Franco-American fiction. The negativity in the
work prompts Sorrell to conclude that whereas maintenance of one’s cultural heritage
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offers no tangible results, “it is equally useless to try to rise outside of the group”
(“Novelists” 47). What emerges in No Adam in Eden is an irreverent critique of the
homeland and, at the same time, a bleak assessment of the opportunities for migrants in
Anglophone communities of the Northeast. For instance, in Monique’s daughter
Angelique’s relationship with Bill Endicott, the narrator chronicles the discrimination
and lack of opportunities that Franco-Americans faced in mill towns such as Livingstone,
New Hampshire.
4.3.3 Social Space and Discrimination: “Canuck Girls from the South End”
Much textual space in No Adam in Eden is devoted to attempts by the various
characters to leave their working-class roots behind and to ascend the social ladder.
Angelique Bergeron dedicates herself to escaping her French-Canadian ethnicity. Like
Metalious’s mother Laurette, Angelique attempts to play the grande dame, harboring
deep prejudices against those ethnic groups that she considers inferior—Greeks, Poles,
and Italians. When her daughter Lesley announces plans to marry Gino Donati,
Angelique lashes out: “I don’t want my daughter mixed up with a bunch of wops and
that’s final” (296). Although Angelique has felt the sting of discrimination herself, she
still sinks to the use of racial slurs, motivated by her all-consuming desire to climb the
ladder of success and to be a part of the high society of Livingstone. Being part of that
group precludes having an Italian son-in-law.14
The Northeast Manufacturing Company’s mill owners, the individuals who define
high society in Livingstone, are portrayed explicitly as living stones: they resent laws that
limit the workweek to fifty-five hours and refuse to close the mills during the influenza
outbreak of 1918, thereby causing widespread fatalities among the French-Canadian
workforce. Attracted to the upper-class prestige, wealth, and power, Angelique aspires to
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join this social group. Her relationship with Bill Endicott and his family’s reaction to it
exemplify the kind of discrimination that bars Angelique from these circles.
The insurmountable social divide between the Franco-American and the
Anglophone is portrayed in No Adam in Eden, Canuck, Wednesday’s Child, and It Stops
with Me: Memoir of a Canuck Girl. These texts, all written by women, explore the
discrimination that the racial epithet “Canuck” implies, with a particular emphasis on the
impact that such prejudice has on women. Côté Robbins, explaining the lack of
opportunities for Franco-Americans in Waterville, Maine, and the prejudice against
“Canuck” girls, writes,
Waterville . . . is heady on its own fumes because of the school which makes its
home there—Colby College. The workplace for many Franco-Americans as
cooks, janitors, secretaries and maids. Zamboni drivers. Toilet bowl cleaners.
Salad preparers. Rarely do Franco-American children attend Colby College.
Although children of workers can attend for free. Few choose to stoop to that
level of social climbing. . . . The women of my neighborhood were the playthings
of the Colby men. “The girls on Water Street” were girls the Colby men were told
to avoid. (49-50)
This attitude—that Franco-American girls are to be avoided—is shared by many
Yankees, and prevents Angelique from being acceptable to Bill Endicott’s parents. Paula
Endicott, Bill’s mother, mocks Angelique’s name: “It sounds like one of those foreign
names like those people who work in the mills. Andgaleek Burdgaron indeed!” (175).
Bill’s father, the general manager of Livingstone Power and Light, has a practical
solution to the problem: “I know something about those little Canuck girls from the south
end. . . . Listen son, how about going down to Boston with me next weekend? I know a
few girls down there who’ll give you all the ass you want with no strings attached. No
son of mine has to fool around with some little Canuck tramp” (177-78).
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Eventually, Angelique has to settle for a husband half French-Canadian and half
French. Étienne de Montigny, whose father was born in France and whose mother was
born in Quebec, represents the hybridity of the author’s own familial situation.
Angelique’s wedding reveals her yearning for social advancement and leaves the local
Franco-American population aghast: “People in the position of the Bergerons had no
business putting on such a display. . . . Angelique carried a huge sheaf of calla lilies. It
did not matter that no one attending the service had ever seen a calla lily and therefore
believed them to be artificial paper flowers” (125-26). The opening sentence reveals the
Franco-American community’s disapproval of the lavish affair and their low aspirations
for social mobility. The calla lilies function as objective correlatives for the total
incomprehension of the guests. Franco-American culture dictates certain expectations
largely unfulfilled by the American-style wedding that Angelique designs using “Emily
Post’s book on etiquette to be sure that everything [is] arranged to perfection” (125). Her
intended audience considers the proceedings a sham, just as they mistakenly perceive the
costly flowers to be artificial.
Like her mother Monique, Angelique finds no comfort in marrying within her
ethnic group. Many of Metalious’s heroines—Allison MacKenzie, Lisa St. George, and
Angelique de Montigny—experience a sense of loneliness and of being trapped in
marriage. Angelique has been imprinted by the horrors of a loveless home: her father lies
dying of alcoholism while her mother plies him with moonshine in order to hasten his
death. Perhaps understandably, Angelique wants no children. In another demonstration of
abusive behavior against women, Étienne thwarts her wishes by tying her to the bed with
his neckties and rapes her in order to impregnate her. She loathes her two daughters.
After Étienne deserts her, she dates only wealthy American men, whom she has no desire
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to marry. The extravagant theatricality of certain scenes—for instance, the rapes of
Monique and Angelique, ironically on their wedding nights—harkens back to
melodramatic Franco-American texts such as Les Deux Testaments, L’Innocente Victime,
and Bélanger, ou l’histoire d’un crime. These texts, published serially in FrancoAmerican newspapers and targeted to blue-collar workers, privilege plot and physical
action over characterization. One might make the same evaluation of No Adam in Eden.
What impels Angelique’s desire to rise in social circles and to reject the
traditional role assigned to Franco-American women? Her dysfunctional childhood
home, one of several households that contradict the stereotypical French-Canadian
centers of family harmony, is a locus of perverted domesticity and violence, one that
does not provide her with a nurturing enviroment. Her mother, sexually frigid and
morbidly fascinated with cleanliness, changes Angelique’s clothes three times each day.
Although Monique has earned a reputation as the best housekeeper in Amity, “no one
ever realized the savage anger with which she attacked her chores. When she polished
her furniture she looked upon each piece as a dangerous enemy ready to attack her with
filth and germs until she had scrubbed and waxed it into sterile submission” (28). Her
obsession with cleanliness has its roots in the squalid conditions that she suffered as a
child in a tenement in Livingstone’s Petit Canada, a household far different from the
spotless home that her mother Claudette had provided before her untimely passing.
Angelique internalizes Monique’s attitudes and, in turn, harshly judges her mother’s
sisters: “[She] hated her Aunt Hélène and Aunt Françoise because they were dirty and
their hair hung down in strings” (142). This portrait also conflicts with the stereotypical
depiction of Franco-Americans as meticulously clean and neat.
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The four generations of women characters in No Adam in Eden—Henriette,
Monique, Angelique, and Alana—emerge as calculating individuals who reject
longstanding cultural expectations that would seek to oppress them. The narrator takes
pains to compare them to women who fulfill the traditional role of mother and
homemaker. The women of Livingstone have nothing in common, for example, with
Armand’s Quebec neighbor, Marie Rose Turcotte, who, “before she reached the
menopause at the age of fifty-one, had achieved a grand total of twenty-two little
Turcottes” (6). The revanche du berceau, in No Adam in Eden, stops at the border—even
Armand’s father, when his wife pushes him away, complains, “Ah, you are like an
American . . . one of those skinny sticks from the States with the look of ice on your
face” (8).
Sorrell argues that the transplanted women in the text “hate all men and ignore
the dictates of their nationality, sex, and class” (“Novelists” 46). The author’s matriarchal
upbringing seems to have left its mark. Her biographer claims that “she lived the book,
preoccupied with the characters, involved with their lives and thoughts” (Toth Inside
289). Indeed, the defection of so many male family members of the de Repentigny clan
may account for the title of the work, a title explained in the closing pages of the text.
After Angelique’s son dies of hemophilia in the first hours of his life, she tells Monique
“Perhaps we are fated never to have men around us. Paradise, Maman. I’ll tell
you what it is—it’s having what you want all the time. I don’t need any man for
that.”
Monique just looked at her and thought: Oh, God, what have I done?
“Don’t look brokenhearted, Maman. That’s the way we wanted it, you and I. The
Garden of Eden is one place you don’t need a man.” (304)
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No Adam in Eden emerges as a painful story of oppression and hopelessness.
Allan Keller’s headline in New York’s World-Telegram asks, “Does Metalious Hate
Women?” He goes on to characterize the “female characters [as] under a load of sin,
lechery, selfishness, and cruelty” (qtd. in Toth Inside 303). The author, most decidedly,
does not hate women. Metalious, chafing under the constraints that her ethnic heritage
imposes, depicts the oppression that millwork, tenement life, and loveless marriages heap
upon four generations of women. She chooses to portray strong female characters for
whom the conventional roles of wife and mother are unsatisfying and imbues these
characters with the desire to escape their ethnicity and to assert their autonomy. Often
cruel and competitive, these women simply do not fit the expectations of a 1950s
Anglophone audience. Their positive characteristics—their good business sense, flair for
sophisticated clothes, and yearning for financial independence—are out of step with
Franco-American cultural values as well. Only Lesley, the most traditional of the
characters, finds happiness and then only in downward mobility, by marrying a truck
driver and by desiring “dozens of babies” (289). The life she constructs with Gino—the
perfect house, the perfect family—seems false and forced, as though the narrator finds
her subservience unacceptable and unrealistic.
The rage and bitterness of the other female characters, women who rebel against
societal and cultural constraints, reflect Metalious’s own experience of oppression,
poverty, and discrimination. She condemns the culture in which women “grew old too
soon and died young after living lives filled with nothing but dirt and drudgery, piggish
husbands, and squealing children” (70), the culture she associates with rural Quebec
province and Franco-American New England.
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Scorning this cultural heritage, Grace Metalious repudiates her ethnicity by
abandoning her faith and her language. No Adam in Eden chronicles the bleak lives of
women who seek to transcend their ethnic roots. They ultimately fail to climb the social
ladder of success: mentally ill, Monique is confined to an institution; Angelique sinks
into alcoholism; and Alana, married and divorced three times, suffers from drug abuse.
One might contend that their fragmented lives parallel the many published accounts of
Metalious’s own excesses. Charleen Touchette, another dissident voice raised against the
ideology of cultural survival, succeeds, where Metalious fails, in finding a meaningful
direction away from her painful past, a Franco-American past in a mill town in northern
Rhode Island.
4.4 Charleen Touchette: Franco-American and Pied Noir
Charleen Touchette (1954-), in her autobiographical text It Stops with Me:
Memoir of a Canuck Girl (2004), chronicles the saga of three generations of a
Woonsocket, Rhode Island, Franco-American family whose lives witness one hundred
years of the group’s history. Touchette raises a voice of discontent that spotlights the
marginality of this ethnic community in northern Rhode Island and breaks the historical
silence of the group.15 In depicting the journey in search of a sense of belongingness of
the women members of the clan, she delineates a collective “her-story” as a part of a
community history in which Franco-American women battle both a patriarchal culture
and an exclusionary dominant Anglophone culture. While exploring her female forbears,
she reconstitutes her own identity in radically different ways, rejecting Roman
Catholicism and the patriarchal Franco-American community, and embracing her Pied
Noir roots.16 (Touchette, throughout her text, prefers the term Pied Noir over its
translation, Blackfoot.) She ultimately chooses membership within a minority group—the
Pied Noir—traditionally viewed as unassimilable.
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Book One, the longest section of the text, explores the exploitation of the
underclass of Franco-Americans in America’s first textile city. A traditional story of the
Franco-American experience in New England, one rooted in extreme poverty,
disempowerment of women, lack of educational opportunities, and harsh working
conditions in the mill, unfolds against the backdrop of the dysfunctional Touchette
household.
Book Two, prefaced by forty plates of the author’s own paintings, is set primarily
in New York City and in New Mexico and traces the protagonist’s escape from a violent
household and her attempts to connect with her Amerindian heritage. Most of the oil
paintings depict female members of her Franco-American and Pied Noir family in
nurturing, supportive roles. Having claimed her place within the cultural traditions of her
Pied Noir ancestors, Touchette no longer needs to seek the valorization that the
patriarchal Franco-American community affords. The gulf between her and her FrancoAmerican roots widens, and she sometimes laments the loss of feeling connected to that
heritage. Book Three, introduced by thirty-two paintings that juxtapose themes of abuse
and protection of children, addresses the narrator’s attempts to heal both a debilitating
physical illness and her mental anguish over chronic sexual, physical, and psychological
abuse at the hands of her father, a Woonsocket dentist.
Unlike Metalious, Touchette succeeds in adopting new cultural traditions that
supplant those Franco-American values that she rejects. Her newly claimed racial
heritage as a Pied Noir and her adoption of her husband’s faith (he is a Jew whose
ancestors fled to Canada from Ukraine during the Russian Revolution) enable the
protagonist to achieve some sense of belonging to an ethnic community. Ironically, the
primary identity that she constructs for herself—as an Amerindian—is one that embraces
yet another marginalized, powerless ethnic group.
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4.4.1 Woonsocket, Rhode Island: A Space of Oppression and Abuse
Notions of place, space, and journey lie at the center of Touchette’s narrative.
Many of the chapter titles of a text divided into Books (Un, Deux, and Trois) reveal the
importance of place in the protagonist’s quest for identity: “Place of Many Falls,” “Pearl
Street,” “Pépère’s Lake,” “Wellesley,” “New York City,” and “Indian Country” delineate
her ever-widening journey westward, away from the locus of childhood oppression and
abuse. Each book has specific, identified locations, and the narrator devotes considerable
textual space to physical descriptions of the settings. For example, Book One sketches a
portrait of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, in the 1950s and early 1960s, when half of the
population spoke French. “Place of Many Falls” opens with a romanticized description of
Woonsocket—a name derived from two Indian words: Woone meaning “thunder,” and
Suckete, meaning “mist of the falls.” The narrator paints a paradisical portrait of
unspoiled territory where a river pours over cliffs forming cascading cataracts of white
mist:
It must have been beautiful when Eastern Woodland Indians first saw the steep
banks of the wide Blackstone River that rushed through the rolling hills thickly
forested with maples, massive oak, and weeping beech trees teeming with deer,
bear, bobcats, and wild turkey. When I was a child, I often imagined how
amazing this place was when Nipmuck, Wampanoag, and Narragansett Indians
hunted in the lush forests bordering the river following it as it surged over glacial
borders making innumerable waterfalls, while weaving in and out of the green
valley. (24)
Like Kérouac’s The Town and the City, Touchette’s text opens with an idealized
depiction of the “weaving” river whose harnessed power propels a different kind of
weaving in the mills. Over many decades, the natural habitat of Blackstone Valley, its
pure waters and fresh greenness, suffered destruction by the Woonsocket textile industry
comprised of Lafayette Worsted, Florence Dye, and French Worsted. The replacement of
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the Edenic scene by one of toxic pollution suggests other defilements to be explored in a
text that uncovers what lies below deceiving appearances:
The Blackstone River’s waterfalls produced spouts of sudsy rushing water that
could be breathtaking, but only from a distance. Close up, the fetid smells were
overwhelming. The foaming water at the base of the falls was a putrid green from
the chemicals. All kinds of offal and detritus floated and roiled about in the
murky chemical stew. We wrinkled our noses and covered our faces with
embroidered handkerchiefs to protect ourselves from the poisonous smells as we
crossed the bridges. (26)
Just as the river, seen from a distance, dissimulates the foulness of its polluted
state, so the perfect façade created by Charleen’s mother hides the disturbing realities of
a dysfunctional family: “Archie and Colleen and their three beautiful daughters dressed
for church. Who would have thought that before Mass our family had violent fights with
screaming, yelling, and hitting? No one saw the bruises underneath my starched skirt and
voluminous petticoats.We were all experts at subterfuge” (43). Archie conceals his
alcoholism and his abuse of his daughters from other family members. Colleen hides her
humble Woonsocket origins when she and her husband move to Cumberland, an upscale
suburb of the city. Just like Henriette in No Adam in Eden, Colleen’s mother Mimi, in an
attempt at upward mobility, teaches her children to hide their French-Canadian heritage
by speaking with a Parisian accent, incurring the ridicule of other mill workers’ children.
The narrator explains her grandmother’s aspirations: “She was poor but she did not
intend to stay that way. Her children would not be called Canucks. Speaking with a
Parisian accent was the first step” (22). She avoids, for instance, the Franco-American
pronunciations of moé and toé, and the neighborhood children mock her by chanting,
“Moi et toi fait deux Chinois” (22).
From the outset, the text, written in English, embraces other languages—French,
Hebrew, Navajo, Blackfoot, Wampanoag—a characteristic of ethnic autobiographical
narrative.17 The textual negotiation between languages mirrors what Richard Rodriguez
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terms “the pull of past ethnic identifications, the hunger of memory” (281). Rodriguez
explores the ways in which ethnic autobiographers feed this “hunger of memory” in
reinterpreting stories of family life and of their past selves. The retelling of stories
centered in the ethnic community interacts with the desire for movement away from these
origins, creating shifting border identities. In writing about her search for cultural
identity, Touchette also writes a story about language itself—as an emblem of her
struggle to resolve her conflicting feelings over her ethnicity. As she moves among
Franco-American, Amerindian, Jewish, and mainstream American cultures, she
negotiates the allegiances that language choice implies. I consider her recollection of the
pleasing musical sounds of French in her grandmother’s Woonsocket kitchen as
indicative of her wistful yearning to recover the illusion of belonging to a supportive
ethnic community. The French of her childhood is the language of her school, École
Jésus Marie, of her games, her first books, her beloved Pépère. English is the language of
her high school years at the prestigious Bay View Academy in East Providence, her first
opportunity to escape the ethnic enclave of Woonsocket. Her memories, focusing on
language, convey both the nostalgia and tension created by two disparate linguistic lives,
a tension common in ethnic autobiographical narratives.
Not all memories tied to language are comforting ones. French is also the
language in which her father chooses to abuse Charleen: “Daddy gripped my arm with
his left hand, and hit me with his right. I was screaming at the top of my lungs. ‘Tais-toi.
Ferme ta grande gueule, Shaaleen Gail’” (33). And French is the language of Charleen’s
prayers, repeated whenever her father beats her with his belt:
The moments between the crack of the leather snapping above him, and feeling its
burning weight hit my naked bottom, lasted forever. I filled those interminable
minutes with frantic prayers begging God to make Maman come in and stop him.
