Quebecois Identity in Literature

Historical Perspective

The area known as Quebec, now one of Canada’s ten provinces, was first explored by Jacques Cartier, who took possession of it in 1534 in the name of the king of France, Francis I. In 1608, the explorer Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec, the province’s capital and the source of the term “Quebecois,” which originally meant an inhabitant of the city of Quebec but which has come to designate a French-speaking citizen of the province. The seventeenth century saw extensive colonization of this area by approximately 10,000 French colonists. In 1759, the Battle of the Plains of Abraham resulted in a decisive defeat of French forces by the British. In 1763, the Treaty of Paris surrendered this territory to the British crown, and a royal proclamation gave the former French colony the name of Province of Quebec. When in 1867, the Dominion of Canada was created by the British North America Act, Quebec, at that time one of four Canadian provinces, was 85 percent francophone.

During the twentieth century, there was pronounced political activity by those members of Quebec society who wished to secede from Canada, in the belief that because of the distinctness of the Quebecois language and culture, it should be a country separate from the rest of Canada. Two referenda, held in 1982 and 1995, were unsuccessful in achieving a majority vote by those wishing to create their own country. The population of Quebec at the time of the 1995 referendum, approximately 6.9 million (compared to Canada’s 26.2 million), was 82 percent francophone.

Throughout the history of modern Quebec, many francophone writers, artists, actors, and social activists endeavored to promote the Quebecois identity through the protection of the francophone culture from assimilation into the majority anglophone, Protestant culture and through the preservation of traditions that bear a distinctly Quebecois flavor. The political activism known as the independence movement was clearly strengthened by the participation of all levels of society.

Identity in Modern Quebecois Literature

The francophone literature of early twentieth-century Quebec evoked a rural, patriarchal society, steeped in Catholic tradition and conservative social and familial values. This evocation was a direct reflection of the dominant ideology, one that espoused the importance of preserving French social and religious customs. Fidelity to the beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church, then an extremely powerful institution, was obligatory as was loyalty to family, the microcosm of Quebec society. The dominant agrarian ideology glorified country life, often ignoring, or portraying in a negative light, urban society.

An example of a work that extols the virtues of a conservative patriarchal society is Louis Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine: Récit du Canada français (1914, serial, 1916, book; A Tale of the Lake St. John Country, 1921). A classic in Quebec literature, this novel depicts the life of Samuel and Laura Chapdelaine, their four sons, and one daughter. The Chapdelaines are representative of the ideal Quebec family, for they are devout in the religious faith and unflinching in their attachment to family values and the continuation of traditional ways of life.

Maria falls in love with one of her three suitors, the adventurer and lumberjack François Paradis. It is symbolic that she is named after the Virgin Mary, as are many daughters in Quebecois fiction, and that she is associated throughout the work with the values of commitment to one’s family and land as well as to the transmission to the next generation of the same value system. François Paradis dies tragically one winter in a snowstorm, and Maria, the following spring, marries Eutrope Gagnon, a solitary man who lives off the land. This final image of Maria as a young woman resigned to sacrificing her personal happiness in order to maintain the identity of the Quebecois pioneers who live off the land, following the example of colonists of New France, appears frequently in Quebecois literature as a symbol of the familial, social, and religious values that define Quebecois identity.

The influence of Hémon’s novel was great in defining the identity of the Quebecois pioneer as a conservative, religious individual who shows a very strong commitment to the preservation of an agrarian way of life. Menaud: Maître-draveur (1937; Boss of the River, 1947), by Félix-Antoine Savard, depicts the struggle of the widower Menaud, father of Marie and Joson, who exhorts his family, neighbors, and friends in an isolated area of Quebec to rebel against the presence of the English, identified in the novel as étrangers (foreigners, strangers), who are to take possession of the mountain and surrounding lands that Menaud and his ancestors consider their own. Marie, like Maria Chapdelaine, is a virginal figure, who reads to Menaud passages from Maria Chapdelaine. It is also Marie who, through her name, represents the importance of the Roman Catholic religion. She is the sole character in the novel to recite the evening prayer in her father’s home for the benefit of Menaud, Joson, and, symbolically, the Quebecois people. The territory depicted in the novel is considered by the characters as a pays, a country in itself. The use of this expression manifests the characters’ ideal to protect and maintain this land, sovereign and distinctly their own. This work communicates an early example of the nationalist ideology that would become more pronounced.

Agrarianism and Backlash

Maria Chapdelaine and Menaud undertake to paint a poetic picture of courageous and idealistic inhabitants of isolated regions in Quebec. The characters of the two novels wish to safeguard their francophone and Catholic identity. Social evolution, however, caused writers to reflect upon a modern Quebec society that became increasingly urban and less centered on agrarian activities. The publication of Bonheur d’occasion by Gabrielle Roy (1945; The Tin Flute, 1947) marked a turning point in the ways in which writers perceived the Quebecois identity. Set in St. Henri, a working-class district in Montreal, during the economic crisis of the late 1930’s and during World War II, Bonheur d’occasion casts a penetrating look at the reality of the time. The aesthetics of traditional Quebecois novels, evoking an idyllic natural setting of countryside, forest, and mountain inhabited by simple, robust rural characters, gives way in Bonheur d’occasion to a realistic portrayal of the struggle of the Lacasse family to overcome unemployment, sickness, and poverty. The francophone identity represented in this work is not the one-dimensional one that is often found in earlier romans de la terre (novels of the land) but rather one that is representative of an industrialized society undergoing profound change. The nationalist question, the conflict between francophone and anglophone, étranger and québécois, as evoked in Menaud, is absent from Bonheur d’occasion. Roy’s groundbreaking work speaks of compassion, understanding, and admiration for those who struggle to know themselves, overcome obstacles to happiness, improve their living conditions, and generally, survive in a dehumanizing industrialized world.

