In the Shadow of the Wind by Anne Hébert

First published:Les Fous de Bassan, 1982 (English translation, 1983)

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Tragedy

Time of work: The summer and autumn of 1936 and the autumn of 1982

Locale: Griffin Creek, a fictional place between the city of Québec and the Atlantic Ocean

Principal Characters:

• Nicholas Jones, a clergyman
• Irene Jones, Nicholas’ wife, who hangs herself in 1936
• Olivia Atkins, a seventeen-year-old in 1936 who is murdered and returns as “Olivia of the High Seas”
• Nora Atkins, a fifteen-year-old in 1936 who is murdered with her cousin Olivia
• Stevens Brown, the first cousin of the Atkins girls
• Felicity Jones, the mother and grandmother of the central characters
• Percival Brown, Stevens’ younger brother who can only communicate by shrieks and cries
• Pam Brown, and
• Pat Brown, the twin sisters of Stevens and Percival and the servants of their Uncle Nicholas
• John Erwin McKenna, a detective sent to investigate the disappearance of the Atkins girls

Form and Content

In an atmosphere marked by the mysterious influence of the sea, Anne Hébert uses multiple narrators to reveal different facets of the central events and characters of In the Shadow of the Wind. The plot revolves around the sexual maturation of two young girls and three violent deaths precipitated by the erotic tension that they innocently produce. As the novel opens in 1982, Nicholas Jones laments the dwindling of Griffin Creek in a broken echo of his former voice. As pastor of an Anglican congregation in French Catholic Québec, he speaks for God to an isolated community. Closely related to his flock, he is invested with patriarchal power, which he abuses. In 1936, he lusted after his nieces Nora and Olivia, driving his wife to suicide. In 1982, he tyrannizes his aging twin nieces, Pam and Pat Brown. The only surviving women of the old community, they nurture each other and somehow contrive to resist his domination. Nicholas attempts to re-create the old Griffin Creek by painting his male ancestors, begetting fathers in his own image. The twins counter with vivid paintings of female ancestors, especially Irene Jones and the cousins Nora and Olivia Atkins. Nicholas Jones’s rambling reminiscence of 1936 sets the stage for a tragedy presented in fragments by succeeding narrators.

Stevens Brown is next, with a series of letters from the summer of 1936. He explains his motives and past to a friend in Florida, “Old Mick,” giving a clear sense of his home and family and of the “buried child,” prey to terrible memories of abuse, hidden in his man’s body. He inspects the landscape of his childhood and identifies with its harsh northern beauty. This is a landscape that he intends to reclaim only during summer, an intense season corresponding to the brief bloom of Nora and Olivia, whom he describes in their delectable beauty. Stevens closes his last letter on the night of August 31, planning to start on a return to Florida the next day.

Nora follows with an inner monologue which covers many of the same events as Stevens, vividly rejoicing in life and the strength of her erotic potential. Every male is a potential “first,” and her reaction to an attempt at seduction by her Uncle Nicholas is to wish for someone her own age and unmarried. Her narration stops in the same moonlit evening as Stevens’, declaring, as he does, that summer is over.

Percival, Stevens’ brother, opens the next section, gazing out at the moonlit scene from his window. A double murder has just occurred; he sees a small boat heading out to sea, but only later knowledge indicates that it contains the bodies of the Atkins girls. As an “idiot,” he is naïve in tone, but acute in his perceptions. Percival’s vision is both poetic and earthy. He understands the relationship between his grandmother Felicity and the sea, guesses at the transmutation of his cousin Olivia to a pure spirit of sea. He also knows people by their smell—Nora and Olivia by a scent of green ferns and blood, the detective McKenna by a fecal, greasy odor. He ignores proprieties; his concern is for the people he loves. The reader is privileged in sharing Percival’s vision, since his communication with his family is essentially nonverbal. He and his father discover Nora’s remains on the beach after a storm.

Percival alternates with the distinctive voices of the collective community and an unidentified “objective” voice. The people of Griffin Creek worry about presenting a united front. They preserve appearances, stress sightings of strangers. The neutral voice presents the actions and words of Griffin Creek as it discovers its loss and continues with the investigation of the crime. Several plausible suspects with possible moments and motives are presented, including unknown men in big American cars or boats offshore. All three narrative voices talk about John Erwin McKenna, the Anglophone detective sent from Montréal, and his investigation. Eavesdropping with Percival, the reader hears McKenna interrogate Stevens, hears the clack of the typewriter which swallows his living words. This segment ends with Percival lamenting the loss of his brother and cousins as he stares out to sea.

Olivia of the High Seas follows, speaking in a present independent of time, joined to a larger consciousness which continues after Olivia Atkins’ death. She has become a disembodied spirit of the waters and communes with the dead women of Griffin Creek. While Nora’s voice is warm sunlight, Olivia’s is cool water. Born by tides of water and memory, she moves effortlessly through time, echoing events recounted in earlier narration, reliving a memory of sunlit communion with Stevens and the violence of his father’s reaction. Consciousness of her murder waits on the shores of Griffin Creek, but fear of a second death drives her far out to sea, before she can recount her story.

It is Stevens’ last letter, dated 1982, that reveals the final horrors to “Old Mick.” Stevens has escaped from a government hospital, where he has been confined, surrounded by men shattered in mind and body by World War II. The deaths of the Atkins girls are almost incidental in this context, but seabirds, his personal furies, prey upon his mind and fill his ears with their cries. He plans suicide after writing one last time. Thus, in a Montréal apartment, he evokes the stormy sea and winds that echoed his fury as he “punished” and killed Nora, raped and killed Olivia. The “mystery” of their deaths is solved, even though Stevens has long ago been acquitted of the murders.