She never did. “Je vous salue Marie, plein de grace [sic]. Mère de Dieu, délivreznous de mal . . . délivrez-nous de mal . . . .” (74)
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Psychological abuse by both parents, in the French language, takes the form of taunting
and nagging, and occurs daily. “My parents always told me I was a bad girl,” (75) the
narrator admits. After being locked in her room for hours, Charleen smears feces all over
the walls and furniture. Her father tells her repeatedly, “Tu est [sic] une bête. Regardez
comme tu est [sic] une bête, Shaaleen Gail. . . . I was overcome with the sickest feeling
of shame. Then, I knew Daddy was right. I was dégoutant [sic]” (76-77).
Only at Pépère’s camp on Little Schoolhouse Pond in nearby North Grosvendale,
a locus of positive experiences, does the narrator discover a sense of home: “The smell of
the pines, the croak of the bullfrogs, and the crunch of the pine needles soothed me. The
pond changed constantly, and I never tired of gazing at the reflection of the full moon
floating in the center of its expanse that could be as still and smooth as a mirror, or
ragged with whitecaps” (59). Charleen visits with her aunts Blanche and Rosie, learning
the family history of Mémère’s thirteen brothers and sisters. At night, other camp owners
join the Ethiers and Touchettes for dancing at the fais dos dos [sic].18
Memories of Pépère’s camp and of family vacations in Quebec City establish
Touchette’s sense of being an insider, just as her reminiscences about feeling excluded at
Bay View and at Wellesley College reveal her experiences as an outsider. Throughout the
text, Touchette discovers that ethnic identity can be confining and oppressive as well as
liberating and comforting. More and more, she comes to reject her Franco-American
culture as a negative heritage and to embrace Amerindian traditions that teach
communion with the land as a sacred source of healing and regeneration. Like Jack
Kérouac, who never succeeds in expunging his Lowell roots, Touchette never totally
abandons Woonsocket and “the rich foreign culture of [her] childhood” (22).
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4.4.2 “Indian Country”: The Search for Roots
Much of Touchette’s text foregrounds forays into new territories as the narrator
locates and relocates herself in a series of sites that reinforce the unstable nature of
identity and homeland. Against this backdrop of a variety of landscapes—both urban and
wilderness—the protagonist shapes her identity, all the while searching for what she calls
“a spirituality compatible with my hopes and ideals” (123). When her parents reject her
for marrying a non-Catholic, Charleen identifies with the expulsion that characterizes the
life experience of many of her and of her husband Barry’s ancestors. Her great-greatgrandmother Lambert, a Blackfoot tribe member, finds herself exiled from the Red River
Valley, her own native land, by the politics of land grabbing practiced by the Canadian
Pacific Railroad. Charleen’s Acadian ancestors, the Aucoins, deported from Grand Pré by
the British in 1755, are either sold into slavery in the West Indies or endure exile in
France and Louisiana. Barry Paisner’s grandfather Morris, in escaping the Czar’s
Cossacks, becomes a coureur de bois in Northern Manitoba. Tropes of exile thus
punctuate the narrative as Charleen searches for both a material and a spiritual home.
Rather than privileging a questing male hero, such as a Pierre Montépel or a Peter
Martin, the text situates a female protagonist who moves first through a maze of streets in
Harlem and then across the continent, hiking for three months far into Amerindian lands.
The representation of space in Book Two juxtaposes urban and wilderness landscapes
and creates tension between the notions of imperilment and safety. In Harlem, living
among marginalized, poverty-stricken members of a variety of racial and ethnic groups,
Charleen moves beyond the self-sufficient, Franco-American enclave of her childhood
and begins to awaken to a radically different view of ethnic groups in general and of her
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identity in particular, an identity that includes her Amerindian roots. In a chapter entitled
“Repatriation,” the narrator begins to explore her mystical association with the land:
My ancestors’ indigenous traditions resonated in my soul, and I began to reclaim
them. Though I had no access to medicine men or women, powerful dreams
connected me with my ancestral spirituality. I smudged myself with sage, cedar,
and sweetgrass, practiced simple ceremonies and prayed that one day I would
participate in ceremonies like sweatlodge. . . . Now I reconnected with the earth,
so I could teach this lost knowledge to my children. (123-24)
This notion of connecting with the land recalls the strong associations that FrenchCanadian immigrants cherished for the ancestral lands left behind. Charleen’s desire to
“teach . . . lost knowledge” to her children mirrors the principles of the ideology of la
survivance, the transmission of cultural knowledge to future generations.
What leads Charleen to reject Roman Catholicism and to embrace tribal shamans,
sweatlodges, and medicine men? Her disenchantment with the faith of her FrenchCanadian ancestors has much to do with the rampant poverty she sees in Woonsocket’s
Petit Canada:
Église Ste. Anne sat in the middle of Cumberland Street surrounded by this
misery. It was an elaborate Gothic style church, with a sumptuous interior
embellished with gold leaf and intricate carvings of the Saints and the Holy
Family. The people were mesmerized by the pomp and circumstance, and
dropped their hard earned pennies into the collection baskets so the Church could
be adorned and the priests dressed in finery, well fed and fat as turkeys. (25)
On a more personal note, she blames the practices of the Catholic Church for
trapping her Tante Giselle in an abusive marriage. Wed to a cruel, faithless, and violent
man who beats her and the children, her aunt explains to Charleen that she cannot leave
him “because she would be excommunicated from the Church. . . . She had twelve
pregnancies resulting in nine live births before she was forty. . . . She got pregnant year
after year and couldn’t use birth control because it was against our religion” (64). Giselle
would neither take the pill nor divorce her husband in defiance of Church doctrine. “Ma
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Tante said she couldn’t live without her Holy Communion” (64). After enduring her
husband’s abuse for twenty years to follow the Church’s teachings, Giselle’s faith finally
wavers. She begins to attend Lutheran services, but misses the social activities in her
parish and returns. Charleen learns that “Foi, langue, et famille were so intertwined.
[Giselle] could not forsake the teachings of the Church without severing herself from
French-Canadian culture. That was unthinkable. Better to suffer and proclaim it God’s
will” (65).
Charleen also witnesses the hypocrisy of a young prelate who has what she terms
“an emotional affair that lasted most of my girlhood” (65) with her mother Colleen. She
could “not help being confused by the palpable sexual tension between Maman and the
priest. But I guess to Maman he was the perfect man” (65). Charleen’s cousin, Giselle’s
youngest daughter, is repeatedly molested by the Monsignor. When Giselle informs the
Bishop of the crime, “[a]t first, nothing was done. Then they sent the Monsignor to a
parish where they said he would not work with children” (67). Charleen, in searching for
a religion that ensures happiness and safety for women, rejects a faith that she finds
arbitrary and destructive. “By thirteen,” the narrator proclaims, “I learned about the
atrocities committed in the name of the Church, and saw the devastation Catholicism’s
rigid laws wreaked on the women in my family. I decided I could not be Catholic
anymore” (68).
During the years she spends living on a Navajo reservation in Arizona, Charleen
immerses herself in the teachings of medicine men, hosts sweatlodge ceremonies, and
learns to chant Indian prayers. What is noticeably missing from the narrative, however, is
any sense of the substance of her newfound roots. Although she achieves a kind of
spiritual balance in her life, as evidenced by the sense of harmony that reigns between
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herself, her husband, and her four children, her religious practice emphasizes the
ceremonial or ritualistic traditions that link her to a community of worshippers—be they
Amerindian or Jewish. Individual spiritual growth and insights gained from this process
remain unarticulated. Much textual space is devoted, for example, to descriptions of
ethnic ceremonies of all kinds—sweatlodges, brits,19 bar mitzvahs, Passover Seders, Sun
Dances, and drumming ceremonies. “Situational neo-ethnicity” among third generation
descendents of immigrants has become, according to Sorrell, a fashionable way to
celebrate cultural roots without incurring the disapproval of the mainstream culture. He
explains that “one can play the role of the ethnic (weekends, family life, reunions,
weddings, social gatherings), while in other contexts one takes on the identity of the host
society (school, the workplace, the larger world)” (“Novelists” 48). Lengthy sections in
the narrative recount the ethnic foods—strudel, kreplach, knishes, bouillabaisse, bûche
de Noël, and poisson en croûte—that Charleen prepares for family gatherings and
religious ceremonies and suggest the fluidity of borders between the cultures she
embraces. She seems to need to “feed” her hunger for a sense of belonging in ways that
are largely symbolic.
The widespread manipulation of ethnicity among Native American art community
members leads some artists to question Charleen’s legitimacy as an Indian artist. Because
she cannot prove her percentage of Indian blood, she remains undocumented and
unenrolled in the Blackfoot tribe. The narrator explains, “I was as Indian as I was. No
more, no less. It affected and informed the direction of my life, but I was not going to
spend time and money trying to find paper proof” (163). In the end, she finds herself
eliminated from Indian Art exhibitions and blacklisted in the weekly Santa Fe Reporter,
prompting her to ask, “Why can’t people accept the fact that ethnic identity is complex
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for people of mixed blood? Not only can we be from two cultures, we don’t have any
choice” (162).
The narrator’s distinctly pluralistic sense of self emerges as she juggles her mixed
ancestry and her husband’s culture. After accusations surface about her legitimacy as a
Blackfoot Indian, Charleen, in an ongoing metamorphosis, decides to convert to Judaism.
She continues to celebrate Chanukah and Christmas and to attend sweatlodge
ceremonies, activities that indicate her partial affiliation with a variety of ethnic
identities. Her rerooting in the American West, beyond the boundaries of her FrancoAmerican community, parallels the rerouting of self in new directions away from the
traditional faith of her French-Canadian ancestors, as she adopts Judaism and
Amerindian tribal ways. Her transplantation does not prove final, as no transplantation
can, and some aspects of her French-Canadian heritage survive: she gives three of her
four children French names and continues regular visits to her Mémère and to the
lakeside camp that was her Pépère’s.
In the final chapter of the text, the narrator weaves tales of displacement and exile
as she tells the story of “five hundred years and twenty generations of French-Canadian
culture in North America, countless centuries and lifetimes of Indian wanderings on this
continent, and innumerable ages of peasant life in France” (238). For Charleen, identity
remains a fragmented construct as she explores, as an adult, a number of cultures in order
to achieve a sense of belongingness to a clan. Charleen’s journey of self-realization
through urban and rural landscapes mirrors the rugged individualism of mainstream
American cultural values. But, ironically, Charleen does not seek individuality. She
needs the reassurance that linking the self to the collective provides, the sense of
membership that a tribe conveys.
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Throughout her journey, whether embraced or rejected by the various cultures
that she explores, she remains a hyphenated, marginalized self. She calls her French,
Blackfoot, Québécois, Eastern Woodland Indian and Acadian roots “a legacy of
dysfunction” (238). The only resolution she seems to achieve involves forgiving her
father for having sexually abused her. Part of her healing comes from tracing “the
unending chain of cruelty handed down generation to generation on back through the
decades” (245). This chain leads to her father’s abusive, alcoholic mother Louisia, who
regularly beats him, and to her maternal great-grandfather Lavallée, who rapes his
daughters, including her beloved Mémère Mimi. Such abuse, the narrator insists, “all
goes back to the Catholic Church” (244), to its promotion of la revanche du berceau:
“The fictional hell promised by the Church for using birth control was nothing compared
to the real life one [my family] lived” (66). In pinning the blame for three generations of
child abuse on the restrictive practices promoted by the Church, the narrator rebels
against the power and influence of this institution and raises a rarely heard dissident
voice against one of the components of the ideology of la survivance.
4.5 Surviving La Survivance
In the title It Stops with Me: Memoir of a Canuck Girl, the word “it” refers,
literally, to child abuse. The narrator explains, “I choose a different legacy for my
children to pass generation to generation. I was not the first girl to be abused in my
family. But I will be the first to say, c’est fini. No more. It stops here with me” (245).
Symbolically speaking, the “it” can also refer to the end of a sustainable ideology of
separateness based on faith, language, and cultural tradition, an ideology that, according
to the writers analyzed in this chapter, inflicted a variety of ills upon those attempting to
adhere to its doctrines.
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During the 1950s and 1960s, the time during which Touchette is growing up,
dissident voices—notably Jack Kérouac’s and Grace Metalious’s—challenge the
viability of a distinct Franco-American culture, given the emerging mores and changes in
lifestyle in mainstream America. During this period, the infrastructure of the Franco
community—French-language newspapers and parochial schools, French Mass, and the
celebration of holidays such as St.-Jean-Baptiste Day—disappears. Paul Chassé describes
living through these decades as “l’agonie d’être Franco-Américain . . .” (17).
Metalious, according to Sorrell, “far more than [Kerouac], rebelled totally against
the traditional triads of survivance. . . . [She] had little to believe in, no motivating
principle, be it Franco, spiritual, or otherwise” (“Novelists” 45). Sorrell characterizes her
No Adam in Eden as “the ultimate reflection of Metalious’s attitudes . . . toward the
meaninglessness of life” (“Novelists” 46). Kérouac, on the other hand, suffers, according
to Chassé, “une frénésie d’identification” (18), envisioning “un monde sans sécurité, un
monde aux anges perdus, un monde d’exilés, un monde de péché” (Chassé 19). Thus,
while Metalious bitterly rejects her cultural heritage, resigning herself to a senseless void,
Kérouac agonizes over conflicting allegiances, and ultimately clings to the religion of his
childhood, despite well-publicized forays into Buddhism during the mid-1950s.20
Waddell casts Kérouac in the dual role of “ce Canadien français que l’on a pris
pour un Américain” (“Kérouac” 3). He perceives the writer as caught between two
cultures, between “cette Amérique incapable de reconnaître son côté franco-américain et
un Québec trop immature pour l’accueillir comme un des siens” (“Kérouac” 3). That
feeling of being between two worlds infuses Kérouac’s The Town and the City with a
pervasive sadness felt by characters lamenting the passing of the old order. John Tytell
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argues that Kérouac’s novels are an “attempt to mend, to build bridges to past values he
thought were worth preserving” (154). An awareness of Kérouac’s Franco-American
heritage helps to explain why the writer felt these bridges necessary.
Writing about Kérouac’s deeply devotional nature, Tytell observes “His was
virtually the only novelistic voice that could naïvely exult in the life of the spirit in a
materialistic era. Kerouac continuously recognized the powers of deity and appreciated
the examples of Christ and Buddha in a time when intellectuals had agreed that God was
dead” (210). After visiting Brittany in search of his French roots, Kérouac, in Satori in
Paris (1966), defines the purpose of literature as “the tale that’s told for companionship
and to teach something religious, of religious reverence . . .” (10). Certainly the author’s
Franco-American ethnicity and the central role of religion in his culture inform his
writing, just as they inspire his artwork.
Both Touchette and Kérouac, as artists, reveal the imprint of their FrancoAmerican childhoods in the subjects that they choose to paint. Ed Adler, commenting on
Kérouac’s many religious paintings, suggests that his artwork “may have been an
endeavor to . . . venture out into the vast alternative sensual hemisphere beyond the limits
of the dialectic, beyond the lexiconical limits of text, beyond words themselves, to a
place where he could find that ineffable extra to flesh out and more fully evolve the
totality of his life” (281). Even a glance at Touchette’s or Kérouac’s paintings reveals
individuals sorting through their Franco-American ethnicity. For instance, in Touchette’s
“Communication about the Spiritual Path” (Figure 1), the Elk Woman (a self-portrait), in
placing her hands on the girl who looks up at her, connects symbolically with the
sexually abused child inside herself. The painting, completed at a time when the author
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was undergoing therapy to enable her to come to terms with the traumatic sites of abuse
during her childhood, includes the Red River Road that leads to the Pecos Mountains,
holy mountains of healing.
Following in the footsteps of William Blake, e.e. cummings, and John Dos
Passos, writers and artists he greatly admired, Kérouac, encouraged by his friends
Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollack, found solace and liberation in painting. My
favorite Kérouac artwork is Old Angel Midnight, a pastel and ink drawing that can be
read as a roadmap to his Franco-Americanity. It spotlights downtown Lowell in a
deserted, lonely scene. All of the components of the work suggest the ethnicity that held
Kérouac apart from mainstream culture during his life: the three-story wooden
tenements, the dominating presence of the mill with its bell tower clock, the flapping
laundry that in its whiteness floats like angel wings on the night air, the quarter-moon in
the form of a smile tipped vertically, the mullions forming crucifixes. The artist signs his
work Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, insisting upon his French heritage.
This urban landscape of Kérouac’s hometown, replete with religious imagery,
captures the Moody Street tenement’s third-floor apartment that was the Kérouac
family’s last home in Lowell.21 It still stands, across from the Pawtucketville Social Club
that Leo Kérouac managed, and its first floor Ma’s Restaurant (the Textile Diner in
Kérouac’s time) still beckons to those who are hungry for the blue plate special or for the
memories of the man who descended the stairs to order a bean sandwich and a cup of
coffee—that “old stateless Jack” (Beaulieu 169), who wrote “home I’ll never be” (On the
Road 255).
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Figure 1. “Communication about the Spiritual Path” from It Stops with Me: Memoir of
a Canuck Girl, written by Charleen Touchette. Santa Fe: Touchart Books,
2004. (No page number). Reprinted with permission of the publisher.
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The authors in this chapter all search for the home they never had, the one that
adherence to la foi, la langue, et la culture françaises promises yet does not deliver, in
texts that portray dysfunctional Franco-American families. In doing so, they provide “the
final proof of the fallacy of the dream of survivance in the Québec d’en bas envisioned
by Franco leaders in New England” (Sorrell “Jack Kerouac” 15). The dissident voices
that they raise are similar but not identical. Metalious drops everything—the family, the
French language, and Roman Catholicism—and suffers the emptiness that results.
Touchette, equally eager to erase her painful childhood with one sweeping brushstroke,
bitterly divorces herself from the Church and from her abusive parents. Unlike
Metalious, she substitutes a variety of new traditions for the ones she tosses aside,
although to this reader, her cultural practices seem superficial and contradictory. Jack
Kérouac drops nothing, and remains a man at the crossroads of two cultures, a symbol of
both French America and the American dream.
Notes
1
Yves Roby gives a highly detailed account of new migrations from Quebec
during the 1920s and the struggle between supporters of the ideology of la survivance
and those who favored assimilation into mainstream American culture. See Section III
entitled “La Franco-Américanie Éclatée, 1900-1929” in Les Franco-Américains de la
Nouvelle Angleterre 1776-1930 (Sillery: Septentrion, 1990).
2
The practice of using French-Canadian strikebreakers was not confined to the
textile industry. Management in the quarries of Barre, Vermont, engaged hundreds of
workers from Quebec to replace those on strike. See Tamara K. Hareven’s Family Time
and Industrial Time: The Relationship between the Family and Work in a New England
Industrial Community, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982: 323).
3
See Richard Sorrell’s “The Sentinelle Affair (1924-1929) and Militant
Survivance: the Franco-American Experience in Woonsocket, Rhode Island.” Diss. State
University of New York at Buffalo, 1975; Elphège-J. Daignault’s Le vrai movement
sentinelliste en Nouvelle Angleterre, 1923-1929, et l’affaire du Rhode Island. Montréal:
Éditions du Zodiaque, 1936; and Jean-Guy Lalande’s “Le mouvement sentinelliste:
réflexions sur un problème de survivance.” Masters thesis Université Laval, 1971.