The 1960’s were rich in literary production, and particularly in works that depict Quebec society in an authentic, nonidealized, and sometimes troubling manner. Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel (1965; A Season in the Life of Emmanuel, 1966) by Marie-Claire Blais is an eloquent example of this type of aesthetics. Unlike Maria Chapdelaine or Menaud, Une saison offers glimpses of cruelty, sordidness, and abuse in a rural family. Héloïse, one of the daughters of the family depicted in the novel, is expelled from a convent where she was unable to curb her sexual desires, and begins the life of a prostitute. Death, illiteracy, superstition, and poverty are counterbalanced by the quest for knowledge, symbolic of an escape from this narrow existence, represented by the young Jean Le Maigre, who ultimately dies of tuberculosis after having composed brooding and magnificent poetry. His death is, however, followed by the birth of a brother, and so the unrelenting cycle of misery continues.

An enigmatic novel, L’Avalée des avalés (1966; The Swallower Swallowed, 1968), by Réjean Ducharme exploded on Quebec’s literary scene after it had been rejected by Quebec publishers. Its ultimate publication by a prestigious Paris firm can perhaps be explained by a somewhat fantastical plot whose main character, Bérénice Einberg, an adolescent with a distinctly more mature and sometimes diabolical single-mindedness makes her an intriguing figure. This novel is clearly an example of the work of a Quebecois writer whose inspiration is not political in orientation but rather is one focusing on wordplay and stylistic innovation. Ducharme is, therefore, representative of Quebecois writers who wish to open the limits of the imagination to areas that were not yet fully explored in Quebec society and not associated with political aspirations to create a separate country.

The aesthetics evident in Ducharme’s work became more prevalent in subsequent decades. The idealization of Quebec society ceased to be the touchstone of its literature, particularly after the so-called Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, in which there was push to modernize Quebec. Writers in the later part of the twentieth century strove to create innovation in style and content. They expressed the Quebecois identity in myriad forms, including those created by women writers, expatriates and immigrants, Jewish residents of Montreal, and Quebec’s gay and lesbian community. Throughout the evolution of its identity, Quebec society has undergone profound changes. It has gone from being—or being depicted as—a rural and insular world, steeped in conservative values and dominated by the Roman Catholic Church, to being one that is urban, cosmopolitan, and varied in its ethnic and religious mix. The Quebecois identity was still represented to a large extent by the francophone population that wishes to achieve sovereignty within Canada.

By the second decade of the twenty-first century, multiculturalism, globalism, and migrant narratives had largely supplanted traditional preoccupations about Quebec cultural survival and separateness in Quebecois fiction. Themes of hybridity, migration, and expectation versus reality became more common, in addition to concerns of urbanity and pervasive social isolation. Novels by Vietnamese immigrant Kim Thúy and Haitian exile Dany Laferrière provide a notable examples of the trend.

The preservation and use of the French language has nevertheless remained central among Quebecois writers. By the 2010s, writing in standard French or nonstandard dialect—itself a fraught sociopolitical statement for twentieth-century writers like Michel Tremblay—had become a noncontroversial artistic choice. English translations continue to expand the audiences for Quebecois writings.

Bibliography

Dionne, René. Canadian Literature in French. Ottawa: Canadian Studies Directorate, 1988. A study guide.

Kandiuk, Mary. French-Canadian Authors: A Bibliography of Their Works and of English-Language Criticism. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1990. Especially helpful for English speakers.

Laurendeau, Paul. "Joual." The Canadian Encyclopedia, Historica Canada, 27 Jan. 2016, www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca. Accessed 30 Aug. 2019.

Malla, Pasha. "Too Different and Too Familiar: The Challenge of French-Canadian Literature." The New Yorker, 26 May 2015, www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/too-different-and-too-familiar-the-challenge-of-french-canadian-literature. Accessed 30 Aug. 2019.

Shek, Ben-Zion. French-Canadian and Quebecois Novels. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Offers insights into Canadian culture.

Shek, Ben-Zion. Social Realism in the French-Canadian Novel. Toronto: Harvest House, 1977. A study of modern Quebec society as it is portrayed in various novels.

Villeneuve, Felix. "PEN Québec: A New Generation on a Familiar Quest for Literary Identity." Interview. PEN America, 15 Oct. 2017, pen.org/pen-quebec-new-generation-familiar-quest-literary-identity. Accessed 30 Aug. 2019.

Weiss, Jonathan M. French-Canadian Theater. Boston: Twayne, 1986. A general introduction.