New Manifestations of Spirituality in Post-Quiet
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LEAVING THE CHURCH: NEW MANIFESTATIONS OF SPIRITUALITY IN POST-QUIET REVOLUTION NOVELS BY WOMEN by DEANA SUZANNE SHUMAN (Under the Direction of Nina Hellerstein) ABSTRACT The Quiet Revolution of 1960 brought with it many changes in the social structure of the province of Québec. For the first time in centuries the Catholic Church lost power over the central institutions of the nation, and the resulting liberation manifested itself in Québécois fiction by women as an explosion of spiritual experimentation, especially through the arenas of Creativity, Sexuality, Maternity, and the Occult. These four arenas allow women to enjoy the full spectrum of the human experience, unlike the patriarchal tradition of the Catholic Church that has long refused to give women access to the most important arenas. The spiritual journeys of the women in Québécois texts after the Quiet Revolution overwhelmingly reject the overly pure image of the Virgin Mary, instead allowing for a more realistic integration of both light and dark elements. INDEX WORDS: Québécois Literature, Women’s Spirituality, Sexuality, Maternity, Creativity, The Occult LEAVING THE CHURCH: NEW MANIFESTATIONS OF SPIRITUALITY IN POST-QUIET REVOLUTION NOVELS BY WOMEN by DEANA SHUMAN B.A., Georgia State University, 1999 M.A., University of Georgia, 2001 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2009 © 2009 Deana Shuman All Rights Reserved LEAVING THE CHURCH: NEW MANIFESTATIONS OF SPIRITUALITY IN POST- QUEBECOIS NOVELS BY WOMEN. by DEANA SHUMAN Major Professor: Nina Hellerstein Committee: Catherine Jones Doris Kadish Timothy Raser Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2009 iv DEDICATION I would like to dedicate this dissertation to all of my students—past, present, and future—in thanks for the gifts of humor and patience that they give me year after year. In special memory of Meredith Emerson, a student and friend whose beautiful spirit lives on in her loved ones. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many people deserve thanks for their support during this endeavor, and none more than Dr. Nina Hellerstein. Her tireless readings of my chapters and her thoughtful comments and guidance have been indispensable, and her patience with my sometimes aimless ideas has helped me find focus. To my committee members Dr. Timothy Raser, Dr. Doris Kadish, and Dr. Catherine Jones (as well as Dr. Jonathan Krell, whose sabbatical in France has unfortunately left him out of the last stages of this project but who kindly read my first two chapters), I am so grateful for your insight. My family has been immensely supportive during these years: I thank my Daddy and Merlene, whose encouragement was unfailing. My in-laws, Bob and Judy Frink, deserve great thanks for their loving support, most notably in the form of the laptop computer that has made the last year of writing my dissertation so much easier. I am so lucky to have married into such an awesome family! My husband, Brad Frink, deserves the greatest thanks for keeping me as sane as possible on a daily basis. Thanks for dealing with daily annoyances when I couldn’t come up for air. The dogs and the chickens would no doubt thank you if they could speak English, but I will thank you for all of us. What a wonderful, bizarre little family we have. You’re the best husband / doggy daddy / chicken wrangler ever! . vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .............................................................................................................v CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION .........................................................................................................1 2 CREATIVITY..............................................................................................................20 3 SEXUALITY ...............................................................................................................51 4 MATERNITY ............................................................................................................106 5 THE OCCULT ...........................................................................................................141 6 CONCLUSION ..........................................................................................................169 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................176 1 Chapter 1 Introduction While the literatures of former French colonies in Africa and the Caribbean have experienced a well-deserved rise in popularity across the academic sphere, literature from the French-speaking Canadian province of Québec has been surprisingly slow to catch the interest of the literary world, despite the unique position that Québec holds in the modern literary domain. This is perhaps due to the fact that the society of Québec existed for a long time in something of a cultural and political vacuum, while the rest of the world was moving quickly into the 20th century in terms of religious and political thought. A study of women in Québécois literature— especially from the mid-to-late 20th century—reveals, in fact, much common ground between the struggles of Québec as a province and the struggles of women in Québec: especially in terms of religious, social and economic issues, these women “have ‘grown up’ with…the province of Québec. Their concerns have mirrored the historical, social, cultural, linguistic, and political events of each passing decade” (Gilbert, Dufault 15). The province’s slow entry into the modern era has been especially painful for the women of Québec, who have often found themselves in the position of being pigeon-holed and oppressed by the powerful Catholic Church. It is therefore appropriate that we see reflected in women’s literature the inevitable rejection of oppressive religious ideology as the province moves into modernity. In this study I will look at the ways in which women writers after the period of the Quiet Revolution not only reject their Catholic past but forge new and non-traditional paths for their spiritual fulfillment. I will suggest four categories into which many of these experiences of spirituality as seen in the literature of post-Quiet Revolution may be placed: creative expression, sexuality, maternity, and the Occult. 2 Despite its physical and cultural isolation from the rest of the world, Québec at last experienced a strong break—beginning with the onset of the Quiet Revolution in 1960—from the outdated ideologies of previous generations. Less a true revolution than a series of quickly- moving changes in the political landscape of the province (the dominant Catholic Church was at last ousted from its all-powerful position in government, a secular government put in its place), the events of the Quiet Revolution provide an appropriate backdrop for many concurrent literary texts written by women. The Quiet Revolution—beginning in the early 1960’s after the end of the ultra-conservative Duplessis era in Québec—pitted liberal elements in Québec against political and religious oppression in the province. Marking the end of Québec’s blind adherence to the Catholic tradition, the events of the Quiet Revolution pushed the State to adjust its politics to accommodate an increasingly liberal population. While aiming to return a sense of power and autonomy to the people of Québec, whose power had been usurped by what Roger Gaillard calls “une multiplicité d’oppressions” (“l’Angleterre, détentrice souveraine de la Constitution, les traditions rurales, la religion dévote et asphyxiante, les compromis politiques avec les anglophones sourds, car sûrs de leur pouvoir” [23]), the Quiet Revolution did not focus specifically on any part of the women’s movement. Its influence, though secondary, is nonetheless incontestable: women writers, spurred on by the long-awaited changes in the political domain, quickly rose to the occasion. The revolutionary political spirit of the time produced shock waves in the literary scene, encouraging writers to make fast breaks with traditional values and beliefs. The Quiet Revolution emboldened these writers in their desire to create a new paradigm, specifically one that included woman as an individual rather than a necessary cog in the patriarchal wheel. The Church has told women that their original purpose was that of a gift to be “received,” while the man has only to accept the woman as a gift to fulfill 3 his part of this “complementary” couple (Durkin 65). In looking outside of the Church for spiritual sustenance, women reclaim themselves as a gift not for men but for themselves. This focus on individualism in post-1960 Québec manifests itself in the world of women’s fiction as “the creation, quite literally, of a ‘new writing,’ la nouvelle écriture…influenced in its approach to language by French post-structuralism, and materially centered on the body, . closely related to l’écriture au féminin (not to be confused with écriture féminine)” (Dickinson 137). More than a political statement that would pass with the early 1960’s, this new woman’s writing attests to the blossoming of various forms of mystical experience in Québécois women’s writing. Texts from the decades after the Quiet Revolution provide us with women characters who struggle to break free from the social, political, economic and psychological prisons of the patriarchal Catholic system. In the wake