234
4
Middle- and upper-class parish members were able to rent or to own pews in the
church auditorium. Some pewholders paid their rent weekly.
5
See Adrien Verrette’s La Croisade Franco-Américaine, Manchester: L’Avenir
National, 1938 for an account of the founding of Le Comité and its Congrès of 1937 held
in Quebec City. Le Comité Permanent de la Survivance Française en Amérique still
exists today as Le Conseil de la Vie Française en Amérique.
6
Gérard Robert’s Mémorial des Actes de l’Association Canado-Américaine 19461971 (Manchester: Ballard Bros., 1975) provides accounts of the proceedings from the
Congrès held by Le Comité Permanent de la Survivance Française en Amérique during
the years indicated in the title.
7
Kérouac’s nickname, “Memory Babe,” refers to his extraordinary ability to
recall, in detail, entire conversations that occurred in the recent or distant past. Armand
Chartier sees in this ability Kérouac’s desire to “vaincre le temps destructeur en
immortalisant des milliers de souvenirs” (“Jack Kérouac” 91).
8
The Town and the City, edited for publication from over eleven hundred to five
hundred pages, represents Kérouac’s longest work. In tracing the lives of the Martin clan
over two decades, the author produces a saga that seeks to discover “the mysteries of life
and the universe” (Theado, 42).
9
Poteet enumerates the French-Canadian markers in the text: “quatre-vingt pour
cent des trains (dont le sifflement monte inévitablement dans la nuit) se dirigent vers
Montréal (7, 15, 216, 222, 499); les rivières dont la source se situe close to Canada (3); à
un certain moment, même Dieu s’adresse au monde en français (391); les références à la
communauté franco-américaine du nord-est des États-Unis. Toutes ces marques
textuelles donnent une orientation au récit (une thématique de turning about) de retour
aux sources” (“Avant” 390).
10
Weil contends that “la très grande majorité des Francos ne reprit pas à son
compte les critiques lancées par Kérouac ou Metalious, acteurs d’une contre-culture en
laquelle peu de Francos se reconnaissaient. Il reste que ces dissidences suggèrent
l’établissement d’un climat nouveau, d’une distance grandissante entre les Francos et leur
culture collective” (207).
11
When Grace was a child, “French Canadian” referred to both French speakers
born in Canada and to their American-born descendents. It was not until the post-World
War II years that the term “Franco-American” became widely used.
12
13
Grace, against her mother’s wishes, married a Greek. They had three children.
Toth chronicles the various attempts made by Metalious’s editor, Bucklin
Moon, to encourage her to improve the abrupt ending of the novel. Eventually, five pages
were added between the bitter confrontation of Angelique and Lesley over the latter’s
future husband, and the final, happy scene between Lesley and Gino. These five pages,
235
Toth claims, were written by someone who knew Metalious’s, her mother Laurette’s, and
her sister Bunny’s lives intimately. According to Toth, the pages still clashed with “the
chaos and cruelty of most of the book . . . The first part had some of Grace’s best writing,
but the denouement simply didn’t hang together” (299). Toth, unable to identify the
author of these pages, implies that they may have been supplied by Metalious’s good
friend June O’Shea.
14
Angelique’s rejection of Gino mirrors Laurette’s dismissal of George
Metalious, a Greek, as unfit to wed Grace. Wed they did, however, as Grace was two
months pregnant. George was seventeen.
15
In September 2005, Touchette's book was removed from the shelves of
Woonsocket's Harris Public Library at the request of the author's sister, Bard Professor
Kim Touchette Weiss. Bard College's President, Leon Botstein, supported the ban. After
the American Civil Liberties Union and a variety of literary organizations protested the
library's action, the book was returned to circulation.
16
Touchette’s great-great-grandmother Lambert was a member of the Pied Noir
(the Blackfoot) tribe of Western Canada, who, with her French-Canadian husband, ran a
trading post.
17
Roger Bromley’s article, “Narratives for a New Belonging—Writing in the
Borderlands,” addresses the construction of the self in ethnic autobiography and explores
the plurality and fluidity inherent in narratives of displacement and marginality.
18
Fais dos dos are dances where traditional French Canadian tunes are played on
the violin, accordion, harmonica, and guitar. The name derives from mothers who,
visiting the nursery room, encourage their babies to go to sleep so that they may return to
the dance floor.
19
The Jewish rite of circumcision performed on male infants as a sign of inclusion
in the religious community.
20
For years, Kérouac carried in his wallet a ragged image of Notre-Dame-de-laGuadeloupe. On the reverse side, his mother had written: “Mon fils, ne te laisse pas
achaler par n’importe quoi: n’aie pas peur de la maladie ou de choses épeurantes. Je t’ai
pris sur mes genoux et je suis responsable de toi. As-tu besoin d’autre chose?” (Louise
Ingles, “Jack Kérouac: le damn canuck de la québécité”).
21
Moody Street has gone through two name changes. First rebaptized Textile
Avenue, it now bears the name of University Avenue because it borders the University of
Massachusetts at Lowell. A long street that parallels the Merrimack River, various
stretches of it are alternately designated by any one of the three names.
CHAPTER 5
REMEMBERED SPACE
5.1 Memory and the Ethnic Self in L’Héritage and Le Petit Mangeur de fleurs
Robert Perreault’s L’Héritage (1983) and Normand Beaupré’s Le Petit Mangeur
de fleurs (1999) both explore remembered spaces—personal and collective. The
linguistic and cultural (dis)location from which both authors write emerges in their
narrators’ juxtaposition of Franco-American heritage and an assimilationist Anglophone
culture. The two texts attempt to reconstruct and to recover lost cultural memories, an
ambivalent process in both cases. What appear at first to be uncritical celebrations of
Franco-American heritage mask, upon closer reading, issues of poverty, disempowerment
of women, and lack of opportunities inherent in minority group membership.
Much attention has been given to memory theory and memory studies during the
last two decades of the twentieth century. For instance, Pierre Nora’s Les lieux de
mémoire (1984-1992) explores the memory sites that contribute to French national
identity. These lieux shape the cultural values and ideologies of the French nation. The
act of remembering, according to Nora, creates collective social identities, a notion
applicable to the preservation and transmission of a distinctly Franco-American cultural
heritage. Other scholars such as Wolfgang Binder and Nicola King point to the vastly
increasing interest in memory theory on the part of historians, anthropologists,
ethnologists, psychologists, and scholars working in cultural studies, diaspora studies,
and postcolonialism. Binder attributes much of the attention that “large sectors of
236
237
academia have paid to the field” (87) to “the turn of the century, the millennium with its
nostalgic tendencies and the world-wide urgency of important and, often enough,
extremely sad commemorative dates” (87). King, on the other hand, argues that interest
in memory as it intersects with narrative and identity marks a “renewed desire to secure a
sense of self in the wake of postmodern theories of the decentered human subject” (11).
Since the 1980s, Franco-Americans have shown renewed interest in their cultural
memories, as evidenced by a return to writing in the French language by several authors,
the establishment of Franco-American heritage centers and institutes, and increasing
numbers of commemorative reunions and other social events. This interest may be
informed by what Binder perceives as nostalgia for a lost and better time as well as by
what King attributes to feelings of marginality and hybridity that the modern fragmented
self impels.
This chapter concerns itself with the role of memory in the construction of ethnic
identity and the relationship between memory and literary creation. In my exploration of
memory and the negotiated sense of the ethnic self in L’Héritage and in Le Petit
Mangeur de fleurs, I focus on the double process of remembering and representing the
past self discursively—the child’s self in Beaupré’s text, the granddaughter’s in
Perreault’s—and on the ways in which the process of writing memory serves as a catalyst
for the narrators’ artistic creations. The two texts considered here embody acts of
remembering not only on behalf of the narrators themselves, but also on behalf of the
French-speaking community (a readership implied by the authors’ choice of French and
le parler populaire as the languages of narration).
“Memory,” according to Mary Jean Green, “both personal and cultural, occupies
a central place in the texts of la littérature migrante . . .” (18), and this “memory is
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intimately connected with place” (18). The memory sites evoked in these two texts are
mill towns with large Franco-American populations: Manchester, New Hampshire
(during the 1960s and 70s for L’Héritage) and Biddeford, Maine (during the 1940s and
50s for Le Petit Mangeur de fleurs). As they explore ethnic heritage and the complex,
dynamic relationship between past and present selves, the narrators in both texts attempt
to reconstruct the lives of parents, grandparents, and other close relatives. Additionally,
the first-person narrator of Le Petit Mangeur de fleurs, a text best characterized as
autofiction,1 explores his own ambivalent feelings about his Franco-American heritage.
He examines the loss of individuality that he experiences in the face of the collective
identity of the ethnic group and the expected conformity to group values and behaviors.
In both narratives, attempts at the reconstruction of identity are largely informed by
remembered ethnic enclaves—memory sites—that the narrators portray with more than a
little nostalgia.
These memory sites embrace the traditional values of the Franco-American
community—family, authority, filiality, the home, the parish church, and the French
language, sites that, according to Nora, are fundamentally vestiges of another era, relics
forever lost. He contends that the creation of archives, the celebration of festivals, and
other commemorations are sad, lifeless rituals: “La défense par les minorités d’une
mémoire réfugiée sur des foyers privilégiés et jalousement gardés ne fait que porter à
l’incandescence la vérité de tous les lieux de mémoire. Sans vigilance commémorative,
l’histoire les balaierait vite” (xxiv). Nora relegates these undertakings to futile exercises
that attempt to preserve cultural practices “plus tout à fait la vie, pas tout à fait la mort”
(xxiv). His depiction of the loss of national memory and the conflict it produces speaks to
the Franco-American immigrant experience and the progressive ambivalence of
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succeeding generations: “Mémoire qui nous tenaille et qui n’est déjà plus la nôtre. . . .
Attachement viscéral qui nous maintient encore débiteurs de ce qui nous a faits, mais
éloignement historique qui nous oblige à considérer d’un oeil froid l’héritage et à en
établir l’inventaire” (xxv).
The authors considered in this chapter disagree with Nora’s bleak assessment of
the viability of keeping cultural heritage and memory alive. They seek to slow the
effacement of an ethnicity threatened with extinction by resuscitating the cultural
practices and the language of these practices. The Franco-American community, to which
Dyke Hendrickson refers in 1980 as a quiet presence, emerges somewhat from its silence
and recovers its voice in texts substantially written in le parler populaire.
St. John Perse’s comments about the importance of language in the quest for
identity have particular application to Franco-Americans’ use of dialect: “[S]peech
restored to a living community becomes the life lived by an entire people in search of
unity” (21). In transcribing the dialect, the language of the Franco-American experience
in New England, the narratives “restore to a living community” its language and serve an
archival purpose, rescuing the speech patterns of Petits Canadas’ immigrants from
oblivion. In this way, the texts preserve both the distinct characteristics of these speech
patterns and the cultural memories that they evoke.
5.2 Writing Memory in le Parler Populaire
The authors’ choice to write texts in French and le parler populaire, breaking
with the forty-five-year tradition of Franco-American novels written exclusively in
English, diverges from trends among other minority literatures. For example, Puerto
Rican authors such as Víctor Hernández Crúz and Rosario Ferré have begun, from their
island homeland, to write in English, in recognition and in acceptance of a mainstream
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Anglo-American readership to be tapped (Aparicio 154). Does the return to writing in
French and le parler populaire late in the twentieth century among some FrancoAmerican authors imply a certain impractical linguistic purity or return to the ideology of
la survivance? Or does the use of standard French and the Franco-American dialect
establish an authentic voice with which to represent local or cultural knowledge? Does
this choice signify, on the part of the authors, a more personal resistance to assimilation
as a process of dispossession (of language and of cultural memories)? Answers to these
questions depend, of course, on the intent of individual writers themselves and on their
motivation in writing for a select readership in a language other than English. In
commenting on the use of French in L’Héritage, Louise Péloquin writes, “L’auteur
souhaitait mettre en scène des Franco-Américains contemporains et il s’est apercu que,
dans son cas, la langue qui lui permettait de leur insuffler vie était le français, prévue que
cet idiome n’est pas un outil archaïque en Nouvelle-Angleterre” (“Le Roman” 406). The
desire on the part of Beaupré and Perreault to transcribe and to imitate faithfully the
spoken dialect of Franco-Americans in urban centers of New England implies a
valorization of speech forms condemned by some as “the social disease of people-whocould-not-finish-high-school” (Gauvin 39).
L’Héritage, Le Petit Mangeur de fleurs, and other French-language texts exist
alongside of bestsellers written in English by Franco-American authors such as Robert
Cormier, David Plante, and Ernest Hebert. Given the Anglophone literary market in the
United States, those Franco-American authors who embrace the French language publish
with the knowledge of reaching a limited (Francophone) market.2 In the case of Perreault,
grandson of Franco-American writer and activist Adolphe Robert (1886-1966), the
choice to write in French seems in line with his personal regret over the assimilation of
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Franco-American communities into mainstream American culture. He attributes the
assimilation process to “a number of influences: television, radio, comic books, movies,
friends and relatives who speak only English,” and to the failure of parents who
“neglect[ed] the ethnic formation of their children” (“One” 45). Chartier characterizes
Robert as “a thinker and a doer. He helped define and propagate the ideology of
survivance” (“Franco-American” 39), and his grandson seems no less dedicated to
Franco-American ethnicity: “[W]hen the government, the Catholic Church hierarchy, and
other assimilative bodies finally admitted the worth of speaking more than one
language,” Perreault insists, “the previously unassimilable Franco-Americans simply
pointed their weapons in the opposite direction and committed ethnic suicide through
passive self-assimilation” (“One” 41). In writing L’Héritage largely in dialect, Perreault
seems to be personally invested in the recovery of lost heritage through the meticulous
reconstruction of working-class speech.
In order to avoid the intense debate surrounding the word joual, a term used to
describe a variety of French spoken in Quebec province, I refer to Franco-American
speech as le parler populaire. However, in a letter to the author on the subject of joual,
Pierre Anctil observes, "If we accept that the Quebec dialectal form was exported to New
England quite naturally and that there were no other forms available to immigrants from
the countryside, it is joual that was spoken in the mill towns in Maine and elsewhere,
with only minor differences with regards to the use of certain anglicisms."
David Plante’s comments on language, remarks that articulate the kind of
bilingual/bicultural conflicts with which Kérouac struggled in his writing, serve both to
validate the use of dialect in writing memory and to warn of the exclusive nature of
reminiscences only meaningful to those able to read in the language:
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Everyone knows that the secrets of a culture are best kept in its language. . . . It is
a rich language, including anglicisms which, I think, shouldn’t be purged. It is, as
my private language, somewhere below my public language, the English I write
in. I never write “skunk” for example, without hearing an aunt talk about the
smell of a bête puante. And whenever I see cranberries I think of the word we
used at home: atocas. Many Franco words shine through the English, but I can’t
assume that this shine is seen by anyone who doesn’t know the language, and that
is, I’m afraid, a great many. (“Tsi gars” 117)
Plante refers to anglicisms present in Franco-American speech, just one of several
unconventional features of the dialect.3 Dialectology, as a discipline, has produced dialect
atlases, innumerable studies, and many scholarly journals, and remains beyond the
parameters of this study. Furthermore, it is not my intention to explore at length the
heated debate over the use of popular speech in works written in Quebec during La
Révolution Tranquille. That said, a brief overview of the history and the salient features
of joual—what Anctil terms the Quebec historical dialect—provides necessary
background to a consideration of the vernacular language used by the characters of
L’Héritage and Le Petit Mangeur de fleurs.
Little agreement exists among linguists in regard to a definition of joual; most
dictionaries define it as an urban working-class dialect characterized by various phonetic
traits and by the use of anglicized vocabulary (Beauchemin 8). Having lost some of its
initial pejorative connotation, the term joual has come to refer to “le niveau familier,
non-surveillé, non-corrigé par l’école, du langage spontané” (Beauchemin 9). Laurent
Santerre contends that joual differs most significantly from standard French in
phonology, and he defines the dialect as “une manière de parler qui applique des règles
de réduction de surface à la série phonologique sous-jacente” (46). Jean Marcel, agreeing
with Santerre, observes that joual “est du français mâtiné d’anglais à la surface du
vocabulaire . . . [L]a syntaxe reste indemne” (135). Albert Valdman, finding the dialect
243
most distinct in its vocabulary and phonology, argues that joual is very much “a phonetic
phenomenon” (405). Henri Bélanger, on the other hand, maintains that joual
demonstrates “une syntaxe française profondément viciée” (qtd. in Coates 74).
Many scholars mistakenly attribute the coining of the word joual to Jean-Paul
Desbiens, French-Canadian author of Les Insolences du Frère Untel (1960), in which he
contends “Parler joual, c’est précisément dire joual au lieu de cheval. C’est parler comme
on peut supposer que les chevaux parleraient s’ils n’avaient pas déjà opté pour le silence .
. .” (24). Desbiens goes on to characterize the dialect as “une décomposition,” “une
absence de langue,” and “un cas de notre inexistence” (24-25). It is novelist ClaudeHenri Grignon, writing in Quebec in 1939, who can be credited with the first use of the
term joual (Gauvin 36). Grignon satirically observed that the French ought to have “au
moins le bon sens et la politesse de nous dire que nous parlons ‘joual’ et que nous
écrivons comme des ‘vaches’” (193). He alludes here to the spoken nature of joual, and
this distinction is in line with other writers such as Albert Pelletier who argues in
1931—long before the debate over joual in the 1960s and 70s—for the existence of a
situation of diglossia in which the literary language differs considerably from the spoken
language of Quebec: “Le français est une langue que nous avons apprise dans les livres:
ce n’est pas la langue que nous parlons dans la vie, ce n’est pas notre langue” (26).
Marcel Dugas, firmly camped on the other side of the debate proclaims, “Il existe une
langue française; il n’y a pas de langue canadienne. L’idiome canadienne n’est pas une
langue, c’est une corruption” (254).
As evidenced by the remarks of Pelletier and Dugas, unamimity with respect to
literary language has been elusive. In fact, since the late nineteenth century, writers in
Quebec have debated over whether to write in standard French or in a more informal
244
register, one that seeks to transcribe into text the patterns of popular speech. Certain
periods (the 1960s and 70s of the Quiet Revolution, for instance) and certain genres
(notably drama, with its emphasis on orality) privileged popular language.4
Although Kérouac interspersed some novels with snippets of what many of his
biographers call joual (notably Visions of Gerard, Doctor Sax, and Satori in Paris),
Perreault and Beaupré have the distinction of writing substantially in dialect. Throughout
Le Petit Mangeur de fleurs, Beaupré’s narrator weaves skillfully in and out of le parler
populaire and what may be called, with increasing difficulty, “standard” French, as he
gives voice to poor working-class characters who, in the past, had no voice in FrancoAmerican prose fiction. These fluid and stylistically unlabored intersections of different
registers of language allude to the hybridity of the immigrant experience itself—the
mixing of Francophone and Anglophone cultures in urban centers in New
England—mirrored in the code-switching and borrowings of the Franco-American
dialect.5 Additionally, the narrator’s use of dialect in Le Petit Mangeur de fleurs defines
the socioeconomic status of the group and contributes to an authentic portrait of a
community with rigid shared values.