Context

Anne Hébert won early fame as a poet, one of the first of the women of Québec to reach an international audience. Her bestseller Kamouraska (1970; English translation, 1973) became a widely distributed film, and in 1982, she won the prestigious French literary prize, the Prix Femina, for In the Shadow of the Wind. Her works are intense, intricately crafted in language, and emotionally dark and violent. Thematically consistent, they deal with the destruction of innocent victims: by vampires in Héloïse (1980), by Satan worshippers and cloistered nuns in Les Enfants du sabbat (1975; Children of the Black Sabbath, 1977), and by the inbred violence of the isolated patriarchy of In the Shadow of the Wind. The oppression of the individual by patriarchal cultural patterns is consistently a pretext for tragedy.

Paradoxically, it is also in meticulous patterns that some hope can be found. Although Nicholas and Stevens use biblical language for their destructive ends, the beauty of the language and images in the Bible can have positive uses. The Song of Solomon sets Olivia dreaming of love and Nora speaks of her parents’ happy home as an ark. Hébert even ties this novel to her own poetry, by having Olivia of the High Seas quote the poem “There is certainly someone . . .” from Le Tombeau des rois (1953; The Tomb of the Kings, 1967). The patterning of privileged words, scripture, and poetry is a source of positive pleasure, as is the cultural and spacial pattern that governs the Griffin Creek community in the central barn dance scene. The balanced interplay of men and women in the dance is erotic, but not violent. Stevens is able to swing through the line of women, touching them all, and does no damage. Dance, fully cooperative and pleasurable, is a model for the male-female community. When Irene Jones sits aside from the dance, she prefigures her suicide. When Nicholas Jones exceeds the pattern and frightens Percival by his predatory kissing of his nieces, he prefigures the violence that Stevens will carry into action.

Female desire, in Nora and Olivia, is a positive, constructive force, while Hébert’s predatory males are destructive. Still, her women are not all passive victims. They have also cooperated in the victimization of other women and their own children. Like Felicity, they have chosen resentment and have refused to use their full creative power, both erotic and maternal. Hébert identifies women, through Felicity and Olivia, with the vast, untapped fertility of the sea. In the Shadow of the Wind is a text saturated with marine images, charged with the violence of sea and wind and the predatory birds and fish that flash between them. The novel may seem despairing in the destruction that it chronicles, but in its poetic beauty it offers the hope of creation.

Bibliography

Booklist. LXXX, July, 1984, p. 1521.

Canadian Forum. LXIII, March, 1984, p. 37.

Gould, Karen. “Absence and Meaning in Anne Hébert’s Les Fous de Bassan.” French Review 59, no. 6 (May, 1986): 921-930. This study considers the poetic language and formal construction of the novel and shows them to be subversive and feminist. Citations are in French.

Green, Mary Jean. “The Novel in Québec: The Family Plot and the Personal Voice.” In Studies on Canadian Literature: Introductory and Critical Essays, edited by Arnold E. Davidson. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1990. This essay provides a historical context for Hébert’s novel within the rubric of novels dealing with Québecois culture, although it analyzes only Hébert’s early novella Le Torrent (1950, 1963, 1965; The Torrent, 1973). Contains a useful bibliography of Québecois family novels and criticism devoted to them.

Kirkus Reviews. LII, June 15, 1984, p. 538.

Macleans. XCVI, October 17, 1983, p. 61.

New Statesman. CVIII, July 20, 1984, p. 24.

The New York Times Book Review. LXXXIX, July 22, 1984, p. 7.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXV, May 18, 1984, p. 142.

Quill and Quire. XLIX, November, 1983, p. 20.

Rea, Annabelle M. “The Climate of Viol/Violence and Madness in Anne Hébert’s Les Fous de Bassan.” In Québec Studies. Vol. 4. Hanover, N.H.: Northeast Council for Québec Studies, 1986. Analyzes the violent physical and psychological climate of In the Shadow of the Wind and the images used to present it, in particular the use of seabirds. Quotations are in French. Includes extensive notes.

Slott, Kathryn. “Submergence and Resurgence of the Female Other in Anne Hébert’s Les Fous de Bassan.” In Québec Studies. Vol. 4. Hanover, N.H.: Northeast Council for Québec Studies, 1986. Examines the passive role of women in Hébert’s novel, referring to categories developed by Simone de Beauvoir in Le Deuxième Sexe (1949; The Second Sex, 1953). Quotations are in French.

Smart, Patricia. Writing in the Father’s House:The Emergence of the Feminine in the Québec Literary Tradition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. This study of French-Canadian literature from a feminist perspective attempts to analyze and generalize “within national and gender contexts.” Chapter 4 studies Hébert’s poetry. Smart argues that traditional novels are based on the “founding murder” of a woman, and her brief analysis of In the Shadow of the Wind in chapter 6 asserts that Hébert’s novel demands cultural transformation by exposing this murder. Offers a bibliography and an index.

Smith, Donald. “Anne Hébert and the Roots of Imagination.” In Voices of Deliverance: Interviews with Québec and Acadian Writers. Translated by Larry Shouldice. Toronto: Anansi Press, 1986. This interview with Hébert focuses on her verse and earlier prose. Particularly interesting as a personal context to Hébert’s work.

Women’s Review of Books. II, November, 1984, p. 15.