Aesthetic Violence: the Victimisation of Women in the Quebec Novel
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AESTHETIC VIOLENCE: THE VICTIMISATION OF WOMEN IN THE QUEBEC NOVEL by JANE LUCINDA TILLEY B.A.(Hons), The University of Southampton, U.K., 1987 M.A., The University of British Columbia, 1989 A THESIS SUBMITI’ED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Department of French) We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA June 1995 Jane Lucinda Tilley, 1995 ___________ In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Bntish Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. (Signature) Department of The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada Date 22 ‘( (c/s_ DE-6 (2188) 11 Abstract The latent (androcentric) eroticism of rape has been exploited in Western culture, from mythology through to a contemporary entertainment industry founded on a cultural predilection for the representation of violence against women. In literature the figure of Woman as Victim has evolved according to shifting fashions and (male) desires until, in contemporary avant-garde writings, themes of sexual violence perform an intrinsic role in sophisticated textual praxis, Woman’s body becoming the playground for male artistic expression and textual experimentation. These themes are encoded in particular ways in Québec literature, where for many years the saintly Mother-figure served as both valorising icon and sacrificial victim of the conservative, messianic refuge values adopted following colonisation. The tacit matricide of the ideological literature is replaced, however, in the textually and linguistically subversive novels of the “quiet revolutionary” period by more explicit patterns of violence. Here, in place of quietly fading Mothers, female characters die screaming, victims of overt, sexual abuse at the hands of their male counterparts. Now frequently presented as voracious, oppressive and castrating, Woman must be destroyed if the “emasculated”, colonised male is to be liberated and become a “Man” once again. The relationship between colonisation and (sexual) violence is explicitly addressed in three novels of the period. Victor-Levy Beaulieu’s Un rêve québécois offers a model for the study of this connection, as the “shattering” of the text is reflected in the frenzy of 111 frustration and sadistic (fantasised) violence directed at the unsympathetic, provocative wife of a colonised protagonist. Hubert Aquin’s L’Antiphonaire expands on the textual/sexual parallel, eroding the distinction between the body of the female protagonist/narrator and “her” text, as both are subject to repeated “violations”. Both novels subvert “realist” conceptualisations of time, identity, order etc., but rely on the continued and graphic victimisation of Woman to convey both a political and an aesthetic message. Marie-Claire Blais’s Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel, subverts the roman de la terre, exposing its ideology as the perpetuation of a cycle of implicit violence and victimisation, in which the ostensibly powerful and valorising Mother is the primary victim. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Table of Contents iv Acknowledgement v Introduction 1 Chapter 1 The Aesthetics of Rape: Literature and Violence 16 Chapter 2 The Reign of the Mother: Violence in the Québec Novel 52 Chapter 3 Un rêve guébécois: The Eroticisation of Violence 94 Chapter 4 L’Antiphonaire: A Literary/Literal Striptease 138 Chapter 5 Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel: Hereditary Victimisation 192 Conclusion 233 Bibliography 241 V Acknowledgement The choice of violence against women and misogyny in the literature of Québec as a topic for a doctoral thesis by someone originally from England, studying in British Columbia, might appear out of place, “invasive”, even hostile. This was certainly not my intention. Québec literature and culture have fascinated me since, while working in Québec City in 1985-86, I read Jean-Charles Harvey’s Les Demi-Civilisés, Louis Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine and Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’Occasion. The contrasts and contradictions within these three texts convinced me of a rich and complex culture and history of which I wanted to know more. Since that time, my research in this particular field has gone hand in hand with a growing feminist consciousness. The phenomenon of repeated sexual violence against women, evident in so many of the more recent novels from Québec could therefore not pass unremarked. This phenomenon is not however unique to Québec, although there are particular characteristics and “causes” (not extenuating circumstances); I have taken pains to draw the reader’s attention to this fact. I have been extremely fortunate in my committee. I would like to thank Dr. Réjean Beaudoin for sharing his considerable knowledge and insight, and for the encouragement offered over the years. Dr. André Lamontagne and Dr. Valerie Raoul have also provided invaluable contributions, both academic and personal, to this study, for which I am very grateful. I would also like to thank Pete for his constant support and friendship - and for showing that there is light in the darkness. This thesis is dedicated to my parents, Angela and Mark and to my grandfather, Eric Middleton. 