An example of the kind of intolerance that rigidity promotes can be found in
Madame Lajeunesse’s recollection of the day that the parish priest condemned La
Souillonne’s drunken behavior. The passage depicts the condemnation by the priest and
parishioners of nonconformist behavior and also serves to spotlight the syntactical,
lexical, and morphological particularities of le parler populaire:
Un beau dimanche, à grande-messe de onze heures, pendant l’sermon, monsieur
l’curé l’a presque pointée du doigt. . . . Y parlait de ceux-là qui cause le scandale
dans la paroisse. Comme ceux qui fréquentent les beer joints et qui sont la cause
de débauche . . . .Y avait l’oeil de rage, l’curé, c’matin-là. Un moment donné, y
s’est farmé pis, sans virer la tête, y a dardé l’oeil sur Maybelle. Comme on
245
déviarge un animal piteux. Drette dans la face. A tournée rouge, rouge comme
une bette. Pis, y en a ben qui ont commencé à tousser pis à la r’garder
d’travers. . . . Depuis c’temps-là, a fait pas d’cas d’personne. Personne y parle.
Seulement moé. Asteur, j’la vois presque jamais. (49)
The priest’s rage, the unfortunate woman’s shame, and the discomfort of the other
parishioners who witness the rebuke are all conveyed in simple, yet powerful images that
reduce the woman to a pitiful animal. The priest, the ultimate authority figure in the
community, enjoys unquestioned obedience, as demonstrated by the reaction of a
community that forever shuns the sinner.
In regard to the dialect itself, the above passage conveys an indication of the
difficulty a writer faces in reproducing the phonetic features of a spoken language in
written form. He needs to avoid orthographic distortions that would render the written
word unintelligible. Additionally, the writer remains unable to reproduce textually certain
features of the spoken language: diphthongs, vowel lengthening, or high-vowel laxing
(Ossipov 946). Features of Franco-American speech most apparent in the passage
represent phonetic and morphological traits. Phonetic features include the pronunciation
of diphthongs in moi, puis, and bien as moé, pis, and ben; the insertion of a final
consonant t in some words such as frette; the lowering to [a] of the open /e/ in farmé; the
use of the apostrophe to show a dropped e-muet (or schwa) in such constructions as
r’garder and j’la vois. Examples of the morphological traits of the dialect are the deletion
of the impersonal subject il of il y a as in pis, y en a ben; the weakening of the clitic
pronoun il by the loss of the l, rendered in written language by the use of the y, as in y
parlait, y avait, and y a dardé; the reduction of the clitic elle to a as in a tournée rouge
and a fait pas.
246
Perreault’s L’Héritage preserves Franco-American speech patterns in a text where
the dialogue appears in what the author himself calls joual and the narration in standard
French. This text also includes a bilingual glossary with standard French translations as
an aid to deciphering the dialect.6 A conversation between the narrative’s heroine and her
boyfriend Normand illustrates the use of dialect:
“Caroline, ça t’tente-tu de venir aux mouvines avec moué à soir? J’ai vu dans le
papier qu’ils sont après jouer un double feature au drive-in, deux portraits de
James Bond.”
J’voudrais ben, Normand, mais j’ai déjà promis à mes parents que j’irais avec eux
autres chez grand-maman. Va fouaire cliner pis vider sa maison. Depuis qu’alle
est morte le printemps passé, mes parents pis ma tante Sophie parlent de se
débarrasser de tout son ménage pis de vendre la propriété. Moué, j’sus supposée
de leur donner un coup de main.” (4)
Influence from English includes mouvines (movies) and cliner (to clean); code-switching
is evident in double feature and drive-in. The narrator approximates Franco-American
pronunciation in words such as moué, ben, fouaire, and pis. The passage demonstrates
certain nonstandard usages such as après (for en train de), à soir (for ce soir), le papier
(for le journal). Also noteworthy are the deletion of the impersonal subject pronoun il in
the expression va fouaire (il va falloir) and the presence of the interrogative particle –tu
(normally used in joual with any subject pronoun and appearing after the conjugated verb
in a yes/no question) replacing est-ce que in the expression ça t’tente-tu.
Clearly, I have not explored in any exhaustive way all of the lexical, syntactical,
phonetic, or morphological features of Franco-American speech. My aim in examining
two passages from these texts is two-fold: to provide an introduction to those unfamiliar
with the dialect in order to facilitate the reading of these works and to raise questions
about the authors’ return to writing in a language other than English after a four-decade
absence of French-language Franco-American fiction. Although writing memory in le
247
parler populaire certainly emphasizes the regional quality of this prose through its use of
popular speech, a deeper issue lies beneath the obvious authenticity that the narrators
seek.
An author is primarily a creator rather than a linguist, and his concerns are
literary, not scientific. What, then, does a text partially narrated in dialect accomplish? It
may suggest the notion that the self that speaks is in the process of becoming Other to its
reconstructed past self, since the resurrected dialect of the speaker’s ethnic past no longer
serves as the primary voice he or she employs discursively. Certainly in Le Petit
Mangeur de fleurs, the narrator, who considers his childhood from the vantage point of a
young adult on the brink of a writing career, undergoes a metamorphosis as he
nostalgically resuscitates memories of an ethnic childhood, memories recounted in
dialect: “J’avais toute une vie à faire. Fallait-il que je m’arrache à mes liens ethniques
tantôt doux, tantôt étouffants? Car je sentais que j’étais autre (emphasis added) que mon
argile franco-américain” (173). This metamorphosis, this becoming Other to one’s sense
of a past self, impels the narrator’s recognition of the role that his memories of a
distinctly ethnic life play in literary creation: “A quel moment reconnaît-on qu’on est
artiste? . . . [L]e mode de vie engendré par une minorité ethnique . . . m’a fourni la
matière et le sens de la création . . . Saint-Exupéry a dit, un jour, qu’avant d’écrire il
fallait vivre” (151-52). The narrator’s observation about the source of his literary material
raises issues about the ways in which the reconstruction of memory interfaces with
notions of self-identity and with the writing of narrative. King contends that “all narrative
accounts of life stories, whether they be the ongoing stories we tell ourselves and each
other as part of the construction of identity, or the more shaped and literary narratives of
autobiography or first-person fictions, are made possible by memory” (2). It is the
248
discursive reconstruction of memory in Le Petit Mangeur de fleurs that allows the
narrator to chronicle the changing relationship between his past and present selves. This
act of remembering emerges as a catalyst in his search for wholeness and integration into
mainstream American culture.
Another implication of writing in le parler populaire is the authors’ assumption
of the role of possessor and transmitter of cultural knowledge to other minority group
members. Their status as Professors of French may explain the didactic nature of their
choice.7 Beaupré and Perreault emerge as preservationists and legitimizers of a dialect
that illuminates the quest for identity by an ethnic group seeking to express itself and its
values in its own voice. Commenting on the role of memory and authenticity in the
writing of Caribbean culture, Sandra Puchet Paquet makes observations that have
particular application to these Franco-American texts. She writes, “If culture is embedded
in memory and memory is rooted in language, the process of literary self-constitution
locates [the author] at the creative center of community and authorizes him to speak of
and for the collective” (199). The dual task that the narrators of L’Héritage and Le Petit
Mangeur de fleurs undertake is to remember and represent past selves discursively in the
dialect of the ethnic community.
5.3 Le Petit Mangeur de Fleurs and the Space of Childhood
Although many Franco-American texts portray adolescents and young adults
exploring their identities within an ethnic enclave—Jeanne la fileuse, Mirbah, Les Deux
Testaments, Canuck, L’Innocente Victime, Bélanger, ou l’histoire d’un crime,
Sanatorium, and The Town and the City—very few narratives present a detailed portrait
of a Franco-American childhood. Touchette’s It Stops with Me: Memoir of a Canuck Girl
explores a dysfunctional family in which three daughters are psychologically, physically,
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and sexually abused by their father. The narrator in this instance, however, is an adult
who revisits traumatic sites of abuse and who discusses painful events from the past with
her two grown sisters. Le Petit Mangeur de fleurs, on the other hand, emerges as a
double-voiced narrative, one that privileges the child’s voice, along with that of an adult
narrator, in the evocation of memories of life in Biddeford’s Petit Canada during the
1940s and 50s.
The unnamed child character, an individual just beginning to explore the
complexities of a world beyond his own neighborhood, seems an appropriate choice as
the central consciousness of the text in that his point of view mirrors the ethnic writer’s
own attempts to come to terms with issues of adjustment, marginality, and
powerlessness. Rocío Davis, writing about the theme of childhood and the use of the
child narrator in ethnic texts, contends that the child serves as “a metaphor for
experiences of the ethnic subject” since childhood provides “the perfect image of
insecurity and isolation, of fear and bewilderment, of vulnerability and potential
violation” (37). The episode of le P’tit Lège (an area of Biddeford’s Clifford Park so
named for its granite outcroppings) conveys the child’s vulnerability and his panic at
losing his way in the woods: “La peur de ne pas retrouver mon chemin m’envahissait à
mesure que les repères que je croyais trouver se faisaient invisibles, remplacés par des
espaces nouveaux, inconnus. . . . Je sentais les larmes aux yeux. Je résistais pour me
montrer digne de mes tout nouveaux six ans” (30).
This episode invites a comparison between the ethnic narrator’s sense of isolation
from the dominant Anglophone culture and the child’s disorientation in “des espaces
nouveaux, inconnus.” The child’s journey towards maturation involves a process of
negotiating new, unfamiliar spaces. What emerges from this and other anecdotes is the
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narrator’s difficulty in accommodating new spaces, new environments, a difficulty that
he experiences throughout the narrative. (Other painful adjustments that the child must
make to the world beyond the ethnic enclave include confronting aggressive Irish bullies
at his parochial school and overcoming loneliness, first at boarding school and later at a
Quebec seminary.)
The stories that the child tells about his adventures in a close-knit neighborhood,
about his family and friends, and about his attempts to move beyond the familiar become
the (con)text of the narrative. In privileging the use of le parler populaire in his depiction
of Biddeford’s Petit Canada, the narrator integrates Franco-American oral tradition into
the narrative, and also locates himself within the collective story of his family and ethnic
group. To relate childhood memories, the narrator uses bits of conversations, FrenchCanadian songs, and children’s rhymes, interspersed with narrative descriptions in
standard French. His earliest aural memories include being rocked to sleep in the arms of
matante DâDâ to the strains of the French-Canadian lullaby “Elle dort.” He also recalls
the lyrics to a children’s rhyme used to taunt la Souillonne: “La Souillonne a pas
d’culotte/Est palotte comme une grosse torche,/Parce qu’a d’quoi à la caboche/Gnaie,
gnaie, gnaie” (38). He includes the lyrics of two of Mémère’s favorite songs—“Écrivezmoi” and “Les curés des États.” The inclusion of these songs and rhymes in the narrative
is one way in which the adult narrator inscribes traces of French-Canadian oral tradition
into his text in order to celebrate the heritage transmitted from one generation to the next.
Additionally, these aural childhood memories contribute to the child’s notion of
home as a comforting, safe locale, an imagined space of belonging and security. Only as
the adult narrator considers his childhood, with knowledge that the child does not have,
does he come to understand that he has been as much Other within his own ethnic
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enclave as outside of it. For instance, he is obviously Other to mainstream Anglophone
culture due to his poverty, his French language, and his cultural heritage. And, as a
teenager, he experiences this Otherness in the refusal of a variety of Anglophone
employers to hire him. Ironically, in the final pages of the narrative, the adult narrator
realizes that he has also been Other to his own rough and tumble friends who cruelly
taunt La Souillonne. These friends do not share his love of writing stories, of vivid
colors, and of the beauty of nature: “Gaston et Eddie Paquette, ainsi que Popeye à
mémère Langevin, aimaient rire de moi, parfois jusqu’au fou rire. Ils se moquaient de
mes goûts, de ma façon d’aborder les choses et surtout de mon attirance pour les fleurs”
(36). The narrator ultimately realizes his liminal position in regard to both cultures, and
he dedicates himself to the vocation of writer, finding, in aesthetic pursuits, a sense of
identity that has eluded him in the past.
5.3.1 Narrative Strategies for Configuring Memory
The narrator of Le Petit Mangeur de fleurs explores the relationship between
memory and identity in a work that the author characterizes as fictionalized
autobiography. In textualizing the Franco-American immigrant experience in post-World
War II northern New England, the narrator initially privileges a nostalgia that distorts the
events of his childhood. For example, the sentimental anecdote about the child’s new
winter coat, a garment made from an elegant but yellowed overcoat that his father had
worn on his honeymoon, masks the poverty that the family endured. As the text evolves,
the narrator turns away from a wistful depiction of the past and begins to reconstruct his
adolescent years with increasing disillusionment. In the end, although the narrator does
not actually reject the places of his past, he certainly feels a growing alienation from the
life that he led in a culturally different, ethnically segregated community. This sense of
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estrangement arises from what the narrator perceives as a repressive upbringing, one that
he feels has stifled his creative energies.
What narrative strategies contribute to this progression from an idyllic portrait of
past time to one of disenchantment with the past? Much of the recovery of memory
depends upon the point at which the event is remembered and, therefore, by which self
does the remembering. In the reconstruction of childhood by an adult narrator, a doublevoiced narration captures both the uncritical reactions of the child and the analysis of the
events by the adult. For instance, the adult narrator recounts his childhood role in
delivering to customers the hundred or so fruit pies and tourtières 8 that his mémère
bakes at Christmas: “Dans le doux bagage de mes souvenirs, je retrouve mémère Beaupré
. . . la meilleure cuisinière du voisinage. . . . Chaque samedi, j’allais faire la livraison des
tartes avec mon petit chariot en bois” (70). Although he collects a quarter from each of
the one hundred customers, at the end of the day his mémère pays him only “un gros cinq
sous” (70). Here, the voice of the child can be heard as he excitedly pockets his nickel.
The adult narrator then continues the anecdote, explaining how he hesitated to spend this
amount since “la mise en garde gravée en moi dès le plus bas âge de ne rien dépenser
inutilement me hantait chaque fois qu’une pièce de monnaie me tombait entre les
mains” (71). The adult narrator articulates a cultural lesson, one that has been learned at
an early age. At this point in his life, the child would lack both the knowledge that he has
been underpaid for his work as well as the understanding that he should be careful in
spending his money, thrift being a highly valued trait in Franco-American culture. One
hears the child’s voice again at the close of the episode when, in deciding which candy to
purchase, he debates the relative merits of Milky Way and Hershey chocolate bars.
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The narrator’s technique of shifting between adult and child differentiates clearly
between the individual who perceives and the individual who narrates. In Patrick
O’Neill’s words, “there is a voice that speaks and eyes that see: the former belonging to
the narrator . . . the latter to the focalizer, the perceived center of consciousness” (85-86;
italics in the text). It is when the perspective shifts to that of the child’s—conveying his
fear in Clifford Park, his outrage over unjust punishment at the hands of frère Gratien, or
his revulsion in fetching the pig’s head from the butcher—that the scenes attain a real
poignancy and immediacy. One such scene in which the “voice that speaks” differs from
the “eyes that see” focuses upon la Souillonne. She has managed to corner Popeye, one
of the boys who continually taunts her, on the landing outside of her apartment. The child
who witnesses the episode is horrified to see one of her breasts pop out of her nightgown
as she struggles with the squirming bully. He is revolted as he studies the dirty, drooping
breast the color of stuffing with a brown tip “comme un gros œil malin et revêche” (43).
The adult voice, in a careful, neutral commentary, explains, “En ce qui concerne
l’épisode du sein de la Souillonne, chez nous, le mot sein était rarement prononcé et
encore moins le mot téton” (44).
The adult narrator also makes generalizations about the importance of frugality in
the Franco-American home: “Dans mes souvenirs de jeunesse, je revois ma mère à
l’œuvre dans la cuisine. Traditionnellement, chez la mère franco-américaine, le besoin
d’épargner, l’exigence de ne pas dépenser pour rien et le gros bon sens pratique
motivaient ses démarches quotidiennes” (85). He draws the conclusion that his mother, a
woman who grew up on a large farm, knows the importance of procuring the freshest of
foods at the best possible price: “[C]ette femme avait toujours connu les économies et les
privations imposées par un mode de vie agricole et par la grande dépression” (98).
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Although the adult narrator clearly understands the importance of thrift, the child does
not. In the following passage, the adult voice introduces the episode of the floral bouquet,
and the child narrates the rejection of his gift: “Enfant dont la jeune vie était très souvent
réglée par les tendances et les prescriptions des adultes, je ne comprenais pas toujours les
dispositions de maman d’apprécier ce qui était beau” (98). After the adult makes this
brief observation about the oppressive rigidity of a Franco-American upbringing, the
child tells his tale using the passé composé: “Un jour, avec l’argent de mes commissions,
j’ai eu l’idée d’acheter à maman, sans raison spéciale, un bouquet de fleurs” (99). Instead
of appreciating the love that motivates the gift, the mother sees only wasteful excess:
“‘Pourquoi as-tu fait ça? Dépenser ton argent pour à rien. Ça brûlait-tu tant qu’ça, tes
cennes dans ta poche?’” (99). This rebuke prompts the adult narrator to observe in the
passé simple: “Et moi, je lui bafouillai un faible non. Lorsque le cœur est vidé de paroles,
les lèvres seules n’en viennent pas à bout” (99).
Becoming progressively more critical of his strict homelife, the adult narrator
ultimately blames his Franco-American upbringing for having stifled his creativity:
J’étais devenu un adolescent peu débrouillard, obéissant à toute autorité et assidu
à tout devoir. Je n’étais donc pas préparé à me livrer entièrement aux
extravagances et aux bizarreries de la création littéraire demeurée latente dans
mon cerveau et mon imagination. Le respect humain m’en empêchait. . . .
Toujours, le souci d’être accepté des autres me poursuivait. (149)
The narrator has internalized the importance of reticence, obedience, and caution that to
him constitute the Franco-American mindset: “Attention aux excès. Pas d’écart. . . . On
pousse l’adhésion jusqu’à la soumission” (151). He wonders whether the sort of restraint
of “une vie bien réglée va-t-elle à l’encontre de l’élan créature?” (152). Ironically, as he
attempts to rid himself of the cultural traits that he associates with his Franco-American
upbringing, he chooses to write about the past, the cultural memories, the history of three
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generations of French-Canadian settlers in New England—the very things from which
literary representation might liberate him.
