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 Franco-
American, 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 Brief Overview of the Franco-American Novel of New England ...... 1 1.2 The Franco-American Novel and the Ideology of La Survivance ...... 7 1.3 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 Space and Place in Two Franco-American Novels of Immigration ...... 44 2.2 Jeanne la fileuse: Topographies of Lower Canada and Fall River ...... 49 2.3 “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 2.4 “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 2.5 The Working Class, the Franco-American Elite, and Spaces of Inequality . . 75 2.6 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
3.1 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
4 THE SPACE OF DISCONTENT ...... 164
4.1 The Foundering of the Ideology of La Survivance ...... 164 4.2 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
5 REMEMBERED SPACE ...... 236
5.1 Memory and the Ethnic Self in L’Héritage and Le Petit Mangeur de fleurs 236 5.2 Writing Memory in le Parler Populaire ...... 240
v 5.3 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
6 CONCLUSION ...... 283
Notes ...... 297
REFERENCES ...... 299
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 318
vi FIGURE
Figure page
1 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 Franco-
American 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 Franco-
American 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 Franco-
American 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 Franco-
Américanie” (“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 Franco-
American 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’étendra- t-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 scrub- lumbering 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 Franco-
American 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 Franco-
American 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 Franco- America—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 Franco-
American 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, Franco-
Manitoban, 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 Franco-
American 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, self- serving 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 Franco-
Américains, 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 vingt- quatre 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 three- year 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 Franco-
American 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 Franco-
Américaine (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 Franco-
American 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 Franco-
American 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 Lessard-
Bissonnette’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
1The 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 XIXee et au XX siècles: étude quantitative.”
2Benoit’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. 3For 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.
4See, 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 1870- 1905.” 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.”
5In 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 Franco- American cultural identity.
6In one of the communities, Van Buren, Maine, 81% of the total population still speaks French in the home. 43
7Many 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.
8The 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. 10Several 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 Franco- American 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 Franco- American Heritage Center on the Lewiston-Auburn campus of the University of Southern Maine was a treasure chest of information about Le Messager, its Editor-in- Chief, 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 Franco-
American 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, self- definition, 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 French-
Canadian 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 urban- rural 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 seven- volume 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 French-
Canadian 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 oft- repeated 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. 59
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 60
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 trente- cinq 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 61
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 62
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 land- based 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 63
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 64
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 Saint-
Charles, 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 65
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). 66
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 67
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 68
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. 69
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 70
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, 71
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 72
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 73
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 74
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 75
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- 76
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, 77
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 Franco-
American 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 78
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 Franco-
American; their interest was simply elsewhere. Charles Maurras, Léon Daudet, and
Maurice Barrès, Nationalists of the French radical right, were widely read by the Franco-
American 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 Franco-
American 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 79
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 Franco-
American 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- 80
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 81
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- 82
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 Franco-
American 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 83
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 Sainte-
Julie-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. 84
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 French-
Canadian” 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 85
feelings of ill-will towards each other from the very beginning” (Early, “The French-
Canadian” 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 Lessard-
Bissonnette, 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 86
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 87
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 88
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 French-
Canadian 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 89
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 90
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: 91
“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. 92
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 93
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, well- placed 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 94
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 95
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 self- knowledge.
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 96
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). 97
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 98
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 99
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 100
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. 101
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 102
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 103
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 104
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. 105
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 post-
Conquest 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 106
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 107
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 108
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 mid- nineteenth 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 Franco- American 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 French- Canadians swelled phenomenally between 1890 and 1897: in New Bedford the 109
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 See historical accounts by Elizabeth Wilson in The Sphinx in the City.
14 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. 110
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
111 112
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 Franco-
Américaine 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. 113
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 114
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 115
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. 116
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 117
“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 118
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 Franco-
Américaine. 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 119
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 Lessard-
Bissonnette, 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 anti- survivance 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 120
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. 121
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) 122
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, 123
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 124
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 125
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? 126
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 127
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 128
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 Franco- américaine” (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) 129
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, 130
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 131
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 132
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 133
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. 134
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 135
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 teacher- pupil 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 136
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 self- perception. 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. 137
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 138
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 139
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 140
“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. 141
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. 142
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 self- repression.