1 Introduction 2 Novels written in Québec in the 1960’s and 70’s are strewn with the corpses, mutilations and abuse of female characters, most often at the hands of their male counterparts. Agaguk beats his wife as she gives birth, and Milien (one of Les Grands pères) kicks his dying wife. Jos Connaissant breaks his lover’s nose, while François Galarneau jokes about having his girlfriend stuffed, and the narrator of La Corde au cou murders his mistress because she has been unfaithful. In Le Nez gui vogue, Chateaugué kills herself, once her male friend has no further use for her, as does Christine Forestier of L’Antiphonaire, having suffered multiple rapes and mental abuse at the hands of every man she meets. This pattern builds on an earlier system of violence which Patricia Smart has identified as a “foundation” of matricide, upon which the edifice of French-Canadian literature is constructed’. There is a marked difference, however, between this almost tacit matricide and the later phase 2. of violence The deaths of women in earlier texts are primarily the result of natural causes, brought about by the harshness of their lives. These women, the highly prized and idealised Mothers of the ideological roman de la Patricia Smart, Ecrire dans la maison du père: l’émergence du fémiriln dans la tradition littéraire du québec (Montréal, Quebec/Amérique, 1990). 2 This development is noted in Smart, Ecrire dans la maison du père, and in Lori Saint-Martin’s article “Mise a mort de la femme et “libération’ de l’homme: Godbout, Aguin, Beaulieu”, Voix et Images 10.1 (automne 1984) 107-117 and also in Valerie Raoul’s study, Distinctly Narcissistic: Diary Fiction in Ouébec, (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1993). 3 terre, are either dead before the story begins or disappear into silence, their memory hanging like a shadow over the text. The deliberate and often graphic brutality of the later novels is unheard of unimaginable in the promised land of snow, agriculture and Roman Catholicism. The increased violence of the literature of the 1960’s corresponds with an assertive “prise de parole” by the Québécois, tired of the colonial rule under which they had been suffocated for two centuries, deprived of the power of self-determination, alienated from their origins and rendered ineffective. Under such conditions, the frustrations of men - denied their “birthright” of power and a superior status within patriarchal society - turn into a misogynous and often violent resentment and envy of women who appear relatively more powerful under colonial 3. rule Although colonised themselves, Québec women’s situation (like that of any colonised women) may not be as radically different from their expected or prescribed stereotypical social role as that of colonised men. Women have always been “colonised”, in as much as they have been deprived of the right to an identity of their own. Defined in relation to men (their fathers or husbands and in either case their “proprietors”), women have traditionally been treated as objects of exchange - “le bien par excellence” or “le supreme 4 - cadeau” in the “hommo-sexual 5 economy” that is patriarchy. Functioning as Man’s other, the object Raoul, 37. ‘ Claude Levi-Strauss, Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (Paris, Mouton Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1967) 73 and 76 respectively. Irigaray, “Des Marchandises entre elles”, Spéculum de l’autre femme (Paris, Minuit, 1977) 189-193. 4 which guarantees his status as full subject, the mirror which reflects the image he wishes to see of himself, Woman is what Man desires her to be, an unstable, cultural and social construct, fashioned from certain (obviously essential) anatomical characteristics, according to man’s 6. need Indeed, according to the various discourses which uphold the Law of the Father and are fundamental to male-dominated 7, culture women are weak, prone to madness, inherently evil and sexually insatiable, and at the same time, vulnerable, ideally delicate, graceful and preferably silent - conflicting “facts” which have served as justification precisely for the (often violent) control or “protection” exerted over women. It seems “natural” in some way then, that the frustrations of the colonised male (or perhaps any male who considers himself deprived of his rightful privilege) should be taken out on the bodies of women, for within Western culture Woman is perceived as the “consummate victim”.