A close reading of Le Petit Mangeur de fleurs reveals the narrator’s strategies in
constructing the self that does the remembering. The process of representing memory
discursively enables the narrator to explore the events of his ethnic past with an
increasingly critical eye and to judge its shortcomings. As he does this, he succeeds in
putting enough distance between himself and his ethnic roots to embrace the vocation of
writer, and the text that he ultimately offers chronicles his process of becoming this
writer.
5.3.2 Memorable Places and Proustian Moments
Regret over the loss of old places and the hope of renewing attachments to these
sites of memory initially impel the narrator of Le Petit Mangeur de fleurs to explore his
childhood in a memorialization of times past. Returning through memory to one’s past, in
Émile Ollivier’s view, can be a painful process: “Je sais qu’il n’est guère d’entreprise
plus risquée que celle de revisiter son enfance, de revenir sur sa vie, de la repasser, de la
resucer, comme de la bagesse” (98). In an attempt to better understand how the past has
shaped his evolving sense of identity, the narrator revisits, discursively, his Biddeford
Petit Canada, a site peopled with a cast of quirky characters that includes three
generations of family members. In Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature
(1972), Margaret Atwood posits that one becomes a writer in order to deal with one’s
relationship to one’s past. She observes, “One way of coming to terms, making sense of
one’s roots, is to become a creator” (181). This observation certainly describes the
narrator of Le Petit Mangeur de fleurs, an individual whose childhood reminiscences
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about his Franco-American family and friends provide the material for his narrative. His
representation of these early memories comprises the text.
Like Proust’s Marcel, the narrator of Le Petit Mangeur de fleurs turns to writing,
and the text emerges as a novel about artistic creation. Beaupré’s narrator comments
repeatedly about aesthetic production—both with words and with oil paints. His text
comes to an end just as he arrives at an understanding of what he terms “la concrétisation
de l’appel à la vocation des mots” (175). He dedicates himself to painting “avec les mots,
à les employer avec la fougue d’un forgeron et la force d’une sensualité vigoureuse et
lumineusement imprégnée de texture, telle la peau fraîche d’un enfant ou la guipure du
laiteron” (175). For the narrator, the question of identity is bound up with the process of
literary creation: his memories are reconstructed through writing, an act that retranscribes
them, and his writing is driven by memory. In a certain sense, therefore, the process of
memorializing the past seems a prerequisite to writing in the present.
The narrator’s childhood memories initially surface unbidden, prompted by the
sensual experience of dipping of a Mary-Ann bar into a glass of milk. An obvious
allusion to the madeleine in Proust’s Combray, the taste of the Mary-Ann “déclenche une
sensation concrète, comme un moment privilégié. . . . C’est une félicité exquise pour le
palais que ce bon goût de mélasse adouci par le lait . . . une richesse qui nous pourvoit de
souvenirs soutenus” (145). This experience inspires the narrator’s attempt to align
childhood moments and places in order to rediscover his lost past. The search for lost
places proves as elusive for him as for Proust’s Marcel, who ultimately accepts
la contradiction que c’est de chercher dans la réalité les tableaux de la
mémoire. . . . Les lieux que nous avons connus n’appartiennent pas qu’au monde
de l’espace où nous les situons pour plus de facilité. . . . Le souvenir d’une
certaine image n’est que le regret d’un certain instant; et les maisons, les routes,
les avenues, sont fugitives, hélas, comme les années. (419-20)
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These musings on the spatialization of memory foreground the constructed, and therefore
ephemeral, nature of memory sites. Fixed places of the past—houses and roads in this
passage—emerge as impossibilities according to a narrator who characterizes these
constructs as fleeting “comme les années.” This notion, much in line with Nora’s
perception of memory places, precludes materializing the immaterial.
If, as Nora posits, memory cannot be embodied in material form, what purpose
does the rekindling of the past serve? The attempt to memorialize the tenement house and
neighborhood streets of an ethnic childhood allows the narrator of Le Petit Mangeur de
fleurs to come to some understanding of his heritage. He at last becomes able to admit his
ethnic culture’s repressive control over him and then to move on towards his career as a
writer, a career alien to most Franco-Americans: “Les Franco-Américains, d’habitude, ne
lisaient pas beaucoup . . . . Pas dans mon voisinage d’ouvriers. Mes amis n’avaient pas de
livres non plus, car les livres coûtaient cher et les familles ouvrières ne pouvaient pas se
permettre ce qu’elles appelaient le luxe des plus fortunés” (146). He ultimately
transcends these working-class roots in the act of putting pen to paper, and he ponders
what has hindered his people’s progress in their adopted land: “Pourquoi les nôtres ne se
sont-ils pas révoltés contre l’assujettissement de la carde, de la bobine et du métier?
Pourtant, ils avaient du talent, ces gens-là. Ils étaient doués d’énergies créatrices; ils
étaient tellement ‘patenteux,’ ils auraient pu inventer des moyens de sortir de ce
marasme” (163). Here the narrator laments the wasted artistic talent of a people content
to collect a weekly paycheck, people he considers “trop attachés à leur prison ouatée”
(164). Writing, for the narrator, represents liberation from the dehumanizing work that
he, like his forbears, performs at Pepperell Mills.
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At this point in his life, two crucial places emerge in the narrator’s search for
identity: the Petit Canada in which he had lived much of his childhood and Fortune’s
Rock, the beach near Biddeford Pool where he reconciles his ethnic past and his present
yearnings to write. Returning to his Cleaves Street home in a voyage of the imagination,
the narrator explores the nature of memory as he ponders the creative process. For
instance, the narrative opens with this reflection upon the role that memory plays in
artistic creation: “Les souvenirs deviennent les reflets lumineux, genre de papillons de
feu, de la pensée créatrice en train de saisir un passé riche d’expériences vécues ou
racontées. . . . Les souvenirs sont pour moi de petites flammes qui réchauffent et
illuminent l’élan créateur” (11). Ironically, the narrator frames the depiction of writing
memory in fragile, perishable images. Dependent upon an outside source of light, “les
reflets lumineux” are insubstantial and, at any moment, may cease to shimmer. The
“papillons,” in their last stage of development, face an imminent demise. And the “petites
flammes” evoke the dying of the flames.
A momentary return to a lost past can, of course, fire the imagination of the
writer, inspiring his creative output. Yet this return may depend, somewhat, on other
individuals who recall and relate past events; indeed, the narrator implies that access to
the childhood self is not to be gained exclusively through his own remembered
experiences but rather through “d’expériences . . . racontées.” The memories that
relatives tell and retell him “viennent combler les lacunes dans la croissance de nos
réminiscences. Ce sont des souvenirs de deuxième ordre” (21). The retelling of these
anecdotes over time serves to crystallize the events into mythic proportions. These oftrepeated tales become so removed from the narrator’s personal experience of them that
he begins to narrate in third-person when speaking about himself. One such episode (in
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which the child eats some petals of tante Élise’s bleeding heart garden plant) inspires the
title of the work—Le Petit Mangeur de fleurs:
Que les cœurs-saignants de tante Élise étaient alléchants! Le charme naît et agit,
le goût du beau se fait irrésistible. . . . La petite main se lève sans hésitation, sans
bruit. Elle s’avance légèrement comme un papillon qui volette au-dessus des
éclosions matinales. L’index mignon . . . s’accroche à la fleur chancelante, la
palpe, puis tire jusqu’à ce que le bijou se détache de la branche. . . . La fleur
désirée est maintenant dans la bouche de l’enfant. (25)
The alluring fleurs, which beguile the child, may represent the narrator’s initial attraction
to the recovering of his Franco-American heritage. This heritage, one that he has
internalized, has both sustained and repressed him. The flowers, “suspendus par un fil à
de longues branches recourbées comme des bras minces” (24), represent the fragility of
such a heritage. Indeed, the child destroys them one by one until “un cri aigu fend l’air,
[et] la sérénité est brisée par les vives remontrances de tante Élise” (25). The child’s act
of eating the flowers serves as a metaphor for the ephemeral nature of Franco-American
culture. The act suggests the culture’s ultimate absorption by a mainstream culture that
swallows it up.
The flowers that the child consumes are, significantly, bleeding hearts—not
pansies, grape hyacinths, or iris. The bleeding heart evokes martyrs, suffering, and
death—the kind of aura that permeates a text in which each household prominently
displays the plaque Dieu me voit on a kitchen wall. Religious symbols have certainly
always loomed large in Franco-American practices of Roman Catholicism. For instance,
typical artwork in Franco-American households includes images of Jesus and of saints
with their hearts exposed, usually framed in dark wood adorned with hand-carved maple
leafs where the corners intersect.
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Atwood finds a similar religious symbolism in Quebec culture which, she posits,
is “addicted to survivalism, cultural and religious survivalism. . . . This obsession is
simply an image which reflects a state of soul. What the image says is that the Quebec
situation is dead or death-dealing, the final result of being a victim” (223-24). Although
Atwood was writing in 1972, long before the fruits of La Révolution Tranquille were
harvested, one can still draw parallels between the two French-language groups—those in
Quebec and in New England—attempting to preserve their faith and language in the face
of Anglophone assimilationist pressures.
The fragility of flowers, as a metaphor for the state of Franco-American heritage
in New England in the 1950s, emerges as a leitmotif throughout the text. In another
episode, the child, unable to resist “cette fleur pas comme les autres . . . unique au
monde” (29), picks a ladyslipper growing near moss-covered rocks: “Je la désirais
ardemment, car je voulais à tout prix satisfaire ma fringale. . . . J’enserrai de mes doigts
la tige droite et ferme et je tirai assez fort pour emporter même les racines” (29). He
dares not pick its companion and feels “un peu coupable d’avoir séparé les deux fleurs.
L’autre me paraissait triste, seule dans son refuge ombreux” (30). The flower that he has
picked, in an attempt to preserve it, withers in his grasp: “Ma fleur, ma pauvre fleur,
maintenant flétrie, le petit sabot ratatiné et suspendu mollement à sa tige” (30). One
could argue that the flower he pulls up by the roots evokes the French-Canadian diaspora,
a mass exodus of individuals impelled, like the child in the anecdote, by a sense of
hunger: the child seeks to satisfy his need for possession of a dazzling object while the
immigrants attempt to satisfy a more basic need to feed their families. The separation that
the diaspora occasions tears at the very roots of Quebec society, just as the child pulls so
hard that he carries away “même les racines.” Deprived of its native soil, the flower that
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has been torn away fades in the new environment, unable to survive the hostile
conditions. And the narrator, who has lost his way, finally admits, “J’étais complètement
désorienté” (31), a commentary on the Franco-American immigrant experience in New
England.
Working through these remembrances of lost places by representing them
discursively allows the narrator to move toward a future far different from his FrancoAmerican past. A final episode at Fortune’s Rock serves to demonstrate the narrator’s
lucidity, gleaned from an examination of his own past. The great change that the narrator
experiences is his coming to writing. This act liberates him from the constraints he
perceives inherent in his ethnic upbringing. Fortune’s Rock “c’est un lieu magnifique où
les touristes passaient la saison estivale en douce fainéantise. Ces chanceux pouvaient se
payer le luxe d’un chalet. Mais les Franco-Américains ne fréquentaient pas beaucoup cet
endroit, car les droit d’accès publics étaient rares” (171). Although legal residents of
Biddeford, Franco-Americans ironically find themselves excluded from the spit of beach
reserved for wealthy tourists. This situation seems yet another form of exile for a group
already alienated from the dominant culture. The narrator, both figuratively and literally,
seeks to walk in paths once denied to his forbears, and he will do so through artistic
creation.
In taking up a liminal position between “l’océan à perte de vue et . . . l’étang . . .
de l’autre côté de la rue” (171), the narrator consciously hesitates between two distinct
spaces: the space of limitation, represented by the circumscribed, stagnant pool and that
of boundless opportunity, promised by the fluid ocean currents. In realizing his need to
expand his horizons, he turns away from “l’étang et ses fleurs [qui] étaient devenus pour
[lui] le reflet d’un passé nostalgique. L’avenir et l’actualisation de [ses] souvenirs se
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trouvaient du côté de la mer” (172). The narrator appears to have grasped that the writer
creates his own future, often by writing out of his past. The possibility of toying with
words—“mots anglais autant que mots français” (174)—intrigues him. He speculates,
“Peut-être auraient-ils une place pour moi et moi une place pour eux, une place de choix
où je me sentirais à l’aise, nourri d’inspiration et muni des outils qui me permettraient
enfin de la traduire, cette inspiration, avec le souffle des mots” (174). The text ends as he
feels for the craggy rock beneath his hand while gulls squawk overhead—as he still
clings to something solid while yearning for vast, uncharted spaces of artistic creation.
5.4 L’Héritage and the (Un)burying of Cultural Memories
Robert Perreault’s L’Héritage (1983) pits a third-generation Franco-American
woman, dedicated to preserving and transmitting her cultural traditions, against her father
Charles Ladouceur, equally keen on ridding himself of all vestiges of his ethnicity. The
family name, one that evokes sweetness, contrasts ironically with Charles’s bitter
rejection of his cultural roots. The eldest son Ernest shares his father’s disdain for
reminders of their French-Canadian heritage. For instance, after their mémère’s funeral,
Ernest surveys the contents of her attic: “C’est toute d’la junk. Ça nous prendra pas
longtemps à cliner out c’te place icitte, pis après ça, it’s off to the dump! On va tout
sacrer ça à la dompe” (23). His sister Caroline finds treasures where he sees only trash:
“Toute l’histoire de la famille à maman pis à grand-maman se trouve à être dans c’te
valise en bois drette icitte. . . . Rien qu’à voir tout le stuff qu’y a icitte dans le grenier, ça
me donne le goût de vouloir en savoir plusse” (24).
Caroline develops her own ethnic consciousness as she launches into a quest to
unearth information about her grandmother’s past as a weaver in the Amoskeag Mills of
Manchester. Her discovery of photos, letters, newsclippings, and other mementos in
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Emelia’s hope chest impels Caroline’s search for cultural memories. Her lack of
knowledge about her own heritage demonstrates what Perreault considers to be the
failure of ethnic parents to transmit Franco-American cultural values to their offspring.
What the grandmother bequeaths to Caroline are the memories—the bits of her cultural
heritage—stored away in her hope chest, and this shared cultural history enables Caroline
to forge links to a past that she had never before contemplated. In recording her feelings
about her newly-discovered ethnic roots in a diary, and in making copies of some of the
fragile letters she finds, Caroline preserves, in part, a heritage that she fervently
embraces.
In The French-Canadian Heritage of New England (1986), Gerard Brault
explains that the grandchildren of immigrants choose to cultivate certain ethnic traits as
they discover “what it means to belong to Franco-American circles . . . [and as they]
learn of the hardships experienced by their ancestors” (159). Brault considers this third
generation of French-Canadians in America as one in need of an antidote to the
materialism and the alienation of modern times. That antidote can be found, he claims, in
embracing Franco-American folklore, customs, and genealogy, and in attending social
events. He reiterates Marcus Lee Hansen’s theory that what the ethnic parent repudiates,
the grandchild wishes to remember.9 Hansen’s groundbreaking 1938 essay, “The
Problem of the Third Generation Immigrant,” served for several decades as the basis for
discourse on ethnic history. According to his theory, the immigrant son seeks to forget
his cultural past and to become an American, all the while eager to repress cultural
memories of hunger, political powerlessness, and poverty in the Old Country. Caroline’s
father certainly fits this profile. He wonders how long his daughter will annoy him with
her “manie de vouloir tout connaître à propos de l’histoire de la famille, des souvenirs
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d’une vie dure que Charles lui-même avait toujours voulu enterrer” (62). He resents his
daughter’s obsession with memories that he characterizes as “fantômes, appelés ferme,
sol, bétail, émigration, manque, besoin, pauvreté, usine, Petit Canada, maladie et mort,
qui reviennent [le] hanter après tant d’années de paix et de bonheur” (62).
According to Hansen, the third generation reclaims idealized memories of the
homeland replete with quaint folklore and pastoral scenes of natural beauty. These
sanitized versions of cultural heritage allow third-generation members of immigrant
communities to straddle two or more identities as they adopt an American persona while,
at the same time, clinging to their ancestral roots. Caroline, beguiled by the contents of
Emelia’s hope chest, casts herself in the role of renewing and promoting earlier cultural
practices at a time when Franco-American heritage is being actively forgotten by the
members of her family and her community. Like those third-generation immigrants in
Hansen’s paradigm, she attempts to entertain two identities and, in so doing, she not only
clashes with her materialistic father but also breaks off her engagement to a FrancoAmerican suitor who does not share her passion for her ethnic roots.
In her essay “Feminist Fiction and the Uses of Memory,” Gayle Greene
comments on women who seem almost obsessive about compiling records and
preserving mementos of the past. She makes the point that these women, who lack
opportunities in the present, “live more in the past, which is why they are the keepers of
diaries, journals, family records, and photographic albums” (296). Emelia, trapped in a
patriarchal society, fulfills the traditional role of mother and homemaker, and she returns
to work at Amoskeag Mills after her husband’s premature death. She thus exchanges the
constraints of domestic labor for those of the unskilled workforce. Her scrapbooks, diary,
and record-keeping provide some escape from the gender and class oppression that she
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experiences. In embracing an ethnic heritage that she finds appealing, Caroline remains
unaware of the repression that her grandmother suffered in the patriarchal system in
which she lived. As Greene puts it, “[W]omen knew their place, and it is not a place to
which most women would want to return” (295). For Caroline, then, her identification
with her ethnic heritage involves a complex act of selective recovery: she is eager to
reestablish ties with Quebec relatives, to wear her grandmother’s wedding dress, and to
purchase Emelia’s tenement house in the Petit Canada that her immediate family long
ago abandoned. From her solidly middle-class perspective, however, Caroline fails to
comprehend Emelia’s marginalization and disempowerment, due largely to her grinding
poverty and her inability to speak English.
The protagonist’s increasing fascination with her ethnic roots creates tension
between herself and her father Charles, a man seeking total acceptance by the uppermiddle-class neighbors that he courts. A clash ensues between two diametrically opposed
value systems—one that de-emphasizes material goods and privileges the cultural values
of la survivance, and another that champions wealth, competition, and social standing.
The novel traces the growing alienation that Caroline feels towards a father who rejects
his cultural heritage in favor of amassing wealth and social status. She explains the life
that she envisions for herself: “J’sais comment riche qu’une personne peut être en
étudiant pis en connaissant son passé. Avec le monde qu’on a à c’t’heure, qui veulent
rien que avoir gros de l’argent pour avoir des belles maisons pis des belles machines . . .
j’cré que moué, j’aime mieux m’envelopper dans le passé, pis vivre d’une manière ben
simple, comme ma grand-mère faisait” (191). Charles’s cruel and vindictive act at the
close of the narrative results in Caroline’s flight to California and in the permanent
rupture of the family unit. Caroline, like Peter in The Town and the City and Charleen in
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It Stops with Me: Memoir of a Canuck Girl, ultimately chooses space beyond the FrancoAmerican community in which to negotiate a different identity.