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 143
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. 144
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. 145
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 Franco-
American 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 self- determination.
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 146
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 Franco-
Américaine 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 147
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 148
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 self- sacrifice and her kindness in the face of his duplicitous behavior. 149
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 150
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 self- assertive, confident woman who makes her own way in the world. Reversing the 151
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, African-
American 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) 152
Fanny herself serves as an example that not all African-American migrants embody the
“disorder and backwardness represented by the rural South” (Wolcott 274). African-
American 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 153
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, 154
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: 155
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 156
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 157
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 African-
Americans 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 158
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 Franco-
Americans 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 African-
Americans 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 159
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 160
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 161
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 Franco-
American 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 162
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. 6Sherry 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 70- 71).
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 Anglo- Saxonism” (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-little- girls, 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 self- sacrifice 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). 163
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 French- language 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 Franco-
Américains 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.
164 165
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). 166
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, Victor-
Lévy 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 long- or 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 167
and consented to work beyond the number of hours mandated by law. Established
workers held them responsible for management’s hardline stance. Only the Franco-
American 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). 168
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 English- language 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) 170
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 Franco-
America—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, 171
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 172
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 173
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. 174
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. 175
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 176
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 French-
Canadian 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). 177
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 178
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 179
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) 180
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 181
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, place- saturated 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 182
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 183
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) 184
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 185
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 186
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). 187
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 188
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 character- structures 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 189
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, 190
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” (363-
64).
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, 191
“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 192
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 193
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 194
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 195
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 196
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 197
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 198
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 199
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.-Jean-
Baptiste 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. 200
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. 201
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 Franco-
American 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, 202
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 203
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 204
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 205
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. 206
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. 207
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 208
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: 209
“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 210
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 211
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 212
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). 213
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 214
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 Franco-
American 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. 215
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) 216
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. 217
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. 218
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 Franco-
American 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. 219
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 220
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 221
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, délivrez- nous de mal . . . délivrez-nous de mal . . . .” (74) 222
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). 223
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-great- grandmother 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 224
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 French-
Canadian 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 French-
Canadian 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 225
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 226
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 227
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 Franco-
American 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. 228
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. 229
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 230
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 Franco-
American 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 231
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). 232
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. 233
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
1Yves 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).
2The 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).
3See 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.
5See 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.
6Gérard Robert’s Mémorial des Actes de l’Association Canado-Américaine 1946- 1971 (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.
7Kérouac’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 Grace, against her mother’s wishes, married a Greek. They had three children.
13 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-la- Guadeloupe. 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 238
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 239
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 240
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 Franco-
American 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-who- could-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 241
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: 242
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 Claude-
Henri 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 Franco-
American 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, 249
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 250
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, French-
Canadian 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—“Écrivez- moi” 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 251
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 252
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 double- voiced 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. 253
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). 254
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 255
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 256
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) 257
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. 258
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 oft- repeated 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 259
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. 260
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 261
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 Franco-
American 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 262
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 263
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 264
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 Franco-
American 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 265
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 upper- middle-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 266
It Stops with Me: Memoir of a Canuck Girl, ultimately chooses space beyond the Franco-
American 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 two- hundred 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 Saint-
Cuthbert, 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. 267
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 Franco-
American 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 268
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 269
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 270
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 271
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. 272
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 Franco-
American 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). 273
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 274
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 French-
Canadians 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 275
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 276
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 jalousie- là,’ 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; 277
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 middle- class 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 278
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 279
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” 280
(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 281
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
1At 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 nineteenth- century 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. 282
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 Franco- American 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
283 284
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 285
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 286
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 287
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 288
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 Franco-
American 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 289
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 290
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 French-
Canadians 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 291
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 best- seller, 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 292
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 Franco-
Americans’ 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. 293
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 294
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 Franco-
American texts. For instance, Dorothy Burton Skårdal, researching Scandinavian-
American 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 Swedish-
American 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 Franco-
American 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 Franco-
American 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 French- language 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 Franco-
American 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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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.
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