42 Deslandres
Chapter 3 Female Voices and Agencies on the Canadian Missionary Frontier, according to Marie Guyart de l’Incarnation (1599–1672)
Dominique Deslandres
Marie Guyart de l’Incarnation’s writings are considered by historians of Canada to be one of the most accurate sources for the French encounter with Amerindian cultures in seventeenth-century America. The thirty-three years that she spent in the French colony of New France as a missionary Ursuline nun and the lengthy and uncensored observations found in her second autobi- ography and very large correspondence (over 8000 letters) provide unique perspectives on the Canadian missionary frontier.1 Because her educative mission focused on women and girls, her writings were especially attentive to their names and voices, which is an important fact because women are often silent and anonymous in other historical sources on New France and Native America2. Her works are doubly significant because they expose both French and Amerindian female agency (that is, the ability to make purposeful choices), and reveal agendas on both sides of the cultural frontier.
1 Neither Guyart’s autobiographies nor her letters were destined for publication and therefore were not censored like the famous Jesuit Relations. Her autobiographies ‘‘Relation of 1633’’ and ‘‘Relation of 1654’’ are to be found in Marie Guyart de l’Incarnation, Écrits spirituels et historiques (1626–1672), ed. Albert Jamet, 2 vols. (Québec-Paris, Desclée/Les Ursulines de Québec, 1929), facsimile 1985) [hereafter R1633 and R1654]. The letters are in Marie de l’Incarnation. Correspondance, ed. Guy-Marie Oury (Solesmes: Abbaye Saint-Pierre, 1971) [hereafter cited as MI] and a selection of letters exist in From mother to son: the selected letters of Marie de l’Incarnation to Claude Martin, ed. and transl. Mary Dunn (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014), and The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, ed. Reuben G. Thwaites, 73 vols. (Cleveland: Burrows, 1897) [hereafter JR]. This collection was revised and completed by Lucien Campeau for his Monumenta Novae Franciae, 9 vols. (Rome-Québec: Monumenta Historia Societatis Iesu-Presses de l’Université Laval, 1967–2003). 2 Francine Girard Ducasse, Les jeux de la nature et de la grâce en Nouvelle-France: la présence des femmes dans les écrits des Jésuites, de 1610 à 1660, MA diss., Université de Montréal, 1981). Chantal Théry, “Un jésuite et un récollet parmi les femmes: Paul Lejeune et Gabriel Sagard chez les Sauvages du Canada,” in Les jésuites parmi les hommes aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles, ed. Bernard Dompnier et al. (Clermont Ferrand: Presses de l’Université de Clermont-Ferrand II, 1987), 105–113.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/9789004325173_004 Female Voices and Agencies 43
To better understand these voices and agencies this essay adopts a double perspective. It pays special attention to Joan Scott’s historical category of gen- der, defined as the power relationships between socially constructed sexual identities.3 Simultaneously, it applies Ann Laura Stoler’s theory of the sexual politics of empire to the early modern French case. Stoler’s approach offers essential guidance because sexual control ‘was both an instrumental image for the body politic [...] and itself fundamental to how racial policies were secured and how colonial policies were carried out.’4 Intersecting in the realms of edu- cation, conversion and miscegenation, Scott’s emphasis on power interplays between the sexes and Stoler’s stress on the roles of “domains of the intimate” in the consolidation of colonial power allow us to revisit the history of the Canadian missionary frontier in the seventeenth century5. This essay is therefore divided into three parts. Firstly, an examination of Guyart’s life and action vividly demonstrate the ways in which seventeenth- century French women empowered themselves and settled on the French- Amerindian frontier, in this case present day Quebec, the first French gateway to the continent. Further, it stresses the fact that, once on the ground, Guyart’s missionary work was central to the crown’s imperial strategy to extend French sovereignty. Finally, it shows how Guyart’s care in recording the views of Amerindian actors unveils attitudes and reactions among the peoples who came into contact with her, testimony which remains far more complex and varied than is usually considered. This is particularly true of the behaviour of Indian women, which spotlights an order of power relationships between the sexes that mystified the newly-arrived French colonists. These echos of
3 The historiography of gender has grown since Joan Scott’s classic article, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” The American Historical Review, 91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1053–1075,. See her recent questioning, “Fantasmes du millénaire: le futur du “genre” au 21e siècle,” Clio, 32 (2010)