In recounting the conflict between these two individuals in a text in which all
dialogue is written in the vernacular, the omniscient narrator imagines the reader to be an
insider to Franco-American culture. The narrator emerges as highly invested in the
recreation of cultural memory and in the transmission of Franco-American heritage as a
precious legacy held in trust for future generations. Only in the Epilogue of the twohundred page novel does the reader learn the identity of this narrator: Having discovered
his sister’s diary after her departure for San Francisco, Denis, Caroline’s elder brother,
sympathetically recounts her efforts to preserve her cultural heritage. He speaks directly
to the reader, confessing his role in the production of the text. As a history professor, he
shares her interest in their ethnic roots. The text that emerges explores three components
of cultural memory—language, religion, and traditional customs, the triad of la
survivance—in an attempt to promote Franco-American values largely erased by the
process of assimilation.
5.4.1 Cultural Memory and Spaces of Transformation
The narrator of L’Héritage situates cultural memory in three distinct places:
mémère’s tenement, the Amoskeag Mill Yard, and the family’s ancestral village of SaintCuthbert, Quebec. All of these spaces undergo the inevitable transformations associated
with modernity and progress. Recovery and preservation of the past proves an elusive
goal for Caroline Ladouceur: she ultimately fails to persuade her fiancé Normand, her
brother Ernest, and her parents Charles and Marguerite of the value of safeguarding their
Franco-American heritage.
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Located in the heart of Manchester’s Petit Canada, mémère’s tenement represents
part of the history of French-Canadian settlement of the city’s West Side. As a child,
Caroline finds unconditional love, emotional security, and encouragement of her artistic
talents in her grandmother’s home. More than simply a physical, architectural space, the
tenement house embodies the values of Franco-American ethnicity. For instance, the
kitchen, the center of the house, mirrors the occupant’s cultural traditions. Mémère’s
culinary rituals, shared with her daughters Sophie and Marguerite, include the baking of
tourtières and the preparation of soupe aux pois and crêpes. Caroline’s growing sense of
her cultural past propels her to learn how to prepare these ethnic dishes under tante
Sophie’s tutelage. Rarely does Caroline enjoy these foods in her own house since her
mother Marguerite must serve the kind of meals that Charles deems appropriate to their
middle-class status.
Mémère’s house, both as a physical location and as a symbolic site of FrancoAmerican values, occupies a central place in the plot. The disfiguring transformations
that the structure undergoes in the hands of new owners metaphorically convey the
changes that Franco-American society experiences in its interaction with the dominant
Anglophone culture. For Caroline, the three-story tenement is saturated with warm
feelings and cultural memories. She suffers as she watches its metamorphosis under new
ownership:
Ils sont après tout ramancher. . . . Tu devrais voir ça, comment laitte que c’est. . . .
Par exemple, les galeries su’l’côté de la maison. Ben, ils les ont toutes jetées à
terre, mais ils ont gardé la couverture des galeries au deuxième, pis ils ont mis des
gros pôteaux pour la supporter . . . c’est pour faire accraire que c’est des colonnes,
comme ils ont su’es maisons riches dans l’North End. (157) 10
The attempt to transform the outdated French-Canadian architecture into a modern,
American-style dwelling results in an aesthetically unpleasing amalgamation that
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Caroline condemns: “C’est pas ben balancé pantoute. . . . Ça va nous donner des choques
aux yeux pas pour rire” (157). Her commentary has obvious application to the hybridity
that comes to characterize Franco-American culture in its response to the pressures of
assimilation.
In an attempt to comfort Caroline, her brother Denis (not yet revealed to the
reader as being the narrator) explains that “avec chaque nouveau locataire, il y a une
nouvelle âme, et l’âme qu’avait donnée grand-maman à son appartement cessait d’y être
du moment qu’elle l’a quittée pour la dernière fois. . . . Le souvenir de notre grand-mère
est complètement disparu de sa maison” (156-57). Even though her grandmother no
longer lives there, Caroline treasures the associations with the past that the space
engenders. Making connections between architectural space, memory, and identity,
Gaston Bachelard, in La Poétique de l’espace explores “la valeur humaine des espaces de
possession, des espaces défendus contre des forces adverses, des espaces aimés” (17). He
asks, “Comment des chambres disparues se constituent-elles en demeures pour un passé
inoubliable?” (18). In her attempt to purchase her mémère’s house, Caroline seeks to
reconstitute her cultural past through physical possession of the tenement. Despite her
best efforts, she fails to acquire the property and to defend the house from the kind of
changes that the new owners begin to make. Even so, the “chambres disparues,” the
spaces that exist only in her memory, still conjure up comforting memories of her
childhood past.
Bachelard examines space, from cellars to attics, in its application to poetic
creation. What he says about the connection between images of space and intimate
moments can be useful in analyzing mémère’s relationship to her home and, most
importantly, to her attic. According to Bachelard, architectural space functions as an
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enclosure for the storage of human emotions and memories. “Nos souvenirs,” he writes,
“sont logés” (19). Hsin Ying Chi similarly contends “Architectural spaces are not only
houses and rooms of a physical structure but also houses and rooms that have reflected
rich human experiences, and have revealed a close relationship between the architecture
and the dwellers in that architecture” (7). The space that functions as shelter is, according
to Bachelard, infused with human values: “Il y a un sens à prendre la maison comme un
instrument d’analyse pour l’âme humaine. . . . Notre âme est une demeure. Et en nous
souvenant des maisons, des chambres, nous apprenons à demeurer en nous-mêmes. . . .
Les images de la maison marchent dans les deux sens: elles sont en nous autant que nous
sommes en elles” (19). If one’s use of space provides a window on one’s soul, and if one
dwells in space as much as one internalizes it as a mental construct, then mémère’s attic
space emerges as a revealing commentary on her need for a sanctuary where she can
escape the toil associated with the rooms below.
In literary texts, the attic traditionally has been viewed as a marginalized space,
one whose frequent association with women has not been accidental.11 Attic space,
usually a forgotten and hidden area of the house, mirrors women’s lack of importance,
presence, or power in society. In L’Héritage, the attic represents Emelia’s personal space
where she can create her scrapbooks, write in her diary, and organize mementos in her
hope chest—“ce vieux coffre qui renferme son âme, tout comme cet autre coffre déposé
dans la terre contient son corps” (52). After her grandmother’s death, Caroline is drawn
to “cet énorme espace sombre sous le toit, ce coin mystérieux de la maison” (17), a
private arena in which she can escape into her cultural past. Her brother Ernest spurns the
attic as “tout sale, plein de poussière, de la vraie cochonnerie!”(24); he prefers the
basement of his parents’ home, a cluttered space that houses his Lionel trains and his
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father’s workshop. This juxtaposition of images of high and low, the attic and the cellar,
invites a consideration of other binary oppositions symbolic of the high and the
low—refinement and debasement for instance, or spirituality and materialism. Certainly
Caroline and mémère represent the higher ground whereas Ernest and Charles express
baser elements such as brutishness, chauvinism, and racial prejudice.
As Caroline begins to come to grips with the changes to her grandmother’s
tenement, she learns that urban renewal will result in the razing of much of the
Amoskeag Mill Yard, including her grandparents’ workplace—building three. She has
long lamented the state of disrepair of these architecturally significant monuments to “la
misère de la vie ouvrière d’antan” (33). She finds the vandalism of “des gamins [qui]
avaient cassé la plupart des fenêtres” (33) particularly disturbing, and she wonders what
the workers would think “s’ils revenaient de l’au-delà pour voir comment la génération
actuelle ‘rend hommage’ à la mémoire de ses ancêtres” (34). She comes to realize that as
guardians of the past, the current generation must preserve the storehouses of collective
cultural memory. Faced with the imminent destruction of “toute trace de la vie et du
travail qu’ont connus les gens comme sa grand-mère” (166), Caroline springs into action
with the local historical society in order to “faire vivre à jamais le souvenir de ses
ancêtres et . . . de garder intact un tel endroit, en témoignage . . . d’un peuple et d’une ère
qui, autrement, s’évanouiront avec la fuite du temps” (166-67). These efforts to preserve
historic landmarks meet with a general sense of apathy among the local community, and
Caroline fails to halt the transformation of a culturally meaningful space into a pile of
rubble.
A third potential site of cultural memory undergoes a transformation similar to
mémère’s tenement house. In an attempt to learn about her ancestors, Caroline makes a
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pilgrimage to Saint-Cuthbert, Quebec, Emelia Hébert Marcouillier’s hometown. This
journey proves as disappointing as her other efforts to recover and preserve the past.
Armed with an envelope of photographs taken at the beginning of the twentieth century
by Emelia’s friend Cléophas, a professional photographer, Caroline intends to revisit
these places and to take her own snapshots of them. Cousin Fortunette dashes Caroline’s
plans: “[Elle] apprend qu’il lui sera presque impossible de voir et de photographier ce
qu’avaient vu, au tournant du siècle, les yeux et la lentille de Cléophas Rousseau. La
raison: parmi les nombreux bâtiments visuels du photographe, de nos jours, pratiquement
rien n’existe” (186).
Neither Fortunette nor Tante Sophie knows the location of Emelia’s land because
“aucune maison ou aucune grange dans les environs ne ressemble à la ferme des
Marcouillier, telle qu’on l’aperçoit dans les vieilles images” (186). Additionally, all trace
of Emelia’s parents’ land has been erased by “la vente de la plupart de la terre ancestrale,
par la démolition des bâtiments originaux qui s’y trouvaient et par la construction de
nouvelles maisons qui n’évoquent ou ne révèrent du tout le souvenir d’un monde
d’autrefois” (187). Dejected, Caroline wanders the streets of the hamlet with her fiancé
Normand, and “le Saint-Cuthbert d’aujourd’hui qui lui passe sous les yeux n’est qu’une
illusion car, dans son esprit, elle voit seulement le village tel qu’il paraissait à l’époque
de ses aïeux” (189). Having internalized the scenes from the ancient photographs,
Caroline refuses to behold the transformations that have occurred to her mémère’s
homeland. What Caroline fails to comprehend is that no memories can preserve the past;
cultural memories are always a reconstruction from a contemporary vantage point and, as
such, may prove to be inaccurate representations of actual conditions.
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The three spaces privileged in the text—the Petit Canada tenement, the
Amoskeag Millyard, and Saint-Cuthbert, Quebec—evolve or, in some cases, vanish, as
various transformations work their effects upon these storehouses of memory. Despite
Caroline’s best efforts to perpetuate her Franco-American ethnicity through the
preservation of these spaces, she remains unable to promote or to defend her heritage
against the forces of assimilation and modernization.
5.4.2 Images of Loss and Fragmentation in L’Héritage
L’Héritage, published in 1983, reflects the loss of social and institutional support
networks within the Franco-American community during the 1960s and 70s: many
Franco-Americans, just like Charles Ladouceur, no longer lived in segregated Petits
Canadas; French-language parochial schools had either closed or had accepted other
nationalities, making instruction solely in English necessary; even in Manchester’s
Franco-American West Side, the priest had begun saying mass in English. The novel
explores tante Sophie’s dismay over this accommodation: “Ils ont commencé à avoir une
messe en anglais à cause qu’y a des jeunes qui comprennent pas l’français. J’sais que les
curés, ils ont pas grand choix, s’ils veulent garder la jeunesse, mais pour nous autres,
ceux qui ont appris leurs prières en français, ça fait drôle d’entendre la messe en anglais”
(66). It appears, therefore, that during the late 1960s the very fabric of the FrancoAmerican lifestyle was unraveling. Understanding the historical context in which the text
was written may help the reader to understand the narrator’s insistence that, as Poteet
puts it, “l’héritage n’est pas un tas de balivernes tout juste bonnes à jeter à la poubelle. La
communauté doit s’engager à le preserver des ravages du temps et des modes passagères”
(“L’autre” 97).
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Images of loss permeate the narrative from its opening graveside service for
Emelia to its surprising conclusion—the destruction of her hope chest and its contents by
Charles and Ernest, two individuals intent on eliminating all reference to their ethnic
past. Charles ardently explains his desire to fit in with the dominant culture: “On est pu
des habitants nous autres, pis on travaille pu aux moulins non plus . . . on est arrivé, pis
on devrait regârder comme du monde” (29). Loss takes many forms in
L’Héritage—death, warfare, suicide, the Spanish influenza epidemic, willful destruction,
divorce, urban renewal, and rupture of the family unit. Additionally, the text is set against
the backdrop of the Vietnam War, and the characters heatedly debate the loss of troops in
Southeast Asia. The many deaths that the text references function as a trope for what the
narrator considers to be the impending death of Franco-American culture in New
England.
L’Héritage, in its consideration of the state of Franco-American solidarity in the
late 1960s, raises the question of whether one should preserve or bury the past. In
exploring this issue, Poteet explains that “plusieurs débats prennent place dans le roman à
propos du lieu où vivre, de ce qu’on doit manger et, plus particulièrement, comment on
doit parler; le choix existe toujours: travailler fort pour conserver ou se laisser entraîner
dans le ‘courant’ américain” (“L’autre” 97). The debate over the importance of cultural
heritage rages chiefly between Caroline, who desires to preserve a sense of shared
history, culture, and tradition, and Charles, who is only interested in material gain. He
insists that “on vit pu dans l’vieux temps; c’est fini ça, c’est du passé, pis nous autres on
vit à c’t’heure” (28).
This debate, however, may be far more problematic than it appears since the
novel raises troubling questions about the cohesiveness of the group itself. On at least
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two occasions, the narrator calls into question the very group solidarity that he seeks to
champion as a legacy to be preserved and transmitted. Both incidents reveal an
unmistakable fragmentation within Franco-American society, one that precludes group
unity. The first incident reveals Charles’s prejudice against the waves of FrenchCanadians immigrants who arrived in the late 1920’s and early 1930s. He contends,
On a pas besoin de c’te sorte-là icitte. Ils sont pas pantoute comme nos Canayens
des États. . . . Les Canayens des États, on est des vrais Américains. . . . Mais d’un
autre côté, y a toute une différente sorte de Canayens qui viennent icitte. . . . Ça
ramasse leurs cennes, ça gratte pendant des années, pis ça commence une
business où ça engage rien que d’autres maudits Canucks comme eux autres. Pis,
après dix, quinze, tedben vingt ans, ça retourne vivre au Canada avec les poches
pleines de nos piasses américaines. (53-54)
Ironically, Charles’s view that the latecomers simply wish to amass their fortunes and to
return to Canada was an attitude widely shared by native New Englanders in regard to the
original French-Canadian settlers of the late nineteenth century.
A second incident demonstrates the fractured nature of a group with a jealously
guarded social hierarchy. Those sharp distinctions emerge when Charles visits his men’s
club, Le Club La Salle, where he and Thomas Noury are the only two members who are
local businessmen. Donald Sansouci, one of the dentists, asks, “As-tu toujours ton p’tit
magasin pour les p’tits vieux pis les p’tits vieilles du P’tit Canada?” Charles offends the
others with his reply: “T’sais, tenir un magasin, c’est pas aisé comme le travail d’un
avocat ou bedon d’un docteur. Moué, j’ai pas l’temps d’aller me promener en Europe à
toués étés ou en Floride à toués hivers, pis j’ai pas l’temps non plus d’aller jouer au golf
toute la journée” (94). Later, in a private moment, Noury complains that his wife was
unable to purchase tourtières for the holiday at Charles’s store. Charles admits that with
the death of Emelia, the tourtière preparation, in the hands of his wife, has not produced
the needed volume. After Charles leaves, Noury spreads gossip to the dentist about the
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imminent failure of Ladouceur’s market and claims Charles will return to work at
Chicopee Mills, a complete fabrication. Sansouci replies, “Pis là, s’il faut qu’il aille
travailler à la Chicopee, j’ai ben peur que va fouaire y demander sa clef de membre. On
peut pas avoir des ouvriers dans notre club. . . . C’est pas un homme de notre trempe . . .
il est pas cultivé comme nous autres” (104).
Certainly, the fractious Franco-American community portrayed in L’Héritage
demonstrates little group cohesiveness. Ultimately, one wonders how ethnic solidarity in
the promotion of cultural memory can ever be achieved by these individuals.
Furthermore, unity, even among the family members in L’Héritage, remains
unattainable. Each holiday gathering provides a new opportunity for bickering over a
wide variety of social, political, and personal issues, such as the division of Emelia’s
assets. The contentious Ladouceur and Marcouillier clans emerge as individuals who are
unable to communicate their needs and desires to each other, thus remaining isolated and
inarticulate. If ethnicity is a cultural production dependent upon the labors of each
generation for its perpetuation, this heritage seems an endangered one.
5.5 Identity and Language in Le Petit Mangeur de Fleurs and L’Héritage
The texts considered in this chapter explore the ways in which individuals
mediating between two cultures construct their identities and defend or reject the values
of la survivance. A profound sense of dissatisfaction with traditional Franco-American
identity—the kind of timidity, docility, and subservience that endeared the group to mill
owners—emerges from both texts. Furthermore, the narratives attribute the lack of
political, economic, and social progress among members of this ethnic group to an
absence of cooperation in achieving shared goals. The narrator of Le Petit Mangeur de
fleurs, although nostalgic about his childhood, blames the rigidity and low aspirations of
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his ethnic group for his lack of boldness and self-confidence. He regrets being held back
by what he perceives to be the rejection of new ideas and the general lack of drive in his
Petit Canada. He wonders why the desire to succeed seems so important to him:
“Pourquoi me dévorait-elle, cette passion, alors que les héritiers de notre culture ne
sentaient pas le besoin de nous l’inspirer . . . d’une manière tangible et convaincante?
Parce que les Franco-Américains se satisfaisaient trop souvent de leur petit pain et de la
promesse d’un ciel rémunérateur”(157). Charles Ladouceur also blames the lack of
material progress among Franco-Americans on their own shortcomings, on “la maudite
jalousie canayenne. . . . Nous autres, on se laisse diviser par notre jalousie, pis on perd du
chemin avec ça, ça nous empêche d’aller aussi vite que les autres. Si les Canayens . . .
prenaient l’temps de se regârder dans l’miroir pis se dire ‘arrête ça, c’te maudite jalousielà,’ on verrait notre monde avancer pas pour rire . . .” (148). Thus, both characters rebel
against the submission and meekness that traditionally characterized Franco-American
identity.
The search for identity drives the narrative of L’Héritage; individual family
members attempt to negotiate their sense of their own ethnicity and to discover their
relationship to each other and to the larger Anglophone society in which they live. The
narrative hinges on “des personnages en quête de leur identité dans un univers tout à fait
états-unien et pourtant baigné dans une ambiance résolument franco, par sa tradition, sa
vision du monde et, bien sûr, sa langue” (Péloquin “Le roman” 406). As the characters
debate the importance of those elements that form the very bedrock of the ideology of la
survivance, the issue of language takes center stage.
Throughout the narrative, the various characters give much attention to language
choice and usage. For example, Ti-Nest emerges as the least fluent speaker of the group;
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his father and his brother constantly correct his language production, often with
humorous results:
“Eh, Ti-Nest, tu trouves pas que les chars allégoriques dans la parade sont mieux
cette année qu’ils ont coutume d’être?”
“Les quoi?”
“Les chars allégoriques.”
“Les chars al . . . allé . . .?”
“Allégoriques. T’sais, les floats.”
“Ah oui, les floats. Chars allé . . .? Hmmmm.” (45)
Caroline, Sophie, and Fortunette share an awareness and appreciation of
belonging to a unique cultural group, and they remain dedicated to conversing
exclusively in French. Charles, Marguerite, Ernest, and Normand, on the other hand,
have actively sought to “mettre de côté” (30) their cultural heritage in favor of a middleclass American lifestyle. If they continue to speak French, “c’est plutôt par habitude que
par un souci de la survie de cette langue” (30).
Denis emerges as the text’s most complex character, since he both embraces and
rejects his Franco-American identity. As a Manchester native with an appreciation for his
cultural heritage, he supports Caroline’s efforts to preserve architecturally significant
buildings at the Amoskeag Mill Yard, buildings in which his ancestors worked. Yet, as a
history student who has been studying in Paris for a semester, he rejects the vernacular
that the family uses. When he returns for the holidays, he converses with family and
friends in standard French, a practice his father condemns: “Depuis qu’il est revenu d’la
France, on dirait qu’il se donne des airs. Il parle français comme un vrai Parisien. . . .
L’accent est assez épais qu’on comprend rien. Tout c’qu’on entend, c’est une bunch de
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sons qui vont ‘rrrrron-ton-ton-ton-ton’ du fond d’la gorge” (128). His father challenges
him on this point, reminding him that even in the face of pressure from his high school
French teacher, he refused to imitate her Parisian accent. Denis explains his change of
heart:
J’ai toujours cru que nous, les étudiants sortant des écoles paroissiales
francophones, parlions un français impeccable à côté de ces professeurs
Anglophones. En revanche, cela n’empêchait pas ces ignorants de se moquer de
nous, de notre accent et de nos canadianismes. Donc, comme défense, je refusais
carrément d’imiter leur accent pseudo-parisien. (134)
Denis’s comments corroborate Brault’s assessment of the negative influence of schools
on Franco-Americans’ retention of their native language. He explains that graduates of
French-language parochial schools, finding themselves in high school language classes,
were greeted with “open hostility from French language teachers. Their initial confidence
vanished when instructors insisted from the outset, often sarcastically, on ‘Parisian
French’ pronunciation and vocabulary. Parents . . . frequently did not object when their
children decided to drop French” (169).
Only when Caroline explains to Denis that she regrets hearing “le monde icitte
dire que mon frère, il agit comme s’il avait honte de sa famille pis de ses amis” (160),
does Denis consider what his new way of speaking conveys about his attitude towards his
ethnicity. She reminds him that “il faut que tu seyes toué-même, que tu seyes naturel, pis
là, tu t’feras respecter. . . . Pourquoi faire que ton français a besoin de changer à cause
que t’es allé en France? Oublie pas qui c’est que t’es pis d’où c’est que tu viens . . .
éloigne-toué pas de ton monde, à cause que tu vas te trouver tout seul un jour!” (160). In
the Epilogue, the reader learns that Denis has resolved what he calls “mes difficultés
concernant la fierté éthnique et le parler populaire des nôtres. Ai-je repris l’accent des
miens? J’cré ben que oui, pis j’en sus fier étou” (206). Denis indicates that although he
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has mastered the ability to communicate in both registers, he prefers to converse in le
parler populaire. Thus, the narrator ultimately embraces his cultural heritage and hopes
that his sister, despite her disappointments, “va réaliser que notre passé, il vaut queuque
chose, pis que ç’a du bon sens de vouloir le conserver, même si notre père cré pas à ça”
(206).
Language also takes center stage in Le Petit Mangeur de fleurs, and the narrator
uses the issue to explore the dynamics of a family as dysfunctional as the Ladouceur
clan. Various family members resort to silence—the absence of language—to register
their disapproval of the narrator. His pépère refuses to converse with him and retires to a
corner of the kitchen during family visits. His father is cold and distant, and his mother
gives him the silent treatment when, as a teen, he quits a grueling factory job. An incident
that foregrounds the importance of language concerns the narrator’s Irish aunt Alice, the
wife of Conrad, his father’s brother. The family had opposed the marriage since “pour les
Franco-Américains, épouser un Irlandais, une Irlandaise, c’était presque une trahison,
une mésalliance. . . . Aunt Alice n’était pas vraiment l’une des nôtres. Et ceci avait causé
une sorte de fêlure au métal canayen dont est forgée la famille franco-américaine” (68).
The chief difficulty centers on language use. Aunt Alice speaks no French. According to
the narrator, “les Irlandais, pour la plupart, ne parlaient pas notre langue et plusieurs ne
voulaient pas l’apprendre, alors que nous, nous nous efforcions d’apprendre la leur qui
était aussi celle des Américains Yankees” (67).
The narrator’s mémère, Madame Beaupré, serves a boarding-house lunch five
days a week to her daughter-in-law Alice and to other relatives who work at the mill. One
day, the narrator’s mother and his aunt Ida receive “une lettre d’avocat leur annonçant
qu’il représentait Alice O’Ruck Beaupré qui déposait une plainte formelle contre elles”
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(69). A lawyer’s letter initiated by a relative shakes the family to its core. Aunt Alice
takes this step “pour la simple raison que les deux femmes préféraient parler français à
table et que la parente irlandaise prétendait que ses deux belles-sœurs parlaient d’elle”
(69). The narrator remembers that for many years the incident “causa une telle bouderie
entre tante Alice et ma mère, et surtout tante Ida, que je crois que ma tante portera cette
rupture jusque dans sa tombe” (70), and he learns “l’importance du caractère unique de
notre langue française . . . et le sens d’appartenance” (70). Language, as a tool of
exclusion, sharpens the distinction between insiders and outsiders and reinforces, for the
child, the difference between the ethnic self and the Other. In L’Héritage and Le Petit
Mangeur de fleurs, the narrators, struggling with the pressures of assimilation, explore
their sense of self as an amalgamation of their ethnic heritage and its interface with the
dominant Anglophone culture. In so doing, they expose rifts within the family unit and
debunk the widely accepted coherence of the group and its communality of shared values
and perspectives.
In both texts, cultural memory, fluid and elusive, is intimately connected to place,
to language, and to traditional practices, and the characters seek to recover what has been
lost. The nostalgic yearning to capture and hold on to an earlier time and place, shared by
the narrator of Le Petit Mangeur de fleurs and by Caroline in L’Héritage, translates into
the recording of these memories in artistic endeavors—creative writing for the one,
painting for the other. These aesthetic acts fulfill the individuals’ desire for stability, as
reflected in his assignment of words to paper and in her application of oil paints to
canvas. This kind of fixity and immutability are unattainable in human experience in
which everything is open to negotiation, improvisation, and transformation, and all the
more so in the experience of those who straddle two cultures and two languages. The
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protagonists in Le Petit Mangeur de fleurs and L’Héritage, in mediating between the lure
of the old ways and the demands of the modern world that they inhabit, turn to creative
pursuits in order to capture their memories in a concrete way, to fix them by turning them
into art forms. For these two protagonists, the space of belonging and security, the fixed
mooring, seems best sought in the realm of the imagination.
Notes
1
At his personal home page, Beaupré calls Le Petit Mangeur de fleurs a roman
vérité and explains that although based upon the events of his childhood, the text also
incorporates fictional episodes and characters.
2
Beaupré’s novels are published by a French-language publisher in Montreal and
are distributed in France, Switzerland, and other French-speaking European countries.
3
With regard to anglicisms in Franco-American spoken French, if the influence
of English was present in the variety of French imported by Franco-Americans, this
influence probably increased after migration due to the degree of contact with English.
4
Louvigny de Montigny’s play, Boules de neige, performed in 1903, integrated
popular speech into certain scenes featuring habitants. Marie-Louis Milhau of La Revue
Canadienne notes the audience’s reaction: “Il a pris pour des intermèdes grotesques les
scènes où paraissent les paysans canadiens . . .” (389). This reviewer makes his own
opinion quite clear: “[L]a langue que l’on parle sur les bords du Saint-Laurent est aussi
intéressante et aussi savoureuse que la langue des intellectuels canadiens et l’on ne
saurait voir du ridicule là où il y a matière à étude et à intérêt” (390). Many nineteenthcentury plays used satire to poke fun at the elitism inherent in standard French, and
continued the debate over the language of literature. By the time of the Quiet Revolution,
audiences became somewhat more accepting of the use of French-Canadian dialect in
theatrical works such as Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles-Sœurs (1968) and Jean Barbeau’s
Joualez-moi d’amour (1972), two plays of alienation and dispossession on the part of the
working-class poor. The latter work credits joual with enabling the hero to overcome his
impotence, thus rendering the dialect one of “power and virility, a real man’s language”
(Gauvin 42).
5
Code-switching and borrowings are two different outcomes of linguistic contact.
As used in French discourse, English words that conform to the grammar of English can
be interpreted as code-switches. This strategy, observable in stable bilingual locales, is
the case, for example, in some Franco-Ontarian communities. English words used in
French discourse that conform to French grammar are considered to be borrowings, a
strategy observed in monolingual French communities in contact with English.
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6
The lexique contains borrowings from Amerindian languages (atoca for
canneberge, ouaouaron for grenouille géante), borrowings from English (bobbé pin for
pince à cheveux), derivations from English (bommer—from to bum around—for flâner,
déter—from to date—for courtiser), and Franco-Americanisms (bouésson for boisson
alcoolique, drette contre for tout près de, tedben for peut-être).
7
Both Perreault and Beaupré have been very active in their respective FrancoAmerican communities in Manchester, New Hampshire, and in Biddeford, Maine. Robert
Perreault is Professor of French at St. Anselm’s College in Manchester, and Norman
Beaupré, Professor Emeritus at Biddeford’s University of New England.
8
Tourtières are French-Canadian meat pies, usually made of pork, ground beef,
and spices and are traditionally served at Christmas.
9
Hansen, a pupil of Frederick Jackson Turner, wrote chiefly about European
immigrants to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Postcolonial
theorists find Hansen’s views problematic when applied to such groups as Native
Americans, African Americans, and Japanese Americans. For example, the latter group
serves to foreground how memory enters into cultural politics in ways unanticipated by
Hansen. The removal of Japanese Americans to internment camps during World War II,
ostensibly in the name of national security, prevented both the second generation’s
assimilation into mainstream America and the third generation’s celebration of its
Japanese heritage. Amritjit Singh provides further criticism of Hansen’s pioneering essay
in his Introduction to Memory and Cultural Politics: New Approaches to American
Ethnic Literatures.
10
Manchester’s wealthy residents, especially those who owned shares in the
Amoskeag Mills, lived in mansions along Elm Street on the north side of the city.
11
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman
Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination offers a comprehensive study of
major works by British and American women writers and explores the symbolic meaning
of the attic for women.
CHAPTER 6
CONCLUSION
To investigate a new corpus of literature is to discover an unfamiliar territory, one
that exists in its own geographical, cultural, historical, socio-economic, and linguistic
space. The nine Franco-American texts that I examine all treat the ideology of cultural
survival within these spaces and the consequences of border crossings—geophysical,
emotional, and psychological—for Franco-American laborers and their families. Given
its historical role as the destination of 1.5 million French-Canadian migrants between the
American Civil War and the Great Depression, New England represents the center of the
diaspora’s literary space. These texts, published between 1875 and 2004, all speak to the
tensions between two distinct groups—the indigenous Yankee population, largely
Protestant and Anglophone, and the French-Canadian newcomers, Catholic and
Francophone. These narratives about immigrant experiences in liminal spaces of cultural
conflict explore notions of identity, voice, and disempowerment.
I analyze these texts within a theoretical framework of material and metaphorical
spatialities in which characters negotiate displacement, exile, hybridity, and cultural
memory. In these spaces, identity emerges as performatively constituted. Henri
Lefebvre’s notion of the cultural production of space, of how experience is lived and
acted out in sites embedded in political and economic practices of repression, has
particular application to the exploitative and inhuman conditions under which many
characters in these texts live. Michel de Certeau’s conception of space as the product of
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284
individuals in society attending to the practice of the everyday is relevant to the feelings
of isolation and otherness of individuals such as Besson Labranche, Liz Martin, and
Caroline Ladouceur. A gendered view of space, articulated by Linda McDowell and bell
hooks, contests the oppression of women in patriarchal spaces of domination; this
gendered viewpoint provides a different perspective on characters that reject narrow
categories of identity, individuals such as Vic Labranche and Fanny Lewis. The
importance of memory sites in the preservation and redefinition of cultural identities—as
articulated in Pierre Nora’s conception of les lieux de mémoire—is especially pertinent to
those characters in Le Petit Mangeur de fleurs and L’Héritage, whose encounters with
the Anglophone community foreground the problem of finding one’s place in the
borderland between two cultures.
Like other immigrant literatures that treat cultural borders, flight and return,
mobility and stasis, space and place loom large in Franco-American prose fiction.
Characters feel the need to escape and incessantly wander across America. (As
archetypal pathfinders, Père L’Allumette, Ludwig, Robert Lewis, Peter, Joe, and Liz
Martin, Étienne de Montigny, Sal Paradise, and Charleen Touchette all crisscross the
continent.) Other protagonists reconnect to the homeland in an actual journey back to
Quebec (Jeanne Girard, the Labranche and Dupuis families, and several Delusson
children). Some only dream of returning, and they spend their lives regretting the loss of
their ancestral land (Jean Baptiste Delusson, Caroline Ladouceur, Sophie Marcouillier,
Marguerite Martin, and Monique Bergeron). The novelistic treatment of the mobility and
stasis of these characters parallels the the actual diaspora and the crossing of physical and
psychological borders between the adopted country and the homeland. Regardless of
whether the characters choose a coureur de bois lifestyle or adopt the sedentary ways of
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the habitant, all of them negotiate the borders between their minority group membership
and their evolving American identity.
Border spaces imply the transgression of boundaries, their permeable nature, and
their shifting lines of demarcation, and the characters in Franco-American prose fiction
struggle with the liminality and otherness that living in such frontier spaces implies. The
texts in this study foreground the characters’ awareness of their otherness, their
acceptance or rejection of a hybrid identity, and their attempts to grow new roots in a
new social space. This negotiation of the fluid space between two cultures implies the
overlap of conflicting lifestyles—the ethnic and the mainstream. This overlap produces a
space of tension, disorientation, and marginalization in which characters grapple with a
variety of choices: a separatist position informed by an ideology of exclusion, urged by
characters such as Jean Lacombe, Jean-Louis Montépel, and Charlie Ross; an
assimilationist stance, best exemplified by Charles Ladouceur and Angelique de
Montigny; or an uneasy alliance between two or more cultures, an accommodation urged
by the narrators of Le Petit Mangeur de fleurs, It Stops with Me: Memoir of a Canuck
Girl, and L’Héritage. Each of the characters’ strategies functions as a response to the
difficult process of acculturation, and none satisfactorily bridges the interstices between
the cultural divide.
In my analysis of the trajectory towards acculturation, I have maintained that
Franco-American novels are complex and ambiguous texts; I have argued against a
reductionist notion that these texts exist only to bolster their readership’s resistance to
assimilation and to promote the maintenance and transmission of the ideology of cultural
survival. The scant critical attention paid to these works has traditionally argued along
such lines. In urging a more open reading of the texts, I have demonstrated that whereas
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some narrators of Franco-American texts do urge adherence to la langue, la foi, et la
culture françaises, other narrative voices excoriate these traditions or straddle a
borderland between old and new ways of negotiating daily life in urban centers of New
England.
In Jeanne la fileuse, Canuck, The Delusson Family, and Mill Village, sympathetic
narrators effect the return of French-Canadians to their native soil with more than a little
nostalgia for the homeland. Idealized pictures of rural Quebec contrast with negative
images of industrialized cities in the Northeast. The Granite Mill blaze, the violence,
pollution, and infant mortality in the Labranches’ Petit Canada, and the dangers inherent
in factory work (Benoni loses a finger and a thumb in two separate accidents in Mill
Village) convey the hazards of the adopted land.1 Other perils threaten the immigrant
spiritually and morally. Jeanne Lacombe falls victim to “le démon de l’ennui [qui] semait
l’ivraie et l’encerclait en ses griffes poignantes l’âme ébranlée de l’enfant,” and in the
decadent environment of New York “elle se livrerait entièrement à l’influence païenne
qui l’entourait” (Lessard-Bissonnette 59). Jeanne’s American friend Helen, “dont les
yeux étaient diaboliques” (62), succeeds in luring her away from “le chemin étroit et
droit” (59), accompanying Jeanne to a brothel from which she escapes.
Other narrators, in texts such as No Adam in Eden, It Stops with Me: Memoir of a
Canuck Girl, and The Dogs of March, censure the abusive behaviors of clergy members,
husbands, and fathers, behaviors that rupture the home and expose the stereotypical
close-knit Franco-American family as a myth. For these narrators, the cultural practices
that ground the ideology of la survivance emerge as hypocritical or even irrelevant to
pressing social problems that afflict the characters. These individuals struggle to survive
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alcohol and drug addiction, sexual abuse, battering, dementia, or chronic physical illness
and consciously reject or simply ignore their Franco-American heritage.
Ambivalent narrators, such as those in The Town and the City, Le Petit Mangeur
de fleurs, and L’Héritage, portray individuals at the crossroads of two cultures. These
characters are both attracted to and repelled by the excesses of a materialistic,
competitive culture quite unlike their Franco-American heritage that valorizes thrift,
suffering, sacrifice, and heavenly rewards. The ambiguous hyphen between the words
“Franco” and “American” may suggest separation or union, otherness or acculturation
and implies the conflict that these characters experience. Grégoire Chabot, author of Un
Jacques Cartier Errant (1977), explains this borderland existence as “une sorte de
schizophrénie perpétuelle” and adds that he has never felt “entièrement à l’aise ni comme
Franco, ni comme Américain . . . et ces deux choix étaient responsables pour le fait que
la plupart des oncles et cousins qui m’avaient précédé s’étaient mis à boire” (iii).
Chabot’s comments foreground the ambivalence and frustration of those who inhabit
liminal spaces between two languages and cultures.
In establishing the historical, political, and social context in which these texts
were composed, I have chronicled the efforts of powerful community leaders on behalf of
cultural survival. Joining forces with Franco-American authors promoting the ideology of
la survivance, the French-language press, the clergy, and members of the elite warned the
masses of the influence “hypnotisante d’un pays immensément riche, entreprenant,
matérialiste et jouisseur, étranger [aux] appartenances spirituelles” (Verrette 5). L’Abbé
Verrette cautioned: “Nous vivons dans un climat assimilateur d’une civilisation étrangère
à la nôtre” (18). From the elite’s viewpoint, such a decadent civilization threatened to
lure immigrants away from their ethnic enclaves and their traditional way of life. I have
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explored the economic implications of such a breakup and have posited the vested
interest of the clergy and the elite in the promotion of the ideology of la survivance.2
Typical of elitist rhetoric is this passage from Philippe Sainte-Marie’s Les
Aspirations d’une race. The narrator asserts that “la famille franco-américaine est
menacée gravement à cause de ses contacts incessants et obligatoires avec les agents de
perversion spirituelle, d’égarement intellectuel, de corruption politique, de troubles
industriels, d’embarras sociaux de tout genre” (187). This and other texts such as La
Jeune Franco-Américaine, The Delusson Family, and Sanatorium promote a separatist
stance in order to combat the risks—moral, physical, and spiritual—inherent in
mainstream American society, risks that would fracture the group’s unity. In their desire
to promote solidarity, the narrators of these texts tend to sentimentalize the immigrant
experience in their portrayal of dutiful children, self-sacrificing parents, loving home
environments, devout parishioners, and compliant laborers.
In chronicling efforts on the part of the press, the clergy, and the FrancoAmerican elite to ensure the survival of a uniquely Franco-American way of life, I frame
the study historically both in order to show the appeal of these texts to their initial readers
and also to situate them for modern readers in the circumstances that impelled their
production. In their desire to influence the attitudes and behaviors of their readership, the
narrators are not unlike those American novelists between 1790 and 1860 that Jane
Tompkins describes as having “designs upon their audiences, in the sense of wanting to
make people think and act in a particular way” (xi). She argues that the thesis novels
these writers produced, although aesthetically unsatisfying, offer insights into the way a
culture thinks about itself. The texts articulate solutions to problems faced by certain
groups at particular moments in history (xi). She contends that the authors’ designs
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render the texts suspect from a modernist standpoint that classifies such works as merely
propagandistic or sensational, a standpoint that criticizes them for aesthetic defects such
as improbable plots, stereotyped characters, and a lack of psychological intricacy (xviii).
These charges have often been leveled at Franco-American prose fiction, and
Tompkins’s defense of works that she calls “agents of cultural formation” (xvii) has
application to the Franco-American corpus of novels. She insists that “when one sets
aside modernist demands . . . and attends to the way a text offers a blueprint for survival
under a specific set of political, economic, social, or religious conditions, an entirely new
story begins to unfold, and one’s sense of the formal exigencies of narrative alters
accordingly” (xviii). Tompkins contends that writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe or
Charles Brockden Brown wrote texts in order to effect social change, to provide the
readers of their time with “a means of ordering the world they inhabited” (xiii). She
further argues that in order to account for the success that these texts enjoyed with their
audiences, a success that puzzles the modern reader who sees only their “glaring artistic
defects” (xii), it is necessary to recapture the context in which they were written.
In analyzing nine Franco-American texts written between 1875 and 2004, I have,
like Tompkins, avoided a narrowly literary critical mode by situating the texts in the
social space in which they were produced and in relation to controversies over language
choice, church policies, and maintenance of cultural traditions. In reconstructing a
“context” for the works, I am mindful that any selection of historical details may be
influenced by the bias of the individual framing the context. Tompkins warns that a
reconstitution of context “is as much determined by the attitudes and values of the
interpreter as is the explication of literary works” (xiii). Although I do not claim to be a
disinterested party, I have attempted a more neutral reading than other scholars, notably
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those of Franco-American heritage themselves, who have tended to approach the corpus
prejudicially, voicing strong opinions on, for example, Metalious’s portrait of family life
or Kérouac’s views on religion. And unlike these scholars, I have not accepted so-called
ideological novels at face value since, when closely scrutinized, texts that urge the
ideology of la survivance often negate the very message that they appear to promote.
I demonstrate the ambiguities inherent in novels traditionally considered to be
romans à thèse. For example, Alberte Gastonguay’s La Jeune Franco-Américaine seems
to promote straightforwardly the exclusionary ideology of cultural survival. Yet the
narrative fails to convince the reader of the code of conduct that it so ardently advances.
It ultimately subverts its own message about the sanctity of the family unit, the
importance of racial purity, and the necessity of adherence to Roman Catholicism with its
implication of an incestuous father-daughter relationship and with the introduction of
Jeanne’s future spouse, a non-Franco-American and lapsed Catholic. Similarly, the
narrator of Jeanne la fileuse does an about-face, at first fervently defending FrenchCanadians who settle in New England for economic reasons and then orchestrating their
return to Lower Canada. In Le Petit Mangeur de fleurs, Beaupré’s narrator fails to sustain
a convincing portrait of the loving, close-knit Franco-American family that he introduces
in his first chapter. His father and grandfather emerge as cold and uncommunicative men
who lack the conviviality of a George Martin or an Armand Bergeron. His mother
repeatedly acts cruelly towards the children. And his aunts and uncles squabble over their
brother’s estate, resulting in an estrangement that endures to the grave. What begins as a
nostalgic picture of familial harmony ends as a portrayal of a dysfunctional family.
Perhaps the most tragic narrative twist occurs in Les Enfances de Fanny, in which the
message of racial tolerance is subverted by the death of the heroine, precisely because of
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her efforts to bridge the divide between the races. Thus, in these and other texts, narrators
undermine their own pro- or contra-survivance stance, and the novels emerge as
surprisingly complex and ambiguous.
Until very recently, little scholarly attention has been paid to Franco-American
prose fiction. This may be due to both the unavailability of the texts as well as to a
general lack of visibility of an ethnic group with little political or economic power. The
group has tended to fade quietly away despite the often impassioned rhetoric of its
community leaders. Denis Ledoux, Franco-American author and activist, explains the
importance of breaking through the silence that has enveloped an ethnic group dubbed
“the quiet presence” by Maine journalist Dyke Hendrickson. Ledoux observes: “I am a
writer even more than I am a Franco-American, and it is in writing about the inner world
that transcends these cultural borders that I find the most meaning. I write to dispel the
silence that envelops us all” (3). Other writers echo Ledoux’s perspective: Janet Shideler
calls the process of Franco-American acculturation “the quiet evolution” (2), and David
Plante characterizes the French in America as “a quietly strange culture” (qtd. in Ledoux,
Mountain n.p.). Franco-American writer Steven Riel contends: “I grew up feeling that
my Franco-Americaness was invisible . . . . We were so assimilated that we did not even
realize we were a group!” (Ledoux, Lives 141).
This notion of invisibility drives the narrative of Robert Cormier’s 1988 bestseller, Fade.3 Set in the Frenchville section of Monument, Massachusetts, the text opens
in a crowded neighborhood of tenement houses set apart from the solidly middle-class
Yankee town, a “monument” to capitalist success and exploited workers. Frenchville is
home to various members of Paul’s extended family, all of whom are laborers in the
plastics factory. The narrator describes the hellish working environment at the Monument
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Comb Shop: “You opened the door of the Rub Room at the comb shop and a blast like
purgatory struck your face . . . . On the coldest day of the year, the temperature in the
Rub Room was oppressive; in the summer, unbearable. The workers there were exiles
from the rest of the shop: newcomers from Canada eager for any job at all. . .” (60). His
father, uncles, and cousins spend a third of their lives in this windowless, noisy, and
unsafe environment, and Paul vows to escape a similar fate by becoming a writer. The
sight of his father bent over the wheel in the Rub Room inspires his first novel, Bruises in
Paradise. Like so many other characters in Franco-American novels, Paul turns to
creative pursuits in his search of self-expression.
Cormier’s personal sense of being an outsider to mainstream culture translates
into his creation of a series of characters who are all loners. In Fade, the story of Paul
Moreaux’s childhood, a thinly veiled autobiographical tale, the thirteen-year-old
protagonist discovers that he can literally fade away, an ability inherited from his Uncle
Adélard, who received the gift from his Uncle Théophile. Although the original fader
remains unknown, Adélard has traced the phenomenon back to a seventeenth-century
French peasant, who sailed to New France. The fader, an enigmatic figure that moves
between two states—presence and absence—suggests the ephemeral quality of an
ancestral history that has been erased in the communal memory.
Paul’s physical condition, over which he has no control, reduces him to a virtual
prisoner. Never knowing when he may fade and reappear, Paul tends to stay close to
home, and later in life becomes a successful, although reclusive, writer. Evoking FrancoAmericans’ voicelessness and lack of status in New England as well as the eventual fate
of their culture, Fade explores how being invisible leads to misunderstandings, isolation,
and an ultimately empty and powerless existence.
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Following Cormier’s lead, other writers have made similar observations on the
fading of Franco culture. Alfred Poulin Jr. (1938-), Franco-American poet and translator
from Lisbon, Maine, laments the passing of a relative still living in Quebec. His death
impels the poet to grapple with the loss of cultural traditions of the homeland. In his
poem “To My Brother,” he writes: “Each time I return from burying one/of them, all the
way back home from/Lisbon, I can feel unremembered and/unknown parts of me vanish
in the dark/and exhausted silence behind me./They die, Normand, they die./And, dying,
they kill our only history” (Ledoux, Lives 39). Of note is the poet’s privileging of Quebec
over Lisbon as “home,” thus erasing decades of residence in the adopted country. The
affective ties to the ancestral land still remain strong. Fragmentation of identity and a
confused sense of self are evident in the line “unknown parts of me vanish in the dark.”
Additionally, the poet alludes to an “exhausted silence,” implying efforts that have failed
to give a voice to this minority group.
Erased cultural history and attempts to recover and make use of this history
engage Franco-American writers today, individuals who seek to make sense of their
borderland existence and to mediate between their own ethnicity and the mainstream
culture. These writers, like those represented in this dissertation, continue to be
fascinated with differential boundaries, with what distinguishes “here” from “there” and
the hyphenated American Other from his mainstream counterpart. Susanne Pelletier
(1952-), Franco-American poet and activist for social justice and environmental issues,
stresses the importance of memory and remembrance in the construction of a viable
identity. She writes: “We inheritors look back, gather up a broken history, reclaim what
we need to better understand our present, connect with a changing world, reclaim what
we need to write or to envision new dignity for ourselves and for others we see bereft of
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it” (Ledoux, Lives 140). Rather than being a static, bounded entity, ethnic identity
emerges as a cultural construct, a work in progress, encompassing shifting, unstable
boundaries. This notion counters the false view “of ethnic identity as a changeless
substance shared by fairly homogeneous social groups . . . as a natural, timeless essence”
(Brogan 12).
Other ethnic literatures take up issues similar to those addressed in FrancoAmerican texts. For instance, Dorothy Burton Skårdal, researching ScandinavianAmerican literature, uncovers motivations among the Swedish elite not unlike those of
Franco-American community leaders. She points to “the high ambitions of the group’s
cultural elite both to preserve their Swedish heritage and to develop a lasting SwedishAmerican culture, including a literature of their own” (73).4 A strong preservationist
movement in Swedish enclaves in America promoted an ideology of cultural survival
designed to discourage assimilation. Skårdal explains that the Swedish elite urged
immigrants “to remain in their own ethnic group, speaking its language, worshipping in
its churches, studying in its schools, reading its own literature and newspapers” (81).5
Strong parallels can also be drawn between Cuban-American and FrancoAmerican literature. Cuban literature written in this country—the work of Cristina
García, for example—depicts a fractured Cuban-American community. Recent
immigrants, those of the Mariel migration, encountered hostility from the established,
largely white Cuban elite. Later waves of French-Canadian workers of the 1920s and
1930s faced that same kind of antagonism from members of the established immigrant
community. Even before the arrival of the Marielitos, signs of fragmentation within the
Cuban community had appeared. Second-generation Cubans, like second-generation
Franco-Americans, had no cultural memories of the homeland and were redefining
295
Cuban identity. The children of Cuban exiles felt as little connection to Cuba as FrancoAmerican children felt towards Quebec. And unlike their parents and grandparents,
neither group aspired to return to the ancestral homeland. García, like Chabot, writes of
her insider-outsider status as being a schizophrenic situation. She seems resigned to the
process of assimilation: “Immigrants have to make their way into the U.S. Eventually,
English becomes the first language in terms of social interaction, of education. Those of
us who kind of straddle both cultures are in a unique position to tell our stories, to tell our
family stories” (qtd. in Brogan 94). What she implies here is that second-generation
Cubans reconstitute family stories in order to reflect their own evolving sense of identity.
Ethnicity seems more improvised and less fixed among young Cuban-Americans, a
notion that supports Kathleen Brogan’s sense of ethnic identity as a work in progress. In
regard to the prose fiction produced by second- and third-generation Franco-Americans
since the 1980s, although most have chosen to tell their stories in English, a small
number of authors still write in French. (Normand Beaupré will publish another Frenchlanguage novel, La Souillonne, in 2006.)
In Dreaming in Cuban, García’s characters are haunted by the land that they have
left behind. A grandmother in Cuba envisions her granddaughter, growing up in New
York, as “pale, gliding through paleness, malnourished and cold” (7). The granddaughter,
although missing her native Cuba, has difficulty holding on to her memories. She muses:
“Every day Cuba fades a little more inside me, my grandmother fades a little more inside
me. And there’s only my imagination where our history should be” (138). Characters in
both Cuban-American and Franco-American fiction must deal with the erasure of their
cultural history. Their subsequent efforts to rewrite identity on a clean slate evoke a
palimpsest image. Like Cormier’s fader, the granddaughter lacks any cultural
296
embeddedness. Her ethnicity, like Charleen Touchette’s, seems at best a fragile construct
and at worst, a pure fabrication of her imagination. García’s second novel, The Agüero
Sisters, negatively depicts Miami anti-Castro exiles, whose violent politics are motivated
by “their habit of fierce nostalgia, their trafficking in the past like exaggerated peddlers”
(45). Their fixation upon the past reminds one of French-Canadians who clung to a
nostalgic view of the homeland, in the alien space of New England.
Ethnic literatures abound with narratives of immigrants who transgress borders,
who seek rootedness in the adopted land, or who restlessly wander, forever in search of
their lost cultural identity. Franco-American prose fiction, when viewed from the broader
perspective of American ethnic literature, concerns itself with themes common to many
other immigrant texts, themes such as displacement, exile, disempowerment, and
hybridity. These texts treat the acculturation of individuals whose traditions, language,
religion, and values contrast sharply with the American culture that they encounter.
Franco-American novels distinguish themselves from other ethnic American literature in
their positioning of the ideology of la survivance at the center of an exploration of
Otherness. These texts, while purporting to support or to reject the tenets of cultural
survival, emerge as highly ambiguous explorations of the spaces of unassimilated
difference that their characters experience.
The novels analyzed in this dissertation examine how this encounter with the
Other in a variety of border spaces—geographical, cultural, racial, linguistic, and
gendered—shapes Franco-American identity, a construct in perpetual flux. Although
first-generation Franco-Americans maintained a close affiliation with their homeland,
crossing and re-crossing the geophysical border for seasonal work and family reunions,
second- and third-generation Francos, lacking the cultural baggage and ardent nostalgia
297
for the ancestral home, have begun the process of defining a new Franco-American
identity. In Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature,
Brogan explains the disassociation from their cultural heritage of the children of
immigrants as the product of loss of memory sites. She writes: “Ethnicity is grounded by
memory, and that ethnic memory, challenged by confusing new realities, no longer
moors present experience as much as it once did” (170). No sentinels patrol Nora’s space
of memory. And no border guards protect cultural heritage, although the FrancoAmerican elite may have assigned themselves to this defensive position. Like García’s
protagonist Pilar, whose Cuba “fades a little more” each day, and like Cormier’s Paul
Moreaux, destined to fade and reappear, a distinct Franco-American culture struggles to
persist in the face of powerful forces of assimilation and to reemerge from the fade
through the process of ethnic redefinition.
Notes
1
Howard Elman, overseer in a textile mill, loses his small finger in an industrial
accident in Ernest Hebert’s The Dogs of March. Adding insult to injury, he subsequently
learns that due to the precipitous closing of the mill, just shy of his thirtieth year of
employment, he will receive no pension.
2
This vested interest informs Denis Monière’s study Le développement des
ideologies au Québec des origines à nos jours (1977).
3
Robert Cormier (1925-2000), recognized as an important Young Adult author
for novels such as The Chocolate War and I Am the Cheese, grew up in a Leominster,
Massachusetts, Petit Canada. His immediate family members were all workers in the
textile mills in and around Worcester. The second of eight children, he attended a
French-language parochial school prior to enrolling in public high school. Like Normand
Beaupré, Cormier began to write in response to encouragement from one of his teachers.
And like so many other Franco novelists, he first worked as a newspaper reporter and
columnist. The success of his first three novels for adolescents enabled him to retire from
a thirty-year career with the Worcester Telegram and Fitchburg Sentinel. Some of
Cormier’s thirteen novels targeted an older readership, and his adult audience grew
steadily with the publication of each new book.
298
4
Scandinavian-language novels were often serialized in various ethnic
newspapers between the 1820s and 1930s, and Swedish-American journalists contributed
to the corpus of literature in much the same way as Franco-American journalists did. Of
the 1.2 million Swedes who immigrated to America during those years, most were from
the rural lower-class, individuals who sought economic advancement. Early settlers
displayed the same antagonism to latecomers as chronicled in Cuban-American and
Franco-American fiction.
5
The elite encountered problems with second-generation Swedes similar to those
that the Cuban-American and Franco-American elite faced. H. Arnold Barton outlines the
problematic transmission of Sweden’s national culture and the retention of the Swedish
language by an uneducated, lower-class immigrant group: “How can anyone require that
someone preserve what he has never possessed? The emigrant has as little contact with
formal Swedish as he has with Strindberg’s plays . . . . The emigrant’s language is West
Gotlandish, Varmlandish, Skånsk, Smálandish, and so on. And out here they mix them all
together and talk all at once. And then after they’ve been here awhile, they begin to mix
in a lot of English words . . .” (276).
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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Cynthia C. Lees was born in Wakefield, Massachusetts, and graduated from
Wakefield Memorial High School. She earned a B.A. in French from Salem State College
in 1974 and an M.Ed. in English as a Second Language from Boston State College in
1980. After a career in teaching foreign languages and ESL, she returned to the University
of Maine where she was awarded an M.A. in French in 2003. The recipient of two Foreign
Language Area Studies grants, she did coursework and research in québécois literature at
Laval University in Quebec, Canada. As an intern in Maine State Government in 2002,
cosponsored by the Franco-American Center in Orono, Maine, and the Margaret Chase
Smith Center for Public Policy at the University of Maine, Cynthia authored a study of the
history of mental health treatment for Franco-Americans at Bangor Mental Health
Institute. An Alumni Fellow at the University of Florida, she also received the Ernest G.
Atkin Award for Summer Study in 2004 and the Threadgill Dissertation Scholarship in
2006. She graduated in May 2006 with the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in French.
318